Oakland, California: High Crime, High Energy Prices, and a Lot of Left-Wing Nonprofits

Oakland, California, is home to a disproportionate share of America’s stridently left-wing nonprofits. Twenty-six of the most strident examples have a combined annual revenue of more than $566 million. That works out to $1,300 annually for each of Oakland’s 435,000 residents or $5,200 for every household of four. It is hard to imagine any American city—with the anomalous exception of the nation’s capital—that has more left-wing nonprofit advocacy spending per capita than Oakland.

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

• Sierra Club ($167,540,907),
• Movement Strategy Center ($32,262,236),
• Common Counsel Foundation ($54,978,381),
• Dream Corps ($53,488,309),
• PolicyLink ($46,107,101),
• Faith In Action ($37,999,794),
• org Education Fund ($15,608,394),
• Grid Alternatives ($23,149,824),
• PowerSwitch Action ($12,685,553),
• Center for Third World Organizing ($9,361,552),
• Solidaire Network ($7,973,691),
• New Energy Nexus ($7,571,267),
• Vote Solar ($7,417,991),
• Asian Pacific Environmental Network ($6,601,028),
• PSE Healthy Energy ($6,479,363),
• Solutions Project ($5,188,682),
• Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation ($4,684,554),
• Sustainable Economies Law Center ($4,439,630),
• Akonadi Foundation ($4,336,703),
• Center for Environmental Health ($3,772,383),
• Center for Media Justice ($3,618,412),
• Amazon Watch ($3,586,796),
• Anti Police Terror Project ($2,692,549),
• East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy ($1,972,251),
• International Rivers ($1,625,269), and
• Critical Resistance ($1,014,329).

Oakland has some real problems that these groups could be addressing.

Crime Chaos

In “The Fall of Oakland,” a report posted in July at the Free Press, local reporter/resident Leighton Woodhouse began by describing recent and surreal lawlessness:

OAKLAND, California — Around 4:30 a.m. on July 5, dozens of people broke through the front door of a 76 gas station mini-mart near Oakland’s international airport. For about 40 minutes, the mob casually looted tens of thousands of dollars of merchandise and stole $22,000 in cash from the ATM. The sole employee working the window ran away, called the police, and was told to file an online report. It reportedly took cops nine hours to finally arrive on the scene.

Earlier, on Juneteenth, 14 people were shot and injured in a gunfight by Lake Merritt, Oakland’s equivalent of Central Park. One of the victims was walking toward a Korean restaurant when a man strode up and shot him in the hand and in each thigh 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 most known for its nationwide advocacy to “defund the police.” Despite this being a clearly obtuse policy for a crime-afflicted town, several other Oakland nonprofits have promoted defunding law enforcement: Color of Change, PolicyLink, Faith in Action, the Center for Third World Organizing, Critical Resistance, the Akonadi Foundation, and the Anti Terror Police Project.

Requiring police officers to wear body cameras is a movement that sprang directly from the desire to make policing more transparent and hold bad cops accountable. Similarly, using electronic monitoring and home detention for low-level felons has emerged as a less punitive, more cost-efficient alternative to pricey prison cages.

But the Center for Media Justice is crazy enough to oppose both tech-assisted crime management tools. The nonprofit claims police body cameras “continue a legacy of criminalizing communities of color” and refers to electronic monitoring as “E-Carceration.”

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

The East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy is an advocate of a broad array of left-wing economic and social movements. So broad, in fact, that the agenda items seem to be working at cross purposes with one another. On the one hand, East Bay Alliance opposes development projects that “cater to tech and those seeking luxury condos.” This is blamed for the “skyrocketing cost of housing” that is “forcing working families and people of color out of neighborhoods where we’ve lived for generations.” But they also promote the sanctuary city movement: “Regardless of where someone is born, we should be able to plant roots in the East Bay and make a home.”

The unifying theme appears to be that the ruination of low-income Bay Area neighborhoods occurs after wealthy people try to move in.

Energy Chaos

Along with enduring higher crime, Californians also pay far higher electricity and gasoline prices than the rest of America. They also import more electricity than any other state. Here as well, Oakland-based nonprofits are part of the problem, rather than the solution.

The Sierra Club is one of the nation’s oldest and most noxious climate alarmist nonprofits. They are not only opposed to processing energy from coal, oil and natural gas, but also “unequivocally opposed” to carbon-free nuclear power. On a civil society measurement, this means they are opposed 92 percent of all energy produced by the United States last year—or most of what makes our industrial civilization 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 available energy sources, accounting for fewer deaths per kilowatt-hour of power than even wind energy. The Energy Department’s analysis also concludes the “footprint” of nuclear power is far superior to all other carbon free energy options: “you would need more than 3 million solar panels to produce the same amount of power as a typical commercial reactor or more than 430 wind turbines (capacity factor not included).”

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

• Movement Strategy Center,
• Dream Corps,
• Grid Alternatives,
• PowerSwitch Action,
• Asian Pacific Environmental Network,
• Solutions Project,
• Sustainable Economies Law Center,
• Amazon Watch,
• Center for Environmental Health,
• Vote Solar,
• International Rivers, and
• Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation.

Oakland takes up a tiny 56 square-mile plot of land, so this works out to almost $6.3 million of annual revenue per square mile for the city’s anti-energy, anti-nuclear groups.

Another of the Oakland nonprofits, New Energy Nexus, promotes expanded deployment of those weather-dependent, land-gobbling wind and solar energy systems.

PSE Healthy Energy has launched a crusade against natural gas. Burning natural gas for electricity rather than coal reduces carbon emissions by 43 to 51 percent (depending on type of coal). Over the past 15 years the United States has become the world’s largest producer of natural gas, and the lower resulting prices have caused power companies to switch from coal to gas, a major contribution toward a 17 percent decline in total American carbon emissions since 2007.

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

While it isn’t fair to blame Oakland’s stridently left-wing advocacy colony for the town’s crime and energy chaos, it is fair to credit them with surrendering to it.

Ideally, the American nonprofit sector exists as a major pillar of civil society, a funding tool for the loose network of nongovernmental charities and volunteers that keep communities healthy.  Oakland could use a lot more of that.