Patronage Army General Willie Brown Stumps for Pension Reform

I repent!

​Willie Brown, who in 2001 deployed his friends, family, and hangers-on into what was commonly referred to as a "patronage army," is now helping the governor campaign against the classic patronage perk known as bloated pensions.

At an event last week Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger billed as a "pension roundtable," Brown began a speech stumping for state-worker pension cutbacks by acknowledging the irony.

"I don't come to this issue, frankly, with clean hands," Brown was quoted as saying by the Sacramento Bee. "I did a lot of stuff when I served as a member of the Legislature."

Brown's been walking a path to contrition for a few months now. In a Chronicle column on Jan. 3, Brown wrote:

"The deal used to be that civil servants were paid less than private-sector workers in exchange for an understanding that they had job security for life. But we politicians, pushed by our friends in labor, gradually expanded pay and benefits to private-sector levels while keeping the job protections and layering on incredibly generous retirement packages that pay ex-workers almost as much as current workers."

And, last week, Brown told those assembled at Schwarzenegger's pension reform event that he'd come to appreciate the problem of bloated government pensions while serving as a local government representative on the board of the California Public Employees' Retirement System

Of course, by bringing up his term as a CalPers director, Brown points toward a whole new issue that might benefit from contrition from the ex-mayor and Assembly leader. In 1999, SF Weekly ran an article titled "W.L. Brown, a public-private partnership" about how CalPers invested pension money into investments the mayor stood to benefit from.

Shall we soon witness the bizarre spectacle of Brown calling a press conference to announce that it's time for politicians to keep their hands out of the public cookie jar?

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