Perhaps Gov. Arnold “the Educ-Hater” Schwarzenegger got it right when he vetoed Senate Bill 218 on Sunday.
Sen. Leland Yee’s pesky little bill would have provided transparency in how California State University, University of California and California Community College foundations and auxiliaries use private money as personal money — even when it’s in the public domain.
With a swipe of his rubber stamp, the Educ-Hater once again showed his contempt for all levels of public education. Although his original campaign promises were based on government transparency and protecting education, promises are meant to be broken, right?
The SB 218 veto was his quid pro quo for CSU and UC leadership’s complicity in slashing budgets, raising student fees and overcrowding classrooms. The CSU board of trustees and the UC board of regents sat on their hands as Schwarzenegger stayed the course in his mission to turn public higher education into a for-profit corporation.
Put your ear to the door and you can almost hear the conspiracy: “Let’s set a policy of exclusion. Poor people out, children of the wealthy in. Admit only those who can hide substantial money in our university foundations. Somebody call our sponsors Nike, B of A and Toyota.”
Schwarzenegger’s veto reasoning, of course, was that transparency would “have a chilling effect” on donors. If nobody smells corruption and collusion they are too genetically removed from their olfactory senses.
Yes, they are playing like Madoff and other Wall Street thieves. It’s easy to float your cronies loans they can’t repay if nobody is watching the cash register. What’s the big deal if a university foundation member gets a no-bid contract to build a campus theater he will profit from? And who cares if a city college campus executive uses public money to renovate his house? Cloud cover that blocks the California Public Records Act is all part of the game in the Sunshine State.
Capitalism works best when you can play an unchecked, unsupervised shell game with public money. The status quo dealers in this game of Three-Card Monte needed protection and Arnold delivered.
And maybe, just maybe, part of the tradeoff for CSU Chancellor Charles Reed and UC President Mark Yudof acting as good little puppets was Arnold’s veto of Yee’s other bill, SB 86. Both “educators” lobbied Arnold heavily to block SB 218, so why wouldn’t they ask him to toss in a nix on SB 86 since he was being so “generous” with his veto power?
The provisions of SB 86 would have been hell on them if they had to go without raises and bonuses whenever the state general fund was less than or equal to the previous year. More privatization? Nah, just because they act like the banking industry and give bonuses where bonuses aren’t due, they ain’t crooks.
Reed and Yudof were not only strategically silent as our systems were pummeled; when they did speak they offered feeble excuses in defense of the governor’s actions.
Of course, they said they felt our pain and tsk, tsked the pity of it all. It’s easy to be empathetic to first-generation, minority and low-income students not having access to higher education when you earn more than the president of the United States. After all, the twin flunkies earn the big bucks for being mediocre suck ups. They’re just doing their jobs.
Let’s face it folks, California education is in the hands of a small group of flim-flammers, con artists and thieves.
They get away with it because we refuse to do anything about it. Oh sure, we wrote some letters to state representatives and held a few mock funerals.
What more could we do? Why should we do more?
We’ll be leaving in one to four years — degrees in hand — and it will be up to the next generation of students to fend for themselves.
What the heck; as long as we get ours, wink, wink. We’re learning from the pros. We peer through the windows of timid legislators and learn how to turn a blind eye on what’s right for those who will follow; our little sisters and brothers, nephews and nieces, daughters and sons.
If they never make it to college, it’s not our fault. We’ll never really know who to blame because we’ll never get to see the books explaining where the money went.
Some might claim inaction makes us co-conspirators. Ignorance will truly be bliss — thanks to Arnold, Chuck and Mark.