We had a wonderful meeting yesterday at Lakeside Park. Many thanks to all who attended to support the Coalition for a Better Oakland. Here are some highlights:
It’s clear how passionate our members are about our two issues, encampments and cops. People are truly upset by the crime, the filth, the deterioration of the town we all love—or used to. One by one, they told basically the same horror story: Lived in Oakland for “x” years, but the last several have made them have to consider moving. They told story after story of calling 9-1-1 while home invasions were underway, with no response; of being robbed multiple times; of fentanyl houses that OPD is completely aware of but does nothing about; of City Council members whom they consider to be literally out of their minds. Seneca Scott spoke and showed why he is our candidate for Mayor. By coincidence, Vincent Williams, CBO’s Person of the Year, also showed up, walking his dog; he made a forceful impact.
One gentlemen expressed a theory I was unfamiliar with: that the true goal of the Fife-Kaplan-Bas-Thao block on the Council is to “equalize crime” so that it is widespread all over the city, instead of being limited to just its traditional neighborhoods in East and West Oakland. That way, the progressives believe, everyone in Oakland will get so upset that they’ll feel they have no choice but to throw even more money at the corrupt schemes that inevitably fill the swamp of Oakland politics.
Of course, this theory testifies to just how incompetent this City Council is. They celebrate each robbery, each murder, each carjacking. (I know this is hyperbole, but it testifies to an underlying truth.) They figure that the middle classes and wealthy might as well get a taste of what poor communities of color have experienced for years. Sick as that sounds, there can really be no other interpretation for why this City Council and their minions on the Police Commission have allowed things to get this bad. I had a friend from Boston call me yesterday and ask what the hell is going on in Oakland. He knows nothing about our city, but he’s been seeing Oakland more and more in the media, where it’s portrayed as the Seventh Circle of Hell.
I guess we could spend all year trying to crawl inside the minds of the City Council, but it would be a waste of time, and a distasteful chore besides. I don’t really care why they do the things they do. All I care about is preventing them from doing those things, which are so devastating to the rest of us. I want them gone, and to stop sucking at the teat of the taxpayer’s money—our money—and sending our town down the drain, for their own nefarious purposes.
During our discussions the topic of the upcoming November elections repeatedly arose. We all know how important those local races are: City Council, Mayor, District Attorney, Sheriff. We will get nothing done if we don’t fire the current office holders and replace them with people who value sanity over woke politics. Please vote in November! Encourage your children, your grandchildren, your nieces and nephews to vote. If they tell you that both sides are bullshit, sit them down and teach. Explain how so many of the things that matter to them are the result of politics: gay rights, a woman’s right, legal weed and so on. Tell them that the tent cities, sick people wandering the streets, the fear of going out at night, the massive dumps of garbage—these things are not normal. That Oakland is a dangerous place because the City Council still wants to defund the police, and the police are not the enemy: criminals are. Tell them it’s not only Trump and his people who are trying to take their freedoms away; it’s also Carroll Fife and Nikki Bas and Sheng Thao and Rebecca Kaplan. Safety is also a freedom, maybe the most basic. Ask them if they have any idea where the hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into Oakland to combat homelessness actually go. When they say “No,” tell them that’s because the City Council doesn’t want them to know. It’s a secretive cult, working out backroom deals with shady people.
The homelessness/anti-police complex is what we’re up against: There are billions of dollars to be made, and unscrupulous grifters intend to get as much as they can. With the help of their fellow grifters on the City Council, these profiteers of human misery are unquestionably the cause of our current degradation. While the rest of America, thank God, is seeing the dangers of progressive “social justice,” Oakland is sinking deeper into the morass. We can do better.
Steve Heimoff