Flashbacks - 27 March 2010

Negative television commercials, by the politicians, against the politicians, are teaching one thing, "Politicians, in general, can not be trusted;" resulting in the following flashback:

Project Censored:
TOP 25 CENSORED STORIES FOR 2005:
13. Schwarzenegger Met with Enron's Ken Lay Before the California Recall

Cheney's Energy Pirates
Behind Schwarzenegger Recall Hoax

by Jeffrey Steinberg

This article appears in the September 5, 2003 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

The very same Dick Cheney-Enron energy pirates who ripped off the people of California during the 2000-01 so-called energy crisis, are now out to loot the state once again—under the guise of the "recall Davis" referendum, and the candidacy of the man Lyndon LaRouche refers to as the "overpriced geek act," Arnold Schwarzenegger.

While the rationale behind the drive to recall Gov. Gray Davis is that he drove the state into a $38 billion deficit, EIR has systematically exposed (see chronology, below) that California was robbed blind by Enron, Reliant, Williams Energy, and the whole crowd of energy pirates, who criminally conspired and profiteered off energy deregulation, while virtually destroying the U.S. electric power grid.

The same people who brought Californians 1,000% increases in energy prices and resulting massive deficits, corporate bankruptcies, and job losses, were responsible for the Northeast energy blackout in August, which crippled many U.S. and Canadian cities, and left 50 million in the dark.

And now, they want to overturn the 2002 California gubernatorial elections by a GOP-bankrolled recall drive, aimed at installing a Milton Friedman-loving Hollywood geek act whose greatest claim to fame is that he pumped himself with enough steroids, and puffed enough marijuana, to win some bodybuilding contests, and parlayed that into Hollywood hits and a multimillion-dollar portfolio managed by some of Wall Street's most notorious speculators. On his own website, "The Terminator" boasts of his business acumen, which he learned from his "mentors," underground economy-promoter Milton "legalize drugs" Friedman, casino magnate Donald Trump, real estate wheeler-dealer Leslie Wexner, and mega-speculator Warren Buffett.

As LaRouche comments, we already had one bad experience, in Germany, when they installed a right-wing Austrian strongman in power. California does not have to go through that again.

Cheney to California: Go to Hell

The looting of California by the energy pirates, led by Enron, Dynegy, Reliant, and Williams, was already under way when George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were sworn in as President and Vice President in January 2001. But that was nothing, compared to the White House-sanctioned looting once they were in office. In 2000-01, California's annual energy bill went from $7 billion to $28 billion, as a result of deregulation and the unbridled price manipulations brought on by California's passage of energy deregulation in 1996 to take effect in 2000.

In December 2000, Governor Davis held emergency meetings in Washington with President Bill Clinton, Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, to head off the imminent bankruptcy of California's two major public energy utilities, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) and Southern California Edison—the fruits of year one of dereg. The utilities were caught in a bind, because there were regulatory caps on the rates they could charge customers, but no ceiling on what the private energy suppliers could charge them. By January 2001, the utilities faced $11 billion in unpayable debts.

As soon as Bush-Cheney took office, they delivered a message to Californians: Go to Hell! President Bush announced a one-time-only, two-week extension of Clinton's emergency order forcing power-merchant companies to sell power to the near-bankrupt California utilities.

Vice President Cheney, appointed to head up the Administration's energy task force on day eight of the Bush Presidency, candidly told reporters the emergency order would not be renewed, and the Bush Administration would not lift a finger to help California to counter the energy pirates. "I'm a believer in markets," he babbled. "I think the notion of deregulation is basically sound. What happened in California, it was poorly executed."

Never mind Cheney's own lucrative career as CEO of the energy firm Halliburton; never mind that Enron was the largest corporate contributor to the Bush-Cheney campaign, and the other energy pirates were right behind Enron in bidding for Administration favor.

Shut off from any help from the Federal government, California was compelled, on Jan. 31, 2001 to legislate $10 billion in new state bonds—just to buy electrical power. And it would take a Feb. 21 Federal court order to force Reliant, Williams, AES, and Dynegy to even keep selling to California.

By March 2001, the piracy by the energy companies had reached the point that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), although dominated by dereg backers, had to launch a confidential probe into price manipulations by Williams Energy and Reliant. Eventually both firms would be fined tens of millions of dollars for shutting down California power generators in order to drive up prices. In the Williams case, the shutdowns were carried out in 2000, before Bush-Cheney, during the opening phase of the looting, but were kept secret by FERC until after the Cheney task force report was issued fully embracing deregulation.

The fines were a slap on the wrist, as Williams' profits soared by 172% in the first quarter of 2001, and Reliant's jumped by 104%—largely due to the scalping of California.

All told, from the 2000-01 crisis to the present, California has been robbed of a sum greater than the current $38 billion state deficit!

Dick, Arnie, and Ken Conspire

The Cheney energy task force was a rubber stamp for Enron and the other energy pirates, who virtually wrote the text of the group's report, which was rushed to release on May 16, 2001 (a new General Accounting Office report assails Cheney for keeping the entire effort secret—see accompanying article). While the Cheney report peddled energy cartel looting on the homefront, it also targetted Iraq and other oil-rich countries for imperial conquest and energy grab.

The Cheney report made scant mention of the California crisis. Cheney also spat on California in a PBS "Frontline" interview after the report was unveiled, coldly denying that the energy giants were functioning as a cartel. "The problem you had in California," Cheney lied, "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."

In April 2001, Cheney had met with Enron's chief executive, Kenneth Lay, a member of the Pioneers group of Bush campaign mega-contributors, who presented the Vice President with a memo laying out eight proposals. Seven of the eight, all promoting radical deregulation, were adopted almost verbatim in the Cheney report. Lay reportedly also pressured Cheney to ensure that his report made little mention of California. Cheney obliged.

Lay was running a simultaneous campaign in California, to focus the blame for the energy crisis on Governor Davis, and to dodge state and Federal prosecutors for Enron's predatory actions. Former Dow Jones California bureau chief Jason Leopold recently revealed that on May 24, 2001—one week after the Cheney report's release—Lay held a secret meeting at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills, to organize a group of GOP bigshots and Hollywood celebs to join his propaganda push against Davis, and peddle Enron's schemes for accelerated looting of the state through even more drastic deregulation.

Among the attendees: former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, infamous Drexel Burnham junk bond felon Michael Milken—and Arnold Schwarzenegger! The attendees were given a proposal titled "Comprehensive Solution for California." One key feature was that all state and Federal probes into Enron's role in the California energy crisis should immediately be shut down.

Lay knew Enron was dying, despite robbing California blind—the firm would file for bankruptcy Dec. 2, 2001—when he made the pitch to end the probes and give Enron one last chance to loot its way out of bankruptcy court.

A Leopold source at the meeting revealed that Schwarzenegger and Riordan had been asked to the session as likely GOP gubernatorial candidates against Davis in 2002.

Just before that meeting, on April 15, 2001, the New York Times reported on a meeting between "Bush political advisors" and the Terminator, to discuss a gubernatorial run. White House chief political advisor Karl Rove was quoted saying that a Schwarzenegger run "would be nice. That would be really, really nice. That would be really, really, really nice." In fact, Arnie had been at the White House, meeting with Rove, on April 12.

Lord Jacob's Dark Age Soiré

While Schwarzenegger declined to run against Davis in 2002, he was being groomed by a much bigger group of financier pirates for some political slot. On Sept. 23, 2002, amid the Washington-London mobilization for war against Iraq, Arnold accompanied speculator Warren Buffett to a gathering at the Waddesdon Manor estate of Lord Jacob Rothschild in Britain. London Times correspondent Anatole Kaletsky, a guest at the European Economic Roundtable conference, co-sponsored by Buffett and Rothschild, wrote about the "dark age" gathering in a column on Sept. 26.

By Kaletsky's account, the meeting aimed at giving the elite financiers a preview of the hell to come, as Cheney and British Prime Minister Tony Blair steered their governments into a string of perpetual wars, starting in the Mideast, but soon to engulf Eurasia. "The apocalyptic tone was set by a hair-raising discussion of the Middle East," Kaletsky wrote. "After hearing presentations from two well-placed Washington officials, it became clear not only that war now was inevitable—and in a matter of weeks, not months. Far more alarming, was that the war would not stop with the removal of President Saddam Hussein, still less with a UN-sponsored campaign to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.... After dealing with Iraq, the pressure for 'regime change' would shift to Iran, then Saudi Arabia, Syria and Pakistan... As if an ever-expanding war were not bad enough, the economic outlook presented to the gathered plutocrats was even grimmer, since it was not overlaid with the blustering confidence of the Washington war party.... The economic experts—including James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, and, of course Buffett himself—all emphasized the impotence of monetary and fiscal policy after the collapse of one of the greatest speculative bubbles of all time. To make matters worse, the assembled company generally agreed that America and Britain would soon be threatened by new bubbles in the property market."

Since the September 2002 session, Lord Jacob Rothschild has emerged as the "white knight" designated to save Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, should President Vladimir Putin move against Khodorkovsky's Yukos oil empire. The same Khodorkovsky was recently a guest of Buffett et al. at the Sun Valley, Idaho ranch of Meyer Lansky's favorite broker, Herbert Allen, Jr., at the annual gathering of telecommunications executives and Wall Street speculators. According to one Russian source, Khodorkovsky capped his U.S. visit with a secret meeting with Vice President Cheney.

In July 2000, a somewhat less elite collection of financiers, technocrats, and politicians than those assembled by Lord Jacob at his British manor, had gathered at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City, to anoint George W. Bush and Al Gore as Wall Street/London-vetted Presidential candidates, because both men would hand financial crisis management to the Federal Reserve and the banks.

According to accounts by Reuters and the Scotsman, the Waddesdon Manor event similarly vetted the Terminator as the man for this season of wars and financial catastrophes.

Enter George Shultz

To make clear that Schwarzenegger is out to rape California in the tradition of Dick Cheney's Enron: On the opening day of his quest for the governor's mansion, Schwarzenegger showed up with his new chief campaign economic advisor, George Shultz, the man who installed Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle as top campaign policy wonks for George W. Bush, and who in 1971 was the official who convinced President Nixon to end the Bretton Woods system, thus triggering more than 30 years of global speculative looting and physical economic breakdown.

In recent years, Shultz, while retaining his status as director of the Bechtel Corp. (a key benefactor, along with Halliburton, of the Bush-Cheney Iraq War), has become a celebrity in his own right—by peddling the legalization of drugs and the total deregulation of the global financial system. Not even the International Monetary Fund would survive Shultz's axe. He proposes a totally Darwinian global financial system, in which only the fittest would survive. Perhaps Shultz should take a second look at his new protégé, since many years of steroid abuse have turned his Mr. Universe legendary pectorals into flabby feminine breasts.

http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2003/3034cheney_calif.html

Document Says:
Oil Chiefs Met With Cheney Task Force

By Dana Milbank and Justin Blum
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, November 16, 2005; Page A01

A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001 -- something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress. [Continue Reading At]:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/15/AR2005111501842.html

Schwarzenegger Accused of Involvement in
$9B California Swindle with Enron's Ken Lay

Investigative reporter Greg Palast reveals how Republican gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger is part of a larger scheme to help Enron and other power companies avoid paying back $9 billion in illicit profits by replacing Gov. Gray Davis.

AMY GOODMAN: Greg Palast is on the line with us, investigative reporter; author of "the best democracy money can buy" works; with the BBC.

Welcome Greg.

GREG PALAST: Morning, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain this memo and why Schwarzenegger two years ago, not a politician at the time, would be meeting with Lay?

GREG PALAST: I think Arnold has to explain this meeting. I'm not so concerned with what he does with women behind closed doors in hotel rooms, but I am concerned with what he does with Ken Lay there.

There was a secret meeting in the Peninsula hotel in Beverly Hills, California; keep in mind this is still at the height of California's so-called power crisis in which the prices Californians pay is a 1000% above normal, which we now know has to do with manipulation of the power market by Enron and about a half-dozen other power companies.

This meeting occurs one month after Cruz Bustamante, lieutenant governor and also of course the leading candidate contender against Schwarzenegger, should Davis be recalled.

Cruz Bustamante filed a lawsuit in California court to get back the $9 billion in over-charges, it's pretty clear that it's at least 9 billion. It has been carefully calculated by the Independent System Operators there.

This suit looks like a winner and is a real crisis for Enron, still in business at the time in fact still in business today in the post bankruptcy mode. According to memos, all together 34 pages uncovered by the L.A. based Foundation for Tax Payer and Consumer Rights. The whole scheme was to undercut Davis and his administration in their plans to recoup the funds.

So the idea is to come up with some type of settlement scheme that would undercut Cruz Bustamante's lawsuit, and Davis's plan demands to get money back from the federal government. What's happening right now is that the federal government, the Federal Energy Regulatory commission, which is supposed to be like electricity cops of America, they're faced with stone cold evidence of manipulation of the market by Enron. Every game, get shorty, death star, kilowatt laundering, fake reporting, you name it, the evidence is piled up to the ceiling smoking guns stacked up one on top of the other.

The feds response, keep in mind the head of this agency appointed by George Bush was recommended personally by Ken Lay. So what is he going to do for his political mentor? The agency comes up with the idea of settling these charges for like a penny on the dollar.

Well if the state goes along with that, that means Arnold Schwarzenegger, if he becomes governor this week if the state doesn't subject to those deals then Cruz Bustamante's suit is dead on arrival because no judge is going to let a case go forward where the governor doesn't object to a settlement.

It's a perfect little scheme, Arnold has to explain himself, and in his only response on Friday evening when I broke the report, one woman did confront Arnold in Bakersfield in front of a supermarket and said, "are you in bed with Ken Lay?"

Arnold's response was, "I certainly wasn't in bed with you." So that's all we've gotten back from the Governator so far.

AMY GOODMAN: While many people know about your uncovering the purged voter roles in Florida; doing reports in Britain well before they were allowed here in the United States about many African Americans and others being scrubbed from the voter roles in 2000 you see a connection between people being disenfranchised in Florida and this recall election which basically redoes the election of Gray Davis.

GREG PALAST: Or undoes the election. You have to understand what's happening here. If the polls are correct Schwarzenegger becomes governor this week, even though it look like Davis may get say 45% or 46% of the vote saying he should be governor, Schwarzenegger in the weird mathematics of the recall looks like he might get about 35% of the vote. Yet somehow he becomes governor. So Davis gets 45, Arnold gets 35, and Arnold becomes governor under the strange procedure of the recall.

It's kind of a coup d'etat by the power companies, in other words, they're the ones who are really on the line here. The state is in the hole this year for $8 billion; they're owed $9 billion by the power companies. The obvious solution is staring the state in the face; the success of the actions by Davis and his lieutenant governor, which are virtually unknown and not covered by the press.

There is a question in my mind as to why Davis and Bustamante don't try to make clear what they're doing, nevertheless, this is why the core corporate powers are arrayed against both Bustamante and Davis.

I've been in this litigation, people may know me as investigative reporter for BBC, but my other little job has been as one of the main investigators of corruption and racketeering by power companies in America.

I was just working with the California Power Association, trying to unravel this business just last week. What people don't realize is that this suit is heading for courted, heading for almost certain success if it gets in front of a jury, and the only thing that can stop it is like yanking the governor out of the governor's mansion,. That's really what is at stake here.

Arnold simply will not explain what he was doing getting himself involved in the scheme by Enron to save itself from… basically, from justice.

AMY GOODMAN: Greg Palast, thank you for being with us, author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, investigative reporter with the BBC. [Democracy Now Complete Source]

While We Are On the Subject of Trust, Did You Know:
TRUTH Has As Many Letters As TRUST ?

Lies, Lies, Lies - BlackMustache.com

Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. - Dick Cheney - August 26, 2002

Every day Saddam remains in power with chemical weapons, biological weapons, and the development of nuclear weapons is a day of danger for the United States. - Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-CT - September 4, 2002

If we wait for the danger to become clear, it could be too late. - Sen. Joseph Biden D-Del. - September 4, 2002

Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons. - George W. Bush - September 12, 2002

If he declares he has none, then we will know that Saddam Hussein is once again misleading the world. - Ari Fleischer - December 2, 2002

We know for a fact that there are weapons there. - Ari Fleischer - January 9, 2003

Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent. - George W. Bush - January 28, 2003

We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more. - Colin Powell - February 5, 2003

Iraq both poses a continuing threat to the national security of the United States and international peace and security in the Persian Gulf region and remains in material and unacceptable breach of its international obligations by, among other things, continuing to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability, actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability, and supporting and harboring terrorist organizations. - Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY - February 5, 2003

We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons -- the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have. - George Bush - February 8, 2003

So has the strategic decision been made to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction by the leadership in Baghdad? I think our judgment has to be clearly not. - Colin Powell - March 8, 2003

Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. - George Bush - March 18, 2003

We are asked to accept Saddam decided to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd. - Tony Blair, Prime Minister - March 18, 2003

Well, there is no question that we have evidence and information that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical particularly . . . all this will be made clear in the course of the operation, for whatever duration it takes. - Ari Fleischer - March 21, 2003

There is no doubt that the regime of Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction. As this operation continues, those weapons will be identified, found, along with the people who have produced them and who guard them. - Gen. Tommy Franks - March 22, 2003

One of our top objectives is to find and destroy the WMD. There are a number of sites. - Pentagon Spokeswoman Victoria Clark - March 22, 2003

I have no doubt we're going to find big stores of weapons of mass destruction. - Kenneth Adelman, Defense Policy Board - March 23, 2003

We know where they are. They are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad. - Donald Rumsfeld - March 30, 2003

Saddam's removal is necessary to eradicate the threat from his weapons of mass destruction - Jack Straw, Foreign Secretary - April 2, 2003

Obviously the administration intends to publicize all the weapons of mass destruction U.S. forces find -- and there will be plenty. - Neocon scholar Robert Kagan - April 9, 2003

I think you have always heard, and you continue to hear from officials, a measure of high confidence that, indeed, the weapons of mass destruction will be found. - Ari Fleischer - April 10, 2003

We are learning more as we interrogate or have discussions with Iraqi scientists and people within the Iraqi structure, that perhaps he destroyed some, perhaps he dispersed some. And so we will find them. - George Bush - April 24, 2003

There are people who in large measure have information that we need . . . so that we can track down the weapons of mass destruction in that country. - Donald Rumsfeld - April 25, 2003

Before people crow about the absence of weapons of mass destruction, I suggest they wait a bit. - Tony Blair - April 28, 2003

We'll find them. It'll be a matter of time to do so. - George Bush - May 3, 2003

I am confident that we will find evidence that makes it clear he had weapons of mass destruction. - Colin Powell - May 4, 2003

I never believed that we'd just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country. - Donald Rumsfeld - May 4, 2003

I'm not surprised if we begin to uncover the weapons program of Saddam Hussein -- because he had a weapons program. - George W. Bush - May 6, 2003

U.S. officials never expected that "we were going to open garages and find" weapons of mass destruction. - Condoleezza Rice - May 12, 2003

I just don't know whether it was all destroyed years ago -- I mean, there's no question that there were chemical weapons years ago -- whether they were destroyed right before the war, (or) whether they're still hidden. - Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, Commander 101st Airborne - May 13, 2003

Before the war, there's no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical. I expected them to be found. I still expect them to be found. - Gen. Michael Hagee, Commandant of the Marine Corps - May 21, 2003

Given time, given the number of prisoners now that we're interrogating, I'm confident that we're going to find weapons of mass destruction. - Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff - May 26, 2003

They may have had time to destroy them, and I don't know the answer. - Donald Rumsfeld - May 27, 2003

For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction (as justification for invading Iraq) because it was the one reason everyone could agree on. - Paul Wolfowitz - May 28, 2003 - [Admitting Premeditated Murder & Maiming of Women, Children, Civilians and U.S. Military ? ] - Permmalink Source

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Right, Middle, & Left Activists, Listen Up:
Initiative Work Proposal!

Put:

None of the Above
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or as we like to call it:
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