Beshear Goes Begging

Kentucky's only governor has come up with a backup emergency budget plan in case his original plan to wait for $500 billion to fall out of the sky doesn't pan out. Plan B is:

beg the Commonwealth's private foundations to cover his ass.

Recognizing the need to find innovative solutions to Kentucky’s challenges, Gov. Steve Beshear today signed an Executive Order creating the Kentucky Commission on Philanthropy.

The governor is asking private philanthropic foundations to come together to address the funding needs of Kentucky’s public priorities. He has encouraged the group to plan and implement a strategic partnership, aligning public and private resources to collectively focus on the state’s most challenging issues.

Perhaps not unexpectedly for someone who spent the last 20 years working as a private lawyer and lobbyist for banks, legal loan sharks and other creepy-crawlies from the slimy uderbelly of Wall Street, Beshear completely misunderstands the nature of charitable foundations.

The reason there are more than 850 separate foundations in Kentucky is because they have more than 850 separate and incompatible ideas about how and upon whom to bestow charitable funds. Expecting them to agree on a single priority - particularly one dictated by a governor at least half of them think is a dangerous idiot - is criminally delusional.

Beshear, of course, is honoring an ancient political tradition: when in deep shit, form a Commission. This one "as part of its mission, will hold a Summit on Philanthropy in June 2009."

Of course it will. At the most expensive convention center it can find in Kentucky - foundation directors don't do state parks. Hundreds of state employees will attend - eat, drink and get merry, that is - at state expense. Foundation directors don't do rubber chicken dinners, cheese-and-cracker appetizers or cash bars, either.

Back up a sec - "part of its mission?" To throw a convention? And June 2009? Whew - good thing "the state’s most challenging issues" are in such good shape they can wait six months for their savior Commission on Philanthropy to hold its Summit on Philanthropy and start discussing how to begin planning ways they can figure out how to cooperate on developing a schedule to hold meetings on choosing a venue for the 2010 Summit.

Listen: Successful charitable foundations are successful because they have found a charitable niche to fill. They do what the government can't or won't do. To ask them to take on the government's responsibility, too, is not "cooperation;" it's abdication.

It's the responsibility of state government to provide items of general and public good: law enforcement, transportation infrastructure, health care, economic development, and protecting the vulnerable young, elderly and disabled. It's the responsibility of the governor to propose a budget that includes taxes sufficient to support the cost of fulfilling those state government responsibilities.

Stop fucking around, Steve. Tell David Williams and his repug senate minions they either suck it up and pass some real revenue bills or they can write a personal check for the whole nut.

Here's an idea for the rest of us: write your state representatives and senators and suggest they vote in favor of Beshear's cigarette tax - on one condition: that he disband his ridiculous Commission on Philanthropy.

Check out the list of the twenty-eight - more than two dozen - members of the governor's Commission on Philanthropy.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.