Reply #56: This is a great article from AUGUST on the meeting...

[dutchdemocrat]

Total amnesia
Arnold can’t seem to recall anything about his secret meeting with Enron’s Ken Lay. Perhaps this will refresh his memory.

By Jason Leopold


Arnold Schwarzenegger isn't talking. The Hollywood action-film star and GOP gubernatorial candidate in the state’s recall election has been unusually silent about his plans for running the Golden State. He hasn’t yet offered a solution for the state’s budget deficit, an issue that largely got more than 1 million people to sign a petition to recall Governor Gray Davis.

More importantly, however, Schwarzenegger still won’t respond to questions about why he was at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills two years ago where he, former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and junk-bond king Michael Milken met secretly with former Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay, who was touting a plan for solving the state’s energy crisis. Other luminaries who were invited but didn’t attend the May 24, 2001, meeting included former Los Angeles Laker Earvin “Magic” Johnson and supermarket magnate Ron Burkle.

While Schwarzenegger, Riordan and Milken listened to Lay’s pitch, Davis pleaded with President George W. Bush to enact much-needed price controls on electricity sold in the state, which skyrocketed to more than $200 per megawatt-hour (four to five times the price it was a year earlier). Davis said that Texas-based energy companies were manipulating California’s power market, charging obscene prices for power and holding consumers hostage. Bush agreed to meet with Davis at the Century Plaza Hotel in West Los Angeles on May 29 of that year--five days after Lay met with Schwarzenegger--to discuss the California power crisis.

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http://newsreview.com/issues/sacto/2003-08-28/essay.asp