A marriage made in heaven has come crashing to earth and gone hellish and sour. The Republican Party and Enron Corporation had so much in common. They were masters of their own sections of the universe, one of the Executive Branch of the United States government and the other of the world of energy trading. Both were flush with cash, both were manned by brilliant operatives in the realms of spin and creative accounting, both were dedicated to the proposition that rules and regulations don’t necessarily apply to the big guys. Once the very picture of wedded bliss, the Party and the Corporation now resemble secret nocturnal lovers who pretend not to know each other when their paths cross again in the harsh light of day.
But it was a beautiful relationship while it lasted. It was holding hands in the park, case after case of the finest champagne, romantic evenings cuddling by the fireplace and, as they say in the personal ads, “more.” While the Party pushed its program of huge tax cuts for the rich through Congress, the Corporation avoided paying any taxes at all some years with clever schemes involving faked futures contracts, dubious accounting mechanisms, and offshore tax havens. The leadership of Enron kept lower-level employees and investors in the dark as to what was really going on. Meanwhile, these savvy upper-echelon executives cashed out hundreds of millions of dollars in the company stock before it crashed.
The relationship between the Party and the Corporation was built on a foundation of mountains of cool cash and plenty of friendly quid pro quo. Naturally, the official Republican line is that while there may have been “quo,” there was absolutely no “quid.” Well, if you believe that, I have some prime Mississippi River bottomlands you might be interested in. Frank Rich said it best in last week’s New York Times: “Though the Bush administration has been in office only a year, Enron’s oily fingerprints are all over its actions as well as its résumés and stock portfolios.”
It is true that some Enron dough flowed into Democratic coffers, too, about 27 percent of the nearly $6 million it lavished on the parties between 1989 and the day it declared bankruptcy. The Corporation was an equal-opportunity influence peddler. But the fact that Enron’s laissez-faire philosophy matched the Republican view on gutting regulation and cutting government to the bone made them natural partners.
It’s looking more and more like Enron, belle (as well as sponsor) of many a Republican ball not so very long ago, was in reality only the latest in a long line of capitalist buccaneers ranging from the nineteenth century robber barons to our own era’s Leona Helmsley, billionaire hotel owner and New York’s notorious “Queen of Mean,” who famously opined that “only the little people pay taxes” before being sent to jail for mail fraud and, yes, tax evasion.
The shrill conservative commentators who shouted themselves hoarse during the Clinton years denouncing that administration’s moral lapses have suddenly decided to rest their voices. One hopes they are reflecting upon the harsh truth that no one political party has a claim to the higher morality. And that unfettered capitalism, free enterprise that refuses to play by the rules, has an astonishing resemblance to racketeering. But somehow I doubt it.