What a strange world this would be if the virtue-mongers in the
Senate were to actually get to the bottom of the Enron scandal
which kicked off the frenetic round of activity to make America
safe from greedy CEOs, CFOs and auditors.
Hinting that the Bush Administration is responsible for all this
(in the hope voters will agree in November), Senator Tom Daschle,
the majority leader, and Senator Joseph Lieberman intone their
veiled attacks with such preambles as “I am gravely concerned…”
and “It distresses me to say…”
It turns out, however, theirs is a case of
do-as-a-I-say-not-as-I-do. For example, when Republican Rep. John
Thune of Daschle’s state, South Dakota, included in the farm bill
earlier this year a provision to allow culling of undergrowth and
dead or dying trees from national forests in the state, Daschle
killed the provision at the urging of environmental groups.
Last week, however, it was revealed that Senator Daschle had
quietly slipped into a defense spending bill a provision to allow
just such thinning of forests in South Dakota as a means of
preventing forest fires. The provision exempts the subject forests
from regulations and lawsuits. At present, more than 20 legal
proceedings aimed at preventing the removal of forest fire fuel
from South Dakota national forests are on court dockets. Western
states’ senators claimed that the Daschle provision should apply to
their states, too. They have a strong argument. According to the
National Interagency Fire Center, more than 3.7 million acres of
forest have been consumed by 50,000 fires this summer.
There is mounting evidence that environmental extremist efforts
to prevent culling and thinning of fuel from national forests have
contributed to the devastation. Imbued with self-righteousness, the
environmentalists deny this, although they gave Senator Daschle a
pass for his action.
As for Senator Lieberman, he was asked if he planned to call
Citigroup Executive Committee Chairman Robert Rubin (who was Mr.
Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury), to testify before his Senate
Governmental Affairs Committee. “I do not,” he replied tersely.
That’s odd. Just the other day, Senate investigators revealed in a
hearing that Citigroup helped Enron disguise its ballooning debts
through an arcane device called “commodity prepays.” These devices
were hidden from Enron investors while Citigroup was selling a
large amount of Enron bonds, now worthless. Rubin, who was nearly
canonized by the media when he left office, joined Citigroup in
1999. By April 2001, Enron had used “prepays” to understate its
debt by $2.2 billion. Under generally accepted accounting
principles, this debt should have been on Enron’s books, but
Citigroup turned the other cheek.
As Enron’s position deteriorated, maintaining its credit ratings
was essential. Three weeks before Enron declared bankruptcy, Rubin
lobbied a senior Treasury Department official to urge him to call
the independent credit-rating agencies to persuade them not to
downgrade Enron. What he was asking the official to do was wrong.
The official told him, in effect, to jump in a lake.
You would think that Senator Lieberman’s committee would be
interested in learning everything there is to learn about the role
of Mr. Rubin and his company in the Enron saga. He’s not. Do you
suppose it is because they are both Democrats? And, you’d think
Senator Daschle would want his forest-thinning exemption extended
to other-fire prone states. He doesn’t. Do you suppose it is
because his fellow South Dakota Democrat Senator Tim Johnson is in
the political fight of his life with Rep. Thune, and Daschle wants
to help him?
We know these explanations can’t be true because virtue reigns
in the Senate.
