Ripped From the Headlines

Reading between the lines: new charter shenanigans, a columnist's second thoughts; a new Instagram star, a skeptical look at nonprofits.

The coup d’etat in City Hall

Under this typical headline…

..our Dinosaur Media once again proves it doesn’t have a clue about the transition to the new, radical, time-bomb city charter. Which, one might remind local editors, won’t kick in until Jan. 1, 2025. Even though the inner government is busy-busy greasing the skids.

Showing some stones for the first time in four years, the mayor of Portland unilaterally changed the current city charter (one, we predict, we’ll look back upon fondly one day). He grabbed every single scrap of the city’s cancerous bureaucracy for his very own. Given that just about everyone on city council (except for Wheeler) is running for the new charter’s generous paychecks, you might have expected the mayor to put it to a vote of the mayoral wannabes. Elsewhere, it’s called democracy.

Nope. Taking a page out of the Kate Brown manual for running the show, Wheeler just did it. Why? To rehearse that newfangled governmental lashup—and just maybe present the new crop of radical pols with a nifty fait accompli.

Wheeler and his bestie, city administrator Michael Jordan, have been busy fleshing out the new charter…adding tons of stuff that wasn’t mentioned in any of the advertising for the new adventure. Remember the line: the next mayor would “run” the city with the “help” of a professional city manager. A golden era would result.

And so the Wheler/Jordan combo came up with two additional layers of bureaucracy positioned between the mopes on the new city council (each member, remember, elected with no more than 25-percent of the vote) and the citizenry. As if this town needs yet another layer of insulation for the bureaucrats, the city manager will have seven deputies running “clusters” of the old city bureaus (which we dissected here)…

…ready to respond when you want to get a pothole filled.

Good luck. (And doncha love that new cluster called “vibrant communities?” Whazzat?)

As with everything else in city politics, it’s right there in the fine print on the city’s self-congratulatory web page…

…which presumes that the new mayor will want Michael Jordan (and no one else) to help sculpt that budget. A cynic (or veteran of Portland’s opaque, clubby politics) might say that it’s a bare-nekkid play for the status quo and the kind of high-tax, low performance government that creatures such as Wheeler and Jordan (not to mention the other inmates of the progressive machine) have produced.

It’s also a transparent insurance play, just in case the low-turnout mouth-breathing voters of Portland—lured away from their pursuit of the best sour beer to vote against the monster Trump—might wise up and elect a candidate who advocates giving taxpayers (not to mention the law-abiding) a break.

And there’s Michael Jordan and his grinning cohorts waiting to greet him/her/they/ze’s agenda. We doubt that any of the announced candidates for mayor will have the stomach for that kind of bloodbath. If those jobs are covered by AFSCME, fugggedaboutit.

Media also missed another significant subtext: as the list of hopefuls grows, odds increase that the new voting scheme—we’re sure you understand it—will go “Alaska,”¹ and produce a victory for a long-shot who isn’t in the City Club/AFSME/Coalition of Communities of Color/racialist nonprofits blob.

We’re six months away from the presentation of a confusing ballot (with three separate voting schemes) to the voters, who will then have to rank candidates based on a zillion-page voter’s pamphlet and thin media coverage. Odd things are sure to happen, especially if the Rubio-Gonzalez race heats up (they’re already sniping). If Gonzalez voters bury Rubio on their ranked-choices (and vice-versa) and go for a comfortable, even amusing second choice…well, second-best will win.

Yah, you’ll be surprised.

As for that race—coverage of which no local media will be able to afford—the Oregonian reverted to old-style “horserace” coverage…

…with a by-the-book dispatch from city hall hitman Shane Dixon Kavanaugh…

Gonzalez and Rubio are seen as frontrunners in November’s contest due to their early fundraising advantages — $137,000 and $79,000, respectively — and institutional support.

…the Gonzio duo proclaimed as “frontrunners” by some mystical process of mental telepathy among political reporters. As for getting the nod because the duo can collect more dough from special interests and “institutions,” we think Kavanaugh ought to get out among actual voters more often.

Meanwhile, the charter charade finally got someone in city hall’s attention…

…yet another indication that..

• Media never got this figured out when it mattered—like a year ago (twelve new councilors to house? Each getting two offices? No problem!);

• …and they still seem oblivious that there will be a Dotty Dozen on the council who could care less what the former council—which they overthrew—might want them to do.

He said WHAT??!!!

Nick Kristoff is a New York Times columnist who, briefly, ran for governor of Oregon, and got kicked off the ballot by Secretary of State Shamia Fagan before she got hung out to dry for low-grade corruption and resigned.

Kristoff grew up on a farm in Yamhill, but Fagan wasn’t persuaded that he and his wife and kids lived there, since vacations don’t count. So he went back to the New York suburbs and continued filing boo-hoo columns, including some openly sympathetic to Hamas thuggery.

Imagine our surprise to encounter his latest…

…which reads like (take your pick)…

• A limited hang-out for drinking the progressive KoolAid…

• Or a hint that he’s thinking about taking another shot at Oregon’s big chair, having suspected that GuvTina is a one-termer.

Here are some tasty tidbits…

Centrist voters can reasonably ask: Why put liberals in charge nationally when the places where they have greatest control are plagued by homelessness, crime and dysfunction?

…liberals like me do need to face the painful fact that something has gone badly wrong where we’re in charge, from San Diego to Seattle. I’m an Oregonian who bores people at cocktail parties by singing the praises of the West, but the truth is that too often we offer a version of progressivism that doesn’t result in progress.

…and…

So my take is that the West Coast’s central problem is not so much that it’s unserious as that it’s infected with an ideological purity that is focused more on intentions than on oversight and outcomes.

…and…

…Portland was one mess we couldn’t blame on Republicans, because there simply aren’t many Republicans in Portland. This was our liberal mess.

…and…

We need to get our act together. Less purity and more pragmatism would go a long way. But perhaps the first step must be the humility to acknowledge our failures.

…which sounds like a rehearsal for an inaugural address. (And we hope that, unlike our current guv, he doesn’t announce his sexual preferences before getting to the business at hand.)

Instagram isn’t all pinups and snake-oil

…barely. Among the growing dreck on the thoroughly Zucked social media are bright spots worth interrupting your scrolling.

In our last post, we mentioned that Kevin Dahlgren (who surely deserves a Pulitzer for his relentless reportage on actual street-dwellers) was bounced by the platform…whereupon he was suddenly—no reason given—reinstated. And we’re glad to report that he’s back with more solid reporting than before. One harrowing report, a tour through a house turned into a surreal visual metaphor of doper-psychosis by squatters resembles a real-world horror movie…

…including a stairway (lower right) into a basement from hell. The tour was a collaboration with another brave photographer, Tara Faul, who goes by the handle of ghostportland, who’s now on our favorites list—and we recommend it for yours.

Ghostportland’s work is reminiscent of the work of one of America’s greatest photographers, Jacob Riis, whose work in the nation’s first progressive era (circa 1890) documented the plight of the urban destitute…

Ghostportland is just as unflinching, as she captures the inescapable fact that these are fellow citizens of the great and failing republic, victims of themselves and of our town’s curious desire to monetize their degradation.

We wonder if the progressives at the Portland Museum of Art will offer Dahlgren and Faul a proper show.

There’s money in those nonprofit hills (which look a lot like Mt. Tabor)

We’ve long been struck by the metastasizing nonprofit sector—our little town’s only true growth industry. So much government money chasing outfits that do…what? Yah, they have to file a federal IRS form 990 to keep their nonprofit status, but don’t bother digging around for current files; the IRS is notorious for not posting the information online and the form itself is, to be charitable, vague.

Our old editor’s nose smells a bad odor but, like something long forgotten in the back of a refrigerator, finding the source is beyond most local journalists’ pay grades.

One would do well to turn to the web for this story in American Affairs…

It’s behind a paywall, but you get a free look…

Choice nibbles…

Hearing that something is a “nonprofit” immediately gives a sense that the organization is trustworthy and the people running it are driven by a charitable agenda. It’s a word that shuts down the critical faculties and grants an instantaneous moral stature to any organization to which it is applied. Consequently, non­profits receive a benefit of the doubt that would not be granted to any other form of private corporation.

…and…

This money is then spent in ways that would shock the taxpayers whose hard-earned dollars are being effectively stolen from them. Non­profits that self-righteously declare themselves providers of homeless services actively lobby to make homelessness worse in order to increase their own funding…

…and…

This is the state of affairs in almost every city where “progressives” have a large impact on local politics. Progressives claim to support government spending programs, but also have an anarchistic, anti-governmental attitude that can be seen in their support for policies like police abolition in 2020. Although progressives want the government to fund public programs, their opposition to centralized state power means they often don’t want the government to run the programs being funded.

The cities progressives control therefore tend to underfund core government agencies in favor of “community-based organizations,” by which they mean NGOs and nonprofits. Once the government can no longer meet its responsibilities, progressive cities outsource those ser­vices to nonprofit organizations, effectively privatizing the government.

Portland and the county would be merely amusing—except that they are creaming off an obscene amount of money that might be deployed more usefully elsewhere, such as in rescuing the city from falling prey to rent-seeking industries, hustlers, bureaucrats, and self-dealers in the nonprofit industry.

Over and Out

1. Alaska, a reliably red state, elected as its only Congressperson a Democrat who came in a distant third in the first round of vote-counting. She won because the GOP was so polarized that no one who voted for their first-choice candidate was smart enough to rank their GOP rival second.