(Mitch McConnell's) Cold words about Enron's victims
by Betty Baye

There's not much good to commend about being forced to spend three and four hours at a time in airports waiting for flights. Airport food and snacks are way overpriced and there's always that important businessman who has to into his cellphone so that everyone around him can know that he's an important businessman.

But if you love to read, but rarely have huge blocs of time to do nothing but, the hours spent in airports these days, thanks to Osma bin Laden's Terror Inc., can be made just a bit more bearable.

  And last weekend, I had plenty of time to read when I flew to Virginia to deliver a speech commemorating the Martin Luther   King Jr. holiday. Of my total 38-hour journey, 10 hours were spent lumbering through security, standing on line to get a seat and waiting for my flight.

  The New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek and USA Today had my almost full attention.
  They hit the story of Enron's collapse from every angle. They covered it as a political drama -- who
  in the White House knew what when -- as a business story -- with a lot less fanfare than Enron
  employees, the $60,000 and under crowd at Lucent, General Electric, McDonald's and Coca-Cola
  have also seen the value of their company stocks fall by more than 20 percent, puttig their futures at
  risk -- and as a human interest story given that 15,000 Enron workers have lost $1.3 billion in their
  company's 401(k) plan.

  And those Enron worker lost while the big dogs at Enron, with the benefit of insider knowledge that
  the company was near collapse, made millions unloading their fat stock portfolios before the fall and
  even as the little guys and gals were be assured Enron's future was rosy.

  When I was reading about one Enron family's plans to sell land that has been in the husband's family
  for generations, I thought about how calloused Sen. Mitch McConnell seemed in a radio interview a
  few days earlier.

  Enron workers, he said, had only themselves to blame.

  They were foolish not to have diversified their investment portfolios, McConnell said.

  In other words, they were foolish to trust their bosses.

  What made McConnell's comments incredulous is that he's a big man in the party that everyone
  knows loves corporations better than pigs than slop. The GOP loves to say that it's mission is to get
  government off the backs of corporations because presumably, left to their own devices, the
  corporations will do right by the environment and their workers.

  Add to that the fact that McConnell's party is the one that thinks it would be a swell idea for
  workers to swell their retirement nest eggs by investing in the stock market instead of good, old, safe
  Social Security.

  McConnell acknowledged that he's gotten money from Enron over the years, but not much he
  assured his listening constituents. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, McConnell's GOP colleague who
  hails from Texas where Enron is based in Houston, said she's giving back Enron's contribution to
  help workers who've taken bath in Enron's collapse.

  That's good for her, McConnell said, but he's not giving anything back.

  He might were he a Texan. But since he's a Kentuckian, oh well.

  I wonder what all those good Republican Enron employees would think of McConnell's view of
  them as simpletons and of him running the official Republican line these days, the truth of which will
  be proven one way or another, that Enron got nothing for the millions it lavished on politicians over
  the years, including Democrats.

  I bet that those good Republican Enron workers would have expected something a bit more
  sympathetic or that the GOP would take as good care of them as it took of their bosses.

  Instead, the White House and assorted other political Enron beneficiaries are running for cover.
  Some, like McConnell, are even blaming the victims of corporate excess and greed.

  Enron got nothing for the millions it lavished on politicians, McConnell said.

  Pleeeeze. That statement is an insult to everyone's intelligence.

  Enron got a lot. It bought access to the powerbrokers and in return for a place on Enron's corporate
  breast, the powerbrokers slathered Enron with favorable legislation and loopholes that made it
  possible for Enron executives and the companies jivetime auditors to exploit loopholes like the ones
  that made it possible for Enron to make billions at one time, but pay zero in taxes.

  And to think, some of the same people in Congress who were all hot and bothered about consensual
  sex, or whatever that was between President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, now sit perfectly
  sanguine when one of its corporate benefactors has, in effect, and with no consent screwed its
  workers and other investors, who've lost $60 billion in the collapse.

  Betty Winston Bayé's column appears Thursdays in The Forum.
 

  Copyright 2002 The Courier-Journal.