Densely fogged in by extraordinary sensitivity, an arcane Town Hall meeting I attended Friday afternoon, downtown in the Ronald Reagan Building, defies meaningful interpretation for us pedestrian listeners.
The subject on the stove was (grab your hat with both hands) “Examining Barriers to Procurement Opportunities for Diverse and Emerging Investment Management Within California’s Public Utility Companies and Public Pension Funds,” which was not as boring as you would suspect. I shall explain shortly.
One day after hearing mayoralty candidate Austin Beutner declare, like Mr. Reagan, that government is the problem not the solution, three well-intentioned politicians were arrayed on a stage in the ground floor auditorium to prove Mr. Beutner and Mr. Reagan exactly wrong. Their mission: To gently grill or nudge an army of same-sounding, amorphous-lingo private sector execs on how ardently they were trying to close the dreaded cultural-racial-gender (did I leave anyone out?) gaps that none of us suspected existed.
For Democrats, equality always is the main prize, not right or wrong.
Do You Agree?
How much poorer our world would be, I often say to my wife when we go shopping, without The Gap, my favorite stop.
First among equals (the primary Democrat value) in the center seat on stage was the Chair of the all-afternoon hearing, state Sen. Curren Price, Culver City Democrat. On his right, Assemblyman Steve Bradford, Inglewood Democrat. Why them? Because in their separate chambers in Sacramento, they chair their body’s Select Committee on Procurement, typical government bologna-speak when they deviously don’t want you to know what they are doing.
On Sen. Price’s left was the most inquisitive member of the trio, billed as Timothy Alan Simon, a member of the state Public Utilities Commission.
In a ceaseless quest to determine what the heck was going on with the audience of 150 during a meeting that wheezed on for four hours, I found this vague description: “The first in a series of meetings this year to discuss recent progress to mitigate barriers to emerging and diverse firms in public utility companies and public pension funds.”
In today’s grim world, when could we ever smile unless we heard government minders instruct us in the moral worthiness of attaining one of two lofty objectives:
• Are you hiring an exactly even number of women, men, blacks, Hispanics (Asians, being the smartest of the bunch, don’t require an artificial boost) or
• Have you hired a number of women, men, blacks, Hispanics (Asians, being the smartest of the bunch, don’t require an artificial boost) in direct proportion to their representation in the general population, firing people of the right gender and race when there is a death in the general population?
So you can be sure your interests were fairly represented, the groups on trial were investment personnel from the California State Teachers Retirement System, CalSTRS, the California Public Employees Retirement System, CalPERS, Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric, Sempra Energy Utilities, Altura Capital Group, Loop Capital Markets, DBL Investors, Progress Investment Management Co., Russell Investments and Callan Associates.
Being in government and being Democrats, heaven forbid, the gentlemen could not call people or things (sometimes indistinguishable) by their true names.
Watch Your Language, Pal
Dirty words like “minority-owned” and “women-owned” slithered out several times. I thought someone had cursed. I recall “emerging” stood for non-white. I don’t remember what bologna term they used to describe women, except they avoided females, girls, gals, dames, broads, chicks and, God forbid, ladies. The whole thing was disguised so normal people would not recognize it.
I felt like a spy.
Being a minority in the room, I was hopelessly foiled each time I tried to find out what was going on.
The idea seemed to be whether the above-named honorable firms were behaving honorably by hiring Anybody But a White Guy when the honorable teachers, honorable government workers and honorable who-elses greedily (strike that, it only applies to Republicans) invested their pensions with companies that had the right number of the right kinds of people.
After listening to two hours of testimony from well-meaning people, I reached a rare conclusion:
I don’t know.
Mostly, the testifiers tirelessly backpatted themselves. They reported, unabashedly, that by George, they were making heroic progress toward their honorable goals.
Sen. Price, at junctures, was as frustrated as I was for the whole two hours I observed. Said he was tired of hearing about the process. Wanted to know why none had yet reached their goals. He did not get an answer comprehensible in English. He wanted to know if there were penalties for not accomplishing goals. Neither of us was answered. Our interpreters had fallen into a deep sleep.
