That brings us to the next big scandal. It soon became obvious that Bush and Cheney had let the incredibly corrupt Enron dictate their national energy policy, word for word, in exchange for their massive campaign contributions. Journalists and investigators had dug up internal Enron wish-lists for how the energy industry should be regulated (actually, more like NOT regulated) and lo and behold, the energy policies issued by Bush were the exact same texts, with perhaps a word or two different. Bush immediately denied everything, essentially saying that the similarities were pure coincidence.
Things got more suspicious, however, when Bush refused to give the federal government’s General Accounting Office the minutes of meetings the White House had with Enron when they were designing their energy policy. In any democracy, what the elected policymakers do is the public’s business. That’s what separates private companies from public entities—public entities are fully accountable to the public. But not in Bush’s world. “That’s private,” he and Cheney effectively replied. “It’s none of the American peoples’ business.”
This is where the whole affair can reach Watergate proportions, because, as I mentioned before, that’s where Watergate really turned into a major scandal: the cover-up part. After repeated requests, the General Accounting Office had no choice but to file suit against the Vice President, Dick Cheney—the first time in American history that the federal government sues its own Vice-President.
It is amazing that few people realize the irony in a Republican administration claiming that what goes on in the White House is not the public’s business. During the Lewinsky scandal, it was the Republicans who insisted that the whole world find out, through the publication of their Starr Report in newspapers around the world, how many blowjobs Clinton had in the White House; the precise time and place he had them; how long it took for him to come; and exactly where each drop of his sperm ended up! (Look up the Starr Report in any newspaper archive if you don’t believe me: it’s outright pornography.) And now, in an issue affecting millions of people and costing hundreds of billions of dollars, what the White House did is nobody’s business?!? It’s so ridiculous that much of the media, and by extension the American people, seem to think “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that …” But once the lawsuit progresses through the courts, it might be a different story. The fact that it’s come this far surely means that some pretty sensational information is hidden in the documents Dick Cheney won’t release. If there’s justice in the world, then this scandal has just barely begun.
But this still isn’t the last scandal involving Enron. There are all the banks which helped Enron hide debts and inflate profits—expect many heads to roll in the banking sector when those investigations wrap up. And then there’s the big “energy crisis”…

THE CALIFORNIA
ENERGY CRISIS

Perhaps the most infuriating scandal for regular citizens occurred when Enron and other companies created the California energy crisis. They did this so they could bilk millions of Californians out of hundreds of billions of dollars. They managed this by setting up dummy companies which reserved, in advance, tons of electricity, which made the system look like it was overloaded—all the electricity was already reserved. The government regulator then feared power shortages, so it ordered controlled blackouts of certain areas. These blackouts shut down hundreds of businesses and inconvenienced millions of people. Meanwhile, electricity prices shot up, like any product does when it’s in high demand but in low supply. At that point, the dummy companies set up by Enron and others gladly sold back to California the energy they’d reserved, at much higher prices then they’d paid.
It didn’t take long for everyone to agree that California’s privatisation scheme was a total failure. For companies like Enron, though, it was a complete success: internal memos show Enron traders wondering whether they should back off for awhile, just in case people start conserving energy. (They sure wouldn’t want that!) It’s the sad truth that California would never have privatised their electricity grid in the first place if it weren’t for Enron. For years, Enron pestered federal and state governments to privatise electricity all over the country. When the people of California got stuck in a crisis almost immediately after their privatisation, they were very suspicious that it was no accident. The governor of California appealed to Bush and Cheney to investigate the crisis, but all they were told was that maybe California should build some more power plants, because it looked like they were running out of electricity. (California did actually start building some new plants, but since the crisis—and the demand for energy— was proven to be fictional, these plants now sit mothballed or half-finished. The one positive side-effect of the crisis is that energy conservation did in the end become widespread.)
Both California’s Senator and Governor repeatedly tried to take part in the meetings Bush and Cheney were holding when designing their national energy policy, to no avail. They’d hoped to explain what they were learning from their horrible crisis, to help prevent such a thing from happening again. But when they told the media that they were certain energy companies like Enron were worsening the crisis by manipulating energy prices, Bush didn’t believe them. He actually claimed their crisis was due to them not privatising enough. They still have too many regulations, he said, and specifically blamed California’s many environmental regulations, saying that the pressure of having to build “clean” energy plants made life difficult for the energy industry. Bush flat-out refused to meet the California legislators, and instead continued meeting regularly with his Enron buddies. As California’s beleagured Senator, Dianne Feinstein, later put it: “Here is a company that was as ribald, as brash, as swashbuckling and as unethical as any company I can possibly conceive of— and they had major access to this administration. But the senior Senator from California can’t get in to see them.”

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