Meet Enron, Bush's Biggest Contributor.

• Author: Chatterjee, Pratap

Early last October, members of the ninth grade girls' track team and the boys' football team at suburban Houston's Deer Park High School's north campus returned from practice reporting severe breathing problems. That day, Deer Park registered 251 parts of ozone per billion, more than twice the federal standard, and Houston surpassed Los Angeles as the smoggiest city in the United States.

One of the biggest contributors to Deer Park's pollution is a plant owned by Enron, Houston's wealthiest company. Enron and its executives are also the single largest contributors ($550,000 and counting) to the political ambitions of Texas Governor George W. Bush, Republican candidate for President of the United States. Kenneth Lay, the chief executive of Enron, has personally given at least $250,000 in soft money to Bush's political campaigns. He is also one of the "Pioneers"--a Bush supporter who has collected $100,000 in direct contributions of $1,000 or less.

What is Enron? And what does it get in return for this largesse?

Enron is the largest buyer and seller of natural gas in the country. Its 1999 revenues of $40 billion make it the eighteenth largest company in the United States. Enron invests in energy projects in countries around the world, including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mozambique, and the Philippines.

The company has recently expanded onto the Internet, buying and selling a dizzying array of products ranging from pulp and paper to petrochemicals and plastics, as well as esoteric products like clean air credits that utilities purchase to meet emission limits.

Texas activists say that the tight connection between Bush and Lay bodes ill if Bush is elected. Andrew Wheat, from Texans for Public Justice, a campaign finance advocacy group in Austin, compares the symbiotic relationship between Enron and the governor to "cogeneration"--a process used by utilities to harness waste heat vented by their generators to produce more power. "In a more sinister form of cogeneration, corporations are converting economic into political power," he says. "A Bush election fueled by Enron dollars could ignite in the public policy arena, and consumers would get burned."

And so may people in the Third World.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have both criticized Enron for colluding with police who brutally suppressed protests at the company's giant power plant in western India. The plant's operating firm is called the Dabhol Power Company. From 1992 to 1998, Enron owned 80 percent of it, with General Electric and Bechtel each holding a 10 percent share. (In 1998, the Indian state electricity board bought a 30 percent share of the company, which reduced Enron's stake to 50 percent.)

For years, the plant has been the site of many nonviolent protests.

"The...