LETTER FROM AMERICA: "Out, out damned spot." Lady Macbeth scrubbed her bloody hands to no avail, writes Patrick Smyth
All over Capitol Hill they are doing the same. Congressmen and their parties, in this mid-term election year, are queuing up to give back their Enron paycheques. Even President Bush no longer talks of "Kenny Boy" but "Mr Lay" and dissembles about the warmth and age of their relationship.
"Out, out..." Make no mistake, we're in the early phases of a major Washington political scandal, the absence of babes notwithstanding. This is a Republican scandal not a Democratic one.The doughty Ms Sherren Watkins, she of the internal Enron warning memo, is definitely not a babe.
Enron's scandal, embracing the corporate, accounting and political spheres at the highest levels, will run and run. The press corps has scented blood and the 10 Congressional committee inquiries now underway, complemented by three in federal agencies, have material to work on.
Vice-President Dick Cheney's aide Mary Matelin, like other administration spinners, wants us to believe this is just spite inspired by the Democratic media. "They act like there is some billing record or some cattle scam or some fired travel aides or some blue dress," she told a radio audience, alluding to Clinton-era scandals.
The Wall Street Journal has blamed the man himself: "Enron was able to play fast and loose in a financial boom and Clintonian moral climate..."
Maybe there's an element of truth there, but the extraordinarily close relationship between Enron and Lay and the Bush family goes back a decade, and more, and has paid dividends for the company. As the Washington Post's Mary McGrory put it inimitably, "Enron is no Whitewater, which was a 15-year-old land development scheme that went sour under the management of obscure provincials with two first names like Billy Bob. It was unintelligible."
And while it may have hurt Clinton, "it never really took off," she argues."But Enron is as easy to follow as a bedtime story. The bad guys lied, cheated and stole from the poor as they always have."
Enron always understood the importance of friends at court - the company and its top executives' investment in President Bush in the last election cycle came to a total of $736,000. Since 1990 the company has given $6 million to Federal candidates and parties, and in the 1999-2000 election cycle, a colossal $2.4 million. It has contributed to the coffers of 71 per cent of the members of the Senate and 43 per cent of the members of the House - 74 per cent to Republicans.
In the first six months of 2001 the company and a subsidiary also spent $1 million lobbying Congress on a range of legislation from energy to tax policy, and even, according to the congressional record, to attempts to ease the payment of gifts to politicians.
Bush has maintained that no favours were done in return and he cites the refusal of his Commerce and Treasury Secretaries, Don Evans and Paul O'Neil, to become involved last October in a credit-rating boosting operation.
Fair enough. If they had been involved, both would now be looking for other work. But there are still unanswered questions about the Enron influence and access, both then and earlier.
Both men say they told the White House Chief of Staff, Andrew Card, about the approaches from Enron, but then we are expected to believe Card sat on the story for 72 days while Enron collapsed, before telling the President.
We are also expected to believe that the President's key economic adviser, Larry Lindsey, who carried out an assessment of the likely effects on the market of the collapse of one of Bush's biggest backers, did not communicate his findings to the President.
The Vice-President, Dick Cheney, is also refusing to come clean about what went on in the six meetings his Energy Task Force had with Enron executives. Henry Waxman, a House Democrat, claims the energy package he produced contained 17 specific proposals favouring the company. The President's spokesman, Ari Fleischer, continues to deflect calls to reveal other contacts between the White House and Enron over the last six months.
As Texas Governor, Bush pushed through tax cuts and deregulation benefiting the company, and in 1997 he personally lobbied his friend, the Governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Ridge, to seek help in securing Enron access to the state's highly regulated electricity market.
After Bush reached the White House, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Committee, Curtis Herbert, a Republican, was fired. This followed a clash with Lay who told him he would have him replaced.
Then there is the not insignificant matter of the repeal of the corporate alternative minimum tax, the most controversial part of Bush's tax-cut package. This gives some $5 billion tax back to big corporations, including $254 million to Enron.
But even if the scandal skates past Bush himself, the crisis poses huge questions about the propriety of the links between business and politics. It is likely to give a major boost to campaign finance reform legislation which is currently languishing in the House.
Strangely, however, the Republicans still fail to see the connection. The Governor of Montana, Mark Racicot, another Enron beneficiary, has just announced he will continue to draw his lobbyist's salary as he serves in his new job as chairman of the Republican National Committee.
Perhaps nothing better, or more pertinently, illustrates the corrupting influence of big money than the scuppering by Congress two years ago of proposals to regulate accountants. The Securities and Exchange Commission had proposed a rule that would have forced accountants to choose between offering their services to companies as auditors or as consultants.
A multi-million dollar congressional campaign was successfully launched against the proposals by the accountancy industry, spear-headed by the big five, including Enron's auditors, Arthur Andersen.
(During the 1999-2000 fund-raising cycle, only 11 companies gave more money to the Bush-Cheney ticket than Enron, and one of them was Arthur Andersen. Since 1989, Andersen has contributed more than $5 million to federal candidates and parties, more than two-thirds to Republicans.)
Among the 52 congressional recipients of accounting cash and most vociferous opponents of the reform were: Texas Senator Phil Gramm ($201,000 between 1995 and 2000), husband of the Enron vice-president and auditing chief, Wendy Gramm; and Representative Billy Tauzin ($143,000), the House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman.
At the time Tauzin insisted that "there is no evidence that even suggests there is a problem caused by a broad range of services, let alone a problem that needs to be addressed right now." Not surprisingly he has changed his tune.
And Mr Gramm claimed "our accounting firms are the envy of the world." As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, he had the last word.
Last year Andersen received $25 million from Enron for auditing services, and $27 million for consultancy work.