News & Politics > Briefs
edited by Lorna Tychostup

Arnold Terminates Taxpayer Refund

Just three days after entering his new role as California’s governor-elect, Arnold Schwarzenegger is set to revive his role as Terminator. As predicted in a report by Greg Palast just prior to the recall election, a Schwarzenegger aide has announced that the governor-elect is planning to settle pending energy fraud lawsuits. This apparently includes the suit filed by Cruz Bustamante and supported by soon-to-be-former California Governor Davis that is on its way to trial in Los Angeles. This litigation would potentially make the power companies refund the $9 billion Palast claims was “vaccuumed out of the state by Enron, Reliant, Dynergy, Williams Company, and other Texas bandits,” and was filed under California’s unique Civil Code provision 17200, of the Unfair Practices Act. The purpose of the act “is to safeguard the public against the creation or perpetuation of monopolies and to foster and encourage competition”; the act expressly prohibits “unfair, dishonest, deceptive, destructive, fraudulent, and discriminatory practices by which fair and honest competition is destroyed or prevented.”

“By way of 34 pages of internal Enron memoranda,” the Los Angeles-based Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights revealed, Palast reported on October 3 that on May 17, 2001, just one month after Bustamante filed the suit, Arnold Schwarzenegger secretly met with Enron’s chief Kenneth Lay and convicted stock swindler Mike Milken at the Peninsula Hotel in Los Angeles. According to the memos, a plan was hatched to undercut Davis and “solve” the energy crisis by neutralizing the Bustamante lawsuit.

Explaining how this can be done, Palast reported, “While Bustamante is kicking Enron in the butt in court, the Davis administration is simultaneously demanding that George Bush’s energy regulators order the $9 billion refund.... Bush’s Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is headed by a guy proposed by Ken Lay.... The evidence against the electricity barons is rock solid: fraudulent reporting of sales transactions, megawatt ‘laundering’, fake power delivery scheduling, and straight out conspiracy (including meetings in hotel rooms).”

According to Palast, the Commission decided to “charge the companies with conspiracy but offer them, behind closed doors, deals in which they have to pay only two cents on the dollar on each dollar they filched.”

Palast ends his report by predicting that if Schwarzenegger is elected he will agree to the “sweetheart settlements with the power companies,” which will mean the end of Bustamante’s court cases against them. “There aren’t many judges who will let a case go to trial to protect a state if a governor has already allowed the matter to be ‘settled’ by a regulatory agency.”

Fast forward to a October 10 broadcast where news talk show host Bernie Ward of KGO radio, San Francisco reported that Schwarzenegger’s aide stated that the governor-elect’s administration did not want to be saddled with someone else’s lawsuits.

A report written on October 15 by journalist Kathy Yurica and posted on Palast’s Web site states, “The Unfair Practices Act, however, has provisions that require businesses who profit from unfair practices to pay the victims those profits. Although the act does not authorize recovery of damages in a representative action, according to Hilary N. Rowen, an attorney from the law firm of Thelen Reid and Priest, ‘the plaintiff—who need not have been harmed by the challenged conduct—may seek injunctive and restitutionary relief, including the disgorgement of profits on behalf of all those injured.’ This provision would make the power companies, who profited an estimated $9 billion from the California energy scam, the losers.”

In the same article Yurica reports, “In the meantime, Claire Cooper of the Sacramento Bee reported Friday on another lawsuit in the Federal Court. She reported the judges from the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals seemed skeptical of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) ‘contention that it acted legally three years ago, when it relied on competition among energy wholesalers to determine the cost of California’s power supply and did not require them to file the rates they would charge.’” California sued FERC, claiming it is due a refund of $9 billion in gouged profits because the Federal Power Act didn’t authorize FERC to approve a fluctuating market-based rate structure. The question is, does the governor-elect intend to settle the federal suit also?

—Lorna Tychostup

Vatican Warns Against Use of Condoms

The Vatican is telling millions of Catholics that condoms don’t stop the transmission of the HIV virus because they have tiny holes, according to a British television program. The church is making the claim despite widespread scientific evidence that condoms are impermeable to the HIV virus. The Roman Catholic Church opposes any form of artificial contraception—particularly condoms, which it says promote promiscuity by breaking the link between sex and procreation. But the traditional opposition is now being reinforced by arguments over their efficacy.

“The moral argument against the use of condoms is being superseded by a clinical argument which is flawed,” Steve Bradshaw, reporter on the BBC Panorama program “Sex and the Holy City” that aired in Britain on October 12, told Reuters.

“The AIDS virus is roughly 450 times smaller than the spermatozoon,” the president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Family, Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, told the program. “The spermatozoon can easily pass through the ‘net’ that is formed by the condom.”

Bradshaw told Reuters the program team did not go out looking for the story, but stumbled across it during research.

The World Health Organization denounced the Vatican’s statements to “Sex and the Holy City,” saying: “These incorrect statements about condoms and HIV are dangerous when we are facing a global pandemic which has already killed more than 20 million people, and currently affects at least 42 million.” The WHO spokesperson conceded that condoms could break or be damaged and permit passage of semen, but said that “consistent and correct” condom use reduces the risk of infection by 90 percent and that condoms are certainly secure enough to prevent passage of the virus if not damaged.

In AIDS-stricken African countries like Kenya, where an estimated 20 percent of the population are infected with HIV, the church’s anti-condom pronouncement has the potential of exposing thousands, if not millions of people to risk. The archbishop of Nairobi, Raphael Ndingi Nzeki told “Sex and the Holy City”: “AIDS has grown so fast because of the availability of condoms.” Reporters for the program found claims about “permeable condoms” repeated by Catholics in Asia, Africa, and South America.

—Brian K. Mahoney/SOURCES: REUTERS, THE GUARDIAN

First Father Honors Ted Kennedy

One has to wonder just who was more surprised when the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation announced on October 3 that Senator Edward M. Kennedy would receive the 2003 George Bush Award for Excellence in Public Service. Reported to be the First Father’s “own most treasured award,” the award turned more than a few heads when the news hit the corridors of Washington, DC. Many wondered if the elder Bush was attempting to send his son, and perhaps the world, a message.

One of GW’s strongest critics in recent months, Kennedy has been relentless in verbally assaulting the current Bush administration. News of the elder Bush’s award didn’t temper Kennedy’s lambasting of GW, but seemed only to fuel the Senator’s attacks. Addressing Bush’s $87 billion Iraq reconstruction proposal from the floor of the Senate on October 16, Kennedy read from a prepared statement titled, “On the Administration’s Failure to Provide a Realistic, Specific Plan to Bring Stability to Iraq.” He began by taking Bush the Younger to task for lying to the American public:

“Nearly six months have elapsed since President Bush flew out to the aircraft carrier and declared ‘Mission Accomplished’ in Iraq. Today, we all know all too well that the war is not over; the war goes on; the mission is not accomplished. An unnecessary war, based on unreliable and inaccurate intelligence, has not brought an end to danger. Instead, it has brought new dangers, imposed new costs, and taken more and more American lives each week.
“We all agree that Saddam Hussein was a murderous tyrant, and his brutal regime was an affront to basic human decency. But Iraq was not a breeding ground for terrorism. Our invasion has made it one.

“The trumped up reasons for going to war have collapsed. All the administration’s rationalizations as we prepared to go to war now stand revealed as ‘double-talk’. The American people were told Saddam Hussein was building nuclear weapons. He was not. We were told he had stockpiles of other weapons of mass destruction. He did not. We were told he was involved in 9/11. He was not. We were told Iraq was attracting terrorists from al-Qaeda. It was not. We were told our soldiers would be viewed as liberators. They are not. We were told Iraq could pay for its own reconstruction. It cannot. We were told the war would make America safer. It has not.

“Before the war, week after week after week after week, we were told lie after lie after lie after lie.”

Warning against the US’s becoming an occupying force, Kennedy went on to accuse the Bush administration of ignoring failed historical models of colonialism.

“Surely, in this day and age, at the beginning of the 21st century, we do not have to re-learn the lesson that every colonial power in history has learned. We do not want to be—we cannot afford to be—either in terms of character or in terms of cost—an occupier of other lands. We must not become the next failed empire in the world.

“The administration seeks to write a new history that defies the lessons of history. The most basic of those lessons is that we cannot rely primarily on military means as a solution to politically inspired violence. In those circumstances, the tide of history rises squarely against military occupation.”

Addressing the plight of American soldiers, Kennedy said, “Reservists are
being sent into combat with inferior equipment. They have told me they had to rely on Vietnam-era night vision goggles that obscure more than they reveal, even though the latest technology is used by the regular military. They told me they had to use outdated and less-effective flak jackets, not the latest models with bulletproof ceramic inserts. They told me they had to wait three months for other current gear. Many units did not have armored Humvees. Instead, they had to hang flak jackets in the windows to protect themselves from attack.

“I visited some of our wounded soldiers last week at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. More than 1,800 American servicemen and women have been wounded in this war, and an average of seven new patients arrive at Walter Reed from Iraq each day. Many were ambushed driving along a road. Many lost limbs because their Humvees did not have the armor to protect them from the blast of a rocket-propelled grenade or a booby trap in the road.”

In a statement released by the Bush Library Foundation, which is located on the Texas A&M University campus, Kennedy was lauded for his “remarkable career” and “his commitment to excellence in public policy and his devotion to public service” which make him “an inspiration to all Americans and make him a superb recipient of the Bush Award.”

“During his remarkable career spanning over four decades, Senator Kennedy has consistently and courageously fought for his principles—and has rightly earned the respect of his Senate colleagues on both sides of the aisle,” said Bush Foundation Executive Director Roman Popadiuk.

Former President Bush will present the award on November 7 to the Massachusetts Democrat, who will join former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl as Bush Award recipients.

—Lorna Tychostup/SOURCES: BOSTON GLOBE, WWW.COMMONDREAMS.ORG