Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [81]
Four miles northwest of City Hall Alma Brown keeps her thermostat set well below seventy. Brown, a seventy-year-old African-American woman living on Social Security, is also disabled. “I get only Social Security, but I been managing pretty good,” she said. For years she sewed uniforms at the Army Quartermaster Building in South Philadelphia. LIHEAP has helped in the past, but with temperatures in the low teens in January, she was still waiting for a response to her 2003 application. “I’ll get it,” she said. “But it’s not going to be as much as last year. They cut everybody back.” Brown was just starting to do the numbers. She had been managing pretty good, but a lower LIHEAP grant, fuel bills up by 45 percent, and a fixed income make it much harder.
Funds get cut and people “fall through the cracks.” The Philadelphia Inquirer reported in late January that Delia Brown, seventy, Betty Clark, sixty-six, and Bobby Rivers, seventy-seven, had fallen through the cracks. Big-time. On the weekend most Americans were watching the Super Bowl, they died in their homes. Their heat had been cut off. The cause of their deaths was a combination of heart disease and hypothermia. They froze to death. The County Assistance Office would not say whether they had applied for LIHEAP assistance. The Philadelphia Gas Works does not discuss customer accounts.
11.
The United States of Enron
He was a supporter of Ann Richards in my run in 1994. And she did name him the head of the Governor’s Business Council. And I decided to leave him in place just for the sake of continuity. And that’s when I first got to know Ken . . .
—GEORGE W. BUSH ON KEN LAY
I strongly supported him when he ran for governor of Texas—both times. I supported his father back before that. Indeed, I believe in both his character and integrity. As well as the policies he’s proposing.
—KEN LAY ON GEORGE W. BUSH
“Do you think there were dinners?”
Kathryn Widme was sitting in the Ol’ PasTime Tavern in Rainier, Oregon, trying to make some sense out of the last three years of her life. “You know. Dinners. Ken Lay. In the White House with Bush. Were there dinners?” Widme is a tall, striking blonde in her early fifties. She is one of thousands of people whose lives were destroyed by Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, and Andy Fastow, the smart guys from Houston who converted other people’s money and lives into derivatives. Widme wanted to know if Lay is the casual acquaintance George Bush now says he is, or if he was tight enough with Dubya and Laura to make the A-list of White House dinner guests.
Rainier is the bluest of blue-collar towns: a jumble of wharves, piers, sheds, and bars strung along the Columbia River. Wood-frame houses and double-wides cling to the green hills of the gorge, and most of the town sits in the shadow of the spectacular Lewis & Clark Bridge that connects Rainier to Longview, Washington.
Lay, dubbed “Kenny Boy” by George W. Bush, never made it to the Ol’ PasTime, or to the Riverview Restaurant next-door, where Widme worked evening shifts after putting in forty hours a week for Lay at Portland General Electric. He did drop in for a couple of visits at PGE’s Trojan nuclear-power plant, fifteen miles south of Rainier. “His helicopter would land,” Widme said. “He would come to all-hands meetings at Trojan. He told us we were doing a great job. Everybody was doing a great job decommissioning the plant. . . . We always saw that smiling face of Ken Lay. Did you ever see him when he didn’t have a shitty smile on his face?”
Lay’s message was always the same. The company is fine. The stock is fine. Finances are fine. The future’s so bright I gotta wear shades. Everyone was on-message, including PGE’s president, Peggy Fowler. Everything was going to be fine. “When the stock would drop, there was always a reason,” Widme said. “They could explain it. They were merging with Dynergy. There