Your tax dollars:

George Rupp, President of the International Rescue Committee traveled recently to Boise, Idaho to visit their newest satellite office.  In an interview with the Boise Weekly he told the reporter how he came to leave his job as President of Columbia University because he needed to satisfy his activist streak.

I had been president of Columbia [University]. I was 58, and it was a good time for a transition. And so, to the shock of the trustees, I announced I was going to leave my position. I loved higher education and scholarly work and writing books and all those things, but I had always been kind of restless and an activist, and I was looking for something that was a little closer to the ground.

I’m guessing though that he didn’t take much of a pay cut to be an activist.  We reported previously that he is paid in the mid $300,000 range.  That was in 2005, it’s probably higher now.

I’ll bet there is some tension in Boise with all the refugees resettled there in recent years, or otherwise there wouldn’t have been this pow-wow that Rupp attended.  Meetings like this one don’t usually happen if everything is going along swimmingly.  It is amazing how the choice of words makes it all sound like a lovefest.

We had a lunch with representatives from the governor’s office, the mayor’s office, the school system, police, a couple of health clinics. These people were all really engaged in trying to figure out how to make sure that it worked having refugees resettled in Boise.

We have been noticing an uptick in stories about how strapped the volags (supposedly voluntary organizations) are, and how they can’t make ends meet, so this is revealing.   These government contractors are already working with both Presidential campaigns to get more money out of you, the taxpayer—you know, to spread the wealth!

We’ve already been working very hard with both campaigns to restructure the whole resettlement program. The resettlement program that the State Department runs is grotesquely underfunded. There’s been no increase in the last 10 years, and the populations we’re resettling have greater needs.

I have loads of ideas on how to “restructure the whole resettlement program” and it involves more private charity as the top agenda item.   And, it needs to be more discriminating about who is invited to resettle in the US.  And, it needs to take into account the economic and social conditions of the community in which they are to drop-off refugees.   And, as for dropping off refugees, they need individual sponsors to take care of them for years if necessary.  And….

Maybe I can talk to the campaigns too!

We’ve written a lot about problems in Boise, so just type “Boise” in our search function for more information.