CalPERS’ staff is seeking to complete its de facto takeover of the board through a set of measures presented at the board offsite last month. Not only is the substance of these proposed changes contrary to the US and California constitutions, as well as the statute governing CalPERS and fiduciary law, but consistent with these proposals being the governance equivalent of a coup, the staff has advanced the plan in an underhanded manner, designed to minimize the ability of stakeholders to protect their interests and stymie these initiatives.
Even though the proposed changes are dramatic and obviously intended to impede oversight of CalPERS’ staff, they are still less radical than they would be in a healthy organization. Despite the diligent efforts of a minority of pro-transprency board members, the CalPERS board is already zombified.1 The complacent majority of the board sits stupefied as the staff regularly and brazenly engages in rank insubordination, such as refusing to provide documents and agendize items, even when requested in public meeting by the board president and committee chairmen; giving evasive and even demonstrably dishonest answers when asked simple questions; ignoring e-mails and usurping board member authority by intercepting their letters and even sending replies in their name without review or approval.2
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1 If you really must know, like this:
To find the world’s most sinister examples of mind control, don’t look to science fiction. Instead, go to a tropical country like Brazil, and venture deep into the jungle. Find a leaf that’s hanging almost exactly 25 centimeters above the forest floor, no more and no less. Now look underneath it. If you’re in luck, you might find an ant clinging to the leaf’s central vein, jaws clamped tight for dear life. But this ant’s life is already over. And its body belongs to Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the zombie-ant fungus.
When the fungus infects a carpenter ant, it grows through the insect’s body, draining it of nutrients and hijacking its mind. Over the course of a week, it compels the ant to leave the safety of its nest and ascend a nearby plant stem. It stops the ant at a height of 25 centimeters—a zone with precisely the right temperature and humidity for the fungus to grow. It forces the ant to permanently lock its mandibles around a leaf. Eventually, it sends a long stalk through the ant’s head, growing into a bulbous capsule full of spores. And because the ant typically climbs a leaf that overhangs its colony’s foraging trails, the fungal spores rain down onto its sisters below, zombifying them in turn.
2 Board member Margaret Brown did halt the hijacking of the mail and identity theft in replying without permission, but that was an exception that proved the rule, in that she had to embarrass staff publicly to get them to halt this abuse; private protests got nowhere.
