There aren’t a lot of public opinion polls in Oakland concerning quality of life issues, but a new one shows some encouraging results: An overwhelming majority of Oaklanders (70%) want more cops, support surveillance technology like Flock cameras (64%), believe the Oakland Unified School District is an abysmal failure when it comes to management (78%), can barely tolerate Barbara Lee’s mayoralty (37% job approval, lower even than Donald Trump’s), believe “the taxes they pay aren’t worth the services they receive,” and “want encampments cleared—now” (79%).
Well, that echoes the feelings of members of the Coalition for a Better Oakland, including me! Were this happening in a normal city, one governed by norms, the City Council would immediately resign or be recalled, ditto for the Mayor, and we’d enjoy a sweeping political and cultural revolution that would finally terminate the stranglehold of “progressives” and unions on Oakland and replace it with moderate, common sense politics that are truly representative of the voters.
But Oakland is not a normal city. Instead, this poll will be completely ignored by the Mayor and City Council. They will continue to do the bidding of their union overlords, further driving Oakland into the gutter. And we, the voters and citizens, will allow them to get away with it.
Now, back to the headline above: My City Council District #3 is the worst in Oakland by any measure of the poll. Here, there is far less support for clearing encampments, more inclination to defund the police, and much more resistance to surveillance technology. Why, you ask, is D3 so much dumber than the other Districts? Well, one explanation is that our City Council member is Carroll Fife, the most “progressive,” anti-cop, pro-homeless member. She’s been shaping attitudes in the District for five years now, and her efforts show in her constituents’ horrible understand of why Oakland is in trouble and how it got here. Although it is a good question whether Carroll Fife caused this voter stupidity, or the other way around: maybe the voters in D3 are the dumbest in Oakland and thereby selected someone as incompetent as they.
All this occurs against the backdrop of the City Council imposing the biggest parcel tax in many years on Oakland homeowners, of which I am one. They’re doing this, of course, after they managed to change local laws to permit higher property taxes with only a simple majority of votes (i.e., 50% plus 1) rather than the two-thirds majority that had been in effect for decades due to Proposition 13. How the “progressives” managed that dainty trick will be analyzed by political historians for years, but here we are: You get the professional petition companies to hire signature-gatherers (AKA trained monkeys) paid with union money. You get moronic voters to sign those petitions (“Free healthcare! Free housing! Better schools!”) despite having no idea of how reality actually works in a collectivized city run according to traditional socialist top-down autocracies. And voila, the voters get these stupid initiatives on the ballot where they pass consistently, thereby ensuring a new generation of union-dominated city agencies that hire more union members. It’s a perfect recipe for disaster, but more than that, it should outrage the sensibilities of all fair-minded people who actually believe in democracy and object to a government run by bullies, grifters and con-women.
I’m waiting for the property owners’ backlash to this extortion. It has to kick in, sooner or later. Or does it? Property owners, including business owners, are so beaten down in Oakland, so tired of being targets, so tired of the Left’s war on the police, so tired of the City Council’s and Mayor’s tolerance of crime and filth, that they sometimes wonder if it’s worth staying in Oakland. Mostly we do, because it would be so hard to pick up and leave. And our overlords—their names hardly matter anymore, for every Rebecca Kaplan and Nikki Bas we get rid of, there are ten more Carroll Fifes waiting in the wings, eager to get their grifting fingers on the payroll. It’s like a waking nightmare in Oakland, every damn day—an Invasion of the Body Snatchers happening right in front of our eyes, where an alien menace, racist “progressives,” infiltrates our lives and we can hardly believe it but don’t quite know what to do about it.
Steve Heimoff