High crime, high energy prices and many left-wing non-profit organizations – Capital Research Center

Oakland, California, is home to a disproportionately large share of America's left-leaning nonprofits. Twenty-six of the most extreme examples have combined annual revenues of more than $566 million. That's $1,300 per year for each of Oakland's 435,000 residents, or $5,200 for each four-person household. It's hard to imagine any American city—with the anomalous exception of the capital—spending more per capita on left-leaning nonprofits than Oakland.

Here are the 26 groups and their most recently reported annual sales:

• Sierra Club (167,540,907 USD),
• Center for Movement Strategy (32,262,236 USD),
• Joint Counsel Foundation ($54,978,381),
• Dream Corps (53,488,309 USD),
• GuidelinesLink (46,107,101 USD),
• Faith in action ($37,999,794),
• org Education Fund (15,608,394 USD),
• Grid alternatives (23,149,824 USD),
• PowerSwitch promotion (12,685,553 USD),
• Center for Third World Organization ($9,361,552),
• Solidarity Network ($7,973,691),
• New energy nexus ($7,571,267),
• Choose Solar ($7,417,991),
• Asia-Pacific Environmental Network ($6,601,028),
• PSE Healthy Energy ($6,479,363),
• Solution project ($5,188,682),
• Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation ($4,684,554),
• Center for Sustainable Business Law (4,439,630 USD),
• Akonadi Foundation (4,336,703 USD),
• Center for Environmental Health ($3,772,383),
• Center for Media Justice ($3,618,412),
• Amazon Watch ($3,586,796),
• Anti-Police Terrorism Project ($2,692,549),
• East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy (1,972,251 USD),
• International Rivers (1,625,269 USD) and
• Critical resistance ($1,014,329).

Oakland has some real problems that these groups could address.

Crime chaos

In “The Fall of Oakland,” a story published in the Free Press in July, local reporter and resident Leighton Woodhouse began describing the recent and surreal lawlessness:

OAKLAND, Calif. — At about 4:30 a.m. on July 5, dozens of people broke through the front door of a gas station convenience store near Oakland International Airport. Over about 40 minutes, the mob looted tens of thousands of dollars worth of merchandise and stole $22,000 in cash from the ATM. The only employee working the counter ran away, called police and was prompted to file a report online. It reportedly took nine hours for police to finally arrive at the scene.

Earlier, on Juneteenth, 14 people were shot and injured in a shooting at Lake Merritt, Oakland's equivalent of Central Park. One of the victims was on his way to a Korean restaurant when a man approached him and shot him in the hand and both thighs for no apparent reason. As the victim lay bleeding on the sidewalk, another stranger stole his phone.

Oakland clearly needs more police, but instead has the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, perhaps best known for its nationwide campaign to “cut police funding.” While this is clearly a dull policy for a crime-ridden city, several other Oakland nonprofits have lobbied for cut police funding: Color of Change, PolicyLink, Faith in Action, the Center for Third World Organizing, Critical Resistance, the Akonadi Foundation, and the Anti Terror Police Project.

The demand to require police officers to wear body cameras is a movement that grew directly out of a desire to make policing more transparent and hold bad cops accountable. Likewise, electronic monitoring and house arrest for low-level felons have proven to be a less punitive and less expensive alternative to expensive jail cells.

But the Center for Media Justice is crazy enough to oppose both tech-based crime-fighting tools. The nonprofit organization claims that police body cameras “continue a tradition of criminalizing communities of color” and calls electronic surveillance “e-carceration.”

The Oakland-based Common Counsel Foundation is the financial sponsor of the Movement for Black Lives, which advocates for defunding the police and abolishing capitalism.

The East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy represents a broad spectrum of left-leaning economic and social movements. So broad that the individual agenda items are seemingly contradictory. On the one hand, the East Bay Alliance opposes development projects that “target technology and people seeking luxury housing.” They blame these for the “skyrocketing housing costs” that “pull working families and people of color out of the neighborhoods we have lived in for generations.” But it also supports the Sanctuary City movement: “Regardless of where someone is born, we should be able to put down roots and make a home in the East Bay.”

The common denominator seems to be that the poorer neighborhoods of the Bay Area are being destroyed because wealthy people are trying to move there.

Energy chaos

Not only do Californians face higher crime rates, they also pay much higher electricity and gasoline prices than the rest of the country. They also import more electricity than any other state. Here, too, Oakland nonprofits are part of the problem rather than the solution.

The Sierra Club is one of the nation's oldest and most pernicious climate alarmist nonprofits. Not only do they oppose coal, oil, and natural gas for energy, but they are also “unequivocally” opposed to carbon-free nuclear power. In civil society terms, that means they oppose 92 percent of all the energy produced by the United States last year — or most of what our industrial civilization makes possible.

The U.S. Department of Energy reports that nuclear power is “clean and sustainable,” “protects air quality,” and “produces minimal waste.” According to Our World in Data, it is one of the safest energy sources available and even causes fewer deaths per kilowatt-hour of electricity than wind power. The Energy Department's analysis also concludes that nuclear power's “footprint” is far superior to all other carbon-free energy options: “To generate the same amount of electricity as a typical commercial reactor would require more than 3 million solar panels or more than 430 wind turbines (not including capacity factor).”

American anti-nuclear nonprofits collect more than $2.5 billion billion per year, and Oakland is home to at least 12 other nonprofit anti-nuclear organizations in addition to the Sierra Club:

• Center for Movement Strategy,
• Dream Corps,
• Grid alternatives,
• PowerSwitch campaign,
• Asia-Pacific Environmental Network,
• solution project,
• Center for Sustainable Business Law,
• Amazon.com:
• Center for Environmental Health,
• Choose Solar,
• International rivers and
• Foundation for the global network “Black Lives Matter”.

Oakland occupies a tiny 56-square-mile parcel, which equates to an annual revenue of nearly $6.3 million per square mile for the city's anti-energy and anti-nuclear groups.

Another Oakland-based nonprofit, New Energy Nexus, is promoting expanded use of these weather-dependent, land-hungry wind and solar energy systems.

PSE Healthy Energy has launched a campaign against natural gas. Burning natural gas to generate electricity instead of coal reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 43 to 51 percent (depending on the type of coal). Over the past 15 years, the United States has become the world's largest producer of natural gas, and the resulting lower prices have prompted energy companies to switch from coal to gas, which has contributed significantly to the 17 percent drop in total U.S. carbon dioxide emissions since 2007.

While natural gas is healthy for both consumers and reducing carbon emissions, the rejection of the gas appears to have been healthy for PSE Healthy Energy. In 2011, in the early days of the natural gas boom, PSE reported total revenue of just $132,410. For 2022, total revenue was more than $6.2 million and at least three PSE employees were paid more than $100,000.

While it's unfair to blame Oakland's stridently left-wing advocacy group for the city's crime and energy chaos, it can be credited with capitulating to it.

At its best, America's nonprofit sector is a pillar of civil society, a funding vehicle for the loose network of nongovernmental charities and volunteers who keep communities healthy. Oakland could use a lot more of that.