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UPDATE (11:19 AM PT): After issuing a dispersal order to remove all students from the room, the Regents are voting on the budget now.
About 500 students are currently blockading entrances to the University of California Board of Regents meeting at UC San Francisco this morning, where the Regents are scheduled to vote on a budget that presumes a 24 percent across-the-board increase on UC tuitions over four years. Picketing students have pledged to shut the meeting down.
According to Charlie Eaton, one of the organizers of the protest and co-author of a report released this week that charged the Regents with employing exotic financial instruments that doubled the UC system’s debt load over three and a half years, as of 8:45AM PT only a third of the Regents have made it inside the building. About 100 students are inside, according to Eaton.
At Governor Jerry Brown’s prompting, yesterday the trustees of California’s State University system postponed a decision on fee hikes and the Regents backed off a plan to raise fees on UC professional school students. But major tuition hikes for all UC students remain on the table. The Regents have voted to increase tuitions in all but two of the last eleven years, this year being one of the two.
Last week, California voters passed Proposition 30, which raises taxes in part to stem tuition hikes in the state’s UC and CSU systems. Student organizing and activism played a major role in the success of the Prop 30 campaign. Yet in the very first meeting of the UC Regents following the measure’s passage, the battle over tuition hikes is continuing unabated.
“These proposed increases are totally unacceptable, especially given the fact that the Regents leveraged student tuition hikes to enter into reckless interest rate swaps that created a huge part of UC’s financial mess in the first place,” said Eaton. “There will be no business as usual today for the UC Regents.”
Photo by Charlie Eaton
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12 Comments
Banks are the “Octopus” of the new millenium like the railroads were in the last.
The UC Regents should be fired with no pensions & benefits. Let ‘em see how the 99% has to get along.
Hire new Regents at less salary & no special perks & lurks. Get someone honest to do the job (well I can dream, can’t I)?
Hiring Regents at less salary & none of these perks would save at least some money.
What the Regents want to do is the typical transfer of money from the underlasses to the mega-rich & Wall St.
Stop the insanity!
We could also look to invalidate the agreements for these floating interest rate bonds since it seems there were conflicts of interest and possibly unclean hands regarding the fairness of these deals.
The Regents’ interest rate swaps were attached to LIBOR, which means they were fixed bets. UC has standing to sue, as other counterparties to LIBOR-based swaps have, but the Regents have neither litigated the contracts *nor even attempted to re-negotiate them.* As the report by the UC grad students points out, this could be due to the direct relationships some of the Regents and members of UC top management have to Wall Street firms, including B of A, which is one of the banks being investigated for the LIBOR scandal. (B of A stands to make tens of millions on one of the swaps the Regents approved.)
That is the definition of conflict of interest, isn’t it?
Absolutely.
Jerry Brown has the trifecta of trifectas now. Let him exercise it.
A supermajority in Sacramento. Prop 30 was approved by voters for education (not for Wall St, BTW). And he has himself to sign the stuff he wants to go through.
There are no excuses now. Get with it!
Richard Blum could be Madoff’s cell chum.
The taxpayers get sucker-punched with Proposition 30 and now the students get this.
Never again.
Here’s what Bob Meister, UCSC Politics Professor has to say about the collusion between the State, UC Regents, and using ever-increasing tuition to fund their own agenda–NOT education:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/10/26/american-students-the-coal-miners-of-today/
And how Prop 30 funds will now go to Wall Street:
http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/openforum/article/Prop-30-funds-for-UC-will-go-to-Wall-Street-4031472.php
chop from the top!
Sorry for duplication.