Power failure?
Now, when I meet people from outside of California, a likeley occurance in New York, they often wonder how Arnold Schwarzenegger became govenor of our state. There's the old line of the people dazzled by celebrity who are too stupid or apathetic to care about actual policy. What I usual try to explain is that the whole recall was a big sham and Arnie benefitted from the chaos and was able to pitch his appeal in safe suburban districts that didn't question his outragously empty rhetoric and showmanship (did anyone else see his acceptance speech where he pretended to play guitar along to Twisted Sister as Dee Snider stood there looking dull?). These things are probably true, but seeing Enron: The Smartest Guy In The Room has given me a new view. What Enron did was just take away power, wait for the price to rise, and sell it back at gouging prices. Literally, they told plants just to shut down, that's what rolling black-outs were, power being arbitrarily stopped or diverted. And they were able to do this because of California's deregulated energy industry. Who deregulated it? Pete Wilson. When the crisis hit, Grey Davis didn't know what to do. When it became clear price controls were needed, he realized he needed federal intervention to, basically, save the state. And guess who didn't want to initiate such controls? George W. Bush. He knew and loved the Enron guys, they all thought de-regulation was the greatest thing, Bush's intital energy plan could've been written by Ken Lay (but is that really much more suspect than Mr. Halliburton, our vice-president orchistrating it?). Now what happens when power is stablised and the state is left in crippling defecit? A groping Austrian leads a recall campaign blaming Davis for the power outages and debt. If we are going to blame Davis for anything, it's not being tougher, calling out Enron and even declaring a state of emergency and forcebly taking over some plants. Now, would Arnold Schwarzenegger be tougher in regulating the energy industry? Of course not. He met with Lay and others in the heat of all this shit. If Bush was willing to pretend that more de-regulation was the cure and Democrats were the problem, why couldn't Arnold? Enron became one of the biggest companies in the world by pretending to make profits. They just said they were making money when they were losing it. Schwarzenegger got elected by saying he, Mr. Buissness, represented a cure to the crisis Gray Davis created, when he really was the disease. The energy crisis was solved by Democrats on the Hill stepping in and regulating California energy. Soon, Enron collapsed under the wieght of their own lies. This year, Arnie is up for re-election, will the Democrats have some balls and expose him for the fraud he is? Will he collapse under the wieght of his own bullshit (as is seeming to happen to Bush about a year and a half too late)? Or, will he just shuckle and jive and pretend everything is allright and be believed by those who can't or don't care to tell the difference?