Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [90]
“This is a real job,” Diane said. “And it has helped so many people. Lots of people.”
Despite their evident mutual affection and enthusiasm, there is a sadness in the Tillotsons’ description of their new business enterprise. Ed and Diane are rock-solid America and were earn-ing good wages providing something as necessary as electricity. When Oregon residents voted to shut down the nuclear-power plant, they went to work dismantling the plant, Ed as a metal worker, Diane a rad-waste handler. Then thieves and speculators turned the stock market and their company into a Ponzi scheme. Defrauded by the biggest corporate crime in modern American history, Ed and Diane Tillotson are working their own small pyramid scheme at the rocky bottom of the country’s retail sales economy.
You gotta hope they pull it off.
“It gives me hope,” Diane said. “Hope. When Trojan is done, we will have our own business. We will have a job. And we will have control. No one will steal your money from you.”
They are signed on to a class-action shareholders suit. That’s the only other small hope they have. Diane and Ed also say they have given up on the notion of Washington doing anything for them.
Asked if this means he’s lost faith in his government, Ed Tillotson answered in a heartbeat. “Yeah. But this is the second time. I was in Vietnam.”
12.
Army Surplus: Two Veterans at Enron
The California crunch really is the result of not enough power-generating plants and then not enough power to power the power of generating plants.
—GEORGE BUSH TO The New York Times, JANUARY 14, 2001
This was like The Perfect Storm. First our traders were able to buy power for $250 in California, sell it to Arizona for $1,200, then resell it to California for five times that amount.
—FORMER ENRON TRADER STEVE BARTH
I can categorically say that it was not ever in the interest of Enron Energy Systems to see wholesale energy prices escalate.
—ARMY SECRETARY AND EX-ENRON EXEC THOMAS WHITE
Tim Ramsey is one of those invisible Americans we depend on when we’re alone in the dark. If you live in Beaverton, Tigard, Lake Oswego, or one of a half dozen other suburbs south of Portland, Oregon, you owe him. When a winter storm roars in off the Pacific and knocks your lights out, Ramsey’s the guy who climbs the power pole to turn your lights back on. His job at Portland General Electric is just the second one he’s ever had. He showed up at IBEW Local 125 thirty-five years ago with his Army discharge papers in hand. The Oregon electric utility hired him as “a grunt.” He’s been running cable, climbing poles, and testing power circuits ever since.
Because a coworker once swung a boom too close to a transmission line stretched across I-5 south of Portland, Ramsey has the no-eyebrows look of Congressman Dick Gephardt. The boom on the repair truck hit a high-voltage cable, and “the most beautiful blue arc of electricity” Ramsey ever saw found its way to the ground through his boot. “They never grew back,” Ramsey said of the absent eyebrows. It could have been worse, he added. “Damn near killed me.”
Even without much in the way of eyebrows, Ramsey is a striking man. Broad shoulders, handsome, weathered face, intense blue eyes, iron gray hair. At one time he was a millionaire. He earns top union scale—about $60,000 a year—and lives on eight acres in a quaint Willamette Valley town at risk of being turned into a giant Pinot Noir vineyard. With Tim’s PGE check and the money his wife, Donna, earned as a waitress, the Ramseys sent their two daughters to college and made the mortgage payments. They were comfortable. The girls are out of college and working. The couple had $360,000 in their retirement account, but neither of them ever expected to be worth a million.
Then PGE was bought