Once again—it seems like always—the Oakland Unified School District is suffering a budget crisis of unprecedented size. But then again so is Oakland itself. In case you’re wondering why Oakland is always running out of money, it’s because the city is corrupt. Top to bottom, left to right, inside and out, it’s run, as it has been for forty years, by racial agitators who represent—or claim to represent—one demographic group: Black people (occasionally broadened into the more politically-appealing “People of Color”). They jury-rig everything in the city for the benefit of Black people, whom they see as especially needing support. But the ironic, and tragic, thing is that the group they’re actually hurting the most, through their meddling, is Black people.

Parcel taxes are once again in the news, as money-hungry cities look to the regressive home levies as a newly fool-proof way of padding their budgets.

My friend J. is a Tibetan man, via Dharamsala, now living in Oakland, where he runs a small neighborhood business. He has written a lengthy biography of the President of Tibet, in Tibetan, alas, so I cannot read it. But J. arranged to have it translated into English by a professor friend of his, also Tibetan, and he now has the translation in manuscript. He has asked me to read it because, he says, he wants to make sure it makes sense to Americans, or “tells a story,” as J. puts it. He hopes to market the book in this country. I of course agreed to his request.

The “Entitlement State Grift”

I do think there’s grift and graft in Oakland, plenty of it when it comes to how government spends our money, especially in the areas of what our enlightened leaders call “equity” and “violence prevention.” Lord knows I’ve criticized it here for as long as I can remember.

Leftwing radicals who resist doing anything to control encampments for years have accused those of us who wish to manage the damn things of waging “a war on the homeless.” It’s a clever line, implying not only that we’re heartless sons-of-bitches but also associating us with Richard Nixon’s “war on drugs,” a massive failure by an unpopular president.