I’m so proud of San Jose and Mayor Matt Mahan for dealing firmly with their encampment problem. I’m also jealous. If you compare San Jose to Oakland, the former has stepped up to the plate and behaved maturely and responsibly in cleaning up these awful slums that befoul streets and parks. Meanwhile, Oakland has done little to nothing concerning our own encampments and shanties because, as L. Schaaf once insanely babbled, “We love our unhoused brothers and sisters!”
Yes, every once in a while Oakland cleans out some particularly obnoxious encampment. But the inhabitants just pick up their garbage and move someplace else. They know that Oakland government isn’t serious about rousting them permanently. As socialist-communists, most of our city’s “leaders” are committed to abetting the homeless and allowing them to remain here. Meanwhile, the homeless know that Oakland doesn’t really care about its productive citizens, the people who work hard, pay taxes and care about their neighborhoods. The homeless know that Oakland doesn’t give a damn about cleanliness, law, order or civic virtue, economic success or competing in a high-tech world or even in the AI-oriented Bay Area, where every other city besides Oakland is benefiting from the AI boom. How do they know these things? Because the homeless aren’t stupid. They’ve watched for years as Oakland elected officials have made Oakland unlivable. They’ve seen how Oakland electeds made downtown a wasteland of empty storefronts, graffiti, tramps and hoboes sleeping in the gutter, psychopaths roaming the streets, overturned garbage cans, no more shops or nightlife, fewer restaurants and unoccupied office buildings. What do the homeless make of these signals? “Oakland must really want us to stay here, because they’ve made the city such a pile of crap that nobody besides us wants to be here.”
B. Lee is out there on the hustings whining about what a liar Trump is when he says Oakland is gone. Well, Trump is right. Oakland is the second most dangerous city in America, according to U.S. News & World Report. But Oakland’s ruin is due to more than just the number of crimes. It’s also due to the quality of life. As a resident of the flatlands for 40 years, I assure you that it’s the worst I’ve ever seen. And it’s getting even worse. We had a chance, last election, to begin to turn things around, but instead the voters, in their dumb naivete, elected the Godmother of Woke, Barbara Lee, a former Black Panther who built her political career on stirring up racial resentment and focusing almost exclusively on race issues. Lee has never represented all the people of Oakland; her only interest is in the lower classes, especially people of color, who constitute the majority of the unions that own Lee. That isn’t to say that an Oakland politician should ignore the lower classes. But for God’s sake, the poor should be told the truth that their sad situation isn’t the result of racism or White supremacy or any of that woke nonsense, but of their own personal failures: failure to play by the American rules, to stay in school and work hard and teach their children to be respectful, to take pride in their city and treat their neighbors as themselves. Instead, the culture that Lee represents has embraced resentment, anger, hostility, grudges, getting even, and blaming others for their problems, instead of the traditional American virtues of self-improvement, humility and self-responsibility.
This is why Oakland is perceived nationally as a dump and an awful place to live or work. Instead of denying it, as Lee and the wokes do, they ought to own up and admit the truth: Oakland is a trash heap, and it’s their own fault. A generation of failed leaders, from Elihu Harris, Ron Dellums and Jean Quan to Libby Schaaf, Lee and—the worst of all—Sheng Thao, not to mention all the clowns that have disgraced the City Council, deserve to be put on trial for what they’ve done to this once-great American city.
Steve Heimoff