What Bush and Cheney said during the FAKE California energy crisis!

Joanne98

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Wed Jul-16-08 11:37 AM
Original message

What Bush and Cheney said during the FAKE California energy crisis!

On May 29, 2001, when the California energy crisis reached its peak, resulting in nearly a week of rolling blackouts, bankruptcies, and several deaths, Gov. Gray Davis met with Bush at the Century Plaza Hotel in West Los Angeles, and pleaded with him to enact much-needed price controls on electricity sold in the state, which had skyrocketed to more than $200 per megawatt-hour.

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 had designed an electricity market that left too many regulatory restrictions in place and that it was that which had caused electricity prices in the state to skyrocket.

It was up to the governor to fix the problem, Bush said, adding that the crisis had nothing to do with energy companies manipulating the market.

But Bush's response, in hindsight, appeared to be part of a coordinated effort launched by Lay to have Davis shoulder the blame for the crisis, which ultimately led to an unprecedented recall of the governor and Republican-funded attack ads on Davis' handling of the energy crisis.

A couple of weeks before the Davis and Bush meeting, the PBS news program Frontline interviewed Cheney. 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. "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."

In April 2001, a month before the Frontline interview and Bush's meeting with Davis, Cheney, who chaired Bush's energy task force, met with Lay to discuss Bush's National Energy Policy.

Lay recommended some energy policy initiatives that would financially benefit his company, and gave Cheney a memo that included eight recommendations for the energy policy. Of the eight, seven were included in the energy policy's final draft. The energy policy was released in late May 2001, after the meeting between Bush and Davis, and after Cheney's Frontline interview.

What many people have failed to realize is that Davis was right in his assessment that energy companies, including Enron, were manipulating the state's wholesale power market. To this day, neither Cheney nor Bush has acknowledged that they got it wrong and that their inaction helped fuel the California energy crisis.

It appears that neither Lay nor Skilling will be held responsible for the scams Enron's traders pulled on California either. The federal court judge presiding over the criminal case against Lay and Skilling ruled earlier this month that the smoking gun transcripts and audiotapes showing how Enron traders caused shortages and blackouts in California could not be introduced by the prosecution as evidence during the trial because it would prejudice the jury.

One of the more infamous audio tapes captured an Enron trader admitting that his manipulative trading tactics in California helped him rip off "Grandma Millie" to the tune of $1 million a day.

Jason Leopold spent two years covering California's electricity crisis as Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires.

http://www.vegsource.com/talk/flame/messages/5669.html

GEE! It sounds exactly like what they're saying now. I wonder why?