| To: Retort From: GB [Gray Brechin, whose Imperial San Francisco illuminated the history of pelf and corruption at the University of California, sends out this appeal to fund some overdue muckraking. IB] Dear Friends, Independent investigative reporter Peter Byrne has taken up the task of revealing just who the regents are and how they use their position of unaccountable privilege and access to the University's portfolio to enrich themselves at our expense. This is a story screaming to be done for decades but shirked by the state's major newspapers (especially the SF Chronicle which has run cover for Alpha Regent Blum and Senator Feinstein for decades.) Even before the current crisis in print journalism, such investigations were extremely expensive and time-consuming as well as requiring smarts, courage, and independence from editors and publishers who usually instead serve the vested interests of their cities (as I revealed in my UC dissertation/book Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin.) Now those investigations are virtually nonexistent, replaced (like foreign bureaux and reporters themselves) with far cheaper celebrity gossip, sports, and crime so that few today are aware of what is missing from the husks of their newspapers. This is a story that concerns all of us and has ramifications well beyond the state limits of California; the endlessly repeated mantra "We feel your pain, but there simply is no money to support public education [or public anything]" begs the question of where and to whom (other than mismanagement) our vast wealth is going. Peter has already discovered some startling conflicts of interest, and he is on the trail of others that should make for a smoking exposé sure to be embargoed by the Chronicle. The kind of work that Peter and a team of assistants is doing would, at a major newspaper or magazine, cost well over $100,000. They are attempting to do it on a shoestring of $10,000, yet have raised only half of that sum. Please consider donating to the fund at Spot.Us (link below): if you think we have corruption now, just wait until investigative journalism goes the way of the dodo for lack of reader support. Please post this to your lists. And see the documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America about Daniel Ellsberg to stiffen your spines and remind you of a time when U.S. journalism had one. And remember, when you hear that UC has only ten campuses, remind the audience that it has twelve; the twin nuclear weapons labs at Livermore and Los Alamos not only were designed to compete with one another to produce the most effective means to incinerate our planet while spreading the blessings of cancer to all, but they have a great deal to do with why the official ten — and the entire public sector — no longer has the money necessary to operate effectively. Regents have profited from those campuses since their inception in the Second World War. The University administration would like us to forget that they exist, yet their photos are given equal billing with the others at UC headquarters in Oakland. As the Chronicle editorially crowed when the federal contract with Los Alamos was renewed with UC and Bechtel, "The lab will now be run more like a business whose product is nuclear weapons." Make you feel better? Sincerely, Gray |