Article: Big Banker Sanford Weill’s Honorary Degree from Sonoma State University

[Shepherd]

By Shepherd Bliss
WaccoBB.net

Retired Citigroup CEO Sanford Weill will receive an honorary doctorate, as will his wife Joan, from Sonoma State University in Northern California on May 12.

Some SSU students, faculty, and staff are upset by this degree, describing it as “dishonorable.” As someone who has taught at SSU for the last four years, this reporter has been interviewing members of our academic community about this matter. They have set up the following website to express their complaints: https://ShameOnSSU.org

Weill was CEO of Citigroup, the largest of the “too-big-to-fail” banks bailed out by taxpayers. Last year he gave $12 million for SSU’s new Green Music Center (GMC). At issue are how Weill got that money and what strings were attached to his passing that money on to SSU.

A major purveyor of toxic mortgages, Citigroup required $45 billion in government investment and a $300 billion guarantee of its bad assets to avoid bankruptcy. Weill retired shortly before the 2008 crash. “Laughing All the Way From the Bank” was the New York Times headline.

“Sandy Weill is greedy,” says graduating senior Melanie Sanders. “He is a symbol of a nation’s economy becoming increasingly unbalanced and building the accounts of the ultra rich on the backs of the very poor. Half of my school loans are with Citigroup. I once took out $15,000 in student loans. Now $29,365 is due.”

Such debt doubling is no longer unusual. It used to be called usury and was considered at least immoral and often illegal. Weill, Citigroup and other big banks create debt bondage to banks.

The national student debt recently reached $1 trillion, which is larger than all the credit card debt. What futures might these college students have to look forward to?

“I am financially broken by his former company and unlikely to recover. I am compelled to protest this award. I must now call my grandma and explain that I will be protesting at my graduation ceremony. I am personally offended that he will be at my graduation and receiving a degree,” Sanders added. SSU offends many by this decision.

“Weill represents a misuse of power, a lack of accountability, and economic abuse of people,” commented another graduating student, Christopher Bowers.

“Tainted money” and “reparations for ill-gotten sins” is how one retired faculty member describes Weill’s gift. He adds that the honorary degree is a symbolic “absolution of sins.”

Citigroup has paid many fines over the years, including $3 billion for involvement in the Enron scandal. As California’s Attorney General Jerry Brown wrote that Citigroup “knowingly stole from customers, mostly poor people and the recently deceased.” It has been charged numerous times with fraud, conflict of interest, and outright theft.

“For He’s a Jolly Good Scoundrel” entitles editor Robert Scheer article in the April 19 The Nation issue. It describes Weill as a “hustler who led the successful lobbying to reverse the Glass-Steagall law” in 1999. Enacted after the Great Depression to protect us from the kind of economic collapse that we are now experiencing, it had been a firewall between investment and commercial banks.

Up went Weill’s fortunes and those of his 1% friends; down went the 99%, as the gap between the rich and the poor grows. Forbes magazine has listed Weill as the 75^th richest American. His Sonoma estate cost $30 million, which included a red Ferrari. Is this a good model for students? Or does it corrupt them?

Weill’s degree exemplifies a trend in public higher education. It is being increasingly corporatized and privatized to meet the financial desires of big banks and mega-corporations, rather than the needs of students and citizens.

Public education has been a primary source of California and the United States’ democracy and greatness. The decline of that public education means the loss of a foundational element of American society, democracy and greatness.

“Education has lost its soul in many respects,” according to SSU sociology professor Noel Byrne. “The corporatization of universities is a fundamental betrayal of the essence of higher education.”

“The honorary doctorate given to Weill is SSU's pandering to the power elite,” said Carolyn Epple, formerly a tenured SSU professor and currently an activist in Occupy Sana Rosa. “Much as Weil used the country as his own economic playground for personal gain, so too have many in SSU's administration turned education into their own schemes for economic gain.”

This is not the first time Weill has gotten bad press in Sonoma County. The daily Press Democrat (then owned by the New York Times) published a commentary April 6, 2011, by Susan Lamont of the Peace and Justice Center. It criticized Weill’s gift to SSU, “That money wasn’t Mr. Weill’s to give. He and Citigroup stole it from us…he should give it back.”

Lamont concludes, “It is time to say no to corporate control of government…time to send the true criminals to jail…time to take back the wealth.” This was published more than half a year before Occupy Santa Rosa took to the streets here, making just such demands.

Protests against Weill’s bought degree have already started. On April 27, activists passed out research on Weill at a GMC dinner honoring him. They held the sign “King of the Subprime Mortgages—Architect of the Great Recession.”

Who knows what might happen at SSU on May 12? Occupy Wall Street activists might exercise their First Amendment rights of free speech and freedom of assembly, before government further restricts them in favor of government of the 1%, by the 1%, and for the 1%.

Green Music Center

Though the complex is officially still known as the Green Music Center, some are already calling it the Weill Music Center, given his name in huge letters at the top of the concert hall, the highest building. Weill seems to be pulling the strings, as he and his corporations did with the federal government, making their own rules.

Weill and Citigroup give credibility to the popular Occupy chant “Banks Got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out.”

(Dr. Shepherd Bliss teaches college, runs and farm, has contributed to two dozen books, and can be reached at [email protected])

[Barry]

Protest to target SSU benefactor Weill
https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20120507/articles/205071070?p=all&tc=pgall&tc=ar

Some faculty, students take issue with honorary degree planned for ex-Citigroup chief

By JULIE JOHNSON
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
Published: Monday, May 7, 2012 at 4:01 a.m.
Last Modified: Monday, May 7, 2012 at 7:11 a.m.

A group of Sonoma State University faculty and students announced Sunday they will protest an honorary degree the school plans to give to a major donor to the Green Music Center at Saturday's graduation ceremony.

Sanford "Sandy" Weill, a former chief executive of Citigroup, and his wife, Joan, last year donated $12 million the school needed to finish the concert hall.

However a coalition of students, faculty and local Occupy activists object to bestowing the honorary degree because of Weill's role in the worldwide financial crisis, said Shepherd Bliss, a lecturer with the psychology and humanities departments. They will participate in an unspecified public demonstration during the ceremony dubbed, "Day of Shame on Sonoma State University."

"We've found no evidence that he has any remorse for the many victims that he and Citibank have been responsible for foreclosing on," Bliss said.

The Weills are renowned philanthropists from New York who bought a home in Sonoma County.

Weill is credited with building Citigroup into the world's largest bank. After Weill left Citigroup in 2003, the subprime mortgage crisis deflated its shares from $55 in 2007 to $1 in early 2009. Citigroup received a $45 billion federal bailout.

Weill went from being hailed by Fortune magazine in 2001 in its "10 Most Admired Companies" list to being on Time Magazine's list of "25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis." The magazine also listed former Presidents Bill Clinton, George Bush and "American consumers" among those to blame.

A committee of faculty and students recommended Weill for the degree, said Susan Kashack, SSU's associate vice president. The California State University chancellor approved it.

"They donated money for something that is going to make a huge difference to the university, to the county, to Northern California," Kashack said.

The Weills also have donated their time to help the center open, Kashack said. Sanford Weill chairs the center's board of advisers. Joan Weill chairs a benefits committee.

"She's helped bring new donors to us that the university had never heard from before," Kashack said.

The donation, while generous, doesn't absolve Weill of responsibility for the crisis, Bliss said.

Protesters are still planning what they will do. They are looking at other models, such as the 1969 Brown University graduation when about three-quarters of the audience turned their backs on Henry Kissinger, who was then special assistant to President Richard Nixon.

"It's fine that he gave the money, but he has bought this degree," Bliss said. "That's a bad precedent."

You can reach Staff Writer Julie Johnson at 521-5220 or [email protected].

[rossmen]

citibank ugg, at one time i had a credit card with them. everytime i went in to pay my bill they tried to sell me more bs. once i tried to cash a check from a customer and they wouldn't honor it unless i opened a checking account! the same manager in sebastopol is probably still there. i hold weill personally responsible. when i read in the pd that he bought the most expensive residential property in sonoma county, and then bailed out the music edifice at sonoma state i wanted to barf. this guy is bad news. is the honorary degree in scumbaggery?

By Shepherd Bliss
WaccoBB.net

Retired Citigroup CEO Sanford Weill will receive an honorary doctorate, as will his wife Joan, from Sonoma State University in Northern California on May 12.

Some SSU students, faculty, and staff are upset by this degree, describing it as “dishonorable.” As someone who has taught at SSU for the last four years, this reporter has been interviewing members of our academic community about this matter. They have set up the following website to express their complaints: https://ShameOnSSU.org

Weill was CEO of Citigroup, the largest of the “too-big-to-fail” banks bailed out by taxpayers. Last year he gave $12 million for SSU’s new Green Music Center (GMC). At issue are how Weill got that money and what strings were attached to his passing that money on to SSU.
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