Schwarzenegger threatens minimum wage for workers
ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gVKofKbtJ2gCh_9py0AYs ipjglpAD9245OE8A
SACRAMENTO (AP) — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is threatening to pay thousands of state employees the federal minimum wage of $6.55 an hour until lawmakers reach a deal on California's overdue state budget.
Democrats and Republicans have so far been unable to compromise on a solution to the state's $15.2 billion budget deficit for the fiscal year that started July 1. As the stalemate continued, Schwarzenegger has ratcheted up his rhetoric.
Spokesman Aaron McLear said the Republican governor is contemplating signing an executive order next week that would pay about 200,000 state workers the federal minimum wage, which is $1.45 an hour less than California's minimum wage.
Employees would receive their full salary retroactively once a budget is signed.
"Because the Legislature has failed to produce a budget over a month past their deadline and because we don't have a rainy day fund, the governor is looking at a number of options to make sure the state does not run out of cash," McLear said.
A draft of the executive order also said state agencies would be prevented from hiring any nonessential employees and would be forced to terminate about 20,000 contracts with temporary workers, interns and contractors. There also would be a ban on most overtime.
The administration estimates that immediately terminating the contracts and suspending overtime would save the state about $100 million a month. The deferred wages would take several weeks to implement, saving the state as much as $400 million a month starting in late August.
State Controller John Chiang, whose office pays state employees, criticized Schwarzenegger's threat as a political ploy that could end up costing the state even more in litigation fees.
"Forcing public servants to involuntarily loan the state cash by foregoing their hard-earned paychecks puts an untenable burden on our teachers, health care workers and those who provide critical public services," Chiang said in a statement.
"Cutting workers' salaries will do nothing meaningful to improve our cash position or help us make our priority payments."
The Service Employees International Union, which represents nearly half the affected workers, was considering legal action to try to block the move, spokesman Jim Zamora said.
"We're victims of this budget crisis. It's not our fault that the state Legislature and Governor Schwarzenegger can't come together to pass a balanced budget," he said.
The union represents about 95,000 clerical, office and civilian workers throughout the state.
Emergency, disaster and other critical workers would be exempt from the order.
Legislative leaders in both houses have said they are working to meet an Aug. 1 deadline. Without a spending plan in place by then, the state will have to start negotiating on expensive loans to address a cash shortfall that will affect state coffers by the end of September.
Democrats are seeking to raise taxes by $8.2 billion, while Republicans want to balance the budget mostly through cuts. Schwarzenegger said Tuesday that he will not sign a budget if it does not include long-term budget reform, such as a rainy day fund to help ease the state through tough economic times.
______________________________
www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/2003-08-2 4-arnold-father_x.htm
Records: Arnold's father was member of Nazi storm troopsThe brief entry in one of millions of documents stored at the Austrian State Archives shows that Gustav Schwarzenegger, the late father of the film star now running for governor of California, was a volunteer member of the Sturmabteilung, or SA — the notorious Nazi storm troopers also known as brownshirts.
The father's Nazi Party membership and combat record in the German army are not new, and his son's dismay about it is well known. The revelations of SA membership that emerged a week ago add another strand to the murky story.
The "SA 1.5.1939" listing shows that the elder Schwarzenegger joined May 1, 1939, the year after Germany annexed Austria and six months after the brownshirts played a crucial role in the bloody Kristallnacht riots.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center, which in 1990 investigated Gustav Schwarzenegger's wartime past at his son's request, plans to conduct new research before the Oct. 7 California recall election to establish what the father's unit did, said Rabbi Marvin Hier.
Whatever it finds out, "We will give it to Arnold, then to the public," Hier told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from the center's Los Angeles headquarters. "Whatever the record shows, so may it show. Should that record have any bearing on Arnold Schwarzenegger himself? In my opinion, absolutely not."
The Wiesenthal Center didn't find the storm trooper reference in its 1990 investigation because that record was sealed until last year, 30 years after Gustav Schwarzenegger's death in 1972.
The new information was "negative," though SA membership is not considered a crime in itself, as membership in the Gestapo or the paramilitary SS would be, Hier said.
"We know what the SA and the Nazi Party stood for," he said. "Arnold knows this, and he's not proud of the fact that his father was a member of the Nazi Party and that his father was a member of the SA. This is a matter of deep embarrassment, but Arnold cannot be judged by his father."
Schwarzenegger campaign spokesman Sean Walsh said Sunday the actor continues to fight for equality and humanitarian ideals.
"His record regarding stamping out intolerance is absolutely rock-solid and he will continue to work closely with the Simon Wiesenthal Center to ensure that the attitudes and actions that occurred in the Nazi era never happen again," Walsh said.
Walsh doesn't believe the actions of Schwarzenegger's father will influence voters in the Oct. 7 recall election.
Arnold Schwarzenegger has donated nearly $750,000 to the center, raised millions more, and helped the organization fight anti-Semitism. Born two years after World War II ended, he long ago distanced himself from his late father's views and in 1991 he received the Wiesenthal Center's National Leadership Award.
Schwarzenegger successfully sued a British tabloid in 1989 and a journalist in 1993 for suggesting he held Nazi and anti-Semitic opinions. He won undisclosed libel damages.
The storm troopers, a paramilitary organization tied to the Nazi Party, played a crucial role in expanding Adolf Hitler's power.
They were part of the 1938 Kristallnacht rampage, during which more than 1,000 synagogues were destroyed. In its aftermath, about 30,000 Jewish men were dragged to Nazi concentration camps and several hundred people were killed or committed suicide.
Gustav Schwarzenegger became a member the following year, at a time when SA membership was declining. The troops had 900,000 members in 1940, down from 4.2 million in 1934, according to the "Encyclopedia of the Holocaust," published in Germany and Switzerland.
Austrian State Archives don't have details about the elder Schwarzenegger's SA activities, and don't provide enough information to determine whether he was any worse than most Nazis, said Ursula Schwarz, a researcher at the Documentation Archive of the Austrian Resistance.
"You cannot judge that from these documents. You would need a whole lot more," she said.
There's no doubt that Schwarzenegger's father was a convinced Nazi; Austrian records indicate he joined the party on March 1, 1938, two weeks before the country was annexed. A separate record obtained by the Wiesenthal Center indicates he sought membership before the annexation but was only accepted in 1941.
But his past raises few eyebrows in Austria, where many have relatives who were Nazis.
Austrian newspapers, in stories proudly describing their native son's successes in a U.S. state much larger than his home country, mention Gustav Schwarzenegger's Nazi ties only in passing, if at all.
The Vienna daily Der Standard, in a recent story headlined "Arnie steps in: A man makes himself a legend," wrote that "Gustav, a high-ranking Nazi, brought up the bespectacled, rather frail boy with an iron fist and quite a few slaps in the face."
The archive records also include the elder Schwarzenegger's tattered ID booklet, with a photo of him sporting slicked back hair and a Hitler-style mustache. It lists injuries, hospital stays and medals. Another document says he saw action in Poland, France, Lithuania and in Russia, where he was wounded.
A health registry document describes him as a "calm and reliable person, not particularly outstanding" and assesses his intellect as "average."
Austrian authorities in 1947 determined that the elder Schwarzenegger could work as a police officer despite his Nazi past because there was no evidence he had committed war crimes.
___________________________
www.slate.com/id/2086742/
Arnold's Nazi ProblemWhy won't he repudiate Kurt Waldheim?
Posted Thursday, Aug. 7, 2003, at 6:46 PM ET
Here's a question Jay Leno forgot to ask Arnold Schwarzenegger when he announced his candidacy for governor of California on last night's Tonight Show: "Will you renounce your support for Kurt Waldheim?"
A little refresher course may be in order. Kurt Waldheim, a widely esteemed former secretary general of the United Nations, was running for president of Austria in March 1986 when it came to light that he had participated in Nazi atrocities during World War II. Waldheim had always maintained that he had served in the Wehrmacht only briefly and that after being wounded early in the war, he had returned to Vienna to attend law school. In fact, Waldheim had resumed military service after recuperating from his injury and had been an intelligence officer in Germany's Army Group E when it committed mass murder in the Kozara region of western Bosnia. (Waldheim's name appears on the Wehrmacht's "honor list" of those responsible for the atrocity.) In 1944, Waldheim had reviewed and approved a packet of anti-Semitic propaganda leaflets to be dropped behind Russian lines, one of which ended, "enough of the Jewish war, kill the Jews, come over." After the war, Waldheim was wanted for war crimes by the War Crimes Commission of the United Nations, the very organization he would later head. None of these revelations prevented Waldheim from winning the Austrian election, but after he became president, the U.S. Justice Department put Waldheim on its watch list denying entry to "any foreign national who assisted or otherwise participated in activities amounting to persecution during World War II." The international community largely shunned Waldheim, and he didn't run for re-election. (This information comes from the1992 book Betrayal: The Untold Story of the Kurt Waldheim Investigation and Cover-Up, by Eli M. Rosenbaum and William Hoffer.)
One month after these revelations began to splash across the front pages of newspapers worldwide, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver held their wedding reception* at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, Mass. Schwarzenegger, a native of Austria, had invited Waldheim to the wedding, which of course can't be held against him because the invitations surely went out well before the war crimes story broke. (Schwarzenegger, who held dual citizenship in Austria and the United States, had also endorsed Waldheim.) Waldheim didn't attend, but he sent a gift—a statue of Arnold, in lederhosen, bearing off Maria, who wore a dirndl. Admiring it, Schwarzenegger offered a tribute that stunned the assemblage into shocked silence (this is reported in Arnold: An Unauthorized Biography, by Wendy Leigh):
My friends don't want me to mention Kurt's name, because of all the recent Nazi stuff and the U.N. controversy, but I love him and Maria does too, and so thank you, Kurt.
Schwarzenegger's name remained on Waldheim's campaign posters. After Waldheim was elected, Schwarzenegger paid him a visit and was photographed with him. According to the New York Post's "Page Six" gossip column, Schwarzenegger was seen sitting beside Waldheim as recently as 1998, when the two attended the second inauguration of Waldheim's successor as president, Thomas Klestil.
In 1988, Schwarzenegger was asked in a Playboy interview what he thought of Waldheim. He replied:
I hate to talk about it, because it's a no-win situation. Without going into details, I can say that being half-Austrian and half-American, I don't like the idea that these two countries that mean so much to me are in such a disagreement. Austria is a very important place for Americans, because it is a neutral country. With a little bit of good will, the problem will be straightened out. I think it's well on the way.
Why on Earth didn't Schwarzenegger take this opportunity to speak out against Waldheim? It surely isn't because Schwarzenegger himself had any Nazi sympathies (though during the filming of the documentary Pumping Iron, he reportedly once made a foolish comment praising Hitler). Rather, Schwarzenegger was likely playing politics—to be more specific, Austrian politics and family politics. For years it was rumored that if Schwarzenegger didn't run for governor of California, he would run for president of Austria. Because Austrians have long resented what they see as Waldheim's pointless scapegoating, any firm denunciation would have ruled the latter possibility out. In addition, Schwarzenegger's mother had for many years lived with Alfred Gerstl, a prominent Austrian politician who rose to the top post in the upper house of Austria's parliament. Schwarzenegger reportedly addressed him as "Uncle." (Schwarzenegger's father, who died three decades ago, was a police official who had belonged to the Nazi party.)
Rather than confront his Waldheim problem head-on, Schwarzenegger has proclaimed his disgust for Nazism, raised money for education about the Holocaust, traveled to Israel (where he met with then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin), and given generously to the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, which in 1997 bestowed on him its National Leadership Award. "He wants no truck with … Waldheim," the Wiesenthal Center's Rabbi Marvin Hier told the Jerusalem Post. "He probably did not have any clue as to the seriousness of the allegations against Waldheim at that time [i.e., 1986]. To suggest that Arnold's an anti-Semite is preposterous. He's done more to further the cause of Holocaust awareness than almost any other Hollywood star."
Clearly, though, that won't be enough. If Schwarzenegger doesn't renounce Waldheim in a highly public way, he can forget about ever becoming governor of California.
Correction, Aug. 11, 2003: An earlier version of this piece stated incorrectly that Schwarzenegger and Shriver "exchanged wedding vows" at the Kennedy compound. In fact, they exchanged vows at a nearby church, then held their wedding reception at the Kennedy compound, where the scene described above took place. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
------------------------------------
Below: Why is Arnold showing off a Nazi Deaths Head on the cover of TIME?
No this is not photo shopped. You can visit TIME magazines online cover archive to view this.
Here is the link: www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20070625,00.html
Schwarzenegger has publicly stated that
he has dreamed of being a dictator and that he
admires Hitler. He campaigned for war criminal
Kurt Waldhiem after it had been made public that he
was a top nazi.
The stories of Arnold's barbaric harassment of women are
legendary. He publicly admits to steroid and marijuana use.
He supported Enron chief, Ken Lay during the California energy
crisis and now his political operatives have launched a blitzkrieg
promoting him for President and seeking to end the Constitutional
bar against him holding that office. And there's more...
