The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception by David Corn

Author:David Corn
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Politics
ISBN: 9780641786792
Published: 2003-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

In early January 2002, the White House—which had refused for months to release any information about the deliberations of the Cheney energy task force—did disclose that Enron representatives had met six times with Cheney or his energy policy staff, before and after Cheney had drafted the administration’s energy plan. One of these sessions was a tête-à-tête between Cheney and Lay.*5

In these meetings, Enron had the opportunity to sell the White House on energy policies that would be good for Enron. Asked about the Enron-Cheney chats—were they a sign of favoritism?—Fleischer replied, “The president thinks that access should be across the board. And that’s why the Sierra Club, for example, as you know, met repeatedly with the energy task force.” What a lie. Sierra Club officials had met once with Cheney but only after the task force had crafted and released its energy plan. “Unlike Enron,” Carl Pope, the executive director of the Sierra Club, noted, “the Sierra Club never met with the energy task force or made any recommendations to it.”

Did the White House sessions pay off for Enron? The Cheney-Lay get-together, in retrospect, appeared especially useful to Enron. On April 17, 2001, the two huddled and, according to an Enron memo later publicized by the San Francisco Chronicle, Lay presented Cheney with a list of suggestions for the White House energy plan. He also expressed his company’s view on how the administration should respond (actually, not respond) to the energy crisis then under way in California. That state had been hit by rolling blackouts and electric bills ten times the normal amounts (or more). The crisis was costing the state tens of billions of dollars, and some Californian officials were calling for caps on wholesale prices. In his meeting with Cheney, Lay, whose company sold power to California, argued against price caps; his memo claimed that even temporary price restrictions “will be detrimental to power markets and will discourage private investment.”

The following day, Cheney, in a telephone interview with the Los Angeles Times, spoke out against caps, asserting (Lay-like) that they would discourage investment. He blamed price caps for California’s fix: “Frankly, California is looked on by many folks as a classic example of the kinds of problems that arise when you do use price caps.” But Cheney was confusing different types of price caps. The price caps he derided were limits imposed by the state on consumer rates; some analysts argued that these caps had left ill-prepared California utilities short of funds to buy power from energy producers. But the price cap then being sought by state officials was a limit on wholesale prices, which would be imposed on companies that produced electricity and sold it to California utilities. Many of these firms happened to be based in Texas and were supporters of Bush. And at the time they were enjoying profits rising by 400 to 600 percent. Did Cheney not understand the difference between the two kinds of caps? Cheney was even dead-set against a temporary wholesale price cap.

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