The Threat to Taxpayers; a Critique of Pure Overspending
SYNOPSIS- Human Progress is advanced in a Competitive Society where Risk and Innovation are rewarded by a system of incentives. When a society values equality and harmony, and where competition is abolished, you get stagnation, conformity, lassitude, and servitude. The Trustee Handbook is a "Big-Government" Document that espouses this latter world view.
For a list of the "good points" of the Trustee Handbook, click here
The delicate social politics of committee meetings have long been the object of anthropologists' inquiry. The central questions are "how do individuals reach group consensus?" and "what forces bind the group together?" I suggest the cohesive element bringing conformity to their votes is fear of ostracism. No one wants to be labled an outcast. Everyone wants to be seen as team player. As trustees explicate and review the details of their Master Plans, words must be choosen carefully so there is no implication of criticism that may lead to hard feelings, and thus a schism, dissolving tenuous coalitions and factions. The consequence? Everybody votes "yes" for their comrades' Master Plan, no matter how overstated or underplanned. No trustee can afford the luxury of total honesty, for fear of losing support for their own "pet project". Thus, the committee becomes an assembly line of "pet projects" generating successively more grandiose, and expensive public work projects that serve not students, but the reputations of the board members. The Board is an instrument to inflate egos as much as budgets.
( These foibles I mention are not recent developments, isolated to a single city, state, or time. I am not referring to merely one or two personalities, but universal human nature. There is a malignant, "collective behavior" at work. I refer to a chronic, long-term "human problem" among elected government workers who have access to tax money, and who are not required to compete or innovate. My comments are doubly true if these "public servants" create budgets in the shadows away from public scutiny. My statements could apply to any collective of "government officials" who think of themselves as "above" the voter in experience or expertise.)
How is it that intelligent, worthy people chronically misspend tax payer money?
I suggest it is a product of "group think", or "pack behavior" seen among folks who have been confined together too long...with your tax money as an intoxicant.
The self-destructive behavior of trustees (i.e, their tendency to misuse other people's money) is caused by the tendency to follow social conformity. Like a kind of mass hynosis, People follow fads. TheDutch tulip craze of the 1600s is a famous example. The stress created by being held captive by the other board member's expectations, is similar to the Stockholm "hostage syndrome", where the brow-beaten captives are seduced to defend (and praise!) the captors, sometimes joining their cause, ala Patty Hearst as "Tanya". They don't detect their own slow debasement. Thus people are lured by a "herd behavior" and new members do as "the group" wants. Conformity wins, individuality subordinated, and free will suppressed.
Although overspending Trustees should be ashamed of what they have done, they haughtily claim it is their right as "public servants" to spend money in an "enlightened" way their handbook (or intuition) may suggest. We can't afford such divine providence from an elected official. In a display of "blaming the victim", trustees may suggest that the money MUST be misspent money on land deals "for the public's own good", "because we know better".
Trustees must be reminded they are employed to serve their clients. And the trustee's clients are the taxpayers.
I suggest that their spiral into overspending begins after reading their bible: the Community College Trustee Handbook.
Here is what I mean: Social coercion, conformity, and manipulation are built into the Trustee handbook. The tone and message of the Handbook reminds one of Machiavelli. The trustees are being groomed to be princes and princesses.
A common theme stresses good public relations: The trustees must appear to be cohesive, and in control.
Also, Trustees must be evolving, adaptable and energetic. This seems to refer more to a super virus in a petri dish.
Emphasis is placed on constant collegial agreement, especially in public. It is important to not appear "dysfunctional", as if the trustees were the "parents" who needed to worry about the psyche of their "children" (the administrators, staff, taxpayers). What a lovely condescension.
Presumably, "functional trustees" are always in agreement, and never argue in public. Thus, secret behavior, and private deals are a sub text built into all the meetings. Deconstructionists would have a field day analyzing the gestures and symbolic language.
The trustees feed the stakeholders a cover story, and veil the "reality" behind the apparent truth with blandishments and flattery. Over time, all credibility for the trustees is lost, as the veneer of respectablity erodes.
But consider this: if the trustees are planning to spend their One Billion Dollars of bond money, wouldn't you expect -and hope for- some truly volatile histrionics about why SCHEME #1 was quantifiably better than SCHEME#2? Money and how its spent is the stuff people are MEANT to argue about, with rhetoric and sophistry and maybe some hyperbole and invective! When it comes to TAXPAYERS MONEY, maybe quality, public, mud slinging is what we need on the Board. That kind of news coverage is catharctic. (Recall those scenes of the representaives in the Taiwanese Parliament throwing shoes and setting toupees on fire.)
The implications of the Handbook are insidious. Value is placed on "not offending" each other with unpleasant intrusions of truth or reality. By all means, don't offend anybody. There seems to be an agreement that nothing should leak to the press. Everyone (by decree) must act harmoniously. Of course it's all a facade. Thus each trustee gets to trot out their "pet projects"for group approval, Similar to 3rd grade show and tell. The result? A half-dozen expensive non-intersecting pet projects. To the outsider, the conglomeration of enteprises looks like incoherence. Which it is. Complaints about the perceived arrogance of the board, their capricious excess, and their autocracy are regally dismissed. "What do you know? You are just a voter." This superciliousness is not only laughably unwarranted, but defies the intention of the CC Boards, that were meant to consist of "lay people, not necessarily educators, who want to serve the public interest."
So when does the "public interest" get served? And, by "public interest" I don't mean the avarice of the Board, but the sanctity of taxpayers keeping their earned dollars?
More fallout from the Trustee handbook: debate, rebuttal, counterproposals, problem solving and critical thinking is to be avoided. No new trustee dare confront another about a "real" concern (like "how much does that really cost?") and risk being dismissed as "not a team player". Ergo, to adapt to your co-trustees, you must agree to whatever heinous property-deal, and remain quiet about the possible impropriety. This is not being accountable with tax payer money.
Who wrote this handbook? Why does it seem to reward "Stepford"-style conformity? More importantly WHY did they write it? Was the sub text meant to sell the merits of a perpetual welfare state, by advocates of Big Government? Please, you tell me. There aren't enough taxpayers in the universe to support such a Quixotic system. At its core, the ethos is undemocratic.
Madison and Jefferson (based on their works, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence) understood that human conflict was inevitible and the only sensible goal was to find explicit methods of conflict resolution by a "balance of powers" while pursuing common goals, such as life, liberty, and property. (Happiness was to be a fortunate by product of these pursuits, it was widely believed.) James and Thomas would be horrified by the bureacratic and stalinist goal of seeking merely the appearance of tranquility. A facade should not be the goal of human existence. Pursuing artifice, and insincerity (with its attendant hypocrisy) is the road to different levels of servitude. Not unlike a party at a Hollywood penthouse.
So, we know Government overspends money. And, "Big Governmen" overspends "Big Money". Students of politics, and human behavior understand this. Each layer of bureacracy requires another level of tax money be confiscated. The value to society per "tax dollar" is reduced to the point that government equals robbery of the working man and wage earner.
We must reduce government spending, because if tax spending continues without rebuttal, behind closed doors, we face servitude.
Are all taxes bad? No. Government is charged with establishing domestic tranquility, promoting the general welfare, and providing for the common defense. Some kind of systematic tax upon the landed gentry, businesses, wage earners, or merchants is implied.
Regrettably, it appears there are two things that are unavoidable: death and taxes.
Are these allegations of LACCD Board overspending justified? Can specific examples be found at the Community College Board?
Case in point: On the LACCD, the 7 Trustees have a staff of 500 people. These 500 employees draw handsome salaries yet generate nothing. They don' teach students. They don't counsel students. They don't manage students. I would suggest that this staff be cut by four fifths (4/5), without a loss in efficiency. True, there would be a loss of water cooler conversations, and the Christmas parties would be quieter. But somehow the remaining 100 trustee staff would get by.
The LACCD Board overspends tax money. Their record make that clear. They consider it their birthright to overspend, and misspend. Their jobs, on the contrary, should be to spend wisely for the students, for education.
The Board overspends and will continue until someone tells them to stop. I want to be that person. I know this will place me as odd man out. But I hope to make my plight so public that I will be joined in 2007 by other "troopers" on the Board who share my viewpoint and who will win elections against the remaining over spenders.
If elected, I expect to be ostracized by the other "overspending" board members. They will certainly not approve of my comments here. But I have a way of fortifying myself. To purge and protect myself, I will write a weblog accessible to the public, to let the public stakeholders (taxpayers) know how I am treated. I want to report as a free-citizen-taxpayer, on the most recent convolution, the most imminent side-step. The citizens need to know how his/her money is being spent.
I intend to let Los Angeles know what I experience as a trustee via a weekly report on the world wide web. Without violating personal privacy, I want to explain why the board decides to go into "closed session" when a new property deal is being discussed. The taxpayers deserve no less. This is quintessence of governmental accountability. Why would anyone -any trustee- have anything to fear? Isn't it about time trustees regained credibility with the public? Wouldn't they welcome the sunshine?
In the long run, I see my job as restoring credibility and dignity to the Board. Please know that by no means do I consider myself a paragon. But I do know an insular organization when I see it. And making the Board's purchases open to public scrutiny will be my platform. The reign of secrecy and unilatera, autocratic decisions MUST END.
There may be slings and arrows. Perhaps a dollop of outrageous fortune. Of course, I don't want to feel sorry for my captors ala the Stockholm Syndrome. I plan on not being seduced. I hope the cruelties are not excessive. Whatever the atmosphere I will report regularly to those who want to know what the Board of Trustees is REALLY doing.
To summarize, This tendency by the Trustees to waste public funds is built into the bureacratic system, (at the genetic, corporate, acquisitive level of mammalian politics perhaps) and is encouraged, sanctified, and facilitated by the Community College Trustee Handbook.
My solution? Discard this BIG GOVERNMENT BIBLE and replace it with the concepts of liberty and embedded in the Declaration of Independence. Let free speech and assembly reign so that Every dollar the trustees spend will be with the consent of the governed. After all, taxation without representation could start a rebellion.
To get a pdf of the Community College Trustee Handbook, to see for yourself how social conformity and the specious "need" for harmony and bureacratic bliss (by stifling dialogue and debate) is used as a weapon of the overpenders, against the taxpayers, click HERE
Who is Gerald Wayne Perttula?
What are the other issues in this campaign?
For a list of the "good points" of the Trustee Handbook, click here
The delicate social politics of committee meetings have long been the object of anthropologists' inquiry. The central questions are "how do individuals reach group consensus?" and "what forces bind the group together?" I suggest the cohesive element bringing conformity to their votes is fear of ostracism. No one wants to be labled an outcast. Everyone wants to be seen as team player. As trustees explicate and review the details of their Master Plans, words must be choosen carefully so there is no implication of criticism that may lead to hard feelings, and thus a schism, dissolving tenuous coalitions and factions. The consequence? Everybody votes "yes" for their comrades' Master Plan, no matter how overstated or underplanned. No trustee can afford the luxury of total honesty, for fear of losing support for their own "pet project". Thus, the committee becomes an assembly line of "pet projects" generating successively more grandiose, and expensive public work projects that serve not students, but the reputations of the board members. The Board is an instrument to inflate egos as much as budgets.
( These foibles I mention are not recent developments, isolated to a single city, state, or time. I am not referring to merely one or two personalities, but universal human nature. There is a malignant, "collective behavior" at work. I refer to a chronic, long-term "human problem" among elected government workers who have access to tax money, and who are not required to compete or innovate. My comments are doubly true if these "public servants" create budgets in the shadows away from public scutiny. My statements could apply to any collective of "government officials" who think of themselves as "above" the voter in experience or expertise.)
How is it that intelligent, worthy people chronically misspend tax payer money?
I suggest it is a product of "group think", or "pack behavior" seen among folks who have been confined together too long...with your tax money as an intoxicant.
The self-destructive behavior of trustees (i.e, their tendency to misuse other people's money) is caused by the tendency to follow social conformity. Like a kind of mass hynosis, People follow fads. TheDutch tulip craze of the 1600s is a famous example. The stress created by being held captive by the other board member's expectations, is similar to the Stockholm "hostage syndrome", where the brow-beaten captives are seduced to defend (and praise!) the captors, sometimes joining their cause, ala Patty Hearst as "Tanya". They don't detect their own slow debasement. Thus people are lured by a "herd behavior" and new members do as "the group" wants. Conformity wins, individuality subordinated, and free will suppressed.
Although overspending Trustees should be ashamed of what they have done, they haughtily claim it is their right as "public servants" to spend money in an "enlightened" way their handbook (or intuition) may suggest. We can't afford such divine providence from an elected official. In a display of "blaming the victim", trustees may suggest that the money MUST be misspent money on land deals "for the public's own good", "because we know better".
Trustees must be reminded they are employed to serve their clients. And the trustee's clients are the taxpayers.
I suggest that their spiral into overspending begins after reading their bible: the Community College Trustee Handbook.
Here is what I mean: Social coercion, conformity, and manipulation are built into the Trustee handbook. The tone and message of the Handbook reminds one of Machiavelli. The trustees are being groomed to be princes and princesses.
A common theme stresses good public relations: The trustees must appear to be cohesive, and in control.
Also, Trustees must be evolving, adaptable and energetic. This seems to refer more to a super virus in a petri dish.
Emphasis is placed on constant collegial agreement, especially in public. It is important to not appear "dysfunctional", as if the trustees were the "parents" who needed to worry about the psyche of their "children" (the administrators, staff, taxpayers). What a lovely condescension.
Presumably, "functional trustees" are always in agreement, and never argue in public. Thus, secret behavior, and private deals are a sub text built into all the meetings. Deconstructionists would have a field day analyzing the gestures and symbolic language.
The trustees feed the stakeholders a cover story, and veil the "reality" behind the apparent truth with blandishments and flattery. Over time, all credibility for the trustees is lost, as the veneer of respectablity erodes.
But consider this: if the trustees are planning to spend their One Billion Dollars of bond money, wouldn't you expect -and hope for- some truly volatile histrionics about why SCHEME #1 was quantifiably better than SCHEME#2? Money and how its spent is the stuff people are MEANT to argue about, with rhetoric and sophistry and maybe some hyperbole and invective! When it comes to TAXPAYERS MONEY, maybe quality, public, mud slinging is what we need on the Board. That kind of news coverage is catharctic. (Recall those scenes of the representaives in the Taiwanese Parliament throwing shoes and setting toupees on fire.)
The implications of the Handbook are insidious. Value is placed on "not offending" each other with unpleasant intrusions of truth or reality. By all means, don't offend anybody. There seems to be an agreement that nothing should leak to the press. Everyone (by decree) must act harmoniously. Of course it's all a facade. Thus each trustee gets to trot out their "pet projects"for group approval, Similar to 3rd grade show and tell. The result? A half-dozen expensive non-intersecting pet projects. To the outsider, the conglomeration of enteprises looks like incoherence. Which it is. Complaints about the perceived arrogance of the board, their capricious excess, and their autocracy are regally dismissed. "What do you know? You are just a voter." This superciliousness is not only laughably unwarranted, but defies the intention of the CC Boards, that were meant to consist of "lay people, not necessarily educators, who want to serve the public interest."
So when does the "public interest" get served? And, by "public interest" I don't mean the avarice of the Board, but the sanctity of taxpayers keeping their earned dollars?
More fallout from the Trustee handbook: debate, rebuttal, counterproposals, problem solving and critical thinking is to be avoided. No new trustee dare confront another about a "real" concern (like "how much does that really cost?") and risk being dismissed as "not a team player". Ergo, to adapt to your co-trustees, you must agree to whatever heinous property-deal, and remain quiet about the possible impropriety. This is not being accountable with tax payer money.
Who wrote this handbook? Why does it seem to reward "Stepford"-style conformity? More importantly WHY did they write it? Was the sub text meant to sell the merits of a perpetual welfare state, by advocates of Big Government? Please, you tell me. There aren't enough taxpayers in the universe to support such a Quixotic system. At its core, the ethos is undemocratic.
Madison and Jefferson (based on their works, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence) understood that human conflict was inevitible and the only sensible goal was to find explicit methods of conflict resolution by a "balance of powers" while pursuing common goals, such as life, liberty, and property. (Happiness was to be a fortunate by product of these pursuits, it was widely believed.) James and Thomas would be horrified by the bureacratic and stalinist goal of seeking merely the appearance of tranquility. A facade should not be the goal of human existence. Pursuing artifice, and insincerity (with its attendant hypocrisy) is the road to different levels of servitude. Not unlike a party at a Hollywood penthouse.
So, we know Government overspends money. And, "Big Governmen" overspends "Big Money". Students of politics, and human behavior understand this. Each layer of bureacracy requires another level of tax money be confiscated. The value to society per "tax dollar" is reduced to the point that government equals robbery of the working man and wage earner.
We must reduce government spending, because if tax spending continues without rebuttal, behind closed doors, we face servitude.
Are all taxes bad? No. Government is charged with establishing domestic tranquility, promoting the general welfare, and providing for the common defense. Some kind of systematic tax upon the landed gentry, businesses, wage earners, or merchants is implied.
Regrettably, it appears there are two things that are unavoidable: death and taxes.
Are these allegations of LACCD Board overspending justified? Can specific examples be found at the Community College Board?
Case in point: On the LACCD, the 7 Trustees have a staff of 500 people. These 500 employees draw handsome salaries yet generate nothing. They don' teach students. They don't counsel students. They don't manage students. I would suggest that this staff be cut by four fifths (4/5), without a loss in efficiency. True, there would be a loss of water cooler conversations, and the Christmas parties would be quieter. But somehow the remaining 100 trustee staff would get by.
The LACCD Board overspends tax money. Their record make that clear. They consider it their birthright to overspend, and misspend. Their jobs, on the contrary, should be to spend wisely for the students, for education.
The Board overspends and will continue until someone tells them to stop. I want to be that person. I know this will place me as odd man out. But I hope to make my plight so public that I will be joined in 2007 by other "troopers" on the Board who share my viewpoint and who will win elections against the remaining over spenders.
If elected, I expect to be ostracized by the other "overspending" board members. They will certainly not approve of my comments here. But I have a way of fortifying myself. To purge and protect myself, I will write a weblog accessible to the public, to let the public stakeholders (taxpayers) know how I am treated. I want to report as a free-citizen-taxpayer, on the most recent convolution, the most imminent side-step. The citizens need to know how his/her money is being spent.
I intend to let Los Angeles know what I experience as a trustee via a weekly report on the world wide web. Without violating personal privacy, I want to explain why the board decides to go into "closed session" when a new property deal is being discussed. The taxpayers deserve no less. This is quintessence of governmental accountability. Why would anyone -any trustee- have anything to fear? Isn't it about time trustees regained credibility with the public? Wouldn't they welcome the sunshine?
In the long run, I see my job as restoring credibility and dignity to the Board. Please know that by no means do I consider myself a paragon. But I do know an insular organization when I see it. And making the Board's purchases open to public scrutiny will be my platform. The reign of secrecy and unilatera, autocratic decisions MUST END.
There may be slings and arrows. Perhaps a dollop of outrageous fortune. Of course, I don't want to feel sorry for my captors ala the Stockholm Syndrome. I plan on not being seduced. I hope the cruelties are not excessive. Whatever the atmosphere I will report regularly to those who want to know what the Board of Trustees is REALLY doing.
To summarize, This tendency by the Trustees to waste public funds is built into the bureacratic system, (at the genetic, corporate, acquisitive level of mammalian politics perhaps) and is encouraged, sanctified, and facilitated by the Community College Trustee Handbook.
My solution? Discard this BIG GOVERNMENT BIBLE and replace it with the concepts of liberty and embedded in the Declaration of Independence. Let free speech and assembly reign so that Every dollar the trustees spend will be with the consent of the governed. After all, taxation without representation could start a rebellion.
To get a pdf of the Community College Trustee Handbook, to see for yourself how social conformity and the specious "need" for harmony and bureacratic bliss (by stifling dialogue and debate) is used as a weapon of the overpenders, against the taxpayers, click HERE
Who is Gerald Wayne Perttula?
What are the other issues in this campaign?
posted by Gerald Wayne Perttula at 10:25 PM
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