I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that the city government Oakland currently has does not represent me or my values.
We have a City Council that’s obsessed with “racial equity” instead of overseeing a city that runs efficiently and safely for everyone. We have a mayor who’s spent a political lifetime in debt to her union bosses and who similarly sees everything through a racialized, divisive lens. We have lifelong career bureaucrats stuffing the offices at City Hall who are happy to get their paychecks and benefits and who don’t mind seeing Oakland devolving into a dystopian nightmare, in which businesses flee town, the remaining residents wish they could, and downtown is, for all intents and purposes, dead, and never coming back. Alone among Bay Area cities, Oakland is shrinking financially, vitally and culturally.
I am hardly alone in thinking this way. The two most recent polls reflecting voter sentiment both show deepening discontent and even horror at conditions in Oakland. The East Bay Polling Institute (EBPI) survey shows an overwhelming majority of Oaklanders identify public safety as their number-one concern, and yet we continue to have City Council members, owned by their cop-hating union masters, refusing to support the Oakland Police Department. We similarly see majorities of Oaklanders wanting more surveillance technology to fight crime, and yet we have a City Council—again, at the behest of their union bosses, joined by the professional poverty and race pimps—resisting that needed intervention. Only one-quarter of voters trust the city with their tax dollars, a shocking finding.
Then there’s the second poll, from the Black Action Alliance. It questioned Black Oaklanders about the same issues as the EBPI poll, and found similar results. You might have expected a Black-run poll of Black voters to find high support for Oakland’s supposedly “progressive” politicians, but that would be incorrect. Fifty-seven percent of Black Oaklanders say the city is on the wrong track. Nearly two-thirds rate life quality in Oakland negatively. An overwhelming three-quarters believe that the taxes they pay “are not worth it.” And this, at a time when the City, again at the demand of the unions, is placing another historically high parcel tax on the ballot.
This City Council we’re stuck with seems like they live on Mars, not Oakland. So blinded are they by their ideologies—of race, of class, of economic theory, of how history develops, of personal pique and prejudice—that they’re unable to perceive what’s right in front of their faces: People hate them! Oakland is in its death throes, and this City Council and their predecessors on previous City Councils are the ones who stabbed our city in the back and then left her to bleed out. To think that we still have a pestilence like Carroll Fife on the City Council, not to mention an unrepentant scourge like Lateefah Simon representing us in Congress, is outrageous. And yet, there they both are, carrying the unions’ water, kowtowing to their every demand.
If you look at history, every civilization that grew this detached from its own people perished. At some point, the corruption grows so rank, so decadent and stinky, that even the most disengaged citizens can no longer tolerate it. We’re pretty close to that point here in Oakland. All that I, as a citizen, can do is to warn and educate the public, and try, from my modest little perch here in Adams Point, to persuade our elected officials to join the rest of us in restoring sanity to our beloved town, even if that means saying NO to the unions. History is watching you, Ken Houston, Charlene Wang, Kevin Jenkins and Zac Unger, and will judge you accordingly.
Steve Heimoff