Contrast

National Public Radio spent the weekend essentially on wall-to-wall coverage of the Smithsonian’s African-American History Museum over this past weekend.

And other than the spectacle of the President of the United States trying affect an Alabama accent, the event – and the museum – sounded interesting, and very much worth a stop the next time I’m in DC.  Whenever that might be.

In stark contrast stands the Minnesota African-American museum, which, notwithstanding three million dollars in various kinds of financing, grants and gifts, has been auctioned off to satisfy creditors:

The latest chapter in a complicated, seven-year tangle of funding struggles and work disputes took less than two minutes in an auction held Tuesday at a counter in the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office. Attorneys for the construction, plumbing and electrical companies that had previously won a court judgment for unpaid work at the museum joined together to purchase the property for $1.3 million: the total amount a judge found that they are owed. The group was the sole bidder at the public auction.

Supporters of the museum are now trying to strike a deal with Minneapolis Community and Technical College to display some items and exhibits, but the museum is without a permanent home — and some financial backers are out thousands of dollars in investments.

Leaders of the museum have not spoken publicly about their plans. The museum’s president, Nekima Levy-Pounds, declined to comment and its last executive director, Lissa Jones, could not be reached for comment. Other prominent supporters, including founder Roxanne Givens and state Sens. Bobby Joe Champion and Jeff Hayden either declined to discuss the museum’s sale or could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.

It might be possible to look at the facts of this episode and not conclude that the whole thing was a means of transferring wealth from taxpayers and non-profits to favored members of the political class.

I’m not sure how you get there, but it’s possible.

18 thoughts on “Contrast

  1. Well for a start Nekima Levy-Pounds is a rent seeker of the first order – if she’s involved of course the finances will be hinky.

  2. Seems like our museum was a great example of the hazards of “keeping up with the Joneses”, as well as trying to plan a museum without an apparent business plan. It’s not clear to me why renovation would have been six million bucks, nor how you would get enough visitors in there to make payments.

  3. Nekima Levy-Pounds, Bobby Joe Champion and Jeff Hayden?

    GTF out of here. You’re kidding, right? Aren’t the latter two involved in a charity scam, and please don’t tell me that’s not the same Leviathan-Pounds of poverty pimp fame.

    Man, I have know a few wanna-be arch criminals in my time, but these are the real deal.

    Hey, I know! Michael Brodkorb should pick up the trail and sniff out the truth! That would be greeeat.

  4. I’m not sure how you get there, but it’s possible.

    I don’t really think it’s possible, unless you have on partisan political blinders.

  5. I think Brodkorb would be snorting blow off Pounds’ gargantuan ass and drinking Chivas Regal out of her muk-luks the first week.

  6. Doesn’t this qualify as theft by fraud? Asking for a friend who supports BLM, I am, so don’t get made at me.

  7. An obvious transfer of wealth from taxpayers? I think you need a better connection of dots for that conclusion.

    Now if you want to see how that is really done, you should look at the stadium in Milwaukee with the $250 million gimme to Hammes and the enormous booondoggle of the crackpot Ham Creationism Ark in Kentucky, to the tune of $18 million to promote crap to nearly zero paying customers.

    http://www.patheos.com/blogs/danthropology/2016/06/cnn-criticizes-ken-hams-ark-encounter-for-using-tax-money-to-spread-christian-message/

    “It’s definitely an evangelical tool,” Ham told her. “We didn’t build this just to be entertainment like Disney. We built it for religious purposes.”

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2015/08/14/scott-walker-takes-250-million-from-u-wisconsin-gives-250m-to-billionaire-sports-team-owners/#53eae5495a09

    “… one of the team’s other owners is Jon Hammes, one of Walker’s top campaign fundraisers. Hammes’ son recently donated $150,000 to a pro-Walker super PAC. For the Hammes, this must feel like a pretty good return on investment: $150K plus some fundraising work in return for $250 million. (Obviously, Walker will deny that there’s been any quid pro quo. But Walker has been working on this deal for months: according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal, he included $220 million in state money for the arena in his budget back in February, but state lawmakers took it out.)

    The libertarian Cato Institute denounced the public financing of the arena, according to the New York Times.”

    Funny how we just don’t see the same criticism from you of conservative white people that you make towards less obvious and less clearly demonstrated corruption and abuse of tax payer funding. While I’m sure you don’t perhaps feel racial animus towards specific individuals, as a pattern this equates to the racism attributed to conservatives, a hypocritical double standard for accusations of wrong doing with an absence of evidence. It is a demeaning or derogatory presumption about a group of people as well as a negative presumption about individuals in that group.

    Perhaps I missed the findings of wrong doing in the prior allegations against either Champion or Hayden, which seemed tainted with partisan politics? Let’s face it, Hann filing an ethics complaint, given his own problems with ethics smacks hugely of partisan witch hunting. Accusation is not conviction, (unlike the criminal findings against Bill Davis, who I heartily agree was a crook who defrauded and stole from the CAM).

    Let me outline what I remember from that Hann filing:

    “The complaint accused the senators of strong-arming Minneapolis Public Schools to approve the CSI contracts.

    In an ethics complaint, the burden is on the accuser to prove the allegations being presented. Hann’s presentation failed to win the majority of votes needed to move the complaint forward.

    The Subcommittee adjourned and concluded its review of the CSI matter indefinitely, in effect, rejecting the complaint.

    What made the challenge unique, among other things, what seemed to some as a double standard that had to do with race as much as with political affiliation.

    It is troubling, said Sen. Champion, that the Republicans in this case were insisting that the he and Sen. Hayden prove their innocence, because there was nothing of substance in their complaint. Sen. Hann admitted in two hearings that he was motivated to bring the complaints against the only two African Americans in the Senate, because of a statement by an unnamed source in a StarTribune newspaper article.
    …Mammen said he nor anyone on the school board was threatened and noted that the contract was negotiated over the period of a year. He said the board voted 8-0 to support it.

    With that information on the table, there clearly was no substance to the allegations, Champion said, and therefore the committee did not feel there was probable cause and voted to close the matter indefinitely. For all practical purposes, he said, it is closed.”

    http://www.insightnews.com/2014/11/17/hayden-champion-prevail-in-senate-ethics-committee-csi-hearing/

    Yup, you righties loves you your anonymous sources, so long as they accuse people towards whom you have a bias, while overlooking clear abuses by your own side.

    Failure is not fraud. Or theft.

    If someone has EVIDENCE of theft or fraud, or anything wrong other than an excessively ambitious project that failed, please show it. The biggest missing piece that strikes me here is the lack of demonstrable personal benefit. And in contrast, the Ark for example, did not and does not provide a clear benefit to the general public in the way the Minnesota African American Museum project has.

    I suspect that Kel doesn’t properly understand the use or meaning of the term rent seeking, particularly as the term refers to increasing wealth inequality, which is clearly the opposite of a life time if endeavor by Ms. Levy-Pounds.

    The other factor which appears to contradict your speculation is that there has been more transparency with the MN African American project than either of the two conservative boondoggles I cited.

    But hey, if you have something that no one else does that indicates fraud or theft, or anything illegal or unethical, produce it. Take it to the appropriate regulatory authorities.

    I’m guessing you’d rather throw mud and shit here than produce or demand evidence, or think critically. Now if you had called for a public audit or investigation to verify that the failure of the museum did not involve wrong doing, I’d be supportive of that. Failures deserve dissection and public accountability, and THEN if something ‘hinky’ turns up, it should be pursued.

    But you go too far for what is known or likely.

    In the meantime, you DO propagandize those who already vote against you to do so for the forseeable future, as their numbers increase, and yours continue to decline. That bogus big tent is going to become a political party shroud – and you have only crap like this to blame for it.

  8. Please to God Mitch, if your not going to ban her, will you at least insist she keeps her ravings to 2 or 3 paragraphs?

    Wha’ts with the essay length crap?

  9. Breaking News: a MN Legislative Ethics Committee deadlocks along partisan lines and the complaint fails.

    DG, please provide a specific example of Sen. Hann being ethically challenged.

  10. It looks like what happened is that the museum’s organizers/founders could not provide a realistic business model that would cover annual costs. $130k in salaries seems light, you would need a full time maintenance person for a place that big.
    That is why the state insisted being #1 lien holder, the state wanted a chance of recovering tax payer $ if the place went belly up.
    The Strib story is a year old. It would be great if the Strib reporter had dug a little bit and identified the reason why the museum failed to even open. I am guessing, but it seems the board was heavy with politicians and activists, and light with administrators who knew how to run a museum.

  11. Bento,

    Yes, it does.

    Like so many of these politically-motivated projects, the goal is “graft first”.

  12. …the Ark for example, did not and does not provide a clear benefit to the general public in the way the Minnesota African American Museum project has.

    dog, you ignorant slut.

    The museum never opened. What public benefit is so clear to you about an empty eyesore?

  13. I suspect that Kel doesn’t properly understand the use or meaning of the term rent seeking, particularly as the term refers to increasing wealth inequality, which is clearly the opposite of a life time if endeavor by Ms. Levy-Pounds.

    ok DG lets use your favorite fact-checking source Wikipedia, here’s the qualifying checklist:
    1. seeking to increase one’s share of existing wealth without creating new wealth
    2. reduced economic efficiency
    3. poor allocation of resources,
    4. reduced actual wealth creation,
    5. lost government revenue,
    6. increased income inequality
    7. capture of regulatory agencies to gain a coercive monopoly
    First up DG creating wealth is not a bad thing and is very seldom equitable.
    NL-P has created a career trajectory that she hopes will make her the next Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, two people who have made themselves multi-millionaires by Racebaiting.
    Lets go through the list item by item to see if she meets the criteria. #1 check – she’s a SJW lawyer when did they ever create anything. #2 check -close down major freeways see how everyone’s productivity increases, #3 check – read link in Mitch’s post (this time for comprehension), #4 check – with more mandated “diversity” training individuals and companies have less actual resources available to compete, #5 check – she’s a strong proponent of $15/hr min wage which will long term reduce the employability and actual employment of low-skilled entry level people, #6 check, as low skilled jobs are increasingly replaced by automation the income inequality will radically increase, #7 check – regulatory capture of police departments is one of BLM’s stated goals.
    There you have it sweetpea NL-P meets all the criteria and I clearly understand rent-seeking better than you.

  14. Troy, if only DG were a person, you would be right. We are all still trying to figure out what species she belongs to.

  15. Logical fallacies of Mad Dog here: tu quoque and ad hominem. Plus a few more.

    And really, if she misses the fact that her host, and most readers here, are against stadium subsidies, her reading comprehension is even lower than I thought it was.

    Regarding the “Ark Encounter”, she’s also incorrect–it apparently has had a few hundred thousand visitors already. I am also no fan of the tax exemptions and infrastructure put in for this, and I don’t think it will pay the mortgage in the long term, but at least let’s try to get the numbers right.

    http://www.wlwt.com/news/riding-wave-of-popularity-ark-encounter-exceeds-attendance-projections/41685082

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