Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [86]
At last everyone in the country knows what it’s like to live in the Great State of Texas.
“WRITE IT SO the boys in Lubbock can understand it,” Bush said of his September 2002 national-security document. The boys in Lubbock might observe that Bush and Co. are “slicker than greased owl shit.” Consider the widely held belief that despite all the money Enron gave them, the Bushies gave nothing back. You won’t find much reporting in your daily newspaper or on Fox News that contradicts this. But we live in a time when some of the best reporting is being done by journalists working outside the corporate mainstream—like investigative reporter Sam Parry at the online site consortiumnews.com.
Parry has documented and published a long bill of particulars describing what Bush did to keep Enron afloat. In fairness to the mainstream press, some of Parry’s work was gleaned from newspapers, but the constraints of “objective” journalism work to stop reporters from thinking on the page and from putting news in context. Put into context, the Bush effort to save Enron is what the boys in Lubbock would describe as a “BFD.”
If you were paying an electric bill in California, you probably remember 2001 as the year your bill increased by 800 percent. It’s what Bush didn’t do about that mind-boggling rip-off that smells like a dead skunk in the middle of the road. Bush and Cheney used the bully pulpit of the White House to stop FERC from imposing even temporary caps on electricity rates in California.
As early as August 2000 a Southern California Edison employee warned FERC regulators that Enron and other companies were gaming the market by withholding electricity and creating phony congestion. But there was no chance Lay’s regulators would step in and stop the gouging without enormous pressure from the White House and the Congress. An April 7, 2001, memo from Ken Lay to Dick Cheney became Bush and Cheney’s no-caps mantra: “The administration should reject any attempt to reregulate wholesale power markets by adopting price caps or returning to archaic methods of determining the cost-base of wholesale power,” Lay wrote. Even temporary price restrictions “will be detrimental to power markets and will discourage private investment.” In California almost a year later Bush said, “Price caps do nothing to reduce demand, and they do nothing to increase supply.”
California senator Dianne Feinstein repeatedly requested a private meeting with Cheney to discuss California’s energy crisis but was turned down—once in a letter with her name misspelled. She did get into two group meetings, but Cheney seemed distracted. “When someone is looking at their watch it gives you a pretty good idea that they want to get out of the room,” Feinstein told The New York Times.
In the end the Bushies had to give in. It was not Feinstein who convinced them. Republicans in Congress warned Bush that the administration’s opposition to caps could cost the party control of the House. Wood, Brownell, and their fellow FERCers on the five-member commission voted to cap electricity prices in California.
After Lay’s fall from power, Pat Wood said of his former patron, “I never sat down and had a beer with him.” Maybe Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee should have invited Wood out for a beer and asked him how to deal with the corporate heavies from Houston. It turns out the energy from a gas-fired utility plant Enron built in Dabhol, India, cost several times what other generators were charging Indian consumers. So Enron decided the Indian government