After examining the corruption that flows through San Francisco’s government-by-nonprofit regime, we now move just a few miles across the Bay Bridge to Oakland. You can begin to see trends in Democratic city governments and nonprofit organizations corrupting each other because the fact is that the two are deeply intertwined.

One such example of this came with Oakland’s Marcus Foster Education Institute. The nonprofit group revealed in 2023 that it had a shortfall of $800,000, which was attributed to the “egregious activity” of staff members who, according to the Oaklandside, “intermingled restricted and unrestricted funds without the board’s knowledge or authorization.” After a year with the organization’s internal investigation making little progress, it was sued by the Youth Ventures Joint Powers Authority, a public agency that used the institute as a fiscal sponsor.

Recommended Stories

• Offense is not a valid legal argument with monuments
• Gavin Newsom’s big Los Angeles riot lie
• Los Angeles will embarrass the US on the World Cup and Olympic stage

The fiscal sponsorship relationship allows groups, such as Youth Ventures, to use the tax-exempt status of nonprofit organizations, such as the MFEI, in exchange for a fee. In this case, the MFEI was entrusted with managing “all of Youth Ventures’ funds, including payroll for the agency’s staff.” Youth Ventures entered into its agreement with the institute in 2014 but didn’t discover issues with the nonprofit group’s auditing process until 2022. The agency is suing to recover over $343,000 in funds.

In 2017, the Oakland City Council voted to sell public land to the nonprofit Oakland and the World Enterprises. The council decided to sell it at a nominal price, less than its market value of $1.4 million, to subsidize affordable housing. An Alameda County grand jury report that same year alleged that Alameda County Supervisor Keith Carson violated the county’s conflict of interest rules by hiring Elaine Brown as an aide. Brown served as the chief operating officer of OAW, a position she still holds. According to the report, Carson hired Brown to his staff and allocated $710,000 to the nonprofit organization.

In 2019, then-Mayor Libby Schaaf was found by the Oakland Office of the City Auditor to have directed the city to make “inappropriate contributions” to Oakland Promise. That included providing the nonprofit group with a workspace, phones, computers, and internet. It also included Schaaf allowing an Oakland Education Fund employee to lead the organization as the “mayor’s director of education” with no agreement to protect the city’s interests, funding the double-dipping director to the tune of some $700,000.

Schaaf founded Oakland Promise one year into her term as mayor. By the time she left office, the nonprofit group had a $15 million annual budget and an endowment of $50 million raised by Schaaf. She also faces thousands of dollars in fines from the Public Ethics Commission for campaign finance violations. She is, of course, running for state treasurer in 2026.

Then there is the case of Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price. Her disastrous tenure fell short of two years, though it still rivaled progressive “prosecutors” across the country when it came to coddling criminals. Price asserted that her refusal to prosecute violent criminals had no effect on their ability or incentive to commit further crimes. Aside from her stubborn commitment to letting criminals off the hook for their crimes, Price found herself in a nepotism scandal just months into the job.

Price hired her boyfriend, Antwon Cloird, to a six-figure salary job in her office, with county officials saying they hadn’t been notified about it. Cloird’s job was, of course, to “identify candidates for early release” as part of Price’s efforts to empty the county’s jails. The mayor of Richmond, California, as well as the city manager and police chief, previously suspected Cloird of shaking down companies using his status as a “connected nonprofit executive.” That led to an FBI investigation, though Cloird was never charged.

That does highlight, though, the incestuous relationship between Democratic politicians and nonprofit organizations. Cloird jumped from his nonprofit group, which helped convicts readjust to living in society after being released from prison, to being tasked by his attorney general girlfriend with releasing convicts from prison.

There are other high-profile examples. Janani Ramachandran, a member of the city council representing District 4, has “worked at various legal nonprofits, and served on the board of violence prevention nonprofits across Oakland.” Mayra Chavez went from working for Councilman Noel Gallo in District 5 to the Unity Council, a nonprofit organization that serves the “Latinx” community in Fruitvale. She was then appointed to a senior staff position by former Mayor Sheng Thao, before Thao was indicted on federal charges as part of an FBI bribery case. Barbara Lee, the mayor who replaced Thao, has her own history with nonprofit groups. Several members of her transition team also worked in the nonprofit space. The aforementioned Keith Carson was also part of her transition team.

There are similar examples from San Francisco. Former Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru used a nonprofit organization as a slush fund, another nonprofit group that threw swanky galas to network with current and former city and state government officials gave its executives big bonuses while the organization itself went broke, and Sheryl Davis jumped from nonprofit to city work, where she then helped secure city funding for a nonprofit group directed by someone with whom she was sharing a residence and a car.

Zoom out, and you see that this relationship plays out outside of the Bay Area as well, all the way up to our national politics. That is where you end up with former President Joe Biden allowing illegal immigrants to flow into the country unchecked, and then relying on nonprofit organizations to handle unaccompanied children. One of those nonprofit groups received more than $1 billion in 2022, another received nearly $800 million, and a third saw a 300% increase in its revenue even as it housed fewer illegal immigrant children in 2022 than 2019 and did so at nearly three times the cost.

BILL GATES’S CHARITY DEEPLY INVESTED IN CHINESE MILITARY COMPANIES

Zoom back in to Oakland for a moment. The city earlier this year had to reckon with budget cuts to balance its books. That led to protests from nonprofit groups that would have their own budgets cut thanks to the removal of city funding. On top of that, nonprofit organizations had to reckon with the Trump administration terminating federal grants that were paid out to them, leading to layoffs. In both cases, through years of Democratic governance in Oakland and the past four years of the Biden administration bloating the bureaucracy and federal spending, you have predominantly left-wing nonprofit groups benefiting to the point that they become nearly unoperational without the taxpayer funding they were receiving.

These nonprofit groups are staffed by the same left-wing activists that Democratic politicians pander to, through both their increasingly radical policy views and their irresponsible, bloated budgets. The lack of oversight is a feature, not a bug, as Democratic politicians and bureaucrats rely on those nonprofit organizations to carry out government functions and to keep left-wing activists and donors engaged in their political operations. Democratic staffers and the politicians themselves cycle between nonprofit and government roles. They are different parts of the same political machine, which is why both the funding and the corruption flow so freely between them.