Posted on 06/07/2008 8:31:30 AM PDT by Timeout
West Virginia University President Mike Garrison says he is resigning effective September 1. [Funny how these perps always get to hang around long enough to get another year's pension, huh?] Long story short, the university manufactured an MBA degree for the GOVERNOR's DAUGHTER.
This is such a sordid tale: How political insiders get plum profitable positions and the power to cover up malfeasance. This is how our government works today. The bureacracy no longer works for you. It works for it's members and the pols and vendors who provide the money.
Bresch: Governor's daughter, works for Mylan, Inc.---politically-connected company, formerly the largest client of Garrison before he became university president. She only completed 22 of 48 req'd credits for the MBA but lied about it. When the press caught her lie, the university covered for her and awarded the degree...11 years after she'd left the program.
Garrison: President of WVU since last summer. Former chief of staff to the governor, no academic background. He left the chief of staff post before he was appointed to WVU. (His leaving was necessary in anticipation of the appointment). In the interim, he was financially supported largely by Mylar, Inc., his largest "lobbying" client, and employer of Ms. Bresch--his good friend.
Bill Case: Garrison created the job of "Communications Director" and gave it to Case. Case previously worked for the Robert C. Byrd Science Center. After the scandal he was reassigned WITH NO PAY CUT. Read his hysterical job description below.
Alex Macia: Another newly created job: Chief Counsel to Garrison. Previously Chief of Staff to the former governor (who got tossed out because of an affair). Directly involved in the university scandal, he'll no longer serve as Chief Counsel. But he keeps his VP designation and will head up the university's legal affairs department....with NO PAY CUT.
Other university deans and academics. All demoted WITH NO PAY CUTS.
Garrison has resigned but only after ALL the other players had been placed in LESS RESPONSIBLE positions with NO PAY CUTS.
My favorite is Bill Case. He was removed as Communications Director and his new job is described thusly: "...help chronicle Garrison's ongoing initiative to review and potentially restructure the Robert C. Byrd Health Sciences Center"...$135,000/year.
Got it? He's going to "help", not be in charge of. And he's going to help "chronicle". What? He's going to keep a diary? And, what's he going to chronicle? Why, he's chronicling "an initiative". An initiative? Yeah, an intiative to "review" the center he used to work for. Oh, and an intiative to "potentially restructure" said program. I guess that means "get more money from Senator Byrd". In other words, it's a job-for-life ("potential" means never ending) with no real responsibility and, almost certainly, a nice fat pension at the end of the rainbow.
Ping-a-ling!
Did you notice how this story was kept quiet for so many weeks? This should have been breaking news in April!
Hell, it’s not breaking news now! (Well, maybe in WV).
I just tripped across from another blog. I’d bet you could ask 10,000 people next week and perhaps one will have heard of this.
That’s because there were Democrats involved. Had this been a case of Republican malfeasance, it would have been shouted out across the land from atop the NYTimes building.
Amen.
But the thing that makes me sick is how horribly familiar it is. We have the same kind of thing going on at our community colleges here in Alabama. I’d bet most states are the same.
Once these folks get on the public tit they’ve put in place all kinds of mechanisms to ensure they can keep milking the system for the rest of their lives.
They are indeed our new PRIVILEGED CLASS.
What’s the Governor’s name and is he a Dem or a Rep? I can guess.
How can one tell that the corrupt politician (Gov. Joe Manchin) is a Democrat? Because the reporter does not mention his political affiliation. Be certain that if he were a Republican, we would have been informed post-haste.
I was born and grew up in WV and thought I knew what political corruption was since I had seen two governors go to jail.
Having spent the last 30 yrs. in W PA, I learned that political corruption doesn't end at the state line and that since PA has more to rip off, there is a lot more of it in PA than in WV.
Martin, That picture is priceless.
I love it!
Actually, I do. Maybe it's that I'm older.
I'm thinking of how we viewed "public servants" when I was a child (1950's). He was that guy in the building dept or post office, the one with a pocket protector and 3 different colored pens, brown polyester pants/beige shirt and a plodding intellect....yesterday's geek. He may not have worked hard, but he was reliable and he really did think of himself as working for us. He was actually a somewhat sympathetic character.
He wasn't paid much so we felt good about giving him a nice pension and a few extra holidays to compensate. (Keep in mind, life pensions were commonplace then.) No one ever talked about "the bureaucracy", especially the federal one. Back then politicians made laws, the bureaucracy simply implemented them.
Everything changed in the late 60's with the War on Poverty and the cultural revolution. Pols discovered they could make controversial decisions in a vague way, leaving it to the bureaucracy to fill in specifics (and take the heat for heavy handedness)---a safe bet since we didn't elect (and couldn't fire) the bureaucrats. The WOP empowered the bureaucracy to do more than simply implement laws. They were charged with "doing good".
Public employee unions began flexing their muscles. For 25 years they pushed politicians to A) sweeten benefits since public pay was non-comparable to private pay and B) raise public pay. I don't know when it was---I would guess the early 90's---that public sector pay actually outstripped private (when time off is factored in). Unions played a "leapfrog" game where any increase for public employees in one jurisdiction was used to demand increases in another. Of course, when the increase was implemented in the latter, that increase became grounds for an increase somewhere else. It was an upward spiral with no downside. Not to mention all those generous benefits we had showered on them when the "low pay" argument was still operable.
Lastly, about 25 years ago bureaucrats discovered they could leverage their public policy expertise into lucrative post-retirement jobs at companies with government contracts. That was the final nail. Public employment had gone from "public service" to a lucrative, secure, relatively undemanding job with no accountability...one that was merely a jumping off point to the really lucrative retirement years when they could sell their "insider information" to the highest bidder.
So now we've come full circle. We have a highly paid, generously benefited, untouchable, bureaucracy that sees no limits to its power. I call them our new "Privileged Class". They're not only better paid. While pensions were disappearing in the private sector, they were becoming more and more generous in the public sector. Think about it: the very people who squandered our Social Security and will eventually tell us we have to work longer...those are the same people who arranged for themselves to retire at every-younger ages with a generous pension (tied to inflation, largely exempt from taxes, and with lifetime health care thrown in). They know the inside track on how to slip self-serving items into legislation without our ever being aware of it.
So, yes there was a time when we thought "public servant" an apt name for them. Those times are long gone. I read something recently that perfectly sums it up:
If the bureaucracies were to write a mission statement that is reflective of what they actually do, it would say they exist for the purpose of serving their employees and the politicians/vendors who fund them.So there's my rant. They don't work for us anymore. We are simply the bank. If they need more money, the question isn't whether WE can afford it. It's simply put to us that we have to pay up. Never, ever do they consider cutting somewhere else. In the coming years the bill is going to come due for all the pension-sweeteners they've slipped into local, state, and federal rules. I wonder what will happen. On the one hand we've got an aging private sector in less secure jobs than we used to have. On the other we've got a generously compensated public sector where they're retiring earlier than us, collecting good pensions, and cashing in with private sector jobs...yet THEY are the ones demanding more, more, more. Will the public refuse to fund those public pensions when they find out we were lied to and never told how expensive this was going to be...especially when we're showering them with benefits we don't get? THAT is the question. I honestly don't know the answer.
Thats why Bobby Huggins bolted KSU for WV. He didn’t have to worry about graduation rates for Basketball players.
As far as I know nobody has had to worry about that since the 1950's, maybe earlier, at WVU. Attending classes, not required. Attending practice, of course.
Your right!
You would get kicked off the team if you didn’t attend practice.
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