Hightower Lowdown

Would you take management advice from a former Enron exec, whose corporate division ripped off millions from shareholders and was involved in the infamous offshore partnerships that brought the corporation to bankruptcy and disgrace?
Like it or not, this Enron guy is now making major decisions affecting your tax dollars. He’s Thomas White, George W.’s pick for Secretary of the Army.
Tommy—as George fondly calls him—recently issued a management memo decreeing that 214,000 Army jobs are to be privatized. This would be the largest-ever transfer of government functions to the private sector. These are crucial military-support jobs—mechanics, accountants, computer managers, and other skilled operators who keep the system moving despite the inept military brass.
White says he’s just trying to cut costs, but in practice, he’s turning over these essential functions to corporations that’ll provide few cost-benefit returns and skim the profits for themselves.
National security be damned, this privatization memo from Mr. Enron is about shifting taxpayer dollars to corporate contractors who financed Bush’s election. George even has a quota system in place, having directed that 15% of Pentagon jobs be converted to private contractors by September 2003.
Who is going to oversee this privatized workforce? Secretary White, you say? Hello. He claims he didn’t know what was going on in his own Enron division. Besides, the Army admits that it doesn’t even know how many people are already on its privatized payroll—guessing that it’s somewhere between 124,000 and 605,000.