The one person in the Enron scandal whom congress is not likely to subpoena is its own revered Phil
Gramm, the retiring Republican Senator from Texas. Gramm and his wife, Wendy, have tight links to
Enron, Wendy being a director and Gramm the pusher of legislation that assisted the company during its
troubles last year. In December, his press secretary denied the latter charge, saying, "Senator Gramm
took no role, had no say, and did not vote on the energy futures provisions."
That's not the story presented by the D.C. watchdog Public Citizen, whose tale goes like this:
In an apparent response to a 1992 plea from Enron, Dr. Wendy Gramm, then chair of the federal
Commodity Futures Trading Commission, moved to exempt the company's energy-swap operation from
government oversight. By then, the Houston-based Enron was a major contributor to Senator Gramm's
campaign.
A few days after she got the ball rolling on the exemption, Wendy Gramm resigned from the
commission. Enron soon appointed her to its board of directors, where she served on the audit
committee, which oversees the inner financial workings of the corporation. For this, the company paid
her between $915,000 and $1.85 million in stocks and dividends, as much as $50,000 in annual salary,
and $176,000 in attendance fees, according to a report by Public Citizen, a group that has relentlessly
tracked Enron, which in turn has called the report unfair.
Meanwhile Enron had become Phil Gramm's largest corporate contributor-and according to Public
Citizen, the largest across-the board donor in its industry. Between 1989 and 2001, the company tossed
Gramm just under $100,000.
In 1998, Wendy Gramm cashed in her Enron stock for $276,912. There's nothing unusual about a
Washington regulator quitting the government and going to work for a private company she was
regulating. And people often get rich in the process. Wendy Gramm, whose office didn't return Voice
calls, has told reporters she sold the stock expressly to avoid any hint of a conflict of interest.
But that's not the end of the story.
In June 2000, Senator Gramm co-sponsored the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, a measure
aimed at deregulating certain kinds of futures trading, but not energy futures. That bill never made it to
the floor, and thus quietly died. Six months later, on December 15, Gramm curiously turned up as
co-sponsor of a bill with the same name, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which did
deregulate energy futures and which, without undergoing the usual committee hearings and preliminary
votes, was immediately attached as a rider to an 11,000-page appropriations bill. It passed and was
signed into law by President Bill Clinton six days later. Few lawmakers had likely perused the rider
carefully, if they even knew it was there. And at any rate, Enron had given to the campaigns of over 200
legislators.
...
On a positive note, when Texas A&M recently named
the three finalists for the presidency of the
university, Gramm wasn't on the list.
This is good for the university, and good for a
friend who works for it.
This guy was a beat reporter several years ago
when Gramm was running a senatorial campaign against
a school teacher whose campaign mainly consisted of driving his old pick-up truck
around Texas.
At a campaign stop, Gramm started braying about how
his opponent was just another insidious Washington insider who didn't have their interests at heart.
My friend asked Gramm to comment, in light of his
decades of experience in holding various government positions and
serving in Congress, on the specific Washington
connections of this Texas school teacher who'd never
been to Washington. I'd give a lot of money to
have seen the look on Gramm's face that day.
posted by Steven Baum
3/22/2002 10:34:12 AM |
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