CalPERS’ workers is in search of to finish its de facto takeover of the board by way of a set of measures introduced on the board offsite final month. Not solely is the substance of those proposed modifications opposite to the US and California constitutions, in addition to the statute governing CalPERS and fiduciary legislation, however according to these proposals being the governance equal of a coup, the workers has superior the plan in an underhanded method, designed to attenuate the flexibility of stakeholders to guard their pursuits and stymie these initiatives.
Regardless that the proposed modifications are dramatic and clearly supposed to impede oversight of CalPERS’ workers, they’re nonetheless much less radical than they’d be in a wholesome group. Regardless of 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 because the workers often and openly engages in rank insubordination, reminiscent of refusing to offer paperwork and agendize gadgets, even when requested in public assembly by the board president and committee chairmen; giving evasive and even demonstrably dishonest solutions when requested easy questions; ignoring e-mails and usurping board member authority by intercepting their letters and even sending replies of their identify with out evaluation or approval.2
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1 In case you actually should know, like this:
To seek out the world’s most sinister examples of thoughts management, don’t look to science fiction. As a substitute, go to a tropical nation like Brazil, and enterprise deep into the jungle. Discover a leaf that’s hanging virtually precisely 25 centimeters above the forest flooring, no extra and no much less. Now look beneath it. In case you’re in luck, you may discover an ant clinging to the leaf’s central vein, jaws clamped tight for pricey life. However this ant’s life is already over. And its physique belongs to Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the zombie-ant fungus.
When the fungus infects a carpenter ant, it grows by way of the insect’s physique, draining it of vitamins and hijacking its thoughts. Over the course of every week, it compels the ant to depart the security of its nest and ascend a close-by plant stem. It stops the ant at a peak of 25 centimeters—a zone with exactly the suitable temperature and humidity for the fungus to develop. It forces the ant to completely lock its mandibles round a leaf. Finally, it sends an extended stalk by way of the ant’s head, rising right into a bulbous capsule filled with spores. And since the ant usually climbs a leaf that overhangs its colony’s foraging trails, the fungal spores rain down onto its sisters under, zombifying them in flip.
2 Board member Margaret Brown did halt the hijacking of the mail and id theft in replying with out permission, however that was an exception that proved the rule, in that she needed to embarrass workers publicly to get them to halt this abuse; personal protests received nowhere.
