CalPERS staff is attempting to complete a de facto takeover of the Board through a series of measures laid out at an off-site Board meeting last month. Not only are the nature of these proposed changes contrary to the U.S. Constitution and the California Constitution, and the statutes and trust law that govern CalPERS, but consistent with these proposals being an act of governance tantamount to a coup, staff have pursued their plans in a devious manner designed to minimize the ability of stakeholders to protect their interests and block these efforts.
The proposed changes are dramatic and clearly intended to thwart oversight by CalPERS staff, but they are no more radical than they would be in a healthy organization.Despite the fervent efforts of a few board members who support transparency, the CalPERS board is already a zombie.1 The majority of Board members have been stunned to see staff regularly engage in acts of brazen and utter insubordination, such as refusing to provide documents or set agendas at public meetings when requested by the Chair or Committee Chairs, dodging simple questions or giving obviously dishonest answers, ignoring emails, and usurping the authority of Board members by intercepting their letters and sending replies in their names without review or approval.2
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1 If you really want to know, here’s how:
Don’t look to science fiction to find the world’s most sinister examples of mind control. Instead, go to a tropical country like Brazil and venture deep into the jungle. Find a leaf that hangs almost 10 inches above the forest floor, nothing more, nothing less. Then, look underneath it. If you’re lucky, you might find an ant, desperately clinging to the leaf’s central vein with its mouth tightly shut. But this ant’s life is over. And its corpse belongs to the zombie ant fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis.
Once the fungus infects a carpenter ant, it grows inside the insect’s body, robbing it of nutrients and taking over its mind. Over the course of a week, the fungus drives the ant out of the safety of its nest and forces it to climb the stem of a nearby plant. The fungus stops the ant at a height of 25 centimeters, an area of temperature and humidity just right for the fungus to grow. The fungus forces the ant to permanently fasten its jaws to the leaf. Eventually, the fungus thrusts its long stalk into the ant’s head and grows into a bulbous capsule filled with spores. As the ants typically climb up leaves that overhang the colony’s foraging trail, the fungal spores rain down on their comrades below, zombifying them in turn.
2 Board member Margaret Brown has stopped email hijacking and identity theft by replying without authorization, but that was an exceptional case and required public shaming to get officials to stop the misconduct. Private protests got nowhere.
