Please read this gut-wrenching article and sign Michael Moore’s petition.
After seeing two amazing movies this weekend that point to scathing misdeeds of the Church (in the movie “Spotlight”) and of the horrors of the bankers gutting our personal savings and pillaging the U.S. Treasury via their sub-prime and C.D.O. scams (in the movie “The Big Short”), I’ve been thinking about how all of these powerful and relentlessly greedy people continue without remorse and with no justice ever serving them.
In this particular exposé linked above, the central points that sound an alarm for me with regard to a horrific situation at the college I teach at, City College of San Francisco:
The whole story starts back in 2011, when a new financial emergency management law in the state took effect, allowing Governor Snyder to unilaterally ignore democratically-elected mayors and city councils, and appoint little dictators called “emergency managers” in cities and districts that were in financial trouble.
In other words, it gave Governor Snyder the authority to appoint city dictators to “cut costs” and “balance budgets.”
The A-HA moment for me!
Many outside interim administrators and two special Trustees have been sent to “fix” alleged problems at my college that have only turned it completely upside down and inside out. Several news stories have recently surfaced regarding wrongful expenditures by our former Chancellor who was placed in power by the State Chancellor’s Office and the Special Trustee With Extraordinary Powers (yes, that was his title). The Special Trustee was empowered to oversee the college alone while our democratically-elected and deposed Board of Trustees had to sit on the sidelines, not even being allowed to meet. (rings of Michigan, no?)
A new financial system was put into place by an Interim Vice Chancellor of Financial Affairs that was supposed to create a “proper system” that had (allegedly) been lacking at CCSF (according to a Financial Crisis Managment Report that bears the signature of this new VCFA when he was at another college!). This report was found to be riddled with errors, but the then “emergency manager” who was our first interim Chancellor refused to call out the errors allowing a wrong assessment to be used against us to this very day.
With all of the new, strictly-managed financial systems in place, how were the two outsiders from Houston (the aforementioned former Chancellor and President) allowed to spend lavishly on themselves with trips abroad, expensive meals, and purchases for themselves that were not for the college? Where was the financial control over them? (I know that, like me, many of the faculty experienced difficulty in being reimbursed promptly for expenses that were owed to us from attending various conferences and such. We had to pay up front for the conference fee, travel, and hotel, only to be forced to wait 5-months or more for reimbursement.)
“Emergency Managers” put into place do not have the best interests of the institutions nor constituents that they are supposed to serve at heart. They empowered for a brief time and bestowed with huge salaries, extra perks such as housing and vehicle costs, and double-dipping into pension programs that are covered by the taxpayers.
Average americans have been RIPPED OFF LONG ENOUGH!
I have been thinking a lot about not only our situation at CCSF, but about America’s “institutions”, and how it’s tough these days to find even ONE that bears any resemblance to honesty and truth. The underserved and the middle class have been cut off at the knees and continue to drown in a cesspool of greed caused by corrupt City Planners, Mayors, Governors, Congressmen, Chancellors, Presidents, and even Judges, who allow the snakes of the mega-corporations to control all of it.
danajae33 