In the first week of the New Year, a poll from Time/CNN showed that Americans have become more concerned about the economy than terrorism. Even when Bush's pre-war approval ratings were middling at around 55%, issues of corporate partisanship were haunting him. In April 2001, an ABC News poll found that only 28% of Americans believed Bush "cares more about protecting the interests of ordinary working people" than the "interests of large business corporations." The American people are not blind: 60% said they felt Bush cared more for big business.

The Favors

After researching the Bush/Karl Rove/Enron connection since June, I don't believe there has ever been a complete list in the big media of exactly what favors the Bush White House did for Enron [if you don't count the website of Congressman Henry Waxman.] About 60% of ordinary Americans already have a hunch that Bush's priority is to help out big business, so they won't be shocked. But to get us all on the same page, here are some of the paths the Senate should pursue in its upcoming investigation:

1. Nora Brownell: Hand-Picked by Enron, Nominated by Bush

Bush's Karl Rove took the advice of Enron's Ken Lay about a prospective appointee to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Nora Mead Brownell (also known to her detractors as "Nora Mead Brownout") was appointed by Bush and confirmed by the Senate. A childhood friend of Director of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, at the Pennsylvania Public Utilities Commission Brownell had helped Enron enter Pennsylvania's newly deregulated energy markets.

The law was most likely snapped in two. When Rove consulted with Lay over Brownell, Rove owned a significant number of shares of Enron. Normally, a White House official needs to apply for and receive a waiver to clear this kind of conflict of interest. When Congressman Henry Waxman asked why Rove had not sought the proper waiver, the White House curtly replied that Rove was not within the jurisdiction of that law. Representative Waxman didn't buy that. But somehow, our political system lets a non-elected paid campaign official in the White House get away with blatant white collar crime while an elected Congressman, the ranking member of the House Government Reform Committee, can't even get his questions answered.

Before her appointment to the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission, Brownell had no experience in public utility management. She was a banker. Senior Vice President for Corporate Affairs at Meridian Bancorp in Philadelphia, she did receive high marks for opening up housing loans to minorities. But her first decision in Pennsylvania, on wholesale phone rates, was criticized as "anti-consumer." The opening stanzas of her testimony to the Senate opens with this breathy libertarian posturing: "In the interest of full disclosure, I believe in free markets."

On 25 May 2001, the Senate confirmed Ms. Brownell. Simultaneously that day, in a move that can't be coincidental, U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), a leading member of the committee that confirmed Brownell, called for hearings into the possibility of an improper relationship between the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the energy industry. In her Press release, Feinstein cited the day's New York Times report that FERC Chairman Bob Herbert had been contacted by Ken Lay, and offered "support" if he would change his policies to be favorable to Enron. Senator Feinstein noted "FERC is a $175 million a year agency charged with regulating the energy industry, and it would be unconscionable if any of the nation's electricity traders or generators were in a position to be able to determine who chairs or becomes a member of the commission."

Today, Nora Mead Brownell remains a defender of Enron's integrity. To her, Enron's spectacular crash was not the product of deceit or hubris, as many Wall Street analysts find. The government's "regulator" is far more forgiving than even the most bullish critics in the marketplace. To Nora Brownell, Enron's fatal flaw was simply a lack of restraint. She told the Washington Post, "In my mind, it is a classic case of a company growing very fast and not putting in place the financial controls and management depth that was needed." Unregulated markets were not at fault, of course. "In fact, the market has worked pretty efficiently." She dismisses the accusations of criminal fraud and chalks it up to the wild west nature of the "free market." In a forgiving voice, she recently told PBS, "When you don't have a Ten Commandments, it's very hard to have a sinner." Enron should hope to find the Senate so understanding. Does the killing of over 4,500 jobs not prick Brownell's conscience? Does the vaporizing of $70 billion in value not strike her as bad for the pensions and economy of average, hard-working Americans?

2. Enron in the California Energy Crisis:

How Could Ken Lay Learn Nothing? In 2000, Enron's annual revenues surpassed the $100 billion mark, more than doubling its revenue of $40 billion in 1999. Critics on the West Coast charged that Enron earned such grosses partly by exploiting the hungry, under-supplied, deregulated California market.

Enron's Ken Lay would later blame his lack of willingness to supply new plants on a lack of full deregulation: "When the governor put on price caps back in October, we, along with another company, cancelled the construction of a couple of big power plant peaking plants, which would have been available for this summer, because we couldn't justify making those big investments in peaking plants, which will just run a few days during the year. Price caps do not solve the problem, but price caps just require the politicians to decide who's going to be curtailed."

But it's ironic that Enron complains about public policy in California. The company played a role in the writing of the California deregulation law that eventually stuck consumers with a $40 billion bill. In 1996, former B-movie actor and California State Senator Steve Peace led the legislature on an eighteen-day "death march" that often worked past midnight to cobble together incomprehensible legislation. At the time, Enron was eager to enter the California market, and was influential through lobbyists like D. J. Smith of the California Large Energy Consumers Association. Eventually, Peace's energy deregulation law was passed in Sacramento without a dissenting vote. "There was a blind adherence to free-market ideology that couldn't possibly work," former utility securities analyst Eugene Coyle later told the San Francisco Chronicle. "There were poorly thought-out specifics."

And today in the Bush White House, the lesson of California has been lost. As recently as this spring, Karl Rove and the Bush White House rejected California Governor Gray Davis's plea to impose price caps on electricity, which, among other things, would have been costly to Enron. (And remember, at this time, Rove was still a shareholder in Enron.)

As reported in a 17 May 2001 energy industry newsletter, Governor Davis is currently so frustrated with deregulation Texas-style, that he threatened to use the laws of eminent domain to seize the power plants of Houston-based Reliant Energy: "He warned that actions taken by Reliant and other independent generators this summer will determine whether he signs a windfall profits tax bill or, in the extreme, commandeers the electricity produced by a plant or seizes the facility itself." Later, the Governor addressed President Bush directly: "Mr. President, runaway energy prices are not just a California problem. With all due respect, I once again urge you to stand up to your friends in the energy business and exercise the federal government's responsibility to ensure energy prices are just and reasonable."