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I'm a political novice in California politics , so correct me if I don't have this straight....Pete Wilson enacted legislation before leaving office that brings about deregulation. Davis is either inept, flim flammed , or complicit for not realizing the scope of the problem, consequently he gets blamed for the mess. A shill(issa)sets for the recall. The original culprit Wilson shows back up via the Bohemian Grove Schwarzenegger juggernaut. Buffett is brought in due to his connections with the Brothers Urosevich, Thereby making sure ESS& Diebold are in play. The plan is to shift burden from ratepayer to Taxpayers by monkeying with prop 13. thus relieving Enron, Reliant, Dynegy, Williams Company of any pesky lawsuits, and the icing on the cake is a setup to deliver California to Bush in 04. my comments in {} {Dave Emory came through with some info back in Sept., go listen to the"For the Record" files...FTR 420, 421,422 } or <http://wfmu.org/playlists/DX>
15. Among the most revealing and cynical of Schwarzenegger’s networking moves is his powwow with Kenneth Lay, the CEO of Enron during the very time period that Enron was helping to destabilize California with the deliberately-constructed “Energy Crisis.” (For more about the destabilization of California and the phony energy crisis, see FTR#’s 280, 420.) This puts Schwarzenegger “right smack dab in the middle” of these shenanigans. “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.” (“Ahnuld, Ken Lay, George Bush, Dick Cheney and Gray Davis” by Jason Leopold; CommonDreams.org; 8/17/2003; p. 1; accessed at www.CommonDreams.org .)
16. “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.” (Idem.)
17. “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.” (Idem.)
18. “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.” (Idem.)
19. “ ‘No,’ Cheney said during the Frontline interview. ‘The problem you had in California was caused by a combination of things—an unwise regulatory scheme, because they didn’t really deregulate. Now they’re trapped from unwise regulatory schemes, plus not having addressed the supply side of the issue. They’ve obviously created major problems for themselves and bankrupted PG & E in the process.’” (Idem.)
20. “The 90-minute secret meeting Lay convened took place inside a conference room at the Peninsula Hotel. Lay, and other Enron representatives at the meeting, handed out a four-page document to Schwarzenegger, Riordan and Milken titled ‘Comprehensive Solution for California,’ which called for an end to federal and state investigations into Enron’s role in the California energy crisis and said consumers should pay for the state’s disastrous experiment with deregulation through multibillion rate increases. Another bullet point in the four-page document said ‘Get deregulation right this time—California needs a real electricity market, not government takeovers.” (Ibid; p. 2.)
21. “The irony of that statement is that California’s flawed power market design helped Enron earn more than $500 million in one year, a tenfold increase in profits from a previous year and it’s coordinated effort in manipulating the price of electricity in California, which other power companies mimicked, cost the state close to $70 billion and led to the beginning of what is now the state’s $38 billion budget deficit. The power crisis forced dozens of businesses to close down or move to other states, where cheaper electricity was in abundant supply, and greatly reduced the revenue California relied heavily upon.” (Idem.)
22. “Lay asked the participants to support his plan and lobby the state legislature to make it a law. It’s unclear whether Schwarzenegger held a stake in Enron at the time or if he followed through on Lay’s request. His Spokesman Rob Stutzman hasn’t returned numerous calls for comment about the meeting. 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. 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.” (Idem.)
{In this more recent Larry King Interview....Kenny 's ideas seem to hold a lot of water with Ahnold....}
Conan unplugged
Sac Bee ^ | 9/19/03 | Bee Editorial Staff
To figure out where debate truant Arnold Schwarzenegger stands, the best voters can do is tease out what he really meant in some softball television conversations with Oprah Winfrey and Larry King. Beware in particular of any candidate who seems lost on the topic of energy.
Lt. Gov Cruz Bustamante is clearly lost given his recent proposal to regulate the price of gasoline, a sure-fire way to constrict supplies, discourage investment in refining capacity and cause long gas lines. But Schwarzenegger looked equally lost in suggesting that the cure to a broken deregulation of electricity is more of the same.
Here's an exchange between Schwarzenegger and King:
"The biggest problem that we have is that we don't really attract any private investors now to build any of the energy plants," the candidate said. "You see, he \Gov. Gray Davis\ has proposed in all his energy plans ... and what happened, of all the energy plants that were proposed to be built, only a quarter of them were built. This is because it's a lack of leadership. ... We have to build more energy plants. ... But in order to do that, is we have to get the state out of the business of running those things.They are competing with the private sector right now. That's why the private sector doesn't want to come in and do that."
"You trust the private sector?" asked King.
"Oh, absolutely," Schwarzenegger said.
Oh, boy. Just what California needs: a governor who trusts the firms that manipulated the power markets in 2000 and stole billions from the state's consumers.
Let's rewind the tape to that part about the state running the energy plants. Where are all those state-run plants? We can't find them. We find plants owned by private energy companies such as Mirant and Duke. We find plants owned by regulated utilities such as PG&E, which the deregulation law took out of the new plant business.
But no state plants.
Now let's go to that sound bite about building new plants. Has Schwarzenegger forgotten the collapse of Enron, the wave of energy company bankruptcies that followed and the retreat of private capital from the power plant market? It's Wall Street, not California, that put a halt to construction.
What does Schwarzenegger mean by "leadership"? Does he want to change California's deregulation law, and if so, how? Does he have a plan to recapitalize the private sector so new plants can be financed?
In the race to sound dimmest on energy, Schwarzenegger has come from behind and is now running neck-and-neck with Bustamante.
------------------
{Surely someone at the wheel must have sensed trouble well before 2000.
Emory goes into the price fluctuations in 1998, and touches on the complicity of Baker in FTR 420:}
3. Beginning the discussion of the deliberate manipulation of California’s deregulated electricity market, the program chronicles a startling fluctuation of rates in 1998. The author of this important, incisive article observes that this was apparently a test of the “power lifting” that destabilized Davis and boosted Schwarzenegger in a position to move to Sacramento. “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 $2000 in December 2000 to $250 in January 2001, and at times a megawatt cost $1,000.” (“Fraud Traced to the White House: How California’s Energy Scam Was Inextricably Linked to a War” by Katherine Yurica; The Yurica Report; p. 1; available online at www.yuricareport.com/PoliticalAnalysis/FraudinWhiteHouse.htm .)
4. “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 41 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.” (Idem.)
5. California’s “energy crisis” apparently served as a foundation for disgraced Enron chairman Kenneth Lay’s pivotal recommendations to Vice-President Dick Cheney’s energy policy task force. “In April of 2001, Ken Lay handed Dick Cheney a two-page memorandum recommending national energy policy changes. The memo contained Enron’s positions on specific, rather technical issues, which were presented as a ‘fix’ for the California crisis. (Enron brazenly advised the administration not to place price caps on energy, which would be precisely the request California officials made to the president, and which the President and the Vice President would just as brazenly deny until public pressure forced them to capitulate.)” (Ibid.; p. 2.)
6. Former Bush (Senior) secretary of state James Baker presided over an advisory report that also appears to have been central to Cheney’s energy directives. “On October 6, 2002, a newspaper in the UK published a little known article about Mr. Cheney’s advisers. According to Neil MacKay, an award-winning journalist, writing for Scotland’s Sunday Herald, Dick Cheney commissioned an energy report from ex-Secretary of State James Baker III. The time of this ‘commission’ is not reported, but since the members of the appointed task force held three videoconferences and teleconferences in December, January, and February 2000-2001, Cheney therefore logically contacted Baker some time prior to the December 2000 meeting—during the presidential transition period.” (Ibid.; p. 3.)
{and from a Prop13 freeper thread to a WSJ article:}
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/964811/posts
Mr. Buffett, the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., took on California's famous Proposition 13, which has limited property taxes there since 1978. As an example, he pointed out the difference between his own property-tax bills for homes he owns in California and Nebraska.
{and finally an admittance of Wilson's prop 13 shenanigans from a freeper himself:)
-Proposition 13 led directly to drastic slippage in financing for local schools, and has contributed heavily to the state's current fiscal crisis.-
The author appears to have a clouded memory. While Prop 13 did initially limit the increases in school funding that were proposed state wide, it had a limited impact on education in rural areas that had low population densities.
The problems started in the metropolitan areas, especially LA county which had high population densities.
The culprit was the Wilson administration which took a big chunck of the property taxes away from the counties and redistributed to school districts based on school populations. Wilson redistributed the wealth from areas of limited electoral impact to areas with significant electoral impact.
That redistribution proved a disaster. The money was wasted on the fatally flawed school systems in the large metropolitan areas, gave great strength to the educational unions, and crippled functional educational system across the vast rural areas of California.
So no Professor Kennedy, it wasn't Prop 13, it was another redistribtion of wealth scheme implemented by an inept, and in this case Republican, governance.
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