I watch a lot of City Council meetings on Oakland’s KTOP public T.V. station, and all I can say is that the hunt for revenues is now on, greater than ever.
Since Measure E went down to defeat, Oakland’s bureaucrats are eying every conceivable source of new taxes they can think of. If you ask them what they consider the most important part of their job, the answer—if they’re being honest—is to wring every last nickel from everyone who lives in Oakland or passes through it. The good news, for those of us who are opposed to never-ending taxation, is that our current bureaucrats are not the brightest bulbs in the chandelier. They’re rather insect-like in their dull insistence of eating. You can spray the roaches and even kill a few, but ultimately their appetite for money will drive them out from their dark crannies, looking for every crumb, every scrap that fell to the floor, in order to satiate their hungry tummies.
An ambitious bureaucrat is the greatest threat of all. Bureaucrats do nothing but sit around all day long and try to look busy. They’re not really busy, because being, say, a City Council member is not a hard job. But they realize that their salaries and considerable benefits are directly tied to the city’s revenues, and they also know that the unions—the corrupt money machines that hire and fire them—will retaliate against them if they fail to do its bidding, which is to get more money to give away to union members, in the form of salaries and benefits. There is no horror more frightening to an elected in Oakland than the possibility of being shunned by a powerful union like SEIU and thus losing your free pass to re-election. So these corrupt, untalented electeds, and the drones that work for them, spend their waking hours thinking up more ways to tax us. They don’t care that most of us are struggling financially. They don’t care that there’s practically zero transparency on how the tax dollars are spent. They don’t care about anything except getting a nice pat on the head by some SEIU block organizer who tells them, “Good boy,” and gives them a nice doggie treat.
When I watch these City Council meetings I’m stunned at how the same dreary people show up. You have ne’er-do-wells like Ms. Millie Cleveland who purport to possess a certain expertise in civic matters—in her case, it’s to defund the police. I wrote about her last year. As I said, “Mayors and City Council members come and go, but Ms. Cleveland is always there, lurking somewhere in the shadows, spreading her cop hatred and thereby enabling pro-crime elements to thrive.” Why the City Council tolerates such a colossal waste of its time is beyond me. Everybody already knows what she’s going to say: “Police overtime, yakkity yak. Police misconduct, blah blah blah. We should have civilians performing most of these OPD functions,” and so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. It’s like Kabuki theater. Even Carroll Fife occasionally looks like she’d like to sock Millie Cleveland in the nose.
It’s important for my readers to understand that these people are constantly at work looking for ways to steal your money and weaken OPD. What will they tax next? What won’t they? Think of something that isn’t taxed yet in Oakland. It’s all on the table. Never mind Barbara “Read My Lips” Lee’s promise of no new taxes. She’ll break that by Thanksgiving. Expect a major drive by Lee’s regime to tax vacant storefronts and properties. It’s ironic: first Lee and her allies push businesses out of Oakland, when when the storefronts shut down, she taxes them.
Here’s an idea: Fire all the “violence interrupters.” Cancel all the homeless shelter beds currently on commission. That’s all a complete waste of money. Give it instead to OPD and OFD. There must be dozens of useless city employees working on “anti-violence” programs. The city’s entire system of commercial code violations is corrupt. You have these pseudo-cops out there looking for every violation of every city rule. These nazified little bureaucrats get their jollies from intimidating property owners because a water heater is out of compliance or the paint is peeling on a windowpane or they hung an unpermitted sign up. When Janani Ramachandran promises “to create a fiscally responsible budget proposal that prioritizes core City services and long-term financial sustainability,” tell her we’ve heard it all before, and are tired of promises.
Fire these bureaucrats. Lay them all off. Let them get real jobs, the way the rest of us do, instead of these cushy, union-protected no-show gigs. Make it against the law for Oakland to declare “fiscal emergencies” or “extreme fiscal necessity” as an excuse to steal money. The next time Ms. Cleveland or some other cop hater comes to a City Council meeting and complains about police overtime, let the City Council president politely tell them to go away because we’re tired of hearing that crap. When they get mugged and call the cops for help, let the dispatcher laugh at them when they give their name. Let’s make Oakland what is used to be, and can be again: a town that loves its cops!
Steve Heimoff