Just a question about the state on the left side

[Gimpy]

But Rush, it's a GOP thing
Aug. 16, 2003 12:00 AM


Rush Limbaugh blames liberals for the state's budget, and gubernatorial crises without offering one example why ("This California quake is shaking liberals," Opinions, Wednesday).

He has good reason not to because they are due to Republican policies.

On June 6, 1978, California passed Proposition 13, an amendment to the state constitution that limits property taxes to 1 percent of assessed value in 1975.

To make sure other taxes were not increased to compensate, a two-thirds majority in the Legislature was required to raise taxes. This was passed with no reductions in spending or alternative programs to recoup those lost revenues.

Cutting taxes without decreasing spending is a proud Republican tradition.

In 1996, California attempted to deregulate its energy market by passing bill AB 1890(which was pushed by republican Governor Pete Wilson and the republicans in the Claifornia Assembly!), allowing Enron to step in and deliberately manipulate the market. Enron created and then relieved phantom congestions on the state's power grid, thus creating false energy crises, rolling blackouts and draining the state of about $46 billion.

Deregulating the power industry and allowing some old cronies to steal billions of dollars is purely Republican.

George W. Bush's economy is sure to be the first to lose jobs since Herbert Hoover, even further reducing the state's ability to raise desperately needed funds. This is the infamous "trickle down theory" at work. The problem is the "trickle" seems to go offshore, not toward creating jobs in America.

Finally, Darrell Issa, a Republican congressman, spent $1.6 million of his money to fund the gubernatorial recall, causing the state to spend $66 million to fund the special election. This is straight out of Karl Rove's playbook: create fiscal havoc then blame the liberals.

The only thing California liberals are guilty of is buying into Republican economic fantasies, lies and greed. - Wesley Brown
Lake Havasu City

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And that's a fact Jack!!!!!!!

[BLUEHAWK]

Yup, so there!

[SuperScout]

Yeah, as ususal, you're right (no, on second thought, you're too bigoted to be right, just correct), it was the GOP's fault for all the ills of California. In fact, it was a virtual miracle, being as how the GOP is the minority party, in both house of the state legislature, and rammed though spending bills that the govenor was forced to sign at gunpoint. Yup, just overspent by billions of dollars more than was present in the treasury.

If malfeasance was committed in the energy crisis, where are the indictments? There probably was all sorts of shenigans, but I have yet to read about the illustrious Democrat attorney general of said and sad state of California bringing any charges. So show us the charges and indictments, or shut up. This smear tactic of how Bush, his friends, or his neighbors, or even perfect strangers stole all this money is one big, continuing lie, unles you can show proof, and so far, all you show is hot air. Or you going to claim that the fuel bill in now $46 Billion? Wow, this story keeps growing like Pinochio's nose, or Algore's bloated resume!! What did the Democrts spend that caused the state to go from a $10 Billion surplus to a $38 Billion deficit? Don't think they (1) had to deal with the tragic effects of 9-11 (2) didn't fight and win a war in Afghanistan (3) or conduct too many offensive operation in Iraq.

So what if the citizens passed a law that limited the amount of taxes that can be assessed on property; are you going to claim (part of your big smear campaign, maybe) that this was some big GOP conspiracy? Can you possibly believe that maybe, just maybe, there were thousands of (gasp!) Democrats and Independent voters who also favored limiting this form of taxation? Or are you questioning the sanity of the voters? So the legislature of California passed a law that allows for recall? It's called local control, it's their state, so it seems to me that they can do what they want to, without the meddling interference of some busybody form Florida.

[MORTARDUDE]

California state government spending went up 40% in the past 4 years..do the math and point the fingers..

Larry

[BLUEHAWK]

Where are the indictments?

- There can be no indictments because nobody has broken any law!
- Nobody has broken any law because the law was written so that it could not be broken in certain ways or by certain types of people!
- This is sometimes the true meaning of "amicus curiae" in the american legislative process!
- Nobody stole the money, it was taken in the light of day legally!
- One of the best ways to thwart the will of the people is for legislatures to enact super-majority votes required for action, which is exactly what happened with Prop 13 in California's Congress. Without that rule, property taxes COULD have risen gradually instead of being totally stalled while real estate values soared (1977-Present!!!!) and everybody who HAD been going home with the profits just took more home!

Good luck California, and Good luck America!

[Gimpy]

If you so-called conservatives weren't so damn funny it would be frightening because you're so out of touch with reality! You'll "follow" your "leaders" of right-wing radicalism to the edge of the earth without admitting their crimes & faults that are leading this country to the brink of disaster!

SuperShouter, your sanctimonious, hypocritical nature has taken on a flavor of which even YOU have not been heretofore suspect of achieving. I'm sure old Dick(head) Cheney, Georgie Boy II, and their minions of right-wing fanatics are proud of you. If you would spend a little MORE time truly "investigating" and "ANALyzing" the subject matter and LESS time attempting to place the "blame" on liberals for EVERYTHING that has been WRONG in this country since before Americus Vespuci landed in the west Indies, it would sure be a change for the better. Ya know what I mean? Your "rhetoric" is only exceeded by your ignorance of the TRUTH!

Case in point below. And, don't worry---cause I got MORE where THIS came from!

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August 18, 2003

The California Rip-Off Revisited
Arnold, Michael Milken and Ken Lay
By JASON LEOPOLD

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.

"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."

A month before the Frontline interview and Bush's meeting with Davis, Cheney, who chairs Bush's energy task force, met with Lay to discuss Bush's National Energy Policy. Lay, whose company was the largest contributor to Bush's presidential campaign, made some recommendations that would financially benefit his company. Lay gave Cheney a memo that included eight recommendations for the energy policy. Of the eight, seven were included in the final draft. The energy policy was released in late May 2001, after Schwarzenegger, Riordan and Milken met with Lay and after the meeting between Bush and Davis and Cheney's Frontline interview.

The policy made only scant references to California's energy crisis, which Enron was accused of igniting, and did not indicate what should be done to provide the state some relief. Cheney said the policy focused on long-term solutions to the country's energy needs, such as opening up drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and freeing up transmission lines. That's why California was ignored in the report, Cheney said.

What's unknown to many of the voters who will decide Davis's fate on Oct. 7, the day of the recall election, is that while Cheney dismissed Davis's accusations that power companies were withholding electricity supplies from the state, one company engaged in exactly the type of behavior that Davis described. But Davis would never be told about the manipulative tactics the energy company engaged.

In a confidential settlement with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, whose chairman was appointed by Bush a year earlier, Tulsa, Okla., based-Williams Companies agreed to refund California $8 million in profits it reaped by deliberately shutting down one of its power plants in the state in the spring of 2000 to drive up the wholesale price of electricity in California.

The evidence, a transcript of a tape-recorded telephone conversation between an employee at Williams and an employee at a Southern California power plant operated by Williams, shows how the two conspired to jack up power prices and create an artificial electricity shortage by keeping the power plant out of service for two weeks.

Details of the settlement had been under seal by FERC for more than a year and were released in November after the Wall Street Journal sued the commission to obtain the full copy of its report. Similarly, FERC also found that Reliant Energy engaged in identical behavior around the same time as Williams and in February the commission ordered Reliant to pay California a $13.8 million settlement.

Had the evidence been released in 2001 when Davis accused energy companies of fraud it would have helped California's case and voters may have viewed the governor more positively. But if FERC were to publicly release the details of the Williams settlement it wouldn't have jibed with Bush's energy policy, which was made public instead in May 2001. It's highly unlikely that Bush, Cheney and members of the energy task force were kept in the dark about the Williams scam, especially since the findings of the investigation by FERC took place around the same time the policy was being drafted.

But Davis was still causing problems for Lay. California's power woes had a ripple effect, forcing other states to cancel plans to open up their electricity markets to competition fearing deregulation would lead to widespread blackouts and price gouging. For Enron, a company that generated most of its revenue from buying and selling power and natural gas on the open market, such a move would paralyze the company.

Fearing that Davis would take steps to re-regulate California's power market that Lay spent years lobbying California lawmakers to open up to competition, Lay recruited Schwarzenegger, Riordan, Milken, and other powerful business leaders like Bruce Karatz, chief executive of home builder Kaufman & Broad; Ray Irani, chief executive of Occidental Petroleum; and Kevin Sharer, chief executive of biotech giant Amgen.

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."

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.

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. A week before the meeting, Davis signed legislation to create a state power authority that would buy, operate and build power plants in lieu of out-of-state energy companies, such as Enron, that the governor alleged was ripping off the state.

For Enron's Lay, the timing of the meeting was crucial. His company was just five months away from disintegrating and he was doing everything in his power to keep his company afloat and the profits rolling in.

It wasn't until Enron collapsed in October 2001 and evidence of the company's manipulative trading tactics emerged that FERC began to take a look at the company's role in California's electricity crisis. Since then, memos written by former Enron traders were uncovered, with colorful names like "Fat Boy" and "Death Star," that contained the blueprint for ripping off California.

Enron's top trader on the West Coast, Timothy Belden, the mastermind behind the scheme, pleaded guilty in December to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and has agreed to cooperate with federal investigators who are still trying to get to the bottom of the crisis.

California is still demanding that FERC order the energy companies to refund the state $8.9 billion for overcharging the state for electricity during its yearlong energy crisis. But FERC says California is due no more than $1.2 billion in refunds because the state still owes the energy companies $1.8 billion in unpaid power bills.

Davis, who refused to cave in to the demands of companies like Enron even while Democrats, Republicans and the public criticized him, was right all along. Maybe Californians ought to cut Davis some slack.

Jason Leopold spent two years covering California's energy crisis as bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. He is currently working on a book about the crisis. He can be reached at: jasonleopold@hotmail.com

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Just one more "nail" in the coffin of republican demise!

[BLUEHAWK]

Thanks for that one Gimpy -
This is how we can be so sure that the system is out of kilter, but I have got to say it is rather satisfying to watch while a vast government like California experiences what it's like to have to cope with the the virtually unlimited power private enterprise has to benefit only itself, at any cost to anyone at any time. Private citizens experience this kind of thing daily, on far smaller but just as devastating scale, millions of times.
I am quite sure the lesson will not be remembered, much less anything done about it.

[Gimpy]

as long as there's a "Bush" in the whitehouse---for SURE!

[BLUEHAWK]

Gimpy -
I know what you are talking about, and would agree mostly... but would have said the same thing when any other president was in office.
I believe the problem is systemic, and has been from the outset of our nation. The schizophrenia of Federalism vs State's Rights has never ever been resolved, and is selectively advanced depending on whose bull is doing the goring.
Victor Davis recently wrote in the NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE something that haunts me, "Remember that wealthy, sophisticated societies like our own are rarely overrun. They simply implode - whining and debating still to the end, even as they pass away."

[MORTARDUDE]

quite another view of the California mess...notice the date it was written...can we say "fiscal irresponsibility" boys and girls ?

or tax and we will spend it..in spades !!!!

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/p...20021127.shtml

November 27, 2002

Say goodbye to the golden land

Pat Buchanan

That 70 percent fall in the NASDAQ and 25 percent decline in the Dow, and the recession and unemployment they produced, have begun to cause major collateral damage to municipal and state budgets. The Empire State and the Big Apple are staring at a combined deficit of $15 billion, "a crisis of historic proportions," says The Washington Post. Rudy Guiliani's successor, Michael Bloomberg, has watched his popularity plummet to 41 percent, as he proposes raising property taxes 18 percent, piling $3 billion in income taxes on commuters, raising subway fares a third and putting tolls on the Brooklyn Bridge.

The salad days of the Clinton Decade, when the tough decision facing mayors and governors seemed to be whether to spend surpluses on raising teachers' pay or cutting taxes, are over.

The 2001 recession cost 2 million Americans their jobs. It has bitten into tax revenues nationwide and forced higher spending on social services. The bear market has killed the goose that laid those golden eggs called capital gains. And with the U.S. trade deficit over $450 billion, the U.S. manufacturing base -- a cornucopia of tax revenue -- continues to hollow out.

NAFTA and GATT, the trade deals beloved of the Beltway elite and the multinationals, continue to suck out of America the manufacturing jobs that were the on-ramp to the middle class. This is a central cause of the crisis of upstate New York, over which our pro-NAFTA politicians so copiously weep.

The fat years are over; the lean years are here. While congressmen may have managed to draw up districts so safe that only one in 20 House races is competitive, governors of both parties will spend this present decade on the endangered species list.

New York's crisis, however, pales beside that of the Golden State. Having spent California's cut of Big Tobacco's future profits -- to close a $23 billion deficit in this election year -- Gov. Gray Davis is now staring at deficits stretching to the end of his new four-year term.

"Hold onto your wallet," warns Nancy Sidhu of the Los Angeles Development Corp. LADC projects "a deficit of $6 billion this year, at least $21 billion in 2003-04 and between $12 billion and $16 billion annually for the next six years."

Adds the Financial Times, "The near-term deficit, approaching 25 percent of California's annual spending, is the most extreme example of the fiscal blight spreading through other states and down to local authorities." Davis' budget crisis can be traced to two causes: loss of 200,000 manufacturing jobs in two years and the devastation wrought to the software industry of Silicon Valley.

But something more ominous is happening to California, akin to what happened to New York after the war. Folks are simply packing up and pulling out. Middle-class Californians, uncomfortable with the radical ethnic changes reshaping the state and weary of the tax load, are leaving for good. In the 1990s, for the first time in history, there was a net out-migration of native-born Californians. Two million left. And as high-income Californians depart, to be replaced by low-wage Latins and Asians who consume more in services than they pay in taxes, California's deficits will explode. And as Gray Davis tries to salvage social programs by squeezing taxpayers even more, even more taxpayers will join the exodus.

California is inexorably headed for Third World status. Tax rates will have to be raised again and again, but immigrant folks picking fruit, working in kitchens and washing cars do not pay the same amount of taxes auto and aerospace workers did. Somebody has to make up the difference. And that somebody is packing up and heading east.

There is no end in sight to the substitution of a new and different California for the old California we all knew. California remains the first choice of final residence for one-third of the 1.5 million aliens who break into this country every year. In the counties of Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Riverside and Orange, poverty levels soared throughout the 1990s.

Meanwhile, the grandchildren of the Dust Bowl Okies who came west in the 1930s, and the grandkids of the veterans of World War II who came after 1945, are moving to Nevada, Colorado and Idaho. In the last decade, 225,000 left for Arizona. And as those states become more Republican, the Golden State becomes as reliably Democratic as Washington, D.C.

The 1990s were good years for Big Government. In Washington and state capitals, politicians bought popularity and re-election with their unanticipated windfalls of tax dollars. Now the spigot has been cut off. The coming budget wars in state capitals should make for some interesting politics.