Brian Owendoff sent racist text messages about Portland City Councilors to a group chat of local pro-corporate political agitators. Our research reveals he’s just one node in a network of powerful people trying to cut taxes for the rich, balloon the police budget, and make it harder for Portlanders to survive.

Brian Owendoff, the commercial real estate developer and recently-unmasked bigot, is many things to many people. 

To the City’s well-heeled real estate class, he’s a longtime wheeler and dealer of Portland’s prime commercial parcels. To the Portland Metro Chamber (Portland Business Alliance) he’s a former registered lobbyist and frequent collaborator. Owendoff is also a noisy critic of the Left; he’s published dozens of articles to his Substack attacking DSA. 

The Owendoff network is far-reaching. Democratic Party elites like City Councilor Dan Ryan rely on his counsel. Corporate power players like Jordan Schnitzer have rubbed elbows with Owendoff in multiple board roles over the past decade-plus. He’s also a central figure in the emerging ecosystem of right-wing and corporate dark money PACs trying to intervene in Portland’s elections.

Online Agitator

Tuesday’s revelations, first reported by the Portland Mercury, was not the first time Owendoff made headlines for disparaging local politicos. Years before he called Portland City Councilor Angelita Morillo a “burrito”, Owendoff was in hot water for attacking another sitting Portland official. In 2011, Owendoff was fired from his job at real estate firm C.B. Richard Ellis after he was linked to anonymous comments posted to the OregonLive website, which disparaged then-Mayor Sam Adams.

Despite his toxic political persona, Owendoff’s rise to become a powerful real estate and influence broker continued unabated. 

Owendoff is currently a member of and contributor to the real estate industry’s latest political venture, the Revitalize Portland Coalition (RPC). RPC is a coalition of interests who benefit from Portland’s housing and homelessness crisis, led in part by real estate magnate Jordan Schnitzer. The Coalition spent lavishly to sink Measure 110 and has previously endorsed a slew of corporate-friendly candidates, including bike cop Eli Arnold and Bob Weinstein (more on Bob below), both of whom lost their recent City Council races.

Another Owendoff connection: Schnitzer Industries has long occupied a board seat at the Portland Metro Chamber, where Owendoff was formerly a registered lobbyist and board member.

Big Business

Schnitzer and PRC together represent a significant nexus of power in Governor Tina Kotek’s effort to sabotage Preschool for All, which is also a frequent target of the PACs in Owendoff’s orbit. 

Among those invited to the group-chats where Owendoff sent racist text messages last week were a host of right-wing political hopefuls and activists with their own ties to Portland’s business lobby. 

Bob Weinstein co-founded dark money PAC Partnership for Progress (PfP) with failed City Council and County Commission candidate Vadim Mozyrsky.  PfP promoted Eli Arnold, the bike cop endorsed by Schnitzer’s Revitalize Portland Coalition. Arnold is also an Owendoff group chat member.

The incestuous political relationships within Portland’s ruling class are headspinning, but no analysis would be complete without reference to Vikki Payne. Payne is another Owendoff group-chat participant, who founded the Future Portland PAC to attack local labor unions and non-profits. 

Dark Money

Until she was fired last year, Payne worked for the campaign and office of Multnomah County Commissioner Julia Brim-Edwards. According to the Mercury, “…while Payne was working for Brim-Edwards, Future Portland propped up Brim-Edwards’ proposed legislative policies and statements…” 

Despite her outside support for Brim-Edwards’ priorities, including her longtime effort to cut Preschool for All, Payne got the axe after being caught hosting PAC events on County  time.  

Payne isn’t just an Owendoff compatriot. Future Portland is a “pragmatic partner” of the Schnitzer-led Revitalize Portland Coalition and the right-wing Northwest Fresh podcast, hosted by now-fired Dan Ryan staffer Andy Chandler (more Councilor Ryan public records to come!). Northwest Fresh is a regular platform for local anti-trans activists, Republicans, and anti-public school advocates, as well as current City Council member Dan Ryan and Mayor Keith Wilson.

Phew! Unraveling the political machinations of Portland’s ruling class can make your head spin. But remember: the enemies of Portland’s working class are not an unknowable Illuminati; they are real people with names, prejudices, and weaknesses. We are uncovering new connections all the time, and since these folks can’t help themselves, we expect this map to grow. Watch this space!

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If you enjoyed this article, please donate an hour of your hard-earned pay to each of Portland DSA’s working class champions for office:

For Portland City Council, we endorsed Councilor Angelita Morillo, she joins now re-endorsed Councilors Mitch Green, and Tiffany Koyama Lane.

In Salem, we re-endorsed Incumbent Farrah Chaichi for House District 35, alongside our earlier endorsement of Tammy Carpenter for House District 27. Salem DSA also endorsed incumbent Leslie Muñoz for House District 22.

We stand in solidarity with comrades in the Twin Cities and around the country who demand that ICE be abolished and cruel immigration policies be reformed. We continue to demand that our local and state government bodies cut all ties and coordination with federal “law enforcement” gangs that seek to enforce white supremacy and terrorize the working class. It should not take murders in broad daylight for us to stand up and say: ICE MUST BE ABOLISHED.

Innocent people continue to die in ICE custody. Families in our country – which claims to be a beacon of justice – are targeted every day by racist stormtroopers breaking into schools, hospitals, and other spaces that should be safe for all. Those who are injured, abducted, and killed in these illegal and unnecessary confrontations are afforded no justice. The ripple effects of this violence shatter families and shake entire communities. This is all by design.

Armed thugs wearing masks do not keep us safe; they keep people scared. Fascists encourage violence and fear because they are scared themselves. They are scared of what we can accomplish when we stand together. They are terrified of losing their grip on power. They want us to lay down and give up our resistance to their racist agendas, but we refuse to cower in fear in the face of authoritarianism. ICE represents a horror that a caring society will not allow, and we in Madison join our comrades in Minneapolis and around the country in standing up and fighting back.

We call upon everyone to stand together in this moment against fascism. We must fight all further funding of ICE and similar carceral spending. Democratic politicians are running scared, worried about the optics of “abolishing ICE” or “defunding”, but we know that the vast majority of humans want our resources invested in actually helping people, not on building cages and propping up an engine of cruelty. 

Defund ICE, build real housing! 

Defund ICE, invest in education! 

Defund ICE, fund the resources that allow us all to thrive! 

We refuse to let the fascist Trump regime and their gestapo rip us apart, and we refuse to be silenced. A better world is possible: a world without ICE.

This past fall, I watched the fourth and latest installment of the Jurassic World franchise, Jurassic World: Rebirth (hereafter, Rebirth). Jurassic World is a sequel franchise to Jurassic Park, launched by the classic film of the same name in 1993. In the original Jurassic Park, a wealthy businessman, John Hammond, creates a theme park on a remote island with dinosaurs resurrected (or de-extincted) through genetic engineering from dinosaur DNA recovered from prehistoric mosquitos trapped in resin. Hammond invites two paleontologists, Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler, to review the park and give Hammond their scientific recommendation to boost his park’s reputation. Unfortunately, the genetically resurrected dinosaurs end up escaping their confines and terrorizing the humans. Jurassic Park has become synonymous with the dangers of the misuse of science, which is explored in more detail in the two sequel films of the original franchise.

The first film of the sequel franchise, Jurassic World (2015), delves more into the theme of misuse of science for the sake of economic profit. A new park is created many years later by the same company, InGen, which starts to create increasingly more monstrous dinosaurs to revive the novelty of the park and increase profit from ticket sales. Eventually, one of the genetically modified dinosaurs, Indominus Rex, gets out and chaos ensues. Themes of animal rights are also implicit in a striking scene in the first Jurassic World film. Vic Hoskins, head of InGen security, portrayed as enthusiastically supporting using velociraptors as weapons of war because they “can follow directions,” convinces the protagonist, Owen Grady, to use the velociraptors to track the renegade Indominus Rex. When the velociraptors catch Indominus Rex, with the human characters watching in the background, the semi-sapient velociraptors and I. Rex communicate with each other and conspire to betray the humans. 

This scene could be interpreted as the dinosaurs revolting against the humans to avoid becoming slaves in a biotech military-industrial complex. To drive the point home, Hoskins is eventually eaten by a velociraptor, a common fate of greedy corporate characters in the franchise. The slogan “eat the rich” is literal in these films. 

A pattern throughout both franchises is a dichotomy between the corporate characters interested in profiting off the dinosaurs and those who see the dinosaurs as intrinsically valuable and want them to be left alone so that they can have the best chance of survival. Another example of the former is Peter Ludlow, the CEO of InGen in the second film, The Lost World: Jurassic Park who has a T. Rex transported to San Diego to start a new theme park. In contrast, Hammond is an example of the latter. He is portrayed as an idealist who wants to bring back the dinosaurs to give humanity humility and perspective. 

Implicit in both franchises are different perspectives on the role of technology.  In the former case, exemplified by corporate characters, technology is for extracting value from nature, seen as a warehouse of raw materials for human production and consumption, through exploitation of natural resources. In the latter case, exemplified by Hammond and most scientist characters in the films, technology is to help us to gain humility and perspective on our true place in the cosmos. 

A real-world example of using technology to help us gain humility and perspective from appreciating nature is the famous pale blue dot image of Earth. In 1990, the Voyager 1 spacecraft, on its way out of the solar system, was told to turn its cameras to look back at Earth. Voyager 1 recorded Earth as only a point of light suspended in a sunbeam. In this way, a robotic spacecraft was used to remind us of our true place, small and fragile in a vast universe. 

In the real world, the for-profit company Colossal Biosciences wants to resurrect long extinct animals, such as woolly mammoths, to restore ecosystems and even fight climate change. It could be argued that this is misguided, but it is certainly a mission-driven, not profit-driven, enterprise because there is currently not a business case for resurrecting woolly mammoths.

The challenge is that although many tech startup founders seem to genuinely seek to benefit humanity and the planet, they operate within an economic system that is based on accumulating profit for investors. Many startups interested in sustainable or “eco-friendly” technology are shaped implicitly or explicitly by eco-modernism. Eco-modernism is better than mere capitalist extractivism in its emphasis on environmental sustainability but falls short because it fails to question the underlying assumptions of the ideology of economic growth for its own sake that undermine environmental sustainability efforts. Religion could play a role in shifting from eco-modernism to true ecological solidarity that encourages the necessary structural changes.

Many religious traditions emphasize our connection to the planet and the importance of nature as God’s creation. They also warn against the folly of seeking wealth as the ultimate source of fulfillment. This outlook is common within Indigenous communities. Also, within Christianity, my background, there is a strong tradition of seeing humans as stewards of God’s creation, particularly in the tradition of Saint Francis of Assisi and the work of modern eco-theologians such as  Leonardo Boff and Sallie McFague who have argued that a healthy relationship with nature is essential to a robust spirituality. More recent religious statements such as Laudato Si by Pope Francis II also emphasize the importance of caring for the planet as a human calling and warn against the dangers of environmental destruction in the name of avarice.

Such religious traditions could help to inspire an approach to technology where the main goal is not expanding capitalist production but to remind us of our place in the cosmos, encourage humility and a non-anthropocentric perspective, and improve the wellbeing and flourishing of humanity and the planet. 

A social movement that embodies such a view of technology is the convivial technology movement founded by Ivan Illich, which inspired the creation of human-scaled technologies to promote individual and communal autonomy. Other examples include the indigenous-led Buen Vivir movement in South America, which encourages living in an ecologically sensitive relationship with nature, and the Red Deal, an Indigenous political proposition that includes restructuring the world economy around, among other things, ecological solidarity rooted in an Indigenous worldview.

It could be said that capitalism currently functions as a global religion. Specifically referencing ecology and biotech, do we want a world that looks like Jurassic World, where dinosaurs are exploited for profit often to the endangerment of human beings, or one that looks more like, say the ending of Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, where humans and talking animals together live freely and in peace? It will depend on what we end up worshiping.

The post Jurassic Park, Ecological Justice, and the Technological Future appeared first on DSA Religious Socialism.