Ahnuld, Ken Lay, George Bush, Dick Cheney and Gray Davis ..good read

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0817-07.htm

Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t talking. The Hollywood action film star and California’s GOP gubernatorial candidate in the state’s recall election has been unusually silent about his plans for running the Golden State. He hasn’t yet offered up a solution for the state’s $38 billion budget deficit, an issue that largely got more than one million people to sign a petition to recall Gov. Gray Davis.

More important, however, Schwarzenegger still won’t respond to questions about why he was at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills two years ago where he, former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and junk bond king Michael Milken, met secretly with former Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay who was touting a plan for solving the state’s energy crisis. Other luminaries who were invited but didn’t attend the May 24, 2001 meeting included former Los Angeles Laker Earvin “Magic” Johnson and supermarket magnate Ron Burkle.

While Schwarzenegger, Riordan and Milken listened to Lay’s pitch, Gov. Davis pleaded with President George Bush to enact much needed price controls on electricity sold in the state, which skyrocketed to more than $200 per megawatt-hour. Davis said that Texas-based energy companies were manipulating California’s power market, charging obscene prices for power and holding consumers hostage. Bush agreed to meet with Davis at the Century Plaza Hotel in West Los Angeles on May 29, 2001, five days after Lay met with Schwarzenegger, to discuss the California power crisis.

At the meeting, Davis asked Bush for federal assistance, such as imposing federally mandated price caps, to rein in soaring energy prices. But Bush refused saying California legislators designed an electricity market that left too many regulatory restrictions in place and that’s what caused electricity prices in the state to skyrocket. It was up to the governor to fix the problem, Bush said. However, Bush’s response appears to be part of a coordinated effort launched by Lay to have Davis shoulder the blame for the crisis. It worked. According to recent polls, a majority of voters grew increasingly frustrated with the way Davis handled the power crisis. Schwarzenegger has used the energy crisis and missteps by Davis to bolster his standing with potential voters. While Davis took a beating in the press (some energy companies ran attack ads against the governor), Lay used his political clout to gather support for deregulation.

A couple of weeks before Lay met with Schwarzenegger in May 2001, the PBS news program “Frontline” interviewed Vice President Dick Cheney, whom Lay met with privately a month earlier. Cheney was asked by a correspondent from Frontline whether energy companies were acting like a cartel and using manipulative tactics to cause electricity prices to spike in California.

more...

Everything is political to the BFEE!!!!!!!!!!!

It has to get picked up by the major networks............

The media circus won't touch this. If would hurt their chosen one.

It seems the public should not assume Arnold knows nothing about the political process.

Why would an actor, with no known political ambitions at the time meet with Kenneth Lay?

from the article:
"A person who attended the meeting at the Peninsula, which this reporter wrote about two years ago, said Lay invited Schwarzenegger and Riordan because the two were being courted in 2001 as GOP gubernatorial candidates."

still makes no sense.

which guarantees no resistance from the majority of americans

This will not get picked up anymore than what is happening to Blair in England about his lies and stories for the war, anymore than Bush policies contributing to the NE power outage, no more than LIHOP of 9/11, no more than etc...

But it is a good read none the less and I did e-mail it to several people I know that are here in CA

"For Schwarzenegger and the others who attended the
meeting, associating with Enron, particularly Ken Lay, the disgraced
chairman of the high-flying energy company, during the peak of
California’s power crisis in May 2001 could be compared to meeting with
Osama bin Laden after 9-11 to understand why terrorism isn’t necessarily
such a heinous act."

This has to be sent everywhere - especially in California. If I lived there, I'd print it, xerox it and distribute it in the street.

also wrote an extremely good article for Salon about Enron, and specifically the shenanigans done by that Thomas White guy, who later became the Army head (now fired by Rummy). There was a big blowup about an incriminating email he quoted from White that was later furiously denied, and in the end Salon kind of left Jason out to dry. That was a big blow to his career. But he's an excellent journalist who comes out with good stuff on a regular basis.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2072609
Dick Cheney, Dove
More on why Bush père's defense secretary didn't want to go to Baghdad.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Wednesday, October 16, 2002, at 4:53 PM PT


Violating a core precept of journalism, Chatterbox put the most interesting part of yesterday's item at the bottom. It was a Dick Cheney quote that Patrick Tyler included in a New York Times story published April 13, 1991, a little more than a month after the shooting stopped in the Gulf war. The quote was interesting because it examined hard questions about overthrowing Saddam Hussein that James Fallows addresses in the November Atlantic Monthly—questions that Cheney (then defense secretary, now vice president) no longer shows the slightest interest in as the nation prepares to go to war with Iraq once again. Violating another core precept of journalism, Chatterbox will repeat the Cheney quote in full:

If you're going to go in and try to topple Saddam Hussein, you have to go to Baghdad. Once you've got Baghdad, it's not clear what you do with it. It's not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one that's currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists? How much credibility is that government going to have if it's set up by the United States military when it's there? How long does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens to it once we leave?

Now, you might argue that Cheney was just being a loyal Cabinet member, advancing arguments of his commander in chief that he didn't particularly agree with. The trouble with this interpretation is that Cheney expressed similar sentiments five years later in a Gulf War documentary produced for PBS's Frontline. Describing the decision to end the war on Feb. 27, 1991—a cease-fire took effect the next day, and for the most part the United States stuck with it—Cheney said:
(snip)

...the United States military when it's there?

What a mess we are in.

Check it out:

In his statement of September 16, 1998, Wolfowitz ridiculed Clinton’s policies toward Iraq and said, “Administration officials continue to claim, as Assistant Secretary Martin Indyk did in testimony to the Senate last week, that the only alternative to maintaining the unity of the UN Security Council is to send U.S. forces to Baghdad. This is wrong.”

Wolfowitz then articulated how, with patience and diplomacy, a critical mass could be reached by supporting dissidents in their eventual overthrow of the Ba’athist regime. “he key lies not in marching U.S. soldiers to Baghdad, but in helping the Iraqi people to liberate themselves from Saddam,” he said.

He detailed the patient commitment that such a policy would require however, such an action would deliver much stronger international support than American militarism. He said, “Our friends in the Gulf, who fear Saddam but who also fear ineffective American action against him, would see that this is a very different American policy, one that can rid them of the danger that Saddam poses. And Saddam's supporters in the Security Council–in particular France and Russia–would suddenly see a different prospect before them. Instead of lucrative oil production contracts with the Saddam Hussein regime, they would now have to calculate the economic and commercial opportunities that would come from ingratiating themselves with the future government of Iraq.”

So, Wolfowitz is making the very argument raised by the anti-war movement, that US military aggression is not the only method that will lead to regime change; in fact it is the least effective method geopolitically. The alienation of allies and the heightened fear and distrust of the US in the Arab world are not unavoidable consequences of seeking a more democratic regime in Iraq. Apparently either his statements before Congress were partisan bluster designed to humiliate the Clinton Administration or he has been converted to the dark side by Richard Perle’s vision of American imperialism.

http://www.republicons.org/view_article.asp?RP_ARTICLE_ID=717

Hmmmmm.

Julie

A couple of weeks before Lay met with Schwarzenegger in May 2001, the PBS news program “Frontline” interviewed Vice President Dick Cheney, whom Lay met with privately a month earlier. Cheney was asked by a correspondent from Frontline whether energy companies were acting like a cartel and using manipulative tactics to cause electricity prices to spike in California.

Well, there is some interesting data to support that theory:

This story begins with the California energy crisis, which started in 2000 and continued through the early months of 2001, when electricity prices spiked to their highest levels. Prices went from $12 per megawatt hour in 1998 to $200 in December 2000 to $250 in January 2001, and at times a megawatt cost $1,000.

One event occurred earlier. On July 13, 1998, employees of one of the two power-marketing centers in California watched incredulously as the wholesale price of $1 a megawatt hour spiked to $9,999, stayed at that price for four hours, then dropped to a penny. Someone was testing the system to find the limits of market exploitation. This incident was the earliest indication that the people and the state could become victims of fraud. The Sacramento Bee broke the story three years later, on May 6, 2001.

Today, Californians are still paying the costs of the debacle while according to state officials the power companies who manipulated the energy markets reaped more than $7.5 billion in unfair profits.

During those early months of the Bush administration, and even during the prior transition period, Dick Cheney was deeply involved in gathering information for a national energy policy. The intelligence he gathered would provide justification for a war against Iraq but would also place White House footprints all over a fraud scam. This is how it all happened.

http://www.yuricareport.com/PoliticalAnalysis/FraudinWhiteHouse.htm

Great read! Highly recommended!

Julie

the self-serving nature of this administration. But most of us are too stupid to understand the smoking gun nature of this information.

and talking...helL SCREAM II FROM THE ROOFTOPS!!!!
"SLAP THAT DONKEY!!!:7