The Shady Bunch - "Protecting Us From Terror"

Company With Ties to VP Cheney's Energy Task Force Faces Criminal Indictment for Gaming Cal Electricity Market

by Jason Leopold
www.dissidentvoice.org
March 22, 2004

Three years ago, while California’s energy crisis was spiraling out of control, Vice President Dick Cheney secretly met with half-dozen corporate executives of the country’s largest energy companies to hammer out a national energy policy for President George W. Bush.
Cheney appeared on a number of news programs in May 2001 to promote his new energy policy, which turned out to be a boon for the energy industries, but abandoned consumers and environmental groups. Naturally, during some of those interviews, Cheney was asked whether a handful of the energy companies that sold electricity in California and stood to benefit financially from the new policy were behaving like a “cartel” and manipulating prices in the state’s deregulated electricity market.

“No,” Cheney said in a May 17, 2001 interview with PBS's “Frontline;” a day after the final energy policy report was released. "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...”

California's electricity crisis wreaked havoc on millions of people in the state between 2000 and 2001, resulted in four days of rolling blackouts and forced the state's largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, into bankruptcy. California was the first state in the nation to deregulate its power market in an effort to provide consumers with cheaper electricity and the opportunity to choose their own power company. The results have since proved disastrous. The experiment has cost the state more than $30 billion.

For three years, California officials pleaded with federal energy regulators, President Bush and Vice President Cheney, to provide the state with some relief from soaring wholesale electricity prices and to investigate many of the energy companies that sold power to California for allegedly manipulating the market.

Former Governor Gray Davis met with Bush a couple of weeks before Cheney’s “Frontline” interview and asked for federal assistance, such as price caps, but Bush refused saying the free-market would sort out the mess...

Reliant(see link and full story for connections to RNC) said in a news release March 8 that it was notified by the US Attorney’s office about the pending indictment, which stems from allegations that the company deliberately shut down its power plants in California for a few days in June 2000, creating an artificial shortage and causing wholesale prices to skyrocket.



...Did Cheney publicly deny that energy companies were manipulating the market because it would have derailed the National Energy Policy? Only a Magic Eight Ball can answer that question correctly, but there appeared to have been a coordinated effort by federal energy regulators to conceal smoking-gun evidence of market manipulation in California in May 2001 around the same time that Cheney released the final version of the National Energy Policy.



Jason Leopold spent two years covering California's electricity crisis and the Enron bankruptcy as bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. He is writing a book about California's electricity crisis. (C) 2004 Jason Leopold.

Cheney, temporarily terminated his problems in CalEfornEyuh by arranging for Arnold to be placed as Governor. Greg Palast gives what Greg always delivers, well researched facts:

Arnold Unplugged - It's hasta la vista to $9 billion if the Governator is selected
Friday, October 3, 2003

It's not what Arnold Schwarzenegger did to the girls a decade back that should raise an eyebrow. According to a series of memoranda our office obtained today, it's his dalliance with the boys in a hotel room just two years ago that's the real scandal.

The wannabe governor has yet to deny that on May 17, 2001, at the Peninsula Hotel in Los Angeles, he had consensual political intercourse with Enron chieftain Kenneth Lay. Also frolicking with Arnold and Ken was convicted stock swindler Mike Milken.

Now, thirty-four pages of internal Enron memoranda have just come through this reporter's fax machine tell all about the tryst between Maria's husband and the corporate con men. It turns out that Schwarzenegger knowingly joined the hush-hush encounter as part of a campaign to sabotage a Davis-Bustamante plan to make Enron and other power pirates then ravaging California pay back the $9 billion in illicit profits they carried off.
Full story at:http://www.gregpalast.com/printerfriendly.cfm?artid=283

Wouldn't you just LOVE to see the truth come out of this woman's mouth - just once.

The whole sordid truth of the Bush family "trading with the enemy" is in the National Archives. The only ones who do not know about it are the GOP owned media, who repeat GWB and Rumsfeld like the mirror reflection of an alzheimer case gone mad. Today they are in a complete tail chasing loop, not much they report about their boy that is positive so they are off chasing ambulances - creating news once again.



This sick excuse of a human being has profited on every war in the past thirty years and conspired with corporations against his own country.

American eugenics at its finest, breeding the perfect psychopathic narcissist. Devoid of empathy, fixated on profit - integrity - he would not know if it bit him in the ass.

From the Phillipines, to South America to Viet Nam to Iraq, there is always another war for the USA and always another country to bring freedom to at the end of an MK47. Chile is a classic example of American "democracy " at work. The US CIA assassinated Salvadore Allende, because he was a socialist, an elected socialist (ya know free parties compete for the people's vote...in a democracy). Allende was also a POET, a cerebral, gentle man with the passion of the people in his blood. The USA replaced him with Pinochet, a brutal military dictator much like Batista (the American plant in Cuba who pulled out finger nails and abused people for years before Castro organized a revolution).


If American media ever publishes the truth about the Bush crime family AND this administration, then freedom might be restored. Until then we are just watching another round of a Bush CIA manipulation and shakedown of the world's resources.