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The Nonprofit Industrial Complex and the Corruption of the American City
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago> Yet nonprofit organizations are frequently the exact opposite of what they appear to be. As a consequence of the benefit of the doubt provided to nonprofits, there is rarely enough oversight to guarantee that they are doing what we pay them to do. This type of unaccountable grift is common in Seattle. During the height of BLM, the city gave lots of money and even public property to random organizations. Taxpayers hard earned money was not just diverted away from core city needs but not really tracked. The same has been true of unaccountable programs to combat homelessness (the “homeless-industrial complex”), with little in terms of metrics to understand what was happening. A lot of this happened because most citizens are too busy to keep track of these things, while activists push for spending on their ideological pet projects, and activist city leaders respond by handing out checks without any competitive process (picking sole winners of contracts) or real public input (hearings are swarmed by activists and held at inaccessible times and the general public isn’t even aware they’re happening). Some example sources to read more: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/state-auditor-finds-bare-minimum-of-accountability-for-seattle-city-councils-black-brilliance-project/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/state-aud... https://sccinsight.com/2021/07/29/the-black-brilliance-research-project-beginning-to-end-part-4/ https://sccinsight.com/2021/07/29/the-black-brilliance-resea... https://roominate.com/blog/2016/anatomy-of-a-swindle/ https://roominate.com/blog/2016/anatomy-of-a-swindle/
- kreelman 2y agoThis happens in Australia too. The nursing home industry here seems a little like what the article outlined for the United States. Like anything, there are good and bad examples. Seems inevitable that there is some corruption in the spirit of it. Don't know how you'd police that.... TLDR on the article. I'll markov summarise it and see if it thought of some ways around the bad players.
- hiddencost 2y agoMeh. I don't believe you. I serious doubt a bit of money for black people is breaking the bank for a city the size of Seattle.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoWell you might view it like that, but to me our taxed money is earned by hard work and seeing it wasted on someone’s political goals or activism or grift is offensive to me. And the city doesn’t have money - it’s about to close like 20 schools because of it. And much of the city is ridden with potholes and missing basics like sidewalks. The police force is less than half the size it is supposed to be. The fire department is heavily staffed by volunteers. https://komonews.com/news/local/seattle-public-schools-sps-elementary-schools-2025-2026-100-million-annual-budget-gap-65-percent-capacity-student-teacher-ratios-final-recommendation-superintendent-brent-jones-utilization-consolidation https://komonews.com/news/local/seattle-public-schools-sps-e...
- vaidhy 2y agoYour disagreement with a policy does not make it corrupt. Being part of a democracy involves compromises and often times, you pick the battle you want to win. This article was about explicit corruption where the public funds are transferred into the hands of a few under dubious reasoning.
- zmgsabst 2y agoThey’re closing schools but transferred millions to racist grifters on dubious grounds in violation of public funding laws. And that’s ignoring such race-based policies are explicitly illegal under Washington law.
- zmgsabst 2y agoThis is taking money from hard working black people and giving it to a handful of racist grifters. Further, it deprives their schools, police, EMTs, etc of tax funding from the wider city to enrich grifters — and these are communities that already struggle with funding. Your comment only makes sense if you view “black people” as an amorphous blob, essentially defined by their ethnicity and not as individually distinct people. Yuck.
- pyuser583 2y agoThis article feels more like a piece of heavy journalism than a political op-ed. The facts it shares are fascinating and damning. I never thought I’d care so much about “Chilean Sea Bass.”
- WesternWind 2y agoNot badly written but it's poorly supported, and argued mainly from anecdote. There's no engagement with subject matter experts, there's cherry picking of data points, and the suggested solution isn't supported by provided data. It's like if I said, build systems are awful and too much dev time goes to maintaining them, a build system was almost used in a clever hack by a state level actor, Kevin Mitnick, a Convicted Felon, used Make when coding hacking tools he used in his crimes, build systems are a problematic abstraction and we should avoid unnecessary abstractions in coding, and therefore we should call compilers directly from the command line. Maybe we should do public social housing like this article suggests, I actually agree with that, but the above is hardly a measured article in support of that, anymore than I laid out a great case for invoking a compiler directly.
- selimthegrim 2y agoThis sounds like a late 80s Pravda article.
- burnished 2y agoIf true I think this should lead to charges and jail time, sounds lime fraud and embezzlement on a massive scale.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoWhat do you do when the “embezzlement” is supported by local elected leaders and not prosecuted by sympathetic / politically aligned city attorneys? There’s no real method to create accountability or enforce the law, and everyday people are too busy with work, family, etc to do anything much about it. That is if they even know it’s happening. That’s one problem with the death of local journalism and the general lack of time in everyone’s lives.
- joemazerino 2y agoGlad this is being written about. Too often non-profits get a pass on perceived altruism. BLM in particular has been egregious. Not a single positive thing or a dollar has been spent to actually improve black neighborhoods but the leaders have enriched themselves. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/black-lives-matter-apologies-mansion-b2056313.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/black-live... https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/04/black-lives-matter-6-million-dollar-house.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/04/black-lives-matter-6... Marilyn Mosby, Baltimore’s former top prosecutor and a BLM activist, was convicted of perjury and fraudulently claiming Covid hardship to get tens of thousands of dollars for her vacation homes. https://thepostmillennial.com/no-jail-time-for-former-dem-baltimore-prosecutor-convicted-of-perjury-mortgage-fraud https://thepostmillennial.com/no-jail-time-for-former-dem-ba... A BLM activist who was the diversity executive at Facebook and Nike has been sentenced to more than five years in prison for stealing over $5 million. https://thepostmillennial.com/diversity-exec-scams-facebook-nike-out-of-millions-in-elaborate-fraud-scheme https://thepostmillennial.com/diversity-exec-scams-facebook-...
- superb_dev 2y agoWere they just “BLM activists” or did they hold actual power in a BLM org? Only the latter seems relevant
- tick_tock_tick 2y agoThey are the BLM org now you might not view that org as being legitimately "in-charge" of the BLM movement but cities and politicians giving money sure did.
- pseudalopex 2y agosuperb_dev was asking about the 2 people joemazerino called BLM activists probably. Marilyn Mosby is not an organization. I found no connection to any BLM organization. It seems some people call her a BLM activist because she prosecuted the police officers involved in Freddie Gray's death. Barbara Furlow-Smiles is not an organization. I found no connection to any BLM organization. joemazerino copied a sentence Andy Ngo wrote about her. Why Ngo called her a BLM activist was not clear. Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation is not in charge of the BLM movement regardless of how many politicians or reporters they confused. And The Movement for Black Lives raised more money.
- hiddencost 2y ago[flagged]
- smogcutter 2y agoMeanwhile in Orange County, County supervisor Andrew Do has apparently stolen millions in Covid relief funds via the “Viet America Society”, a do-nothing nonprofit nominally run by his daughter. https://laist.com/news/politics/orange-county-andrew-do-supervisors-viet-america-society-deadline https://laist.com/news/politics/orange-county-andrew-do-supe...
- polynomial 2y agoDidn't Orange County go bankrupt at least once?
- serf 2y agoyeah in 94, and the reasons were ridiculous.[0] [0]: https://merage.uci.edu/~jorion/oc/case.html https://merage.uci.edu/~jorion/oc/case.html
- throwaway2037 2y agoWiki says: > In 1994, an investment fund meltdown led to the criminal prosecution of treasurer Robert Citron. The county lost at least $1.5 billion through high-risk investments in bonds. The loss was blamed on derivatives by some media reports.[46] On December 6, 1994, the County of Orange declared Chapter 9 bankruptcy,[46] from which it emerged on June 12, 1996.[47] The Orange County bankruptcy was at the time the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.[46]
- 1oooqooq 2y ago> orange county > mr citron is Disney writing this?
- fblp 2y agoThis seems like similar market conditions that led to First Republics collapse (over investment on long term bonds that lose value when interest rates go up)
- DoreenMichele 2y agoNonprofits that self-righteously declare themselves providers of homeless services actively lobby to make homelessness worse in order to increase their own funding This is unfortunately all too true. A primary root cause of homelessness is lack of affordable housing. We should be working towards policies and solutions that foster more "market rate" affordable housing, not affordable housing via government programs or nonprofit organizations.
- Rinzler89 2y agoFor over 20+ years I've been hearing people and politicians talking about "affordable housing" and in that time, the gap between housing price increases and wage increases has only gone up, along with wealth inequality, that I'm tired of hearing even more talks, as I already know where this is going: nowhere. Housing will get more expensive and the rich will keep getting richer, as per usual, while the politicians will keep making vague empty political promises about housing affordability when the election time comes. I'm not holding my breath this will be solved ever in my lifetime, unless war or a violent revolution resets the monopoly board.
- barfbagginus 2y agoWork to bring about Revolution, don't just hope for it.
- amanaplanacanal 2y agoThe problem with revolution is that when it comes, you won’t be in charge. The person who is willing to be the most violent and ruthless will be.
- Rinzler89 2y agoExactly this. It's why the former communist countries had nothing to do with Karl Marx's communism and why people say "real communism has never been tried". Those "communists" who came to power there didn't distribute the wealth to the people, but came to power to pocket it themselves by replacing the monarchies who had all the wealth and power previously to them, but still kept the folk enslaved at gunpoint. You basically switched one undemocratic oppressive regime with another and the average folk kept getting the short stick both times. So be careful when you wish for major revolutions. Doesn't necessarily mean that with new management, things will always turn out better for you this time. Doesn't mean you should stick to the status quo and never try to change things either.
- roenxi 2y agoThe more subtle problem here is actually the idea of governments giving public money to nonprofits at all. The government doesn't need to be involved in this; the non-profit is already providing the organisational oomph to work out what needs to be done where and pooling contributor's funds. But the government's contribution here is organisation and pooling funding, so there is massive redundancy in mission. The only thing the government is providing is compulsorily forcing people to pay into the pool. So the fact that money is being spent on things that people wouldn't willingly commit to is actually the only feature of this system. IE, it is less unexpected than the author may believe.
- phendrenad2 2y agoThis is enlightening. I've long suspected that people's ire toward Dean Preston et al. was misguided, and that the entire political apparatus, from end to end, was compromised by a loose confederacy of regulatory captors. It's like a hydra, if you manage to cut off one of the arms the others will ensure that it has room to regrow.
- benzible 2y agoIn case you're wondering where this is coming from, see: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-new-trumpist-magazine-debuts-at-the-harvard-club https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-new-trumpist-maga... (https://archive.is/ymp9I https://archive.is/ymp9I)
- MilStdJunkie 2y agoAuthor Jon Ireland AKA "SwannMarcus" on Xitter, incidentally. As my uncle might have said, "Whuff. That's a good 'un".
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- j7ake 2y agoWhat a revealing and detailed article. I’m subscribed
- wnc3141 2y agoI think the general rule of thumb is, wherever money moves to, people will absorb it - in the same way bacteria or fungi absorbs biological material. This is not often greed but the result of a chaotic system of (mostly) rational actors trying to eek out a living. This can not only be seen by the masters degrees available - (higher ed. Administration , healthcare administration , etc.) but also ironically by those higher education institutions themselves. As student financing dollars go toward schools, people are there to absorb those dollars through employment in higher education and it's ecosystem. One could argue the merits of having decades of student future salaries garnished to subsidize employment at these institutions, but try explaining that to someone with a career in higher education. This is just one example of the push and pull of providing employment compared to the mandate of efficient production. Of course the stakeholders funding institutions must decide the merits of employment programs (in the form of non profits) vs. the merits of the production of the institution. The answer, being complex may only be born though strong citizen engagement in civic processes where one advocates for and directs the mandate of that institution.
- throwworhtthrow 2y agoEke, not eek.
- 1oooqooq 2y agowhy go that far? did you ever sit down an economic course? under or grad, doesn't matter. specially if it is focused on development policies or econometry. its all a joke. they have just enough math that the average person struggles, then they drop the last steps and approximate everything in a way that completely defeats the purpose of using math at all! its all just to hand wave while pretending to be a science. they still base all econometry knowledge on crap like the RAND workforce study (1960) or something. it's all a cult full of useful idiots who think they are making a difference because they laboured up to 80% of a couple derivatives. but on the end, it does work for race to the bottom after short term profits. so...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- wnc3141 2y agoJust noting the tilt of the article, "American Affairs Journal" was founded explicitly to be a conservative platform.
- baggy_trough 2y agoThe horror of it all!
- throwaway115 2y agoWhat's your own political tilt, so that I can "just note" it?
- wnc3141 2y agoIt's important to note the tilt of opinion pieces that color issues of civic concern in any direction.
- throwaway115 2y agoCan you not evaluate the contents of an article on their own merit, without first biasing yourself for or against the author? Of everything the article mentions, you seem to think it being on a "conservative platform" is the most noteworthy.
- brynb 2y ago“just noting” that this has no relevance to a sober and objective review of the points made within. i sometimes think that we’re lucky we still have two sides of the aisle in this country. i constantly think we ought to aspire to more
- pkaye 2y agoI know some people call it the Homeless Industrial Complex here in California.
- TMWNN 2y agoThere is absolutely a homeless-industrial complex (HIC). The city of San Francisco spends $70,000 annually per homeless person![0] The homeless there are homeless because severe mental and addiction issues cause them to reject help, not because resources aren't available. And no, weather is not the most important reason for why so many homeless come here. If it were, San Diego would have a worse homeless problem than San Francisco. The most important difference is that the city of San Diego spends one third as much as San Francisco per homeless person. ($46.8 million in city spending[1] for an estimated 1900 homeless.[2]) The HIC uses every virtue-signaling, heart-tugging propaganda tool at its disposal to increase the flow of money thrown into its bottomless maw, despite no metric ever improving one bit whatsoever. [0] <https://abc7news.com/sf-homeless-plan-housing-all-san-francisco-supervisor-rafael-mandelman/12760671/ https://abc7news.com/sf-homeless-plan-housing-all-san-franci...> [1] <https://www.lajollalight.com/news/story/2023-04-15/san-diego-mayors-proposed-budget-includes-millions-more-to-address-homelessness-and-streets https://www.lajollalight.com/news/story/2023-04-15/san-diego...> [2] <https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-02-07/downtown-homeless-population-reaches-another-high https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-02-07/downtown...> [3] [3] The count is only of the homeless in downtown San Diego. While presumably most homeless San Diegans are there, just as there are very few San Franciscans living on the sidewalk in Pac Heights, the point is that a larger number would mean that much less spending per homeless person in the city as a whole, and that much more glaring a discrepancy between the two cities.
- tensor 2y agoIn case anyone is curious. This outfit has a right center bias, but is generally credible. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/american-affairs-journal/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/american-affairs-journal/
- sour-taste 2y agoOnce you read past the first few sections that becomes exceedingly obvious. It basically turns into a rant.
- mediumdeviation 2y agoI don’t think I’ve ever seen a right winger advocate for “increasing state capacity and improving the government’s ability to solve problems itself”
- kbenson 2y agoReally? I find that for some people the only criteria they need for a stance, whichever side they're on, is just to know how to stand so they're opposite the other side.
- rob74 2y agoYup, especially this section sounds very true to brand: > nonprofit organizations hire convicted felons—including murderers, gang leaders, sex offenders, and rapists—who go on to commit more felonies ...because a criminal conviction is always 100% correct and should disqualify the person from ever being given a chance again, right? And of course, all of them will inevitably commit more felonies, after all they are born evil, they can't help it...
- twic 2y agoThe whole bit about "violence interrupters" being ex-cons, as if that was bad, when in practice that's a required qualification.
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- unix_fan 2y agoThis is extremely common in Third World countries, where I come from. In my view, both nonprofits and large religious organizations attract the same kind of people. People who want to create their own little thiefdom, by taking advantage of peoples faith and Good will.
- 1oooqooq 2y agoexactly. being from the periphery of world economies, this right wing rant reads like "you can't do in my backward what we do in Africa".
- yegle 2y agoI recently learned the concept of B Corp (a type of for-profit corporation ) that is closer to what most people think a nonprofit is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_%28certification%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_%28certification...
- 1oooqooq 2y agosame, with one more layer. this is iso9000 but for eco-conscious consumers instead of investors. want to sell the torment Nexus, but need wholefoods to place it next to the organic avocados? bcorp was made exactly for this. just pay certification to this non profit. *shrugemoji
- niemandhier 2y agoI believe that this can be solved least for housing. If you construct a housing cooperative that has the following properties the entity should be incentivized to maximize the number of housing units: 1. Each tenant must own shares of the coop. 2. Shares per member are capped. 3. Profit must be reinvested 4. New shares can only be issued for new units build. Rather than subsidizing rent, the government can subsidize the building of new housing, the corresponding shares can be handed over to new tenants. Since tenants are shareholders, the system stabilizes at a point where rent and living conditions are acceptable. In Germany this type of construction is called a “Wohnungsgenossenschaft”, and receives some tax incentives. Currently about 3 Million people are living in flats provided like this. It’s probably one of the only working pieces of socialism.
- throwaway2037 2y agoHat tip: Wiki/English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_cooperative#Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_cooperative#Germany New York City also has co-ops but for very different reasons: To screen potential owners.
- _nalply 2y agoSo some entities call themselves "nonprofit" but are shady enterprises. By calling themselves "nonprofit" they get some relaxation like tax breaks. They enjoy public trust. After all they are in business for higher purposes. Are they? In Switzerland there's the "Stiftungsaufsicht". That's a supervision office for trusts. Does the USA and its states know such institutes? The IRS should be really interested in not granting tax breaks to profit-oriented organizations masquerading as nonprofits.
- nsajko 2y ago> some entities call themselves "nonprofit" but are shady enterprises Aren't most?
- wahern 2y agoIn the US charitable trusts are usually supervised by state attorneys general, roughly similar to how foundations are overseen in Europe, IIUC.[1][2] But the non-profits discussed in this article aren't trusts, but charitable corporations. Similar to this, I believe: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemeinn%C3%BCtzige_GmbH https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemeinn%C3%BCtzige_GmbH Their treatment is much closer to regular business entities in terms of scrutiny of administration and expenditures, so long as expenditures nominally serve the charitable purpose, and it's really only the taxing authority who cares one way or another. [1] I'm relying on https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiftung https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiftung [2] In practice oversight of charitable trusts is minimal unless someone complains and there are resources to investigate. As is typical in common law jurisdictions, the rule is ask for forgiveness, not permission. Charitable trusts are typically only scrutinized when a beneficiary complains, AFAIU. Anyhow, at least in the US charitable trusts are basically just a large pile of assets with an administrator who writes checks to charitable corporations, so there's not much to oversee and illicit self-dealing is relatively less common.
- EarthAmbassador 2y ago600,000 homeless times $10,000 per tiny home, clustered where social services are made available, voila, the problem is solved for $6 billion, which is nothing, excluding the cost of those social services. The issue is really there is a lack of genuine desire to solve the problem because the cruelty and baked-in lies within American self-reliance philosophy put such a solution outside the Overton window of what is possible. Instead of a one-time investment, we dump more than $6 billion into the problem but never solve it.
- JohnMakin 2y agoThrowing money and houses at the problem has failed many, many times before. “just put a bunch of houses where social services are” is profoundly unrealistic. are there any areas that aren’t already developed heavily that would even qualify? social services are already criminally underfunded. Even if you could do this for your extremely underestimated price tag, getting the “chronically” homeless (the people on the street we typically imagine as the homeless) to maintain a property without being a nuisance to neighbors and actually use the social services would require an entirely new social service of its own, with legions case workers being assigned to people, etc. I’m not saying we shouldn’t build more cheap housing near social services, but I think statements like this profoundly underestimate and trivialize a problem that goes very deep - namely, the complete lack of societal safety nets and access to quality healthcare, all of which is exacerbated by a lack of housing.
- lupusreal 2y agoYou make it sound so simple, but the devil is in the details. You've not even gone into the high level details, let alone the low level details. Each level adds more complexity and more cost. At the highest level, obviously the problem can't be solved with a one time purchase of 600k homes. The homes will be worn out and require replacing, some of them very rapidly, and their number will need to grow with time as new people requiring homes come to the city or drop out of regular housing. How many more homes do you need to build each year after the initial batch? Furthermore, this number of homes has an infrastructure cost which isn't captured in your 10k figure. How much does it cost to hook each one into the grid, water and sewage? Without these they will be spoiled immediately. And what of the land cost? Tiny homes aren't usually high rises, so you'll be creating tiny home suburban sprawl. Where do you put it? It should be close to city services, otherwise you might as well make it a camp in the wilderness. But it would be an inefficient use of space close to the city where land is generally valuable, and the cost of the land needs to be factored into it. Furthermore you need to consider the impact to property values this housing project will have. Reduced property values means reduced revenue, from property taxes, from the city. This should be included in the cost of the project when proposing it.
- darth_avocado 2y agoThis can all be solved if non profits are forced to transparently show where the money is spent. And before anyone says, they already do, they don’t. With the current rules you’re only required to show the numbers on how much money was “spent” on the cause, but not how. Meaning, for example you could claim 60% of the $100k budget went to providing services to the homeless, but in reality all that money was paid as salary to a person who gave the homeless haircuts, and the value of services received by the homeless could just be worth $2000. Such obfuscation allows charities to waste a lot of money on self enrichment.
- michael9423 2y agoYou solve this by dissolving all non-profits and seperating the state and the private sector completely. All tax money must be spent by government organizations or call for bids. Something like this should be illegal: https://www.vox.com/recode/22321861/jeff-bezos-climate-earth-fund-andrew-steel-amazon https://www.vox.com/recode/22321861/jeff-bezos-climate-earth... First, Bezos steals money from hard-working employees and tax payers. Then he takes billions and funnels them into climate politics that no tax payer asked for.
- seanmcdirmid 2y agoWhy should Bezos spending his own money on climate change be illegal? A non-profit simply is distinguished by the lack of profit. Since the USA only taxes profit for corporations, that means no taxes, but anyone could set one up to varying degrees of success. Employee salaries and any company they invest in that is for profit are still taxed normally.
- michael9423 2y agoBecause the people pouring billions into policy changes that should be done transparently by tax-payer money also are the same who make the world an objectively worse place by creating a toxic work culture that leads to mental health decline, suffering, etc. and argue that you can't pay a worker more than a given amount and then as a consequence amazon workers can't even afford health care. But for some reason this system where money is "so tight" suddenly leads to billions in profit that can be just thrown away into unrelated activities independent from the company amazon. This is basically circumventing democracy. Money from publicly traded corporations is drained where it would be needed into activities that manipulate the public and don't have political oversight. It's especially ironic, as Bezos says "We will emphasize social justice, as climate change disproportionately hurts poor and marginalized communities.” Well, how about starting with "social justice" in your own company.
- sour-taste 2y agoThis article decries basically all nonprofits. This is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There are very effective and important nonprofits out there, just like there are scammy ones. The solution is to set constraints on which non profits the city is allowed to contract with. Limit executive pay to no more than 5% of income, limit overhead to no more than 15%, set contract benchmarks for performance by objective metrics and you can weed out the bad actors. My fear is that, as the article (IMO correctly) points out politicians and the bad actors are making too much money for this system to be implemented.
- komali2 2y ago> 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. This article is comingling vastly different political ideologies. Very few anarchists would have any interest in engaging the political system to solve problems, since most anarchists believe the political system is one of the systems originating the problems society faces today. There is an alignment between anarchists, socialists, leftists, progressives, and even some liberals (very few!) in police abolitionism, but only because the police are so wildly out of control in the USA that it's easy to align along the general idea of "starting over." And even then, liberals seem to be performative in this support - as soon as students started protesting genocide against Palestinians, liberals predictably started asking why the police aren't out there brutalizing these "student terrorists." Anti-houseless spikes painted with a rainbow flag. > 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. In my opinion a total mischaracterization. Leftists and DSA types absolutely support centralized state power and socialization / nationalization - go read their takes on public transit and public housing. This whole article is describing neoliberal politicians allowing capitalists to do capitalism however they please, which is in line with neoliberal ideology. San Francisco is the best example of the failure of neoliberal ideology, and just because it's a city full of dirty anarchists doesn't mean said dirty anarchists have any political power - SF is politically neoliberal through and through. > What is taking place in America’s most performatively socialist urban areas is that taxes are constantly raised in order to fund public services I don't understand where the author gets the idea that American urban areas are "performatively socialist" from a politician standpoint. American politicians in every city are famously, painfully neoliberal. Eric Adams mischaracterizing and verbally attacking peaceful protesters. London Breed called the cops on a homeless guy she saw laying on a bench. Ted Wheeler pathetically tried to co-opt Black Lives Matter protests before being roundly rejected and then sending the cops to brutalize peaceful protesters. American urban politicians are not socialist nor are they performatively so. > where “socialists” privatize government services at every opportunity; I just don't see this happening. I see neoliberal Democrats doing this, but never avowed socialists. Happy to be corrected. So far as I know even SF has only ever had one avowed socialist politician, Chesa Boudin, and as soon as he was elected every politician in the city banded together to tank his career. Never has such as microscope been pointed at a District Attorney, with predictable results. Everyone was happy to take a potshot and cash in on the socialist under whom violent crime was dropping and who was prosecuting an "unusually high" volume of cases. At least the author isn't leaning into the privatization and pointing out the obvious issues this is causing. I would be interested in seeing an analysis on how leftist ideology offering actual solutions is being co-opted by neoliberals serving the same cause as the reactionaries they run against every election.
- mistermann 2y agoSee also: - freedom - democracy Lots of people are able to laugh at people who believe in the "freedom!" meme of America, but almost no one can do the same for "democracy". If there was a list of most powerful magic words, Democracy would be very close to the top of the list, right along God and Science.
- idiot-savant 2y agononprofit organizations hire convicted felons—including murderers, gang leaders, sex offenders, and rapists—who go on to commit more felonies while receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in government contracts; LOL, what a big pile of bullshit.
- romafirst3 2y agoNonprofits in the USA are basically failings in government. Non profits at their best provide services that any half decent government should provide but do it at a fraction of the efficiency that the government could. At their worst they are private individuals spending tax payers money (that’s what tax breaks actually are) on personal causes and self enrichment. That’s why it’s interesting seeing a right wing publication advocating for fewer non profits, I’m all for it. Cut tax breaks for non profits, reduce funding of non profits and fund government to provide the services.
- tptacek 2y agoI sort of believe the thesis behind this piece, but it's written so viciously that I have trouble taking it seriously. For instance, however ineffective the "Freedom Project" in Seattle is, its finance director, who "once shot up a man’s house as an intimidation tactic to prevent him from snitching on Howell’s drug dealing", did so 20 years ago, served his sentence, went to college, then grad school at Penn State, and started a career. It seems extraordinarily unlikely that the crimes he committed when he was 21 have much of an impact on "Freedom Project" now. The author knows that, but includes the innuendo anyways, which makes me think he can't make a better case than that. Ick.
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- scrubs 2y agoWhether viciously written or no, isn't the salient question: why give tax payer dollars to non profits if either (a) no net low cost housing built (b) the customers of non profit are displeased.
- mattmaroon 2y agoYes, and think how much more convincing the argument would be if it relied on its merits (which are substantial) rather the what amounts to ad hominems.
- tptacek 2y agoYes. This. I think the writing is doubly despicable for discrediting an important argument I agree with. Also I'm irked that the author has so little respect for his readers that he thinks none of them will Google any of the names in his piece.
- mattmaroon 2y agoYeah. I am sure that arguments that appeal to people like us might be somewhat different than once that appeal to the general public, but this seems like the kind of argument that is aimed at people like us. I have done a good amount of work with not for profits in the last 10 years and have definitely seen a small piece of the dark side of the industry that he is talking about.
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- mrcartmeneses 2y agoThe key problem here is that by privatising government services in the form of a non-profit there ceases to be proper democratic oversight of the organisations involved. The possible solutions are therefore very obvious, either bring these services back into direct local government control or in the case of a tenants association require it to be tenant-owned and democratically governed.
- arethuza 2y agoYou can also have social housing operated separately from central/local government control but have a strong regulator - this is how it works in Scotland.
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- smeej 2y agoI had to make a personal rule awhile ago about not supporting nonprofits that are trying to solve an issue that could actually be made worse. The incentives are too misaligned. You can't count on people to do "the right thing" on a large scale at the expense of doing "the right thing" at the scale of caring for their own/their family's livelihood. One of the few organizations that made the cut for me is Hearts of Joy International. They help arrange lifesaving heart surgery for small children who have Down Syndrome, usually paying for the patient and one parent to travel from Uganda or the Philippines to India for the surgery. There really isn't a way to use policy to cause more children to be born with heart defects and Down Syndrome. Nobody's at fault when that happens, and the young child who needs the surgery is as innocent as it gets. Tangentially, I made another personal rule against supporting nonprofits that do their fundraising by focusing on how "evil" their opponents are and how dangerous things would be if the other side "wins." That's meant not supporting certain organizations even when I agree with them that what their opponents are doing is evil. I just don't trust that any organization can overcome evil by focusing on the evil. Too many things can be justified in a "battle against evil." If you want to win, you have to be focused on the good you can do, not the evil you prevent.
- kayo_20211030 2y agoI agree in general, but non-profits themselves have very little to do with the argument, which seems to be that the outsourcing of what should be rightly considered government services for the common good results in gross and unpunished waste. Whether the organization receiving the public largesse is for-profit or a non-profit seems beside the point. Government administrations, at all levels, have abdicated their responsibilities to the citizens, by indulging in this form of wasteful theater. A perfect and horrendous confluence of neo-liberal and faux-progressive ideologies has led us to where we now stand.
- 6510 2y agoI regularly visualize what monumental undertaking it must have been to run a country with a paper administration. Today we have applications a million times more complex running on low end boxes. Small countries don't even compare to the big tech user database. It seems what little arguments the abdication had going for it self require a context before 1990.
- kayo_20211030 2y agoIt goes a long way back. Quote from Reagan's inaugural address > "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." This is from the bloke that's taking charge of said government, and all of its executive capacity. It makes no sense. But, he never really did. Why vilify your own organization, and its essential responsibility to its citizens? It probably won't work out well.