Terrific piece in the Washington Post yesterday that confirms my suspicions of Enron’s motives in setting up its “advisory board” for pundits and policy-makers. Even ” some Enron officials privately suggested [paying pundits] did not pass the smell test.” Paul Krugman wasn’t the only liberal for rent. They approached James Carville (who turned them down) and a man called Paul Portney, of the liberal environmental group, Resources for the Future. Here’s a key passage:
Paul Portney, president of Resources for the Future, said he attended five council sessions. Also participating, he said, was the foundation’s vice chairman, Robert Grady, a senior aide to the first President Bush and a drafter of the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments. In June 2001, Grady wrote a column for Time magazine that endorsed the trading of greenhouse gas emissions rights, a business from which Enron hoped to profit. Grady did not respond to requests for an interview. Enron gave Resources for the Future annual gifts of up to $45,000, and Lay’s family foundation pledged $2 million to endow a research chair. Portney called the stipend granted to advisers a “dream,” but said the money did not influence his views — or his foundation’s decision in April 2000 to name Lay to its governing board. “I am pretty cantankerous; I say what I want,” Portney said. The advisory panel fed Lay’s ego and was “consistent with the idea that you buy your way to success,” said a former Enron political operative. “It was clumsy and the joke was these people took the money and ran. They accomplished little.”
Took the money and ran, eh? And that’s the assessment from Enron itself. Bill Kristol’s still spinning, though. He boasts that, for his $100,000 +, he actually told Lay that John McCain could beat Bush. I wonder if he also told Lay about his own beliefs in campaign finance reform. It turns out Kristol opposes corporate bribes for corrupt politicians, but not for journalists. The hacks, it seems, are beyond reproach.
HEAR THE ONE ABOUT THE CHEAP JEW?: “The last time Andrew S. Fastow got in a public brawl about money, it was with a cab driver and concerned a 70-cent tip. The cabbie got so upset he punched Fastow in the face… The picture that emerges is of a greedy, self-dealing executive whom others dare not cross. Friends say they find that image impossible to reconcile with the synagogue-going, happily married, stand-up guy they know.” – Los Angeles Times, February 7. (Update: after a couple of querying emails, I hope it’s clear that I meant this item to be a criticism of such a clumsy if probably unconscious recitation of an anti-Semitic trope.)
The Dish 