"Narratives" Week #3: UC Merced professor's derry-derry dada rewrite of the Thirties in the Valley

Readers of the McClatchy Co.s Modesto chain outlet were greeting Sunday morning with a glowing review of a silly PhD dissertation republished as one of those highly perishable books academics must publish to keep drawing their state pay.

This one, by one Dr. Jan Goggans, an assistant professor of literature at UC Merced, is called "California on the Breadlines: Dorothea Lange, Paul Taylor and the Making of a New Deal Narrative." It can be read in about a half an hour. The notes, which consume half the book, would take longer.
Its thesis, at least in so far as it concerns Dust Bowl migrant farmworkers in California, is absurd. According to Goggans, Paul Taylor, a UC Berkeley economist, and his famous photographer wife, Dorothea Lange, were the voice of the Okies (with a little help from John Steinbeck). Delving into retread Marxian analytics, Goggans presents the Okies as completely disorganized, disoriented, desperate victims of agribusiness. Zut bleeping Alors! Still in the thrall of French literary criticism, this academic's "narrative" somehow equates the Okies with French peasants Marx studied. It was Hitler Mussolini the leaders of the Associated Farmers admired, handing out the pick handles to the farmboys. Far from being disorganized, the migrant farmworkers of that period organized hundreds of strikes, led, at least among the Anglos in the fields, mainly by American communists. If there are any European historical analogies to what happened in California agriculture from Sonoma County to the Imperial Valley in the Thirties, contemporaneous events in Spain and Italy would be a better fit. To some degree the consequences of the Dust Bowl in the US and the British enclosure acts of the late 18th century can be equated in that both threw thousands of small farmers off their land into the "free" labor market.
However, let us drift somewhat to the left of Goggans derry-derry-dada fable to Labor unionism in American Agriculture By Stuart Marshall Jamieson, 1976, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, whose first 200 pages are devoted to farm labor strikes in California during the Thirties. Most of these strikes were organized by the very same indigenous American communists so well depicted in Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle. Perhaps Goggans had the same time recognizing the organizers and their superb work in the fields during the Depression because, like early readers in the literary East of In Dubious Battle, she didn't think the "Communists talked like communists." In fact, the disastrous fiction of the self-regulating free market in land and labor had come down on those people from the Dust Bowl like Hell itself. They didn't need no ideology or college professors and lady photographers to tell their story. They were still living it in the late Fifties here in the Valley.
As far as a "New Deal narrative" is concerned, if true at all, it was a damned unsuccessful New Deal story. The Blue Dog Democrats of that day forced Roosevelt to exempt agriculture from the National Labor Relations Board, passage of which was one of the greatest achievements of the New Deal.
Goggans diplomatically fails to mention Taylor's continual struggles with the UC administration, whose regents were under constant pressure from the state's Farm Bureau to shut up. Needless to say, she makes no mention of the effective termination of the study of rural sociology throughout the UC in the mid-Forties. 
How many Okies ever heard of Paul Taylor or Dorothea Lange? Nor would Taylor, Lange, Steinbeck or Carey McWilliams have disagreed with their claim that they made their own story through labor organization and strikes, suffering beatings and murder from the quite consciously fascist Farmers Alliance at the time. Eighteen thousand cotton workers struck in 1933, the largest strike of its kind in US history. Farm labor strikes rolled on throughout the Thirties in the California fields. In fact, they continued into the 1970s as potent forces for workers' improvement. Only the brilliant, utterly cynical policy of criminalizing the vast majority of farmworkers in recent years that has stopped the momentum of labor organization in the fields. What would Goggans do with the "post-modernist narrative" contained in the 2007 award given the Last month to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers of Florida by the British Anti-Slavery Society? All in all, the book is a fine representation of UC repression of the history of farm labor, nearly equal in dismal quality with UC Merced's "Fairy Shrimp Chronicles," a purported historical treatment of the founding of the campus. The real message behind the book is that the descendants of the Associated Farmers fascists of the Thirties have nothing to fear from UC Merced.
The university of California has been spending its academic prestige capital instead of creating and banking it. Discipline by discipline, it is going intellectually bankrupt. Its administrators like President Mark Yudof and Chairman of its Board of Regents, Richard Blum, have become bywords for corruption. 
Badlands Journal editorial board
8-22-10
Modesto Bee
UC Merced prof writes book on photographer Dorthea Lange, husband...John Holland
http://www.modbee.com/2010/08/22/v-print/1304507/voices-of-the-downtrodden.html
Dorothea Lange and husband Paul Taylor chronicled Dust Bowl migrants in California more the 70 years ago.
Lange did it in photographs -- women keeping house in ragged tents, men at the wheel of cars packed with all they owned.
Taylor, a lesser-known labor economist, did it in writings and speeches that appealed to a nation's compassion amid the Depression.
Their work is the subject of a new book by Jan Goggans, an assistant professor of literature at the University of California at Merced.
The book, "California on the Breadlines: Dorothea Lange, Paul Taylor and the Making of a New Deal Narrative," describes the professional and romantic passions that drove these two people.
"She saw things as an artist, as a portrait photographer, and he saw things through labor economics and history," Goggans said in an interview last week. "When they combined these, it was riveting."
Lange is known best for "Migrant Mother," her photo of a beleaguered woman with three of her children in a Central Coast pea field in 1936. This woman, Florence Thompson, arrived in California before the Dust Bowl but nonetheless came to embody the farmworkers' plight. She later lived in Modesto.
During the 1930s, more than a quarter of a million people came to California from Oklahoma and nearby states wracked by drought and poverty. About 70,000 of them ended up in the San Joaquin Valley. Many of them faced continued hardship as they moved from farm to farm seeking work.
At the time, Lange had a portrait studio in San Francisco and Taylor taught at UC Berkeley. Their lives merged in a Roosevelt administration project that documented the migrants' struggle. They married in 1935 and four years later produced a book called "An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion."
They advocated for habitable federal camps in the near term and for long-term efforts to help the migrants buy land.
"Are these people Riff-Raff?" Taylor asked in a speech quoted by Goggans. "Are they the unmitigated 'moochers' that some declare? Are they an 'invading horde of idle,' as the newspapers call them? After having seen hundreds of them all the way from Yuma to Marysville, I cannot subscribe to this view. These people are victims of dust storms, of drought which preceded the dust, of protracted depression which preceded the drought."
Lange spoke through her photos and their simple captions, such as this one for "Migrant Mother": "Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California."
Lange shot several pictures at a migrant camp in Westley, though none is in Goggans' book. Near Tracy, she photographed the disabled car of a family from Missouri. "Broke, baby sick and car trouble," the caption reads in part.
Goggans, a native of Woodland, said she became intrigued by Lange when she was a UC Davis graduate student researching the nearby Putah Creek area. She happened upon a 1960 photo essay by Lange about the fight to keep the town of Monticello from being wiped out by Lake Berryessa.
"I really fell in love with her," Goggans said. "I thought she would be pretty feisty."
The author said she enjoyed shining a light on Taylor, who is known mostly to academics. Later in life, he was a leader in the effort to put a 160-acre cap on federal water contracts.
Lange died in 1965, Taylor in 1984.
Goggans said she has a strong interest in sustainable agriculture and in carrying on the respect shown to migrant workers by the famed photographer and her economist husband.
"I think people need to think harder about their response to the people who are working to feed us," she said.
New York Times
University Head’s Housing Raises Ire...STEVE FAINARU, Baycitizen.org
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/education/22bcyudof.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&src=mv&adxnnlx=1282496537-8SJfgf5HFwMOd2 5pJaDXA&pagewanted=print
Five minutes before midnight on June 30, movers hauled the last boxes from a spectacular rented home in the Oakland Hills. The tenant’s lease was about to expire, and in his haste to get out, he left behind thousands of dollars of damage to the hardwood floors and Venetian plastered walls.
The tenant was Mark G. Yudof, president of the University of California. His midnight move was the latest chapter in a two-year housing drama that has cost the university more than $600,000 and has drawn senior U.C. officials into an increasingly time-consuming and acrimonious ordeal over the president’s private residence.
The effort to resolve Mr. Yudof’s housing problems has taken place while the U.C., the nation’s largest and most prestigious public university system, struggles with one of the worst financial crises in its history, including layoffs, student protests and tuition increases.
After six years as chancellor at the University of Texas, Mr. Yudof arrived here in 2008, vowing to bring fiscal responsibility to the 10-campus U.C. system. He chose not to live at university-owned Blake House, the traditional presidential mansion, which the university estimates requires $10 million of renovations and repairs.
Instead, Mr. Yudof, 65, moved with his wife into a 10,000-square-foot, four-story house with 16 rooms, 8 bathrooms and panoramic views. He said he needed the house, which rented for $13,365 a month by the end of the lease and was paid for by U.C., to fulfill his obligation to host functions for staff members, donors and visiting dignitaries.
Mr. Yudof held 23 such functions over a two-year period, according to the university. He also ordered a list of improvements and repairs — including air conditioning and 12 phones — that drove up costs and, according to staff members, tied up university officials in meetings and lengthy negotiations on issues ranging from water bills to gopher eradication.
After the Yudofs vacated the property at the end of June, Brennan Mulligan, the landlord, informed university officials that he intended to keep the U.C.’s $32,100 security deposit. Mr. Mulligan requested an additional $45,000 to cover the repairs for hundreds of holes left from hanging art, a scratched marble bathtub, a broken $2,000 Sivoia window shade and other claims.
“At some point, I got a call from the general counsel, and I’m like, ‘Why am I talking to the general counsel?’ ” said Mr. Mulligan, 40, a boyish Hong Kong-based business consultant and a U.C. Berkeley graduate who bought the Oakland house in 2003 after selling his bike-messenger bag company, Timbuk2.
“To me it’s like, ‘Is this how they spend their time?’ ” Mr. Mulligan said.
Among Mr. Mulligan’s list of complaints was the university’s failure to respond to a May 2010 notification from the East Bay Municipal Utility District that the district suspected a water leak on the property. By the time the leak was discovered, shortly after Mr. Yudof moved, the house’s bimonthly water bill had spiked to nearly $5,000 and 1.2 million gallons of water had trickled into the Oakland Hills, according to copies of the bills.
“It took the plumber 10 minutes to find the leak, literally 10 minutes,” Mr. Mulligan said at an evening interview at the house, the lights of San Francisco visible beyond the glass façade of the living room. “There was a broken pipe and a pool of water and I was just like, ‘Wow, this looks like that oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s just coming out.’ ”
Mr. Yudof said he was unaware of the leak.
On Aug. 5, Mr. Yudof’s aides presented Mr. Mulligan with a settlement agreement that would allow him to keep the security deposit and receive an additional $19,759.05. The university presented the written agreement to Mr. Mulligan on the same day The Bay Citizen filed a public-records request for information about the university’s expenditures on the house. On Aug. 8, Mr. Yudof killed the deal.
He said he had been aware of the university’s discussions with Mr. Mulligan but balked at the settlement when he learned about the “outrageous and ridiculous” terms. He said his decision was unrelated to the public-records request.
“I thought it was totally inappropriate what they were doing,” Mr. Yudof said of his staff. “I don’t have to sign a settlement proposal drafted by the staff on this or any other matter. And I didn’t.”
In an interview last week, Mr. Yudof attributed the housing problems and higher-than-expected costs to Mr. Mulligan, whom he described as “the landlord from hell.”
He said Mr. Mulligan was often unresponsive to maintenance requests, and in one instance missed a payment to a vendor, forcing the university to pick up the tab for a significant repair.
According to university records, U.C. spent $19,423 to repair a two-person elevator that sometimes stalled between floors. E-mails released by U.C. under The Bay Citizen’s records request show that Mr. Yudof’s wife, Judith — who has knee problems that make it difficult to climb stairs — gently implored Mr. Mulligan to pay a delinquent bill from the elevator’s installer, which refused to service the elevator until the bill was paid.
The university ultimately used another company to repair the elevator; on one occasion U.C. paid $3,180.24 in overtime ($530.04 per hour) to complete the work, according to a copy of the bill.
Mr. Mulligan said he unknowingly missed the payment to the elevator company but then immediately sent a check by express mail. He said he did not see a bill from the university until he entered into negotiations for damages two years later and U.C. officials sought reimbursement.
The university paid $70,806.73 to move Mr. Yudof to Oakland from Texas and $39,107.30 to move him again when Mr. Mulligan refused to extend the lease. The frantic move from the Oakland location lasted from 7:30 a.m. to 1:45 a.m. the next day, according to billing records. During the three-week search for a new house, the Yudofs took up residence in a discounted suite at the Claremont Hotel & Spa in the Berkeley Hills, at a cost of $8,394.16 to the U.C.
“I don’t think it was a good experience,” Mr. Yudof said, referring to living in the Oakland house. “Under the circumstances, it was the best I could do.” The home was comparable to that of other university presidents, he added.
The U.C. spent $127,443 on security at the house, following threats against Mr. Yudof and several visits to the house by protesters.
Despite the near settlement, university officials said they intended to go to mediation with Mr. Mulligan and were prepared to litigate to recover the security deposit and other damages.
The money spent on the house came from a private endowment. It was a relatively small sum for a $20 billion, 180,000-employee public university that supports 10 campuses, five medical centers and a national laboratory. But the lavish spending and the numerous hours spent by university officials managing Mr. Yudof’s personal affairs have chafed some members of his team.
“He essentially turned the Office of the President into his personal staff,” a university official said.
Much of the activity took place out of public view. The Office of the President filed at least six reports of “interim actions” related to the house that took placebetween public meetings of the Board of Regents.
Mr. Yudof and his wife have settled into a new home in Lafayette. The rent is $11,500 a month. The house “potentially will save the university as much as 25 percent of what was required to maintain the previous residence,” according to a report filed to the board.
The new house is 4,837 square feet, less than half the size of the Mulligan residence.
Tucked in the new lease is a provision designed to help protect the landlord against damages incurred. “Landlord must approve any items affixed to the walls,” it reads.
2-3-10
Anderson Valley Advertiser
Richard Blum: The Man Behind California’s “Developing Economy”
Will Parrish and Darwin Bond-Graham
http://theava.com/archives/3874
On April 17, 2009, with the edifice of the global economy rotting under an architecture of monumen­tal greed, war deficits, and official hubris, the Univer­sity of California, Berkeley conducted a ground­breaking ceremony for its Richard C. Blum Center for Developing Economies. Before a throng of students, faculty, staff, and PR specialists affiliated with the Center’s new multi-UC campus “Global Poverty & Practice” program, the Blum Center’s namesake was joined on stage by one of the many political heavy­weights he counts among his business partners, Al Gore. The former Vice President praised Blum as a long-time friend and cited the new institute as a key to solving the interlocking problems of global poverty and global climate change, two of the many vexing boogeymen threatening to destabilize the profit-making order.
To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, who published a book on the general subject in 1921, some of the greatest sociopaths in this country’s history have affixed their names to university buildings in an effort to burnish their reputations.
Richard Blum is a San Francisco-based finance capi­talist presiding over a business empire that is, to say the least, expansive. Hedge funds? Blum owns one outright and wields a significant share of various oth­ers. Real estate? His primary investment vehicle, the $7 billion Blum Capital Partners, owns the largest real estate brokerage firm on the planet, CB Richard Ellis, of which Blum is chairman of the board. Construc­tion? Until public scandal prompted him to sell off his holdings, Blum was a majority partner in a construc­tion and engineering company that did billions in business with the US military among other govern­ment clients. Education? Try being the resident Alpha Regent of the largest public university system in the world, the University of California, while also being a primary owner of the world’s second-largest for-profit education firm, Career Education Corporation.

Large land-holding firms? Digital media company of which Al Gore serves as frontman? Health industry corporation fighting to undermine the expansion of public health care? Border-town maquiladora that build weapons components for the Department of Defense? Check, check, check, and check.

The greatest investment of Blum’s career was undoubtedly his marriage, roughly 30 years ago, to the politically Joe Lieberman-esque US Senate Democrat, Dianne Feinstein. At the time of this meshing of Blum’s financial interests with Feinstein’s formidable political ambitions, Feinstein was Mayor of San Fran­cisco and Blum — already one of her main financial backers — had much of his fortune staked to various development projects in the City.

Blum’s preferred means of personal enrichment rely on strong nation-state interventions in markets and societies to promote unfettered corporate domi­nance of national economies and distant lands. It should come as no surprise, then, that he and “DiFi” are among the leading proponents of the Interna­tional Monetary Fund/World Bank/US Treasury nexus’ notion of how economies ought best be devel­oped. This form of economic “improvement” (deriving from the Anglo-French “emprouwer,” meaning “to clear for profit”) involves burying Third World economies under mountains of debt backed by usurious interest rates, facilitating the greatest level of investment possible by rapacious multi-national cor­porate entities, privatizing government functions, and gutting social services. Ironically, this agenda of neo­liberal “structural adjustment” has decimated and impoverished communities across the planet, causing suffering among the hundreds of millions of people Blum’s heart now bleeds for: poor folks.

The economic and political policies promoted by Richard C. Blum and associates, including Senator Feinstein and other leaders of both the Democratic and Republican Parties, have locked nations and peo­ples across the planet into a system of de facto coloni­alism whereby their lands and destinies are controlled by distant, debt-holding banks and hedge funds — among them, Blum Capital Partners, LLC, and New­bridge Capital, LLC, of which Blum was chairman of the Asia investment division for five years. The result has been what author and UC Irvine sociologist Mike Davis calls a “planet of slums,” where 0.23% of the world population privately owns more than 50% of the land, and 85% of urban dwellers in the Third World are consigned to living on illegal squats in hellish shanty towns under conditions of grinding poverty.

Just ask the people of Haiti, whose capital city now greatly resembles a war zone reduced to rubble ala Fallujah, Iraq, or Kabul, Afghanistan, not by virtue of a natural disaster per se, but because the IMF-WTO-US Treasury specialists in immiseration have forced them off their land into desperately sub-stan­dard slum housing, often perched tenuously on the side of deforested hills and ravines. This “urban geog­raphy of mass vulnerability,” as the academic field of disaster sociology refers to it, was created by the destruction of the country’s rural agrarian economy that provided for subsistence, in an economic trans­formation imposed by international creditors with the constant backing of the US military.

Yet, at UC Berkeley, we have Dick Blum hoisting up “sustainable solutions to the toughest poverty challenges” as his new line of work.

Blum’s name is a familiar one to those acquainted with the details of the corporate plundering of Cali­fornia northcoast forests and communities through­out the 80s and 90s. The year was 1995, and Texas corporate raider Charles Hurwitz — whose company, Maxxam, had laid waste to as much ancient forestland as possible, as quickly as possible, for nearly a decade — was looking to cash out of his ownership of the Headwaters forest in central Humboldt County. Headwaters was the flashpoint of the largest direct action protests in the history of the earth defense movement, as well as lawsuits and legislative initia­tives aimed at preserving what little was left of old-growth redwood ecosystems in the Pacific Northwest. It so happened Hurwitz was an investment partner of Blum from way back. Blum also happened to be a major donor, fundraiser, and political booster of US President Bill Clinton.

Clinton and California Governor Gray Davis duti­fully discharged their duty as proxies of the super-wealthy in general — and, in this case, Blum in par­ticular — by appointing the inviolable “DiFi” to chair a legislative team to negotiate the purchase of Head­waters from Hurwitz. Feinstein and Hurwitz agreed on a final deal in 1996, hailed by Feinstein’s website as one of her 10% career accomplishments. Hurwitz gave up very little of real economic value — Maxaam had clear-cut most of the forest in question — in exchange for a $380 million taxpayer-funded payout, or more than four times the market value of the trees at the time. Much of the money went directly into Hurwitz’s personal bank accounts. That despite the fact that all the government really needed to do to protect the acreage in question was enforce the Endangered Species Act. Regardless of the fact that Headwaters became officially “protected,” the vast majority of California’s remaining old growth and other mature stands of redwood were pillaged by the end of the decade. Hurwitz’s empire cashed out, like other timber conglomerates, by liquidating the forests and the livelihoods of the North Coast.

Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair later revealed that Blum and another Hurwitz pal, the Houston-based Continental Airlines chairman David Bonderman, had personally met with Clinton at the White House in a “coffee klatch” fundraiser on December 15, 1995, likely to discuss the details of the Headwaters buy-out, which occurred six months later. Bonderman and Blum are both directors of the Wilderness Society, the only national environmental organization that praised the buy-out.

For all the fanfare that emerged in the Clinton era about how corporate globalization had rendered the nation-state a bit player in the larger drama of the new, “free trade”-dominated corporate economic order, the nation-state’s role in propping up the global capitalist system has never been more central. That role is being laid bare as never before with each multi-billion dollar subsidy the federal government passes onto the financial industry — an estimated $5 trillion in total taxpayer money since the bail-out program commenced in fall 2008 (an exact figure is hard to determine). What is known in academic-speak as “neo-liberalism” represents little more than the sophisticated apex of a governing system refined and perfected over the course of several decades (nay, cen­turies), which is principally designed to socialize the risks of rapacious capitalism while privatizing public goods to create unprecedented levels of profit for the super-wealthy.

Blum is not only a representative of this system, but one of its most skillful promoters and practitio­ners. Throughout his career, and particularly in recent years, he has siphoned off taxpayer money into the coffers of his various personal holdings with a calcu­lated brazenness that would make the most swagger­ing Costra Nostra blush. The Headwaters Forest scam was indicative of exactly how these people have done business for nigh on three decades. To pull only a handful of examples from the very recent past:

In early-2007, investigative reporter Peter Byrne published a groundbreaking series in the North Bay Bohemian, the “Feinstein Files.” Byrne revealed that as chairperson of the Senate’s Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee from 2001 through 2005, Feinstein supervised the appropriation of more than $1.5 billion for two defense contractors, URS Corporation and Perini Corporation, in which Blum owned a controlling interest. In the series’ smoking gun, long-time Blum business partner Michael R. Klein told Byrne he regularly took the highly unusual step of supplying Feinstein’s office with lists of Per­ini’s current and upcoming contractual interests in federal legislation, ostensibly so the senator would abstain from voting on these matters for ethical rea­sons (which she never did). “Earmarks, you know, set asides, you name it, there was a system in place which on a regular basis I got notified, I notified her office, and her office notified her,” said Klein, Perini’s vice chairman at the time. Blum later sold his holdings in URS to the tune of $57 million in personal profit.

In January 2009, Feinstein introduced legislation to route $25 billion in federal funding to a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) program designed to forestall home foreclosures by expediting loan workouts and expanding federal loan guarantees. On the surface, Feinstein’s legislation was a straight­forward intervention on behalf of troubled homeown­ers nationwide. But less than two months prior, the FDIC had also awarded Blum’s real estate company, CB Richard Ellis, a multimillion dollar contract to sell homes the agency had inherited from failed banks. This move was also highly unusual, since Feinstein is not a member of the Senate committee that oversees the FDIC.

This past November, the University of California Board of Regents imposed an “emergency” 32% fee increase on undergraduate students, effective in the 2009-10 academic year. The increase stems not only from severe state-mandated budget cuts, but also a series of decisions by the university’s board of regents — of which Richard Blum is the resident alpha mem­ber (although no longer chair of the board), having been appointed to that post by Gray Davis — that have effectively pledged student fee increases to the capital bond market, thereby creating a financial incentive for the Regents to continually raise fees, in a pyramid scheme that raises money for campus con­struction projects. It should come as no surprise that URS Corporation, the same company that made $1.5 billion on contracts awarded by Feinstein’s Senate military construction committee, has been the main contractor for the largest university capital projects in recent years: UCLA’s $150 million reconstruction of Santa Monica Hospital, UC Berkeley’s $48 million nanotechnology laboratory, and Berkeley’s $200 mil­lion Southeast Campus Integrated Project, which includes a seismic retrofit of Memorial Stadium and an expansion of the Haas School of Business — home of the Blum Center for Developing Economies. More on this in next week’s AVA.

Blum-Feinstein, Inc. has accomplished these immense transfers of public wealth absent of almost any serious media scrutiny. But in recent years, the media deep freeze has slowly begun to thaw, begin­ning with a pair of front-page stories in the San Fran­cisco Chronicle in May 2005. Chronicle science writer Keay Davidson’s fine reporting was spurred on by a public outing at a UC Regents meeting when students revealed Blum’s conflict of interest as a member of the committee overseeing the two nuclear weapons labs the UC runs on behalf of the US government. Blum’s URS Corporation had a $125 million, five-year con­struction and engineering services contract with the UC’s Los Alamos, NM nuclear weapons development compound at the time. Less than two years later, Peter Byrne’s series regarding Blum’s war profiteering appeared in the North Bay Bohemian.

This past semester, UC Berkeley Professor of Geog­raphy Gray Brechin co-taught a course on inves­tigative journalism. Brechin is best known as the author of the definitive historical work on Northern California’s ruling elite, Imperial San Francisco. He has been an observer of Blum-DiFi, Inc. for years.

“I’m very impressed by the reluctance of most jour­nalists to follow a story that has been screaming to be done for years while they have been covering their ears and eyes,” Brechin told us. “You guys and Peter [Byrne] are about the only ones who understand that behind the billowing smoke appears to be a roaring bonfire.”

Blum-Feinstein’s concentration of power is great­est in their home state, of course, and it stands to rea­son in any case that Blum’s CB Richard Ellis would be making a killing off the ongoing fire sale of State of California assets. In October, CBRE secured a con­tract from the California Department of General Services to broker over $2 billion in office buildings the state intends to privatize.

Blum’s fortunes aren’t entirely a function of Fein­stein’s legislative exploits. Nor are Feintsein’s political powers entirely a result of her Daddy Warbucks. And the State of California’s economic plight stems not only from the avarice of a small handful of individuals, but from an economic system that is inherently self-destructive and crisis-prone.

Blum and Feinstein, however, have worked hand-in-glove with other members of the state’s banking, real estate, agribusiness, and military-industrial inter­ests to buffer regressive tax and spending policies, helping to devise the very austerity measures currently being hoisted upon the people of California across all public sectors, not just within the University of Cali­fornia.

Therein lies much of the reason Blum is now so quick to tout his anti-poverty bona fides. Blum, you see, has a public relations problem. It’s built into the way he does business. It’s built into the political economy he straddles as one of the US empire’s most connected and wealthy power elites.

Gray Brechin notes that Blum seems to have hired a public relations firm to bolster his personal brand. “Blum has gotten an extraordinary amount of fawning publicity in a very short time, including a front page feature in the Haas Business School magazine about what a whiz he is. I believe that this coincided with the black tie event at the Palace Hotel where Haas celebrated him as Global Citizen of the Year and I joined others from Cal to protest his actions as Alpha Regent.”

“Then there were the two treacly profiles of him in the San Francisco Chronicle recently. I can’t believe this is all coincidental.”

It isn’t. Nor is it coincidental that, as Peter Byrne revealed, longtime Blum business partner Michael Klein has founded a nonprofit foundation that makes grants to media organizations that watchdog the fed­eral government. The organization started after Wikipedia instituted a policy blocking congressional staffers from editing Wiki entries pertaining to their bosses. Employees from Dianne Feinstein’s office had just been caught editing entries in the online encyclo­pedia that cast Blum and Feinstein in an unfavorable light. Thus does one of Blum’s closest business associ­ates now control a significant portion of the budgets of several ostensibly independent organizations that monitor political corruption.

Blum is also now strongly affiliated with a multi-campus academic program at the UC, centered on an institute at UC Berkeley that Blum founded with $15 million in seed money, designed to put band-aids on the symptoms of global poverty he and his wife have had an instrumental role in creating. Beyond this exercise in mystifying the causes of poverty in distant lands, the state’s economic elite — with Blum and Feinstein helping to lead the charge — have long endeavored to turn their philosophy of neoliberal privatization, fiscal austerity, and personal enrichment on the State of California itself. Richard C. Blum Center for Developing Economies, indeed.

Blum is a self-professed Buddhist and friend of the XIVth Dalai Lama. Many of his anti-poverty efforts are geared toward slum dwellers in Tibet and Nepal. “Would an actual Buddhist provide the bulk of the funding for a multi-million dollar institute, only to attach his own name to it?” Brechin mused.

The populist anger seething below the surface of the American body politic has not yet boiled over into any sort of coherent rebellion against the elites who have wrought the greatest economic catastrophe since the 1930s. There is little indication that it will any time soon. Blum’s own financial empire, however, is now quietly under assault by the hundreds of Univer­sity of California students who have learned to loathe the man who has done more than any other to struc­turally adjust their university and price many of the state’s youth out of higher education. These cognizant students, supported by campus workers paid poverty wages by university leaders like Blum, are now organ­izing building take-overs and some of the largest stu­dent protests on those campuses of the past four dec­ades.

In the next part of this exclusive series for the AVA, we will focus on Blum’s role in gutting the Uni­versity of California, where the tuition increases paid in the last four years by Mendocino County residents alone would be large enough to close roughly half the $7 million county budget gap.

Footnotes for this article are available at darwinbondgraham.blogspot.com.