Entertainment & Sports
Jun. 26, 2002
Ross Perot Could Become the Martha Stewart of California Energy Crisis
Column by Garry Abrams - Pint-size, jug-eared Texas billionaire Ross Perot could become the Great Satan - or at least the Martha Stewart - of the scandal over the price-gouging behind the California energy crisis.
Pint-size, jug-eared Texas billionaire Ross Perot could become the Great Satan - or at least the Martha Stewart - of the scandal over the price-gouging behind the California energy crisis.
The two-time, self-declared white knight presidential candidate and finger-wagging national scold is scheduled to testify next month before the state Senate Select Committee to Investigate Price Manipulation of the Wholesale Energy Market. The committee wants to know what role, if any, Perot Systems, a computer services company founded and chaired by Perot, had in helping power companies manipulate the state's deregulated energy market.
Perot Systems last week began to turn over 10,000 pages of documents to the committee and to the California attorney general's office. Perot also posted some of the documents on its Web site in an apparent attempt to demonstrate its innocence and forthrightness.
Although the company says it never did anything wrong, Perot Systems has admitted that, in the late 1990s, it pitched its expertise on "gaming" the state's newly deregulated energy market to companies such as Reliant and Enron, both implicated in schemes to jack up electricity prices in California. Perot Systems also has said it never got any business from such presentations.
Perhaps significantly, Perot Systems designed the computer software used by the state's now-defunct Power Exchange and its Independent System Operator to help run the state's power grid under deregulation.
It's no wonder that California politicians, including Gov. Gray Davis, have been calling for intensive state and federal investigations of Perot Systems and suggesting that the firm tried to profit from its insider knowledge of the newly deregulated power market.
But so far, the Perot angle has generated relatively few headlines and has not gotten widespread attention.
All that could change if Perot testifies before the Senate committee on July 11. His appearance could make Perot the symbol of the California energy crisis just as all-things-domestic-and-cute guru Martha Stewart has become the symbol of the ImClone scandal.
Stewart, of course, is being roasted like a barbecued pig at a Fourth of July picnic for selling ImClone Systems stock just before the Food and Drug Administration rejected a much-hyped ImClone anti-cancer drug.
The big Martha question is whether she got a heads-up on the FDA ruling from her friend Samuel Waksal, who was head of ImClone at the time of the FDA ruling. Waksal is under a federal indictment for insider trading that supposedly allowed family members to sell $10 million worth of ImClone stock before the FDA announcement.
For better or worse, what Stewart brings to the ImClone story is a name that people can connect with. She makes the ImClone story into a big, continuing headline that the whole country can follow.
The same goes for Perot.
Until now, the California electricity scandal has been mostly a confusing, tangled controversy over faceless corporations.
But everybody knows Perot - and nobody can forget that face, highlighted by those beady, gleaming eyes set between ears the size of romaine lettuce leaves.
Whether or not he's guilty of anything in the California energy crisis, Perot provides the same audience satisfaction as Stewart - a person of fame and wealth with a reputation as a public know-it-all being brought low.
That is the kind of story this country loves. We know that nobody is as perfect as Martha Stewart claimed to be or as omniscient as Perot said he was when he ran for president in 1992 and 1996.
Moreover, Perot is a Texan. As a resident of the state where many of the energy firms that allegedly profited from California's energy crisis are based, Perot also could prove valuable as a Symbolic or Generic Rich Texan.
(Actually, I'm surprised that more people haven't figured out that Texas seems to have been the center of a giant conspiracy aimed at fleecing California on energy costs.)
So let's hear it for Ross Perot, a man and shibboleth for all seasons - both heating and grilling.
Garry Abrams
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