Carroll Fife seldom comes out and says directly what she means, because she knows it would horrify most people. So she speaks in word salad: words and sentences that sound innocuous, but upon examination carry dire implications, the most terrifying of which is that a Fife government would seize your home, throw you out, and hand it over to homeless people.
Her obsession is, of course, homelessness. Don’t forget, this is the woman who, several years ago, squatted in someone else’s home and disrespectfully refused to leave when told to do so. In the long run, a city—Oakland—capitulated to Fife’s bullying. Most City Council members are strong-willed, but Fife somehow has managed to intimidate her colleagues for years, even though they despise her. Maybe it’s the fact that she can rally SEIU dupes to turn up at Council meetings and threaten her political enemies. Whatever, the City Councils of the past five years have pretty much let Fife have her way. Her colleagues have not covered themselves in glory but in shame.
I said Fife doesn’t usually tell the truth, but much can be gleaned from her social media posts. Concerning housing, she’s a fount of misinformation, and her Communist inclinations can clearly be gleaned if you know what to look for. For instance, in a post she calls “Housing is a human right,” she demands “a shift from a financialized housing system to housing as a human right.” To most readers, this is a bit vague, but if you understand the buzzwords, it’s right there in the open: calling it “a shift” is like calling a rattlesnake a big worm. The only way to “shift” away from a “financialized housing system” to something else is to de-financialize the system, which means removing the notion of ownership. You might think you “own” your home because you paid $1 million for it, but under a Fife regime the capitalistic laws of ownership are terminated. All private property reverts to the ownership of the state, which can dispose of that property any way it wants.
Do you think it’s unlikely that Fife’s minions, in some dystopian future Oakland, will march into your home, give you ten minutes to pack up your stuff, and then replace you with formerly homeless people? Think again. As Stalin did when he eliminated the Kulaks in the 1930s in the old Soviet Union, Fife would force homeowners out and “liquidate them as a class” (in Stalin’s words), a necessary step in his forced collectivization of society. Kulaks—peasants with a little more money than most—were eliminated in the harshest ways. For Stalin and his circle, this was merely his revolutionary duty. Landlords were viewed as enemies of the state—as they were here in Oakland a few years ago, when the City Council licked the rear ends of homeless advocates and refused to permit the eviction of renters who defaulted on their payments.
At this point, it must be admitted that Fife’s fantasy is far from becoming reality. But she’s in the process of collectivizing our city. One central premise of Communism, or of any dictatorship, is that all government functions are centralized within one bureau, led by the Dictator himself or his surrogates. A decentralized bureaucracy is not necessarily a threat to our freedoms; it’s an impediment to them, but not an actual cause of alarm. But centralization is something else. Which is why Fife writes that achieving her housing goals “will require bringing as many services as possible in-house in order to have improved oversight and monitoring, developing a robust services pipeline, and investigating current service providers to ensure they are providing the required care and attention.” That word “investigating” is important. It involves the power to subpoena, to force people to appear in court, to unseal financial records. We see this all the time in Washington, when one party or the other weaponizes Congress and the Justice Department to harm their enemies. Translation: if “current service providers” are not “providing the required care and attention” to homeless people that Fife wants, those current providers can, and swiftly will, be terminated, replaced by more pliable bureaucrats who have been slouching towards City Hall for years awaiting their turn.
This vengeance is partly understandable when you consider that, for Black activists, their people have been the victims of decades of injustice by racists. Stalin felt that way about the Kulaks: by the time he seized power, he was determined to destroy them, physically. All that rage had built up during his years of struggle; when he finally had the power, he was not about to forgive his enemies. Quite the contrary: there had to be punishment. Fife is the same way. Every time I see a photo of her, I feel a shudder: the anger, the desire for vengeance, the “you can’t touch me” dare just oozes out of her face. Fife was longing for a fight before she got elected, and she’s got exactly what she wanted. Only now, she actually has the power to harm us.
Fife writes a lot about public housing because it’s the only way to provide shelter for her constituents. We all know that public housing is a synonym for slum. (Even Fife admits that “public housing became increasingly synonymous with Black housing.”) Why were these projects so run down? Because they were “consistently underfunded and under-maintained.” But there’s another reasonable answer: because the people who lived in public housing didn’t care enough to keep it clean. Landlords—the government—understandably couldn’t keep up with all the mold, trash, damage and graffiti, which multiplied faster than repairs could be instituted. Whose fault is it when a residence turns into a slum? Whose responsibility is it to keep it clean? Carroll Fife puts all the blame on [mainly White] landlords and on the capitalist system that lets them own property. She never tells her constituents that a little elbow grease in the bathroom goes a long way toward preventing mold and stains. No, a filthy bathroom has got to be someone else’s fault, never the tenant’s.
It’s important to peer behind the Potemkin Village of Fife’s mind to determine what she’s really after. Control. Of you, me, housing, the government, the whole works. She’s quite ambitious, and quite mad. To her the voters of District 3 have entrusted much power. The power to tax, to tell people where to live, to make—let’s face it—a revolution right here in Oakland that will serve as a model for other Democratic Socialist cities. But that’s what the dummies who vote in D3 seem to want. They haven’t thought out a political philosophy: it’s more a goo-goo emotion. “Wouldn’t it be nice if all the homeless people had nice homes? And let’s give them healthcare, job training and childcare too.” “But sister, that stuff is expensive. Where will you get the money?” “Oh, don’t be such a Debbie Downer. There’s plenty of money in Oakland. All we have to do is raise taxes. If you’re not ready to raise taxes on White people, then you’re not fit to be a revolutionary.”
Steve Heimoff