Lutheran Family Services Rocky Mountains largely funded by government contracts

10/29/2014 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Since we are closely following the controversy in Wyoming (see our previous post), let’s have a look at who exactly has expressed an interest in being the federal government contractor wishing to do business and resettle clients in Wyoming—Lutheran Family Services Rocky Mountains (LFSRM) sometimes known as Lutheran Family Services Colorado. (Why they need to operate under two names is beyond me!).

Rocky Mountain ‘Lutheran’ CEO Barclay makes just short of $200,000 in salary and benefits.

Let’s not tip our hand prematurely!

We first became aware of their role when it was learned that officials there were unhappy to be prematurely mentioned in publicity surrounding Wyoming Governor Mead’s proposed plan. They wanted the plans for Wyoming to be kept secret from the general public until they were further along.

“The largest refugee resettlement agency in the Rocky Mountain region.” they have “offices located in Denver, Colorado Springs, Fort Collins, Greeley/Evans and Fort Morgan, CO and Albuquerque, NM, and services provided in Wyoming, Montana and Western Nebraska.”

Although they do other work for children and families, they had time to resettle a whopping 1,567 refugees in FY12-13. Learn more here.

LFSRM is a subcontractor of the much larger Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services (LIRS) headquartered in Baltimore, MD. Just the other day we noted that LIRS has taken down its reference to an office in Casper, WY:

Note that in this post we wrote in July, LIRS linked a Casper, Wyoming office (Gillette and Casper are two cities mentioned as possible resettlement sites). However, if you go to LIRS website today the link has been erased. Have they given up? Or, are they just laying low until the political storm blows over?

Could they possibly have already been bringing in those Somalis we wrote about here?

Funded almost entirely with taxpayer dollars!

Lutheran Family Services RM is not a privately-funded church group, it is a quasi-government agency which is 84% funded by tax dollars.

Let’s visit their most recently available Form 990 here.

Their gross revenue was $12,915,054

$10,812,318 comes from government contracts.

Although they don’t list grants they do list government contracts on page 9 (they took the word “government” out in this Form 990, but I checked previous ones to be sure in which they did categorize the majority of their income as from “government contracts.”). LOL! I think these so-called ‘non-profits’ are increasingly sensitive and don’t want you to know how much they depend on tax dollars. This is a business not a charity!

When you visit that previous Form 990, check out the big jump Barclay’s salary took in just two years from 2010-2012!

CEO James Barclay makes a cool $199,330 in salary and benefits and 4 other top executives are in the 6-figure category including James Horan who runs their refugee branch. (page 8). Barclay made $172,267 two years earlier.

Then here are some of their expenses (rounded numbers). Without your cash they could not exist!

Nearly $5 million in salary, benefits and employment expenses were paid out.

Occupancy and other office expenses approached $900,000.

$259,000 went for travel expenses (what for just the Rocky Mountain region?).

$55,000 was spent for conferences.

And, they even spent $32,000 lobbying (for what? more money from government?).

Austin, MN: Meatpackers changing the demographics of American towns

09/15/2014 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

There is nothing earth-shattering in this article from MPR News, but it’s just further evidence of the role the meatpacking industry is playing in changing towns in America’s heartland with its avaricious desire for cheap labor—refugee labor! (Remember Senator Sessions called the meatpackers out here last year as a driving force behind amnesty).

We have been following this topic for going on seven years first brought to our attention by the turmoil created by Somali workers demanding workplace accommodation for their ‘religious’ requirements. We have an entire category entitled, Greeley/Swift/Somali controversy, where we archived posts on the topic.

But, you know what is really funny (sort of) is that the meatpackers apparently got sick of the Somali workers in some places and must have asked the US State Department (and their contractors***) for some more docile workers like these Burmese Karen Christians or the mostly Hindu Bhutanese refugees we have been bringing in ever since Bush “welcomed” them in 2007.

The refugees are basically cheap, legal, captive laborers which you subsidize through the myriad social services they receive (see our fact sheet for the list of welfare programs open to refugees).

The largest employer in Austin, MN, Hormel and Quality Pork. Photo from a NYT article in 2008 about a mystery illness there. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05pork.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

From MPR News (hat tip: Deb):

St. Paul is home to the largest Karen population in the country. But in recent years, Austin has attracted hundreds of the Karen and Karenni people.

Austin, a meatpacking town that has seen big demographic changes in the last few decades, started attracting workers from Mexico and Latin America in the early 1990s, followed by a wave of African immigrants. [The meatpackers used illegal labor from south of the border until the feds clamped down and then they discovered refugee labor thanks to Bill Clinton—ed]

The city’s growing Karen population is the first influx of minorities that has not been Latino or African, and the change has come fast.

According to the city’s Welcome Center, the number of Karen and Karenni residents in Austin nearly tripled to 1,224 this year, up from 463 in 2012. Driven out of their long-adopted home of Myanmar to camps in Thailand, the members of the two groups are flowing to the United States as refugees.

That means they can work legally, and some have replaced other immigrants at workplaces like Austin’s Hormel and Quality Pork processing plants, Austin schools superintendent David Krenz said.

Of course this massive plant in Austin would not have had Somali workers in the first place! (Pork of course!).

The Minnesota resettlement agencies affiliated with the federal government are listed here. They are subcontractors of the big Volags below. BTW, they call themselves Voluntary Agencies (Volags), but that is an obvious misnomer as most are nearly completely funded by tax dollars.

***The federal migrant resettlement contractors which we have followed for years (Grant recipient big dogs (devouring federal cash) Baptist Child and Family Services and Southwest Key Programs are new on the scene in recent years and mostly due to UACs.):

Somali refugees have discovered Cheyenne, Wyoming

05/06/2014 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Somali overload in Greeley and Fort Morgan, Colorado is sending Somalis on a northward migration to settle in Wyoming according to good reporting from the Wyoming Tribune Eagle which I blasted the other day here for a careless hate-filled editorial accusing critics of Gov. Matt Mead’s plan “bigots”. This is the type of reporting (sans maudlin sob stories) and the facts they should be gathering before spewing out ill-informed editorials.

One fact that they need to pursue, however, in light of this article which I was sure was going to lead to—this is why we need to have a refugee resettlement program in Wyoming—is that if Lutheran Family Services Rocky Mountains, sets up shop in Wyoming, they will be bringing new refugees from Africa, Iraq, Iran and countries in Asia directly to Wyoming. The federal contractors do not take care of secondary migrants, like these Somalis in Cheyenne, who have been here for months or years. They are like anyone else who moves from one state to another and should not require special “services.”

Ask the folks in St. Cloud, Minnesota how the Somali population expanded there at the same time the Lutheran’s opened their federally-funded office. Be sure to talk to the Mayor of Lewiston, Maine(the Somali capital of New England) too about what happened to them when the Somalis, resettled originally in Georgia, discovered the “services” Maine had to offer. The word “services” is, of course, the sanitized word for “welfare goodies.”

Keep in mind as you read this article that the meat packers (often foreign-owned companies) get cheap captive laborers and you, the American taxpayer, supports the rest of the refugee family’s life!

By the way, US Senator Jeff Sessions called out the meat packers as being among the chief lobbyists for amnesty, here.

Now to the story with an attractive and apparently likeable Somali refugee (with an African sob story history,why is that our problem?) as the star of the article (LOL! this must be J-school 101—start out with a sympathetic character to warm-up readers).

Tribune Eagle (Hat tip: ‘pungentpeppers’) Emphasis mine:

Abdirashid Noor has moved from Colorado to Cheyenne, Wyoming

CHEYENNE — While Wyoming might be the only state in the country without an official refugee resettlement program, that doesn’t mean there aren’t former refugees living in the Cowboy State.

There are dozens, perhaps even several hundred, former refugees living in the Capital City alone.

Many of these people, like Abdirashid Noor, are from the war-torn east African nation of Somalia.

Read the many paragraphs about the hell hole that is East Africa.

Noor’s life changed forever in 2007 when he was accepted into the University of Northern Colorado.

Be sure to go back and read the interesting history I posted just a few weeks ago about Greeley, CO and the Univ. of Northern Colorado’s role in the history of modern day Islamic extremism.

The Tribune Eagle story continues! The migration is on……

Greeley connection

Noor came to Greeley, Colorado, to study accounting at UNC. As fate would have it, when he arrived, he found that the city was home to a growing Somali community.

Unlike Noor, the majority of Somalis in Greeley did not come to attend the university -n they came to work in a nearby meat packing facility operated by the Brazilian meat-processing company JBS.

“When people come into this country and they don’t know the language, they have a lot of issues getting jobs,” Noor said.

“If you can’t communicate with other people and you can’t understand what other people are saying, they aren’t going to hire you.

“So the only area where people from east Africa or Somalia get hired is JBS or another meat plant. They don’t require communication skills as long as you can do the work,” he said.

Because jobs at the meat plant are typically low-paying, many of the Somali employees in Greeley rely on government subsidized housing programs like Section 8.

As the Somali population in Greeley grew, so did the waiting lists for programs like Section 8.

Colette West, co-executive director of the Global Refugee Center in Greeley, said the waiting list for housing subsidies in Colorado can be as long as three years. [That means needy Americans wait too!—ed]

Noor and many others in Greeley’s Somali community began looking north to Cheyenne for affordable housing options.

Mike Stanfield, executive director of the Cheyenne Housing Authority, said, “Some folks (in Colorado) found out the waiting list (for subsidized housing programs) was still open (in Cheyenne) and they came up here and applied.”

According to Noor, many of the people in Cheyenne’s Somali community commute to Greeley to work in the meat plant. Others, he said, have taken jobs here in places like the Wal-Mart Distribution Center west of town.

“Navigating through the system” means they need people in-the-know to direct them to all of the available social services—housing, healthcare, food stamps, interpreters, education for the kids and other GOVERNMENT assistance!

In places like Greeley, where Somali communities have existed for years, there is a system in place to help new immigrants gain access to services and educational programs. But because the Somali community here is newer, those services are sometimes harder to find in Cheyenne.

“They are going to need help navigating all the systems,” West said. “It’s very hard when you don’t speak the language.”

[….]

And as the city’s Somali population grows, so will the need for services.

So, someone like Noor will be paid with taxpayer dollars to be sure to get his fellow countrymen on the taxpayer- funded “social services” roster in Laramie County, Wyoming!

For ambitious readers, we have 90 previous posts in a category entitled ‘Greeley/Swift/Somali controversy’ going back at least 5 years.

If Sayyid Qutb could see Greeley now!

04/21/2014 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Did you know that one of the founders of Al-Qaeda spent six months in Greeley, CO in the late 1940’s early 50’s and his view of decadent Americans gyrating with men and women’s bodies touching at a protestant church dance inspired his hatred for America and his subsequent work in designing a manifesto of sorts which became the seminal work and inspiration behind militant Islam which to this day is terrorizing the world?

Here is a thoroughly informative article by Daniel Brogan which gives us the background.

Fifty-four years ago [now 65 years ago–ed], an Egyptian scholar arrived at the Colorado State College of Education in Greeley. He stayed for six months, sat in on a few classes, and did his best to sample day-to-day life in post-war America. When he left, he was quickly forgotten by the tiny community.

But Sayyid Qutb didn’t forget Greeley.

Time passed and the world changed. Colorado State College became the University of Northern Colorado and Greeley grew like the rest of the state. Qutb (pronounced KUH-tahb) returned to Egypt, where he became the foremost Islamic thinker of his time.

His articles and books were scholarly but passionate examinations of history, politics, and religion. He immersed himself in the Koran, compared it to the world around him, and came to a grave conclusion. Though the modern, liberal societies of the West preached freedom of religion, in truth, they undermined it. Religion and modernity, he concluded, could not coexist.

Qutb saw salvation in Islam, a religion that he believed offered true freedom. But for Islam to survive, a jihad would have to be fought to rid society of the West’s secular ways. Qutb envisioned an Islamic society ruled by Islamic law.

This was subversive stuff, even in the Middle East, and it wasn’t long before Qutb was thrown into prison, where he would stay for more than 10 years. Not surprisingly, prison only hardened his views. Qutb rewrote many of his earlier books and produced new ones at an astonishing pace, including a 30-volume masterwork entitled In the Shade of the Qur’an.

And through it all – right up until the day in 1966 when he was executed – Qutb remembered Greeley. What he had seen in those few months stayed with him through the decades and filled him with fear, disgust, and contempt. What he saw in Greeley made him hate America.

The story doesn’t end on the Egyptian gallows. In death, Qutb’s work became even more influential. Milestones, his best-known book, has been published in nearly 2,000 editions, and though many of his books have been banned in Egypt and other moderate Arab states, millions continue to illicitly circulate throughout the Middle East and over the Internet.

His writings have become both the inspiration and the blueprint for the fundamentalist jihad that now engulfs the world. Qutb’s work is to militant Islam what Das Kapital was to communism or Mein Kampf was to the Nazis. In American terms, he is Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Paine, all rolled into one. His disciples include Anwar Sadat’s assassins, and Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the Egyptian cleric convicted in 1995 of plotting to blow up several New York landmarks. They include militant groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. And they include a Saudi militant named Osama bin Laden.

Read it all—it is fascinating! And, I doubt many Greeley residents or students at the University of Northern Colorado have a clue about the role their quiet American town played in world history.

Asad Abdi, the founder and co-executive director of the Global Refugee Center, instructs refugee role-playing.

Skip to April 2014 and we have Somali Muslim refugees instructing refugee role-playing. A propaganda stunt?

Greeley, CO became a US State Department “preferred” resettlement site a few years ago when Somali refugees were needed as laborers at local meatpacking plants.

We have an extensive archive on the controversy that erupted over demands regarding prayer times in the workplace, here (Greeley/Swift/Somali controversy) which is one way Muslims have begun to successfully change America (Al-Hijra!). Qutb would be proud!

Last week, the Global Refugee Center, which was born out of the 2008 protests by Somali refugees in Greeley, participated in this propaganda stunt to continue to soften-up (welcoming!) Greeley for more refugees that are on the way.

From the Greeley Tribune (Hat tip: Joanne):

Nearly 40 people from around Weld County experienced the loss of family, limbs and property on Tuesday morning.

The experience was part of “A Walk in Their Shoes,” a refugee experience simulation hosted by United Way of Weld County at the Greeley-Evans School District 6 administrative building.

Qutb would be so pleased. Changing America one refugee, one city, one state at a time!

I’m wondering, do they have a statue of Sayyid Qutb at the University of Northern Colorado? Not yet?

Hate crime investigation underway in “welcoming” Ft. Morgan, CO

03/03/2014 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Somalis congregate in Somali cafe in Ft. Morgan where 1/3 of the labor force at Cargill is from East Africa according to Aljazeera. http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/9/27/the-somalis-of-fortmorgancolorado.html

We’ve been following the ups and downs of the Somali migration to Ft. Morgan for several years. The mass migration to the town began in 2008 right after the big blow up in Greeley when Somalis demanded special prayer times at a Swift meatpacking plant there. A lot of the Somalis were fired and moved on to Ft. Morgan to work for Cargill. Here is one post on the move.

We have a whole category about the conflict starting in 2008, here.

Ft. Morgan political leaders have knocked themselves out trying to send the politically correct message that diversity brings strength, but every once in awhile they have a flareup by some who don’t want the ‘change’ being brought to their community by BIG MEAT.

Senator Sessions says we need to slow down that change for everyone’s sake. By the way, it was Senator Sessions who called out the meatpackers as major lobbyists behind the so-called ‘Comprehensive Immigration Reform’ bill as it passed the Senate.

From KUSA:

KUSA – They left Somalia and other parts of eastern Africa to escape unpredictable violence, but now Fort Morgan police say the town’s refugee community is being victimized because of their race and heritage.

In the past week and a half, multiple cars have been vandalized, left with broken windows and spray painted with racial slurs.

“Get out of town. Go back to your country,” said Khadar Ducaale, of what was written. “It’s been very frustrating, at the same time, it’s been scary. We don’t know who is responsible.”

“We left our home country back in Africa for lack of security and instability, “said Abdi Wahab, whose car windows were broken. “It feels like we might be having the same problem we left our countries for now.”

There are hundreds of east Africans who’ve been given refuge by the U.S. government to live and work in Fort Morgan. Many work at the Cargill meat plant. They said vandalism to their vehicles has happened several times in the past. 9News reported on eight cars hit in 2011.

[…..]

Fort Morgan Police said they believe the car windows were shot out by a BB gun. A town spokesperson said a hate crime investigation is underway, but there are no suspects.

Click here for our complete archive on Ft. Morgan. They likely even had an honor killing there a few years ago.

Time to call in David Lubell and the mind police?