We as spiritual beings or souls come to earth in order to experience the human condition. This includes the good and the bad scenarios of this world. Our world is a duality planet and no amount of love or grace will eliminate evil or nastiness. We will return again and again until we have pierced the illusions of this density. The purpose of human life is to awaken to universal truth. This also means that we must awaken to the lies and deceit mankind is subjected to. To pierce the third density illusion is a must in order to remove ourselves from the wheel of human existences. Love is the Answer by means of Knowledge and Awareness!

TomPaine.com

Recuse Me! 
Conflicts Of Interest In Congress
John Moyers is the editor and publisher of TomPaine.com.
Editor's Note: Laura Ephraim provided research for this article. 

Congress will take a look at crooked Enron. The Washington Post reports that 
three House and seven Senate committees intend to hold hearings on the 
scandal -- better late than never. 

The White House isn't happy about the hearings. On January 17, Press 
Secretary Ari Fleischer had the temerity to suggest that congressional 
curiosity is uncalled for. An incredulous reporter replied, "We should just 
trust you on that?" 

The incident affirms the obvious -- the White House is wired to Enron. But 
it's not the only place in Washington that is. The company shared its 
fleeting wealth with some 250 friends on Capitol Hill. 
Many of them sit on committees now launching investigations. 

You don't have to be Ralph Nader to ask: Who in Congress should recuse 
themselves from the investigations? 

In fact, on January 20, The New York Times called for Senator Phil Gramm to 
disqualify himself. He sits on two important committees, Finance and 
Banking, that will look into the scandal; on the latter he is the ranking 
Republican. He's taken $97,350 from Enron, and his wife has a long 
association with the company, including service as a paid director. 

If Gramm should recuse himself, then why not Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, 
Enron's biggest friend in the Senate, who sits on Commerce. She has received 
$99,500 -- Gramm is ranked second. How about Senator Jeff Bingaman, chairman 
of the Energy and Natural Resource Committee? He's seventh in the top ten at 
$14,124, a relatively cheap investment for Enron, but a nice boost to 
anyone's political career. 

When it comes to recusal, the question is not: How much money does it take 
to buy a politician? A better question is: How much does it take to 
undermine public confidence that a politician is acting in the public 
interest? That's a question citizens must answer for themselves, but a 
little number crunching adds some helpful perspective. Compare committee 
assignments against the handy nonpartisan contribution data at 
OpenSecrets.org and the result is eye-opening. 

Enron's reach goes far and deep. The company's top 10 friends in the Senate 
benefited from contributions ranging in size from Pete Domenici's $12,000 to 
Hutchinson's $99,500. Each of the top 10 sits on at least one of the 
investigating committees, and seven out of 10 sit on two or more. 

Take another look at Senator Bingaman. Besides his chairmanship, Bingaman 
sits on two other committees -- Finance; and Health, Education, Labor and 
Pensions. Former Enron employees whose retirement accounts were dashed when 
the company's stock crashed might reasonably ask if Bingaman should recuse 
himself from hearings in the latter committee. 

Now look at Bingaman's Energy and Natural Resources Committee. It's packed 
with Enron's friends -- Conrad Burns ($23,200), Chuck Schumer ($21,933), and 
Gordon Smith ($18,000) among them. If Enron's top 10 Senate friends 
disqualified themselves, the committee would lose six of its 23 members; if 
Enron's top 20 Senate friends recused, the committee would lose 10 of its 23 
members. If a $1,000 Enron contribution warranted recusal, no Republicans 
and just four Democrats would remain on Bingaman's panel. And we haven't 
even mentioned contributions from Enron's sidekick in this calamity, Arthur 
Andersen, which is nearly as big a donor as Enron. 

All but two of the Banking Committee's 21 members would be eliminated if a 
$1,000 contribution from either Enron or Arthur Andersen triggered recusal 
-- senators Thomas Carper and Daniel Akaka would have the hearing room to 
themselves. Looked at another way, eight members of the committee are among 
the top 20 recipients of Enron or Anderson contributions, and six are among 
the top 10. 

The conflict of interest is clear -- both Enron and Andersen have invested 
heavily in the political careers of many members of Congress who will now 
investigate them. Are we supposed to have confidence that there's enough 
independence left in the capital to protect the public interest? Washington 
is wired -- our public servants are privately funded by the people they're 
meant to oversee. They promise to get to the bottom of this mess, but an 
ordinary American might reasonably wonder: We should just trust them on that? 

When he was a senator running for re-election in 2000, John Ashcroft took 
$57,000 from Enron. Now as U.S. Attorney General, he's recused himself from 
looking into the mess. 

Who among his former congressional colleagues should follow suit? The real 
question is: Who shouldn't? 

Published: Jan 22 2002

*****

The Loyal Opposition:
The Enron Affair 
The Scandalous Attitude Of The Bush Administration By David Corn

With most scandals in Washington come the naysayers -- those quick to 
declare the matter no big deal, dismiss it as a partisan witchhunt, or 
assert it is nothing but the concoction of headline-hungry reporters. The 
Enron case is no exception. 

"I'm still trying," columnist Andrew Sullivan says, "to figure out what this 
Enron thing is all about." He calls the Enron affair "less of a deal" than 
Whitewater, noting, "I haven't seen any argument yet that takes us beyond 
the line that many in the Bush administration were close to Enron, that 
Enron helped bankroll Bush's campaigns, and that therefore there is some 
sort of guilt by association." Similarly, National Review's Byron York 
comments there is "scant evidence that Enron equals Whitewater," as if that 
is now the standard measurement of scandal, and he attributes all the hurly- 
burly media attention to the knee-jerk, follow-the-pack tendencies of the 
media. 

New York Times columnist William Safire opines, "the scandal I see in this 
corporate debacle is non-political; it's professional." That is, the 
culprits worth bashing are Enron's accountants at Arthur Andersen who 
awarded their good housekeeping seal of approval to the company's 
sleight-of-hand finances and then destroyed documents. 

Safire and Company are not wrong to point out that the cliched smoking-gun 
-- a piece of incontrovertible evidence hog-tying George W. Bush or one of 
his aides to Enron fraud or coverup -- has yet to be discovered in the 
massive pile of bad paper and shredded documents that federal and 
congressional investigators will be poking through for years to come. (The 
scandal is still young.) And the Bush White House and its defenders 
vehemently maintain administration officials did not rush to the rescue of 
Enron chairman-in-distress Kenneth Lay, Bush's most generous contributor, 
after Lay called his pals in government to say Enron was in deep doo-doo. 
But none of this means the scandal is politics-free. 

There are Bush critics who grouse that by doing nothing the Bush 
administration was a silent accomplice to the screwing of Enron employees, 
who were forced by the company to keep their retirement plans loaded with 
plummeting Enron stock while Lay and other top execs had dumped over a $1 
billion in personal Enron securities before the bubble burst. (Lay pocketed 
$30 million in his oh-so prescient sell-off; another Enron honcho skated 
away with $353 million.) But it is hard to make a federal case over the 
absence of Bush intervention. 

Perhaps the Bush administration should have moved to assist the company in 
some fashion out of concern for the workers but did not because it feared 
such an act would be blasted as blatant favoritism. More importantly, the 
Enron failure illuminates the problems and dangers of the Bush 
administration's we're-all-buds approach toward the corporate community. It 
stirs up significant questions -- political questions -- about the 
predilections and judgments of the Bush Gang. 

Consider this: when the Bush administration decided to cook up a 
comprehensive energy policy, Enron executives were invited several times to 
meet with Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force. In these sessions, 
Enron had the opportunity to sell the White House on proposals that would be 
good for Enron. Many environmental groups, alternative energy experts, 
energy conservation specialists, and consumer advocates were not that 
fortunate. Why did Enron get a special place at the table? How could they 
not, is a better way to put it. 

Lay and his comrades had poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into Bush's 
various campaigns. Lawrence Lindsey, Bush's top economic adviser, was paid 
$50,000 in 2000 for serving on a do- nothing Enron advisory board. (But he 
did earn that money by passing along Lay ideas to the Bush presidential 
campaign.) Enron Field, a baseball stadium, was built by Halliburton, the 
construction company Dick Cheney headed before becoming Bush's sidekick. 
Dozens of Bush officials had held Enron stocks; several others had worked 
for Enron or received campaign contributions from the firm. 

Remove from the equation all these connections -- forget reality, for a 
moment -- and then ask, why should the Bush White House have sought advice 
from Enron? The company was more a paper tiger than an energy policy 
pioneer. It made its phony billions by recording as revenue the total value 
of the goods it traded -- say, electricity, gas and other energy commodities 
-- not by calculating the profit or loss from each transaction. Sell $10 
million worth of natural gas? Who cares if it cost $10.1 million? You have 
$10 million in revenue. 

Enron was like Catch 22's Milo Minderbinder, whose M&M enterprises bought 
eggs for 7 cents a piece, sold them for 5 cents a piece, and claimed a 
profit. The reason for letting Enron in the door at 1600 Penn was 
corporate-political camaraderie that was greased by Enron's past 
contributions and payments to assorted Bushies. Rather than being granted 
audiences with Cheney's energy team, Enron should have been hauled in before 
the Securities and Exchange Commission -- and the IRS. The firm paid no 
income taxes in four of the past five years, via the use of hundreds of 
overseas tax havens and other trickery. 

It's not just that the Bush crowd was duped by Lay and his partners- 
in-fraud. The Bush White House deliberately created a friendly climate for 
such scoundrels. Prior to the fall on Enron, SEC chairman Harvey Pitt, a 
Bush appointee, had refused to take on the accounting industry, claiming 
that in recent years the SEC had been too adversarial toward accounting 
firms. He told Barron's "there is nothing rotten with the accounting 
profession" and called for better self-regulation, not tighter government 
oversight. (Surprise! Pitt used to be a lawyer for the American Institute of 
Certified Public Accountants. And two other Bush SEC nominees hail from big 
accounting firms.) 

After the Enron mess hit the front pages, Pitt chastised the industry for 
not moving fast enough to deal with the sort of iffy bookkeeping practices 
exploited by Enron, and he unveiled the sketchy details of a reform plan. 
But the centerpiece of his proposal was a new over sight board that would be 
funded by -- guess who? -- the industry. Here he was sticking with the Bush 
Doctrine: let corporations regulate themselves. 

Whether Bush and his aides pulled a favor for Enron is only one issue. Zoom 
out, and the broader landscape shows a Bush administration all-too 
sympathetic and open to corporate bamboozlers. 
Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi pooh-poohs the Enron affair as "another 
Incomprehensible Washington Scandal." He explained: "By definition, an IWS 
is so convoluted that it is understood only by participants, partisans, 
lawyers and a few very nerdy journalists -- all of whom are paid to pay 
attention anyway." (Other examples: Iran- contra, the S&L scandal, 
Travelgate.) But the big brush strokes -- the Bush administration's far too 
hospitable disposition toward Enron and Arthur Andersen -- are not hard to 
discern or to fathom. The search for that smoking gun -- which can be a 
mind-numbing, detail- dominated process -- ought not to distract from the 
wider view. (And, yes, the Clinton administration was also in the hayloft 
with Lay and Enron. The company gave the Democrats hundreds of thousands of 
dollars and won much-coveted seats on overseas trade missions headed by Ron 
Brown and Mickey Kantor, Clinton's secretaries of commerce.) 

In noting that Enron's collapse was not unusual business, Treasury Secretary 
Paul O'Neill remarks, "Companies come and go. Part of the genius of 
capitalism is people get to make good decisions or bad decisions, and they 
get to pay the consequences or enjoy the fruits of their decisions." In 
other words, the government doesn't have to fret about employees who get 
nothing while execs -- the people who made the bad decisions -- skip off 
with millions of dollars earned through sleazy transactions. The market 
rules. As does campaign contributions and personal connections. What's 
scandalous (so far) is not the Bush administration's actions (or lack 
thereof), but its attitude. 

Published: Jan 18 2002
David Corn is the Washington editor of The Nation. His first novel, Deep 
Background, a political thriller, was published recently by St. 
Martin's Press.

*****

Enron-omics At A Glance 
A Primer On What Really Happened Before The Fall

Theresa Amato is president of Citizen Works, a non-profit, non- partisan 
organization working to strengthens citizen participation in power.

Editor's Note: Katie Selenski contributed to this article. 

The following is excerpted from introductory remarks Theresa Amato gave at a 
press conference on January 21, 2002. To read the statements given by other 
participants at the press conference, visit the Citizen Works Web site. 

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, whose memory and life work we celebrated this 
week, said that, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." 

As the Enron/Arthur Andersen scandals unfold and the resulting injustices to 
the employees, pension holders, shareholders, and community become clear, we 
are putting forth a set of citizen proposals for reform. 

Before we turn to our distinguished citizen advocates who are going to 
address proposed component parts of this Citizens Agenda for Reform, let's 
do a quick recap of Enron-omics as we know it thus far. 

Enron-omics At A Glance 

In 2001, Enron, a 15 year-old energy-trading corporation, was ranked number 
seven of the Fortune 500. In December 2001, Enron laid off 4,000 employees 
and filed for bankruptcy, the largest such filing ever. Many employees lost 
70 to 90 percent of their retirement savings as they were forced to hold 
their shares from October 16 to November 13 while Enron's value plummeted to 
pennies per share. 

As late as September 2001, Enron employees and other shareholders were 
consistently reassured by top management that the stock was stable -- "a 
bargain" -- and that future prospects were good, while executives sold off 
$1.1 billion in company shares and amassed personal fortunes. 
Enron accumulated more than $1 billion in debt since 1997, debt that top 
executives hid off the books. 

Arthur Andersen doubled as an auditor and as a management advisory services 
firm for Enron, making more than $50 million in fees in a single year. When 
criticism began to surface about its accounting practices, Enron management 
ordered its law firm to run a limited investigation, not to include 
"second-guessing," which resulted in an October report finding no wrong 
doing at Enron or Andersen. Andersen stood by its reports until shortly 
before Enron failed, when Enron decided that four years of earnings had to 
be restated and $600 million - or 20% -- of reported profits had to be erased. 

Andersen shredded thousands of paper and email documents pertaining to Enron 
audits. 
Of the securities analysts following Enron, only one put a sell 
recommendation on the stock prior to the date of bankruptcy; Enron had 3500 
subsidiaries and partnerships, and paid no income taxes in four of the past 
five years because it was able to transfer assets among 881 subsidiaries 
that were set up abroad in tax- sheltered countries. According to Public 
Citizen, from 1989 to 2002, Enron and its employees gave $5.95 million in 
individual, political action committee and soft money contributions to 
federal candidates and parties, 74 percent to Republicans and 26 percent to 
Democrats. Enron employees were the single largest funding source of George 
W. Bush's presidential campaign, and gave $623,000 directly to President 
Bush throughout his career. 

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Arthur Andersen ranked 5th 
on President Bush campaign's list of corporate donors. Since 1989, Andersen 
has contributed nearly $5 million in soft money, PAC and individual 
contributions to federal candidates and parties. Enron officials were 
invited to participate in six meetings of Vice- President Cheney's energy 
task force, which endorsed many Enron proposals. Enron chairman Kenneth Lay 
made calls throughout the fall to the Treasury Department, the Federal 
Reserve, and the White House "providing information" about the company's 
situation to top officials at each, though reportedly no assistance was 
granted.