Grubbing for Terror-Money
A mere $100-million will make POCs feel better
In the annals of self-serving pleading this one tops the list…
Oregon nonprofits ask for $100M federal investment to address white supremacy
This was reported by one of the stenographers of the progressive machine, Oregon Public Broadcasting—the Oregonian and the Tribune didn’t take this seriously enough to rewrite the press release on their web sites. But OPB gave it both a podcast and a lengthy story. Here’s the money-graf…
In a joint letter addressed to President Joe Biden, they say Oregon is susceptible to domestic terrorist attacks against people of color.
In their letter, the seven non-profits got a little more specific…
We ask for a $100 million investment in Oregon split between federal agencies and community- based organizations to immediately increase your work in partnership with Oregon’s communities of color, the organizations that serve them, and the organizations working to combat this threat.
Which makes one wonder: if the perps are white, why spend the $50-million on POCs? To buy all of them AR-15s and a concealed carry license?
OPB did not get on the blower to contact anyone who might disagree that $50-million should be spent, basically, on making the folks in the various tax-exempt organizations spend (and earn) more…or how “increased surveillance” might square with Constitutional limits on search and seizure (so very old-fashioned, and besides, the framers were white), or whether any of the “increased surveillance” would have picked up two insane kids (although there were warnings aplenty in both recent cases), or that given the nature of our social justice prosecutors neither of the homicidal youngsters would have been taken off the street, nor are there really any mental-health places to send them…
The list goes on.
A complete account of government handouts the non-profits are already enjoying, along with other assorted give-aways, and “move-to-the-front-of-the-line” mandates would bump up against Substack’s very liberal length-limits.
So let’s pick one non-profit at random: APANO, the Asian Pacific American Network of Portland. It’s a strange, two-headed beast—there’s also an APANO Communities United Fund—which is basically structured to avoid those pesky rules about non-profits dabbling in politics.
And, boy! Does APANO dabble! Its 2021 annual report trumpeted that
8 endorsed candidates won in Portland and state level seats.
7 endorsed ballot measures passed.
7 partner organizations funded to conduct voter outreach.
This kind of clout doesn’t come cheap. The tax-exempt’s balance sheets (buried deep within the Oregon Secretary of State’s byzantine database) are eye-opening. For their fiscal year 2019-20 (the latest available in any detail), the two-headed outfit had combined net income (ie., profit) of $152,749.
How much came from the government? APANO is a little coy about that number. The ‘19-’20 report liists a total of $1,021,435 in government grants. An entry for “non-profit grants” lists another $1,306,915.
This is not chump change.
If your picture of the folks working for a non-profit trends toward sack cloth and ashes, consider that the organization went looking for three Board of Directors’ Co-Chairs last year. Salary range: $84,000-$103,000. (Happily, they somehow managed to find them.)
Then there was an opening for Director of Finance & Administration, at $78,267-$96,258, with…
Generous 90% employer-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance; 401K plan with employer match; subsidized transit pass; cell phone reimbursement; paid time off & seven paid holidays annually. Flexible work hours.
Meanwhile, their ads for these hires featured this truly weird piece of boiler-plate. See if you can figure it out…
APANO and APANO Communities United Fund are actively seeking to increase representation and develop the leadership of women, LGBTQ people, people with lived experience of economic injustices, and other underrepresented groups, including diverse API communities, both within the organization and the broader racial justice movement in Oregon and API communities. APANO and APANO Communities United Fund are equal opportunity employers. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status, or any other legally protected classification.
Wink-wink, nod-nod, anyone?
As they might have said, applying the old Phialdelphia joke about the Quakers: You’ll come to do good and you’ll do very well.
And now these seven non-profits want $50-million—golly! (And wouldn’t you love to be the fly-on-a-wall when the Executive Directors gather in a smoke-free room to cut up the dough?) Think of how many people will have to be hired to serve as the cut-outs for that government largesse. APANO got to handle the pass-through from the government of $1.5 million in direct assistance during the pandemic. Who got the money? Don’t bother asking.
That $100-million will have absolutely no real impact on preventing nut-jobs like the kids in Texas and New York from shooting up schools—although outfits like APANO would like to lump that under, “…the most recent symptom of white supremacy enacted through political and violent force.” They’re careful not to mention the carnage in Uvalde—wrong color-scheme—and they lean heavily on…
Oregon, which has a shameful legacy of white supremacy, now ranks sixth in the nation for violent extremist attacks.
Funny thing about that rating. It was generated by our Secretary of State, Shemia “Scylla and Charybdis” Fagan, in a report titled, lest you miss the point…
Oregon Can Do More to Mitigate the Alarming Risk of Domestic Terrorism and Violent Extremist Attacks
The report, 25 colorful pages, managed to write thousands of words without a single mention of the word, “Antifa.” As for the one actual death in Portland’s long summer of riots, the report manages to fudge it…
During one clash between ideologically opposed groups, a far-left extremist shot and killed a member of the opposing group.
No mention of the 100 nights of Antifa laying seige to the federal building; nor any mention of the attacks on the police union; no mention of a mob attacking the mayor’s apartment building; no words spent on downtown’s broken windows, looting.
The Report’s timeline happily mingles stuff like the January 6th riot/insurrection at the nation’s capitol with long-ago incidents such as 2016’s…
Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon is occupied by an armed group of far-right extremists.
…where the occupation was handled peacefully, excepting one of the cowboys who got bushwhacked by cops in what looked, to viewers of the tapes, a bit extra-judicial.
And how many domestic violent extremism cases (DVE’s in the initial-laden report) has violent little Oregon piled up?
22 domestic violent extremism incidents in Oregon between 2011 and 2020
11 domestic violent extremism incidents in 2020 alone in Oregon.
Let’s take a deep breath and recall that…
Our local district attorney routinely blows out cases of people arrested for rioting;
The city made a big deal of cutting its ties with the FBI and the national anti-terrorism consortium;
The effort to, essentially, destroy the Portland police was successful;
The political extremism that resulted in renaming high schools, tearing down statues…even the elk!… was supported by virtually every member of the progressive machine;
One of the current Democratic candidate for governor’s legislative staff was arrested for rioting and got a pass to a bigger and better job.
Let’s also note that Oregon has plenty of bureaucrats engaged in combating this white supremacy stuff. There’s the Oregon Homeland Security Council…
The membership of the council consists of:
(a) Four members from the Legislative Assembly appointed as follows: (A) Two members from the Senate appointed by the President of the Senate; and (B) Two members from the House of Representatives appointed by the Speaker of the House of Representatives;
(b) The Governor;
(c) The Adjutant General;
(d) The Superintendent of State Police;
(e) The Director of the Oregon Department of Emergency Management;
(f) A representative of the Department of Justice appointed by the Attorney General;
(g) The State Resilience Officer;
(h) The State Fire Marshal;
(i) The Director of the Department of Public Safety Standards and Training;
(j) The Director of the Oregon Health Authority;
(k) The Director of Transportation;
(L) The State Forester;
(m) The Director of the Department of Corrections;
(n) The Superintendent of State Police;
(o) One member appointed by the Governor to act as a senior policy advisor for emergency operations;
(p) A representative of the Oregon TITAN Fusion Center with the ability to organize and explain mission critical information, appointed by the Attorney General; and
(q) Additional members appointed by the Director of the Oregon Department of Emergency Management as the director may deem necessary.
And there’s an agency in the state’s Justice department with the Orwellian title of the Oregon TITAN Fusion Center, which …
…processes information related to threats in order to detect, prevent and respond to criminal and terrorist activity.
Funny thing about that TITAN Fusion stuff. Back in 2021, as KOIN reported…
A group of Indigenous rights, social justice and environmental advocates filed the lawsuit in Salem on Tuesday against the state DOJ over its operation called the Oregon TITAN Fusion Center.
The lawsuit claims the project issued baseless reports on environmental advocates and Indigenous groups after they peacefully protested Jordan Cove LNG, a now-abandoned fossil fuel pipeline operation, and coordinated with a PR firm hired by the corporation behind that project.
Which, if you bother giving it more than a moment’s thought, is precisely the problem with this loose talk about more government surveillance.
Who does the surveilling?
Who gets surveilled?
Spend $100-million and find out.
The ominously titled "TITAN Fusion Center" was actually a pretty smart clearinghouse for actual 'law enforcement intelligence', before those three words became dirty and unspeakable. Now it is verboten, unless the state is using it pursue unvirtuous non-leftists.
Before it became polluted by Ellen Rosenblum, the Fusion Center was a clearinghouse for bad things before they actually broke out.
Taxpayer money would be better spent on curbing a known threat to Portland's black and brown residents than on managing a hypothetical one. By that, of course, I am referring to gang violence, which on the whole is perpetrated by and against people of color. The conventional wisdom is that today gang members and homeless people commit most of Portland's homicides. This is not unprecedented. Portland was assaulted by a wave of gang violence in the 1980. What is new is the failure of our elected leaders to acknowledge Portland has gang problem, much less use law enforcement to combat it.
As far as City Hall's leading gang denier is concerned, the city's gun violence problem, which includes people being shot dead on the streets of Portland in gang-related incidents, has been solved. Jo Ann Hardesty and Multnomah County Commissioner Jessica Vega Pederson provided a cheery sendoff to 2021 on December 1 in their Portland Tribune piece titled "Our View: Portland Isn't Dying." Among other things, they wrote: "To address gun violence, we invested in a public health response defined by community-based organizations and upstream, culturally responsive interventions."
Readers can be forgiven for not having the slightest notion what "upstream, culturally responsive interventions" are or how they get gang members off the street. What is clear is that law enforcement has no role to play.
Though neither Hardesty nor Pederson volunteered details of their response to gun violence, in an undated document published in the past eight months or so Multnomah County went to great lengths to detail their $4.6 "investment in new gun violence prevention strategies."
The five-page "New Gun Violence Prevention Investments" opens with a statement of guiding principles, the first of which is:
"At the forefront is inclusively leading with race, which is already a core value at Multnomah County. We know that gun violence disproportionately impacts BIPOC communities. And these proposals are intended to focus on serving those individuals."
How well does the County's gun-violence prevention initiative serve a target audience that is disproportionately harmed by gang killings? Well, for one thing, the word "gang" appears only four times in the 1,668-word document; "gangs" is not used once. Secondly, of the 12 "investments" approved by the county, only three of them have anything to do with gangs. Let's see what they entail:
Elevate Program Expansion - $500,000
"The County will expand our Elevate program to 18-25 year old young men in the Latinx
and African Immigrant Community for those impacted by gang involvement and gun
violence. This will provide community support and resources to an additional 50 justice
involved individuals, including peer support, skill building, cognitive behavioral therapy,
and culturally responsive services. This will also provide opportunities to partner with
national experts to build out culturally responsive programming for this population of
justice involved individuals."
Community-Based Mental Health Services for Children and Families - $160,000
"Multnomah County is seeing an increase in gang violence, shootings and homicides.
This is predominantly affecting our African American Community. In 2020 there were 55
homicides in Portland alone. By October 2020 nearly 173 people have been struck by
gunfire and there have been over 595 shootings. This is nearly twice as much as the
same time period last year. Almost half of those most impacted identify as African
American in spite of the fact that the overall population of the Portland area is 8 percent
African American. There is an urgent need for helping to heal the African American
community that has borne the brunt of violence and loss. This offer proposes the
addition of a KSA African American Mental Health Consultant for the Direct Clinical
Services unit to serve gang impacted young adults and their families."
Gun Violence Behavioral Health Response Team - $1,200,000
"This seven member team will be composed of clinicians and peers and provide services
for gang impacted youth and families. Their goal is to address the increased community
violence we’ve seen as a result of the pandemic. The team will work closely with DCJ’s
Juvenile Services Division and use therapeutic interventions to address underlying
needs."
Adding the expenditures reveals the County initiative's most obvious advantage over the nonprofits' white-supremacy money grab. It makes more sense to spend a mere $1,860,000 to deal with the BIPOC community's known gang-violence problem than to scatter $100 million to the wind in search of solutions to a speculative threat.
I will leave it to others with more training, knowledge and experience in the field of fighting gangs to evaluate the three programs and predict their likelihood of success. But one does not need to be an expert in criminal justice to point out that it will be difficult to know whether the programs have been successful unless they have sound policies, procedures, internal controls, well-defined objectives and reasonable performance targets AND someone - preferably the County auditor - looks at each "investment" regularly and reports the results to the public, elected officials and the media.
Speaking of well-defined objectives and reasonable performance targets, it's worth remembering the old saying in management self-help books that what gets measured gets managed or, according to other sources, gets done. If the Multnomah County commissioners who spent $4.6 million of our money to reduce firearms violence put the nonprofits on the spot by demanding that they state how many gun deaths they intended to prevent during the grant period, it is not at all apparent from the County's document. How will these organizations make demonstrable contributions to saving lives if they don't know it's their responsibility to do so?