Now that the top dogs at Enron have been convicted, its time to look back at Enron’s operations in Asia, where the company created a small empire of power plants with the help of the IMF, the World Bank and various lending agencies of the US government. This house of cards would collapse with the rest of the Enron – but both the Clinton and Bush administrations did everything they could to bail the company out of its problems. This 2002 article I wrote for Asia Times tells the full story. “The cozy relationship between this paragon of free enterprise and the representatives of globalized state power – stretching from the White House to the World Bank – makes the American criticism of the Asian economies as “crony capitalism” sound like the shrill hypocrisy it always was.”
