04/26/05

LC050426

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

Teenagers can legally have an abortion, but should the state
force them to tell their parents?

Mary-Jane Wagle>> Government intrusion into family
communication is not the answer.

Val>> And then, they laughed all the way to the bank. How
Enron executives pulled of their brazen scam during California's
energy crisis.

It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.

Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> It's a simple question. Should a teenaged girl be
required to notify her parents before she gets an abortion?
That's what a new initiative would require. But is notifying
parents the same as getting their permission? And what about
cases of rape or incest? Hena Cuevas takes a closer look at an
initiative which, like all abortion issues, is bound to be
contentious.

Hena Cuevas>> The signatures are still coming in to Maria Elena
Kennedy's home days after the deadline.

Maria Elena Kennedy>> It didn't take very long to see that this
issue resonated with the people.

Hena Cuevas>> The issue she's referring to is parental
notification, letting parents know before a daughter under the
age of eighteen has an abortion.

Maria Elena Kennedy>> To this day, a lot of people aren't aware
of the fact that their minor daughter can have something as
serious as an abortion without them knowing.

Hena Cuevas>> Kennedy is one of the many volunteers working to
get the new parental notification act in front of voters. But
to get it on the ballot, the group behind the initiative,
Parents' Right to Know, needed nearly six hundred thousand
signatures. Not a problem, says Kennedy. How surprised were
you at the response?

Maria Elena Kennedy>> I wasn't surprised at all because, early
on in this process, I saw peoples' reaction. When I would talk
to people, whether I was at a Little League game or the
supermarket, about the fact that a minor girl can have an
abortion without her parents knowing, someone as young as twelve
years old, people were astonished.

Hena Cuevas>> So astonished, Kennedy says, that on April 14,
the filing deadline, the group turned in many more signatures
than are required.

Maria Elena Kennedy>> I would be surprised that it wouldn't
make it to the ballot, given the fact that we've turned in over
a million signatures.

Hena Cuevas>> And some more are still coming in?

Maria Elena Kennedy>> Yes, they're coming in on a daily basis.
People are still calling our 800 number and they're still asking
where can they sign the petition.

Hena Cuevas>> But with such a divisive issue like abortion,
there are those who think this measure isn't such a good idea.

Katherine Spillar>> And the average person thinks that sounds
good, but what you don't know is how dangerous these laws can
be.

Hena Cuevas>> Katherine Spillar is the President of the
Feminist Majority Foundation, an organization that works for
women's rights. She says that taking away the privacy that
pregnant girls request is dangerous.

Katherine Spillar>> When people come to understand that you
can't mandate the behavior of teenagers and that if they're
determined not to tell their parents because they're afraid of
disappointing them or they don't want to let them down or
they're afraid of violence in the family, for whatever reason
they don't want to tell their parents, they're going to find a
way not to.

Hena Cuevas>> She's worried that it might lead to unsafe
abortions or, worse yet, force girls to go to Mexico.

Katherine Spillar>> By putting yet another obstacle up that may
prevent her from getting the access to the medical care that
she's seeking, then you're endangering her health.

Maria Elena Kennedy>> For minor girls to have a dangerous
abortion, she doesn't need to go into Mexico. She can have an
abortion here in the United States and it can still be very
dangerous.

Hena Cuevas>> This isn't the first time California has tried to
have a measure letting parents know when their children were
going to have an abortion. There was a law in 1987 which
required permission, but it was challenged many times and, ten
years later in 1997, it was overturned by the Supreme Court who
argued that it violated the minor's right to privacy. This
time, to make sure the law can't be challenged in court, the
group wants to make it a constitutional amendment.

Maria Elena Kennedy>> A lot of the different propositions that
have been passed in California by a clear majority of the voters
have been overturned by the courts, so we want to ensure that
the peoples' will is upheld.

Hena Cuevas>> Also, the initiative requires only that parents
be notified, not that they give their permission. But to amend
the Constitution, supporters needed 250,000 additional
signatures. They say they have them.

Mary-Jane Wagle>> Government intrusion into family
communication is not the answer.

Hena Cuevas>> Mary-Jane Wagle is the President of Planned
Parenthood, one of the places teens go to get information on
sex, contraception and abortions. She says whenever minors go
to Planned Parenthood for help, they're always encouraged to
talk with their parents.

Mary-Jane Wagle>> Sometimes we're able to persuade kids that
they should go talk to their parents and then decide what to do,
but there are most definitely cases where the teens simply can't
do that.

Katherine Spillar>> But if she doesn't want to, now what is the
clinic going to do? Are they going to tell her that, I'm sorry,
you either have to tell your parents or, you know, you're out of
luck? Better that she makes a responsible, safe decision for
her own future than be forced to carry a pregnancy because she's
too scared to talk to her parents.

Hena Cuevas>> The law requires a forty-eight hour waiting
period from the time parents are told to the time an abortion
can be performed.

Maria Elena Kennedy>> Who's going to care about this girl more?
Her parents who have raised her her entire life or an
abortionist who has an economic interest at heart and who's
going to maybe be with her for five minutes?

Hena Cuevas>> So what about kids who are pregnant because of
sexual abuse or fear of violence at home?

Mary-Jane Wagle>> The problem with this law is that it puts the
teens who can't talk to their parents at great risk. Those are
the most vulnerable teens.

Maria Elena Kennedy>> She has a constitutional right to an
abortion. She can go to a judge and say, look, my parents are
very abusive and I have to have this abortion, and there is a
judicial bypass in the initiative.

Hena Cuevas>> Even though the signatures haven't officially
been counted, those against the initiative are getting ready to
fight it. What happens if it does make it on the ballot and
eventually it is approved?

Katherine Spillar>> Well, we'll challenge it. We'll challenge
it legally. California has a very strong right to privacy in
its Constitution, but we're going to try and keep it from
getting passed.

Hena Cuevas>> Governor Schwarzenegger has until June 13 to
declare a special election. If he does, then the parental
notification initiative will likely appear on the ballot in
November. If not, it will have to wait until the election in
June 2006. In either case, it seems parental notification for
abortions is headed for a very public debate. I'm Hena Cuevas
for Life and Times.

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Val>> It's been called the biggest corporate disaster in United
States business history and every Californian, directly or
indirectly, has been impacted. We're talking about Enron where
a few top executives walked away with more than a billion
dollars, scamming consumers, employees and investors. Well, now
a new documentary takes us inside the world of Enron. Vicki
Curry talked with the director of "Enron: The Smartest Guys in
the Room". It's based on a book by the same name, written by
two reporters from Fortune Magazine.

Vicki Curry>> Where do I begin? Why don't you tell me from
your experience how this Enron thing happened in the first
place?

Alex Gibney>> I think it was a fraud that started off with the
best of intentions, but it got out of control because there was
such a wide gulf between the money that was actually coming in
the door and the profits they were reporting and they became
increasingly desperate. It was a human tragedy. It was a human
drama. I mean, it's almost a classic Greek tragedy in that
sense. Here are guys who are arrogant and so full of hubris,
you know, that they tried to fly so high and then they came
crashing down. It's a story about how the mighty have fallen.

Vicki Curry>> There's so much to cover in the Enron story that
a big part of your film, which is obviously of interest to us,
is the California story. Once you put it all together, what did
you learn about it?

Alex Gibney>> The California story is really like pulling the
curtain back on the ugly face of ruthless capitalism. What you
see is, you see people who are in effect laughing while they're
gaming the California market in the midst of rolling blackouts.

>> "During the height of Wednesday's blackout, fire crews had
to free people trapped in elevators."

>> "All that money you guys stole from those grandmothers in
California?"

>> "(Laughter) Yeah, Grandma Millie, man. She's the one who
couldn't figure out how to [blank] vote on the butterfly
ballot."

>> "Now she wants her [blank] money back for all the power
you've charged right up her [blank] (laughter)."

>> "Oh, I can't help myself. You know what the difference is
between the state of California and the Titanic? This is being
webcast. I know I'm going to regret this. At least when the
Titanic went down, the lights were on (laughter)."

Alex Gibney>> What the Enron traders who were actually
operating out of Portland did was they looked at the California
deregulatory system and they saw that it was flawed and that it
was prone to gaming and they could make a lot of money by gaming
it. So they came up with these strategies to probe and take
advantage of the weaknesses in the new system and that's exactly
what they did.

For example, in the film you hear Enron traders calling power
plants and asking them to shut down and the power plants agree
to shut down. You're thinking, well, that doesn't make any
sense. If they're shut down, they're not going to make any
money. But what happened was, by shutting down, they reduced
supply and that drove up the price so much that they then made
tremendous amounts of money when they came back online. That
only works if different businesses are working together.

>> "Hey, this is David up at Enron."

>> "Uh-huh."

>> "There's not much demand for power at all and, if we shut it
down, could you bring it back up in three or four hours?"

>> "Oh, yeah."

>> "Why don't you just go ahead and shut her down then if
that's okay."

>> "Okay."

>> "Those guys, at the flip of a switch, could just yank the
California economy on its leash whenever they wanted to and they
did it and they did it and they did it and they made so much
money."

Alex Gibney>> So it was a very conscious strategy. I mean,
they knew they were playing with the market and they did so
deliberately, both to make money and I think their rationale
was, if we poke and play with the market, the market will reform
itself. That's always the kind of free-market rationale, but in
this case, it was also fundamentally about greed.

Vicki Curry>> Something in your film that I had never heard
about before was a secret meeting that Enron executives had here
in Los Angeles in the midst of the power crisis. Can you tell
me about that?

Alex Gibney>> Sure. It was in the spring of 2001. Ken Lay
flew out here and he was very much trying to beat the drum for
deregulation, both in California and throughout the rest of the
country. So he convened at the Peninsula Hotel here in Los
Angeles a number of influential people, one of whom was Mike
Milken, Richard Riordan and also he had the foresight to include
Arnold Schwarzenegger. I think the reason he included him was
because he knew, and a number of other people knew, that he was
an up and coming political figure.

The pitch to these people -- and we really don't know exactly
what was said at the meeting -- but I think that the pitch was,
look, deregulation is where we want to get to. We've got to
have more deregulation in California. You people are
politically influential. Help us get there. And I think the
implication was we can tag this on Gray Davis. He'll take the
blame and then we can take political advantage of that which
will be good for all of us.

Vicki Curry>> So they had the foresight to invite Arnold
Schwarzenegger to this meeting. Who would have known that, two
years later, he would be the next governor of California?

Alex Gibney>> Exactly. I mean, I think that's how it works. I
think Schwarzenegger -- a light bulb must have gone off in his
head when he saw this issue and he also saw that Gray Davis was
extremely vulnerable and he could take advantage of that. That,
I think, is what led him to the governor's office.

>> "Ladies and gentlemen, the Governor of the great state of
California, Arnold Schwarzenegger."

Vicki Curry>> Another thing that I found very surprising to
learn in your film is the complicity of all the major banks in
America in what was happening at Enron. Tell me about that.

Alex Gibney>> I think the most remarkable part of the Enron
story and what makes it so contemporary and so relevant to today
is the fact that the Enron story is a story of synergistic
corruption, meaning that there were a lot of people who were
supposed to say no in terms of the schemes that Enron wanted to
pull off.

>> "I've thought about this and thought about this and it
couldn't have just been a few executives at Enron that made this
happen. If you think of the banks involved, Chase, Morgan,
Citibank, the billions in loans. Arthur Andersen. What about
Vincent & Elkins, the lawyers that represented us? There had to
have been complicity across the board because it was all too
easy, all too easy."

Alex Gibney>> What the film says and the important lesson of
the Enron story is, ask why. Keep asking why, which was their
corporate motto. Keep asking why and demand more of our society
that it behave in an ethical fashion. That means you not only
have to look at Enrons and banks, but we also have to look at
us. We have to look at ourselves and wonder are we doing the
right thing?

Vicki Curry>> Alex Gibney, maker of the film "Enron: The
Smartest Guys in the Room", thank you so much for taking the
time to talk to us about this.

Alex Gibney>> Thank you. My pleasure.

To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us
by mail at this address:

Life and Times
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You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or
contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val>> Are you tired of the classic detective in a trench coat
always being a man? Well, now imagine a cross between Sam Spade
and Jennifer Lopez or Humphrey Bogart and Selma Hayek. The
detective is Romilia Chacon and her creator is writer, Marcos
Villatoro, poet, teacher and graduate of the most prestigious
writing program in the United States.

It's a Tuesday afternoon at Mount St. Mary's College, an all-
girls university on a hilltop overlooking Brentwood. It's not
hard to spot Marcos McPeek Villatoro. He's the writing teacher
with the trademark hat. Today he'll be giving his students a
lesson that every serious writer has to learn, usually the hard
way.

Marcos M. Villatoro>> "It is a packet of rejection letters."

Val>> Villatoro is the author of four novels, two books of
poetry and a memoir, but to get here, he had to run the gauntlet
of rejection.

Marcos M. Villatoro>> "While I found this to be intelligently
written, evocative, lyrical, atmospheric, poignant, I did not
feel it would work for Stepping Stone. The large cast and
unwieldy convoluted plot made for a tough read. I missed a
clearer, stronger plot in exposition. Very intriguing, though.
Best of luck. Katherine Sandy, I think, Acquisitions Editor.
Okay, what's your reaction to that?"

Marisa Smith>> "I think that what she's saying is she liked the
actual story line, but what she doesn't like is the way you
present your characters and that maybe you should cut down the
amount of characters, then that would make it less confusing and
a more enjoyable read rather than one you're trying to study."

Marcos M. Villatoro>> "You think you got too many characters
here? So instead of making them alive in the first ten pages,
seventeen people and killing them all off in chapter two, I just
got rid of them completely and just started out with one man and
his son. I turned around and I sold the novel and then they
published it, all right?"

Val>> Villatoro's genre is the gritty crime novel, but his main
character is not your conventional gumshoe. She is someone who
students can relate to, a Latina detective named Romilia Chacon.

Marisa Smith>> Being Mexican, I think that's really cool. I
mean, to me it's great. I think that it's great that he makes
her not only a detective, but a good one and a smart one.

Val>> Romilia is a modern character who emerged from an old-
fashioned typewriter. No computers here. Villatoro prefers the
feel of an old Royal.

Marcos M. Villatoro>> I'm one of those writers who goes into
the dark stuff more. My crime fictions are not cozies. They're
much more dark, so in many ways I follow in that Los Angeles
tradition of the noir. "I didn't get along with the other
soccer moms on the field. They talked differently than I did.
They worried about Kellogg's commercials that their children
were in."

Val>> Romilia is an FBI agent who's also a single mom raising a
young son in Van Nuys. Her fellow agent and lover is murdered
the night he proposes to Romilia. Now she must delve into his
past and Los Angeles's criminal underbelly.

Marcos M. Villatoro>> She's always very suspicious about the
drug world and its presence wherever children are or wherever
anybody is. She says, you know, in the glove compartments of
the cars, of all the nice cars that are parked right over to the
side, or underneath the caps of certain men who are wearing
baseball caps, just how much meth could you find? "I don't
know. Something I said to the soccer ladies about the
lacerations around the girl's neck. It didn't look like it had
been done with a wire, but rather a hemp cord which wasn't our
boy's M.O. And besides, she was fifteen, not twelve, which was
another red flag, so we handed it to the blues. The other moms
never asked me under the umbrella again."

Val>> Villatoro knows about living in two cultures. His father
was from Appalachia, his mother from El Salvador. It was love
at first sight.

Marcos M. Villatoro>> My mother said, oh, those green eyes that
man had. Green is a very loving color in Central America and my
dad had those green eyes. Dad didn't speak Spanish and mom
didn't speak English, so they got married. Within a year, they
were married and, within the year, they were married and got on
the back of a Harley Davidson and rode across back to Tennessee.
One of nine trips across the country on the back of a Harley
Davidson.

Val>> And like his parents, Villatoro has meshed two cultures
in poems like this one called "The Holy Spirit of My Uncle's
Cajones".

Marcos M. Villatoro>> "He broke all the sacred laws, drinking
Jim Beam from the bottle and smoking homemade joints thicker
than his electrician's thumb."

Val>> Villatoro started his formal writing training late in the
game in his mid-thirties. By then, he was married with four
kids, but he decided to apply for a coveted spot in the most
competitive and prestigious writing program in the country, the
one every aspiring writer dreams of, the Iowa Writers' Workshop,
and he got in. It was a stressful two years, he says, but worth
it.

Marcos M. Villatoro>> What happens is, every Monday afternoon,
there are workshops where you hand out your poem or your short
story and people eat it for lunch (laughter). You can bring
swords in if you want (laughter) as in swords as in your pen,
but leave your ego at the door because there's no place for it
here.

Marcos M. Villatoro>> "Thanks, clan. Oh, I got to show you one
of my many New Yorker rejections."

Val>> Today's lesson is also about leaving your ego behind.

Marcos M. Villatoro>> "We're sorry to say that this manuscript
is not right for us in spite of its evident merit.
Unfortunately, we are receiving so many submissions that it is
impossible for us to reply more specifically. We thank you for
the chance to consider your work." Okay, now that's Xerox,
right? But somebody at the New Yorker wrote, "Good story.
Thanks." When I received this, I went "The New Yorker. There's
somebody at the New Yorker who thought my story was good."

Val>> For Villatoro, teaching at this Catholic college is a
perfect fit.

Marcos M. Villatoro>> It's been a tremendous match. In fact,
the Romilia Chacon novels started coming out when I came here,
so I have dedicated all the novels thus far to the students of
Mount St. Mary's College, to my writing students especially.

Linda Ignarro>> I was so upset that I had to take a writing
class. I'm an English major. It's required and I was like, no,
I don't want to take a writing class. But the first day of his
class, he became my favorite teacher. I love him and now I want
to be a writer because of him.

Kiran Rawat>> When I'm sad or happy or I just had a moment or
anything, I could just take a piece of paper at my computer and
just go off on it. He calls it vomiting. You just throw up on
your laptop everything that comes out. If it's making sense,
you don't think about grammar, you don't think about anything.
You just put your feelings down and you organize it later.

Marcos M. Villatoro>> At some point, Romilia is starting to
gain a little weight. So one of my students said, well, okay,
if you want her to gain weight, have her throw herself on the
bed so that she can button her jeans and then wiggle like this
(laughter). I never would have thought of that.

Marcos M. Villatoro>> "If you get a Xerox rejection with
somebody's handwriting on it, what do you think? How do you
feel about that? What's going on?"

Val>> No Los Angeles writing career would be complete without
interest from Hollywood and, in fact, one of the Romilia Chacon
novels has been optioned for television. In the meantime, it's
the morning Villatoro loves the most, those four to five hours
where rejection letters are miles away and there's only the
sound of typewriter keys tapping life into a soccer mom
detective in search of killers and good pupusas.

Val>> We've all seen them, drivers who are doing everything
except paying attention to the road. Well, now Life and Times
commentator, Cris Franco, gets behind the wheel and gives us an
amusing look at ourselves.

Cris Franco>> You won't believe the results of the National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration's recent survey on
distracted drivers. Here's what we drivers confess to doing as
we propel our two-ton chariot at blinding speeds down crowded
highways and streets.

Cell phones are extremely distracting and they're all over the
road with one in four drivers talking on them at any given time.
Well, you've got to be constantly on your cell phone when you're
only catching every other syllable that the driver is saying.
I'm telling you, it's very distracting.

Sixty-six percent of motorists adjust the radio. This
distraction will only increase once we have satellite radio and
we're going to spend all our commute time surfing the three
thousand channels. Let me see, in search of our oldies station.
Whoa! I don't need the radio because I sing in my car. In the
shower, I'm Pavarotti, but in my car, I become Whitney Houston.

Forty-nine percent of motorists eat while driving. Guilty.
Although I wouldn't recommend it. Believe me, it's hard enough
to keep your breakfast down and the fried hash-brown patty
things after a near head-on collision.

Smoking and driving is also a not advisable thing. Take it from
me, it's hard to maneuver your car. It's really hard to
maneuver your car. Hey, watch it!

Thirty percent reads while driving. Maps, phone numbers,
reports, even books. Read while driving. Oh, my gosh, he got
in a car accident.

And as much as we love them, twenty-five percent of drivers said
that their concentration is pulled away by fussy children in the
back seat. I don't have children specifically for this reason.

A few people actually pray while on the road. Not a bad idea
when you hear this next alarming statistic.

Thirty-seven percent of drivers admitted to falling asleep at
least once while driving. Thirty-seven percent. So what are
they driving? A 2002 Posture-Pedic?

And I understand this even less. One-fourth of all female
drivers have put on makeup using the rear view mirror as their
private vanity. I'm telling you, if I ruled the world, any man
or woman putting on makeup while driving would immediately be
taken to jail. At least they'd look good for their mug shots.

If those driving distractions don't rock your world, how about
this? Now your cigarette lighter can power your in-car toaster,
microwave, crock pot, waffle iron or blender. So when you get
pulled over by the CHP, you can hand him your ID and a banana
daiquiri.

Val>> I only put on makeup during red lights. And that's our
program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times,
thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> Next time on Life and Times --

It could be our best natural feature, so when is Los Angeles
going to start treating its river with more respect?

>> We killed it. Now it's fighting for its own life. You can
see here now the trees, the shrubbery, the flora, the fauna,
bursting through the cement. You see ducks, you see egrets, you
see natural wildlife. We're not going to beat nature. Nature
is going to beat us.

Val>> That's next time on Life and Times.