Article about Schwarzenegger

[erpowers]

Earlier I read the article about Schwarzenegger at Salon.com. I would like to discuss a few thing from the article here in this post. Frist, the article called the election of Schwarzenegger a populist coup. I agree that it was a coup, but I do not see it a populist. Second, the article mentioned that Schwarzenegger won a hugh plurality of the vote. Was the win really that huge of a plurality? Third, the article mentioned that Schwarzenegger picked a friend to manage his finances while he is in office which is possibly in violation of California law. Have the Democrats or anyone else made a big enough fuss about this. What are the chances of drafting article of impeachment against Schwarzenegger? Is anyone in the state pushing for a law that would require the listing of the groups that contribute to the non-profit organization that pays for his hotel and his trips? What are the Democrats doing in California?

[EVDebs]

1. First, I'm from CA so I've seen this from Day One so to speak

Arnold used the mess set up by the energy crisis to play off the ineptness of Gray Davis. Gray was seen as only about money, so much so that even the most liberal John Burton was disgusted with him. Second, Jay Leno owns a lot of cars...and the vehicle tax helped to undo Davis who was looking to make up for the energy crisis/Enron/et.al gamed system which had just drained the state's coffers of a few billion, in order to just keep the lights on.

Arnold then has meetings with Ken Lay in LA prior to the fiasco as Greg Palast has reported on "Arnold Unplugged - It's hasta la vista to $9 billion if the Governator is selected" http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=283&row=1

""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.""

Populist coup or not, most Californians hated the tripling of the VLF tax and wished that Davis could have gone after Enron et al in order to balance the budget -- see "State Triples Vehicle License Fees" http://forum.teamxbox.com/archive/index.php/t-203818.html
No wonder Arnold was on the Leno 'Tonight Show' so often !

Davis was doing exactly what Arnold would have done...Which is the big surprise behind all of this. Arnold then used Davis' tactics, since Davis used Wall Street loans to bail the state out for around $10 billion; Arnold then turned around and by cutting the VLF added about $4 billion to the borrowing, since he went to Wall Street for $14 or so billion dollars! Neat trick, huh ? So if you were Wall Street during this fiasco, who would you support, a candidate who'd generate 1% commission on a greater or a lesser amount of borrowing ? Correct...Wall Street went with Arnie.

As for populism, Arnold supports Colorado-style TABOR (taxpayer bill of rights) formula budgets. See "Arnold Schwarzenegger supports TABOR -- Wall Street Journal, 9/24/03" at
http://www.idtaxreform.com/TABORintro.htm

You see now that under TABOR's population/inflation growth formulas, as with Colorado's from 1992, an initial year's budget has to be about perfectly equitable to begin with when the formula commences. Arnold is trying to legislate this now, to no success, and will attempt ballot initiatives for it soon.

So there you have it. A disguised 'environmentalist', 'pro-choice','moderate' Republican who, once he's in office will do exactly as the party dictates. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Populist my arse.

Warren Buffetts' advise is curious, since his advise says one thing
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/08/14/MN7302.DTL
in order to get jobs back to California (lower corporate taxes), while saying another when you look closer
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0306-01.htm
(raise corporate taxes). And Arnie is a supporter of outsourcing ! The whole globalization multinational corporate scheme to lower taxes, offshoring jobs and capital, and lower wages in America, is what Wall Street wants to hear, not what Main Street needs. Who wins ? Opportunists like Arnie. Who loses ? Let me guess....

[EVDebs]

2. Oh, and I forgot to mention Pete Wilson's mistakes that Davis took rap for

The VLF dustup stems from Pete Wilson, Arhnolds' mentor, abusing local governments (cities and counties) by instituting ERAF which stole property tax money from them and used it to balance the state budget:

""Five years ago (1993), the Governor (Pete Wilson) and the State Legislature began the so-called "ERAF" program to bail out the State Budget by taking 21% of all City property tax payments and keeping it at the State. They chose to do this instead of balancing the State Budget by making budget cuts at the State level. The result of this program is that the State of California now gets more local property tax revenue from the citizens of San Carlos than the City of San Carlos does!""

http://www.cityofsancarlos.org/is/display/1,1124,deptid-17_isid-242,00.html

So, in hindsight, we see that Gov Davis was the victim of two failed programs of former Gov Wilson, Energy deregulation and ERAF's theft of county/city revenues. Davis' own ineptness in pointing this out is his real fault !