After having not posted anything for a couple of months, there's something fitting in returning o­n the same note I left o­n, with a piece by journalist extraordinaire, Greg Palast, plus an update o­n crop circle activity. O­n the Palast front, with all the last minute attempts to thwart Schwarzenegger here in California, where people might not care enough about what he has considered playful sexual antics, and where his behavior in the limelight for many years might demonstrate to the majority that he's not really a fan of Hitler's, what Palast is writing about could do Arnold in. If this story gets press, I think there's a good chance Californians will hold their noses and keep the Democrats in office.

ARNOLD UNPLUGGED It's hasta la vista to $9 billion if the Governator is selected by Greg Palast 10/3/03

It's not what Arnold Schwarzenegger did to the girls a decade back that should raise an eyebrow. According to a series of memoranda our office obtained today, it's his dalliance with the boys in a hotel room just two years ago that's the real scandal.

The wannabe governor has yet to deny that o­n May 17, 2001, at the Peninsula Hotel in Los Angeles, he had consensual political intercourse with Enron chieftain Kenneth Lay. Also frolicking with Arnold and Ken was convicted stock swindler Mike Milken.

Now, thirty-four pages of internal Enron memoranda have just come through this reporter's fax machine tell all about the tryst between Maria's husband and the corporate con men. 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.

Here's the story Arnold doesn't want you to hear. The biggest single threat to Ken Lay and the electricity lords is a private lawsuit filed last year under California's unique Civil Code provision 17200, the “Unfair Business Practices Act.” This litigation, heading to trial now in Los Angeles, would make the power companies return the $9 billion they filched from California electricity and gas customers.

It takes real cojones to bring such a suit. Who's the plaintiff taking o­n the bad guys? Cruz Bustamante, Lieutenant Governor and reluctant leading candidate against Schwarzenegger.

Now follow the action. o­ne month after Cruz brings suit, Enron's Lay calls an emergency secret meeting in L.A. of his political buck-buddies, including Arnold. Their plan, to undercut Davis (according to Enron memos) and “solve” the energy crisis — that is, make the Bustamante legal threat go away.

How can that be done? Follow the trail with me.

While Bustamante's kicking Enron butt in court, the Davis Administration is simultaneously demanding that George Bush's energy regulators order the $9 billion refund. Don't hold your breath: Bush's Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is headed by a guy proposed by … Ken Lay.

But Bush's boys o­n the commission have a problem. 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).

So the Bush commissioners cook up a terrific scheme: charge the companies with conspiracy but offer them, behind closed doors, deals in which they have to pay o­nly two cents o­n each dollar they filched.

Problem: the slap-on-the-wrist refunds won't sail if the Governor of California won't play along. Solution: Re-call the Governor.

New Problem: the guy most likely to replace Davis is not Mr. Musclehead, but Cruz Bustamante, even a bigger threat to the power companies than Davis. Solution: smear Cruz because — heaven forbid! he took donations from Injuns (instead of Ken Lay).

The pay-off? o­nce Arnold is Governor, he blesses the sweetheart settlements with the power companies. When that happens, Bustamante's court cases are probably lost. There aren't many judges who will let a case go to trial to protect a state if that a governor has already allowed the matter to be “settled” by a regulatory agency.

So think about this. The state of California is in the hole by $8 billion for the coming year. That's chump change next to the $8 TRILLION in deficits and surplus losses planned and incurred by George Bush. Nevertheless, the $8 billion deficit is the hanging rope California's right wing is using to lynch Governor Davis.

Yet o­nly Davis and Bustamante are taking direct against to get back the $9 billion that was vacuumed out of the state by Enron, Reliant, Dynegy, Williams Company and the other Texas bandits who squeezed the state by the bulbs.

But if Arnold is selected, it's 'hasta la vista' to the $9 billion. When the electricity emperors whistle, Arnold comes — to the Peninsula Hotel or the Governor's mansion. The he-man turns pussycat and curls up in their lap.

I asked Mr. Muscle's PR people to comment o­n the new Enron memos — and his strange silence o­n Bustamante's suit or Davis' petition. But Arnold was too busy shaving off his Hitlerian mustache to respond.

[To receive more of Greg's investigative reports click here.]

Where have I been, you might ask. I spent several weeks in England, filming in crop circle country. The phenomenon grows ever more enthralling, with new perceptions continually being made about the intelligence being communicated to us. The latest body of work involves squaring the circle — think Leonardo and that spread eagle man. It's where either the areas or the circumferences of a circle and a square are the same, and is interpreted as symbolizing the union of heaven and earth. It's a mathematical impossibility to calculate this exactly, but sacred geometers work o­n methods of coming very close. A brilliant geometer has recently gone back to the simple crop formations from the 1980's and discovered that a large number of them point to a variety of ways that squaring the circle, to a great degree of accuracy, can be accomplished — the circlemakers seemingly have delivered their metaphoric message, of the need to sacralize our material lives, over and over, and now we finally got it. And, with the circles laden with information, this is an example of how it can take asking the right questions to discover some of that — in a stretching we have to do to get our reward, whereby we will have earned our connection to this otherness rather than being gifted with it out of whole cloth (i. e. why they don't land o­n the White House lawn).

The data piles up ever higher to indicate that crop circles aren't made by people or by natural forces. All that's lacking is public acknowledgment. But what's happening is so far-fetched to the contemporary mind that people cling to shreds of old beliefs.  They so far have remained satisfied by what appears to be governmental debunking — here in America, there's a policy we learned about in now de-classified information, where the Robertson Commission, in 1947, decided to debunk what cannot be explained in order to keep the public from feeling unsafe.

Since coming back from England, where there were 73 crop formations this summer (with an additional 93 formations world-wide this year), everything has seemed to me to be in a quagmire, where what it would take for a breakthrough could be something very bad. In the meantime, my favorite writers are rehashing old topics and I am much less absorbed in their arguments than I was before. Instead, I've been enmeshed in working with our footage, and also in trying get the circles, which tantalize me with the promise of peaceful transformation, into the public eye even faster than media product can be delivered.

Lo and behold, the U.S. has gotten a few unusually good formations this summer. Two of the best were in Ohio, as if, in that funny way the circlemakers have of delivering formations, perhaps the Ohio activity is to support my attempt to get Dennis Kucinich, who's in Congress from Ohio, to announce to the world that the circlemakers are here — or at least to call for an investigation, that would indeed reveal that. Getting Kucinich to come to prominence, where more people would pay attention and appreciate the quality of this rare politician, would be almost as good as getting the circles out there!

For a rundown o­n the latest from Ohio, get your mind blown here.  Note most particularly that there is no access to this formation — no way anyone walked across the field to hoax it. It had to come from above (or below), and there's no technology that exists for doing such a thing.

If you read everything that links from this Ohio story, you'll come across a few things that I've pulled out here:

From a piece in the Toronto Star: A brief history of crop circles and the hoax theory 8/30/03 by Victoria Stevens

For those who think it's all just a big hoax, consider the following:

During the growing season, the fields where these glyphs regularly appear are under virtually 24-hour surveillance by farmers, croppies and researchers. In 1994, the National Farmers Union posted a reward of several thousand pounds for information leading to the prosecution of the vandals damaging their crops…how is it that no o­ne has ever been caught making o­ne?

The sophisticated geometry mathematicians have found in circles and their flawless execution in very short time periods, not to mention the quantity and sheer size of many of them, begs the question of who these alleged hoaxers are, how many of them there must be to accomplish what they do and why have they spent almost every night each summer for years tramping about dark fields for no money and no recognition? Where do they practice or are they so quick, quiet and well-organized that they can put down huge, complex formations with no mistakes first time in the dark, with no o­ne seeing them? What about the formations being created all over the world at the same time? Is there a large, well-organized international hoaxing conspiracy?

If most of the formations are man-made, how do the perpetrators manage to create the weaving and layering which has been observed many times and never yet recreated in any demonstration pattern? How are so many examples of curved but unbroken stems and bent and swollen plant nodes accounted for when this is impossible to achieve by hand? What of the discoveries of W.C. Levengood (a U.S. scientist who has studied crop circle plants for 10 years) and the biological changes found at microscopic levels, yet never duplicated by mechanically flattened tests?

From email posts:

“This formation is VERY exciting, not o­nly because I am an Ohioan but because the locals say these types of things have been around for years! More evidence to the fact that this phenomenon is not a trendy flash in the pan. It is real and it has been going o­n without publicity for decades, even centuries, all over the globe. It's up to people like us to SPREAD THE TRUTH about it.”

“It is nice to see that we are getting formations here in the U.S. which 'follow the same rules' as those in Britain: situated in the landscape near ancient sacred sites and oriented towards those sites, situated near water, having complex internal geometry, etc.”

And this is from Sharon Pacione, who lives in Ohio, to her crop circle list:

“It was quite a trek getting to this new formation. I can tell you that it not easy to walk in a soybean field either. LOTS of vines grabbing at your ankles!…The first o­nes in the formation entered the afternoon of Saturday, September 27th. There was no evidence of tracks into the soybean field, other than a few matted down areas where deer sleep…The newest formation cannot be seen at all from any road…There is a small local airport which sits practically o­n top of the field and that's why it was discovered at all…”

Follow