The latest Oakland bureaucracy to go broke is the Oakland Unified School District, where the superintendent just announced the district is going to have to cut $100 million from its budget next year--20 percent of OUSD’s general fund budget. That’s a lot of money, and right now no one knows where it will come from.
Every year or two, it seems, OUSD is caught in this budgetary crisis. It’s a nightmare that repeats, and the script goes like this: the district says it’s broke. Board announces plans to cut or merge some schools to save money. Parents protest, supported by the progressive City Council and unions. Schools are saved. Somehow, life goes on—and then the cycle repeats itself.
It isn’t just OUSD that consistently spends far more money than it has. So does the city as a whole, which is why once again Oakland is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. There’s a simple reason why this happens: The people in charge of such things are dishonest. They don’t believe in “budgets,” they believe in their political agendas, and budgets be damned. They want to run this city, and our schools, in accordance with their racist fantasies of “equity,” and if this means spending more than they’ve been allocated, so be it. They know that, in the end, the City Council doesn’t care. The Council will bail them out, through imposing higher taxes, and all will be well. After all, it’s just the redistribution of wealth by other means.
It’s all a game to them. If you’re OUSD, you laugh at the budget you’re given: you have no intention of respecting it. When the merde hits the fan and you announce closures, you know you’ll have angry parents—usually of color—and the unions on your side. In Oakland, that’s a potent combination of allies, especially when you add the local media into the mix. The media will always side with the progressives, and never with the fiscally responsible position. The result is loud, disruptive demonstrations, liberally covered on T.V., with signs demanding “Save Our Kids” and accusations that fiscally responsible people want to sacrifice our children on the altar of capitalism.
Actually, the people who think budgets are fictions that can be ignored have some justification. There’s a “boy who cried wolf” thing going on: we constantly hear that such and such an entity (OUSD, the City of Oakland, BART, MUNI, S.F. City College) is on a fiscal cliff, and may fall off and be killed. Then, it never happens. People are rightfully skeptical of such dire predictions. OUSD puts out frightening press releases, promising all hell will break loose if they’re not fully funded, and then they gather after work at the local pub, gossiping over their Andre mimosas and talking about how much of a raise to demand at the next bargaining period.
I wrote the other day that I think most Oakland’s senior managers are serious, competent people. Left to themselves, they would not run the city into the red. But they’re not left to themselves. They serve, most of them, at the pleasure of the mayor, who herself presides over a corrupt city. The woke bureaucracy runs rampant: not even the most talented City Administrator (and Jestin Johnson is very talented) can even come close to controlling the departments. He’s caught between a rock and a hard place: he wants to keep the best job he’s ever had, even though he sees the corruption, stupidity and vanity surrounding him. Poor Jestin, I’m sure, would quit in an instant if he could land a better job.
And this is what happens when you have a calcified, permanent bureaucracy. It subscribes to a completely unworkable and immoral ideology that is as racist as were the Southern states of the Jim Crow era. It’s been in power for decades—entrenched as solidly as the girders of the Bay Bridge into the bedrock. It sees mayors and city council members come and ago, while it remains secretive, determined, aggressive, cynical, powerful and destructive. We need to sweep this festering mess clean—yes, we need to drain the swamp in Oakland, a good metaphor Trump abused.
Steve Heimoff