Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [93]
Enron energy traders didn’t intend to put Annas in a bind when they cooked up electricity-piracy schemes with clever names like “Get Shorty” or “Fat Boy.” They were having too much fun and making too much money. To make the money, they did have to inflict some pain on the California market. “As the [electric utilities] credit exposure gets too high, we will limit the amount of power we deliver into California,” said Enron executive Jeffrey Skilling in late 2000. Skilling assumed that if electricity were kept off the market, the state would step forward and provide money for the utilities to pay what Enron wanted to charge for each kilowatt-hour, and that is exactly what happened.
No one would suggest that Secretary White face reckless-endangerment charges for what happened to Nate Annas and others like him. Or that he intended to harm the hundreds of small businesspeople who saw their electricity bills climb like Enron’s stock value. Still, two years into the Bush presidency, Jeff Skilling was pacing the floors of his nine-thousand-square-foot faux Mediterranean villa in Houston, waiting to be indicted. So why was Tom White still secretary of the Army? White ran Enron Energy Systems while the rolling blackouts cruised across California; surely he knew more about Enron’s plunder in California than Skilling did. “Thomas White told us the California electricity crisis was our chance to turn EES into a profitable unit of Enron,” former Enron exec Steve Barth said. “He said the energy crisis in California would put EES on the map.”
Nate Annas must have been too low on the energy chain to concern Tom White.
Democratic senators on the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee wondered if White was aware that his company had put Nate Annas and the states of California and Oregon in a real bind. “I admire the fact that you were in the Army for twenty-three years, a graduate of West Point in 1967, a Vietnam veteran, selected by General Colin Powell, when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as his executive assistant, and first in your West Point class to make general,” said North Dakota senator Byron Dorgan at a committee hearing. “That is an awesome record, exemplifying duty, honor, country.” That was as good as it got for White. After Dorgan’s little encomium, the testimony and the story turned to Enron. Democrats on the committee wanted to know what White knew and when he knew it.
They asked about White’s Enron shares and about his eighty-four phone calls or meetings with Enron executives while White was in government and Enron was collapsing. They wanted information about the thirteen $13 million in cash from the company for “phantom stock” and the $12 million White earned selling his stock after he was sworn in as secretary. They wanted to know what White’s conversations with Enron employees had to do with his stock sales. “Phone calls that occurred after 9/11, you know, after we were attacked,” said California senator Barbara Boxer. “After we—actually you—had personnel in Afghanistan working twenty-four/seven. And these escalating phone calls and sales of stock.”
Proving criminal intent—or what President Bush calls “malfeeance”—in complicated, private stock trades is dicey. Enron’s “gaming” the California market is easier to grasp. The senators tearing into White in July 2002 had enough information to understand what Enron inflicted on residents of California and Oregon.
“The skyrocketing power prices then enabled Enron Energy Services to go out and sign the contracts with businesses that feared they’d be hit again with expensive electricity bills,” Dorgan said.
Senator Boxer arrived at the hearing with a letter from a former Enron trader named David Fabian. “There is a single connection between northern and southern California power grids,” Fabian wrote. “I heard that Enron traders purposely overbooked that line, then caused others