Word: enronizing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...story of how White became a marked man is the latest dispatch from a secret war inside the Pentagon--a war over the shape and size of the American military in the 21st century. White finds himself fighting a two-front battle, because he is also the lone former Enron executive in the Bush Administration. Above all, the story is a reminder that to survive in Washington's bureaucratic wars, you have to be a master infighter. In this case, White went up against Rumsfeld, perhaps the best of them...
White had plenty of problems before the Crusader came along. Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that internal Enron documents suggested that White's unit, Energy Services, played a role in the price-fixing scheme involving California electricity. (White denied wrongdoing.) But White's clock was ticking even before that. He has had trouble explaining why he delayed selling Enron stock that he had been ordered to drop. Last spring he made an ill-considered trip to sell real estate in Colorado--on a government plane. All of which just made it easier for Rumsfeld to make an example...
...answer is buried deep in the tangle that is California's energy crisis. Here's how it started: Back in 1996, lobbied by Enron and other energy interests, the state (under then Governor Pete Wilson, a Republican) decided to loosen its hold on electricity production. Responsibility for matching supply and demand was handed over in 1998 to an Independent System Operator (ISO), which would buy from providers (like Enron, Calpine and Dynegy) and sell to middlemen (companies like Pacific Gas & Electric) as necessary, even paying providers to take excess electricity out of the state at times when supplies were flush...
...rules remained complex and rife with perverse incentives. The benefits to be gained from the system--taking advantage of its loopholes and stretching them wider--are all too obvious. Mike Aguirre, a San Diego lawyer who specializes in fraud and is representing California in one of its suits against Enron, took an energy-trading course in Houston last year in an enterprising bid to understand what the other side was being taught. There he learned Megawatt Laundering, or how to sell California its own electricity for a higher price by pretending it came from out of state. He also learned...
...course of the conversation Galbraith called the Enron debacle predictable, but defended the modern corporation as an inherently sound institution...