“Peak woke” is a phrase I hadn’t heard until James Talarico, the Texas Democrat running for Senate, allegedly remarked that “Peak Woke got weird” in explaining why he backed off from woke’s more extreme utterances, such as “God is non-binary.”
His Republican opponents, you see, had jumped on Talarico. A Trump advisor said Talarico was “too woke for Texas” and “completely out of step with Texas values.”
Talarico is running in a state that has been reliably red for a generation and is home to some of the most conservative religious whack jobs in the country. So for him to back away from wokeism is understandable. Politicians “triangulate” (in Bill Clinton’s infamous term) all the time, to figure out how to sell themselves in a form the public is willing buy.
We see this happening right before our eyes here in Oakland, where Barbara Lee and her City Council are trying to sell Measure E. Lee’s latest mailer is an outrageous pile of manure even in a medium—the political mailer--that made manure-peddling high (or low) art. The photo of her—gazing into the inscrutable distance like she’s looking over the Promised Land from Mt. Sinai—is priceless. Measure E will deliver, Lee promises us, “safe, clean streets, [solve] crime, homelessness and illegal dumping…keep fire stations operational [and] clean up trash in our parks.” All that, for only $192 a year from each homeowner. Such a deal!
It’s a lie.
Look, the reason Lee came up with this laundry list of aspirations is because she and her predecessors allowed Oakland to deteriorate to the point that they now have to run for office on promises to repair their own damage. Oakland is already the second-highest taxed city in California, and so we know that handing over vaults of cash to our socialist leaders is simply a gigantic waste of our tax dollars, a slush fund to continue the status quo and keep the sleaze flowing. If all the parcel, sales and business taxes Oakland city government has imposed over the last twenty years have only made matters worse, then why would we be dumb enough to approve yet another huge parcel tax—whose funds, by the way, go into the general fund and are not earmarked for anything specific, meaning that Lee and her City Council cronies are likely to take the estimate $40 million a year E would raise and give it to SEIU employees and their union honchos.
No on E!
As I alluded above, Lee, like Talarico, is trying to put lipstick on a pig, striving to discover just the “right ingredients to hit the spot and make the sale to the voter.” That’s from a remarkable analysis published by Oakland Report explaining precisely how Lee and the Council used focus groups and consultants to determine how to justify their latest plan to steal money from us. The article details how Lee and the Council lied when they claimed Measure E was citizen-sponsored rather than city-sponsored, meaning it would require just 50%-plus-one of the votes to pass, rather than the 2/3 majority imposed by Prop 13. In reality, Measure E was city-sponsored--the City Council birthed it, then had to figure out a way to make it seem citizen-sponsored. Realizing that Measure E would never garner 67% approval, the city “hand[ed] off the parcel tax measure to its public employee unions, who placed the measure on the ballot as a ‘citizen-sponsored’ initiative.” This is grift and corruption indeed. SEIU was the lead union that “fronted” this deception by hiring all those stoners who accosted us at supermarkets with their petitions promising us Lee’s dream list if only we’d sign (and they’d get something like $6 for each signature). Who wouldn’t sign a petition for “safe, clean streets” and keeping fire stations open? What kind of puppy killers could be against that?
Lee is an unscrupulous, not-very-bright but savvy career politician who’s lied for so long, she wouldn’t recognize truth if it slapped her in Frank Ogawa Plaza. She stopped speaking English decades ago when she learned political-speak. Her mailer reeks of the sleazy deceit of a snake oil salesman who hopes to flee town before the suckers notice her con.
Congratulations to Oakland Report for having the intelligence and courage to report on this very important story that I hope all Oakland voters will read. We need new legislation outlawing this egregious crap that SEIU/City Council gets away with. We need to get back to the 2/3 majority that always was required for tax increases. This city’s leaders have perfected the art of the con, and this gets us back to the new phrase, “peak woke.” It has a double meaning: woke at the peak of falsity (as in Lee’s mailer), and woke as having hit its peak politically, so that there’s only one way for it to go: down. Like Barbara Lee herself, and Sheng Thao before her, like Measure E, like Pamela Price and all the wokes—going down!
Steve Heimoff