Fife's Commmunism, part 2

Carroll Fife seldom comes out and says directly what she means, because she knows it would horrify most people. So she speaks in word salad: words and sentences that sound innocuous, but upon examination carry dire implications, the most terrifying of which is that a Fife government would seize your home, throw you out, and hand it over to homeless people.

Her obsession is, of course, homelessness. Don’t forget, this is the woman who, several years ago, squatted in someone else’s home and disrespectfully refused to leave when told to do so. In the long run, a city—Oakland—capitulated to Fife’s bullying. Most City Council members are strong-willed, but Fife somehow has managed to intimidate her colleagues for years, even though they despise her. Maybe it’s the fact that she can rally SEIU dupes to turn up at Council meetings and threaten her political enemies. Whatever, the City Councils of the past five years have pretty much let Fife have her way. Her colleagues have not covered themselves in glory but in shame.

I said Fife doesn’t usually tell the truth, but much can be gleaned from her social media posts. Concerning housing, she’s a fount of misinformation, and her Communist inclinations can clearly be gleaned if you know what to look for. For instance, in a post she calls “Housing is a human right,” she demands “a shift from a financialized housing system to housing as a human right.” To most readers, this is a bit vague, but if you understand the buzzwords, it’s right there in the open: calling it “a shift” is like calling a rattlesnake a big worm. The only way to “shift” away from a “financialized housing system” to something else is to de-financialize the system, which means removing the notion of ownership. You might think you “own” your home because you paid $1 million for it, but under a Fife regime the capitalistic laws of ownership are terminated. All private property reverts to the ownership of the state, which can dispose of that property any way it wants.

Do you think it’s unlikely that Fife’s minions, in some dystopian future Oakland, will march into your home, give you ten minutes to pack up your stuff, and then replace you with formerly homeless people? Think again. As Stalin did when he eliminated the Kulaks in the 1930s in the old Soviet Union, Fife would force homeowners out and “liquidate them as a class” (in Stalin’s words), a necessary step in his forced collectivization of society. Kulaks—peasants with a little more money than most—were eliminated in the harshest ways. For Stalin and his circle, this was merely his revolutionary duty. Landlords were viewed as enemies of the state—as they were here in Oakland a few years ago, when the City Council licked the rear ends of homeless advocates and refused to permit the eviction of renters who defaulted on their payments.

At this point, it must be admitted that Fife’s fantasy is far from becoming reality. But she’s in the process of collectivizing our city. One central premise of Communism, or of any dictatorship, is that all government functions are centralized within one bureau, led by the Dictator himself or his surrogates. A decentralized bureaucracy is not necessarily a threat to our freedoms; it’s an impediment to them, but not an actual cause of alarm. But centralization is something else. Which is why Fife writes that achieving her housing goals “will require bringing as many services as possible in-house in order to have improved oversight and monitoring, developing a robust services pipeline, and investigating current service providers to ensure they are providing the required care and attention.” That word “investigating” is important. It involves the power to subpoena, to force people to appear in court, to unseal financial records. We see this all the time in Washington, when one party or the other weaponizes Congress and the Justice Department to harm their enemies. Translation: if “current service providers” are not “providing the required care and attention” to homeless people that Fife wants, those current providers can, and swiftly will, be terminated, replaced by more pliable bureaucrats who have been slouching towards City Hall for years awaiting their turn.

This vengeance is partly understandable when you consider that, for Black activists, their people have been the victims of decades of injustice by racists. Stalin felt that way about the Kulaks: by the time he seized power, he was determined to destroy them, physically. All that rage had built up during his years of struggle; when he finally had the power, he was not about to forgive his enemies. Quite the contrary: there had to be punishment. Fife is the same way. Every time I see a photo of her, I feel a shudder: the anger, the desire for vengeance, the “you can’t touch me” dare just oozes out of her face. Fife was longing for a fight before she got elected, and she’s got exactly what she wanted. Only now, she actually has the power to harm us.

Fife writes a lot about public housing because it’s the only way to provide shelter for her constituents. We all know that public housing is a synonym for slum. (Even Fife admits that “public housing became increasingly synonymous with Black housing.”) Why were these projects so run down? Because they were “consistently underfunded and under-maintained.” But there’s another reasonable answer: because the people who lived in public housing didn’t care enough to keep it clean. Landlords—the government—understandably couldn’t keep up with all the mold, trash, damage and graffiti, which multiplied faster than repairs could be instituted. Whose fault is it when a residence turns into a slum? Whose responsibility is it to keep it clean? Carroll Fife puts all the blame on [mainly White] landlords and on the capitalist system that lets them own property. She never tells her constituents that a little elbow grease in the bathroom goes a long way toward preventing mold and stains. No, a filthy bathroom has got to be someone else’s fault, never the tenant’s.

It’s important to peer behind the Potemkin Village of Fife’s mind to determine what she’s really after. Control. Of you, me, housing, the government, the whole works. She’s quite ambitious, and quite mad. To her the voters of District 3 have entrusted much power. The power to tax, to tell people where to live, to make—let’s face it—a revolution right here in Oakland that will serve as a model for other Democratic Socialist cities. But that’s what the dummies who vote in D3 seem to want. They haven’t thought out a political philosophy: it’s more a goo-goo emotion. “Wouldn’t it be nice if all the homeless people had nice homes? And let’s give them healthcare, job training and childcare too.” “But sister, that stuff is expensive. Where will you get the money?” “Oh, don’t be such a Debbie Downer. There’s plenty of money in Oakland. All we have to do is raise taxes. If you’re not ready to raise taxes on White people, then you’re not fit to be a revolutionary.”

Steve Heimoff

Communism

Almost from the moment Communism was created, and certainly after the Communist Party seized control of the old Soviet Union, the ideology was the hobgoblin of American politics. America is the most capitalist country on earth; Communism is the opposite of capitalism. Under Communism, everything (“the means of production”) is owned by the State, which then distributes the goodies to “each according to his need.” The essence of capitalism, on the other hand, is that the most talented among us achieves his desires through hard work. Communism says no: people should achieve their desires regardless of whether or not they work to earn them. The State, in turn, will control everything, and then put smart bureaucrats in charge, who will determine what everybody gets.

It’s an odd ideology. There’s seldom, if ever, been anything like it in human history. Has there ever been a society whose leaders said, “If you don’t want to work, feel free to loaf. We’ll make sure you get everything anyway.” I don’t think so.

This brings up the subject of “rights.” What is a “right”? Communists and progressives like Carroll Fife have very strange beliefs concerning “rights.” According to them, “rights” are whatever they define them to be. Since housing—a place to live—is so essential to human well being, housing must be a “right.” Ditto food, healthcare, clothing, childcare and “dignity.” And this is the essence of progressivism: It is government’s responsibility to see to it that all “rights” are guaranteed by the State. Otherwise, why have government?

Anyone can see that this ideology is unworkable. This is for two separate but related reasons: one is a moral reason and the other is pragmatic. The moral reason is because we know, as reasonable beings, that getting free stuff in life isn’t right. We’re all in this together. Most of us understand that nobody is going to offer us goodies for nothing. Life doesn’t work that way. Nothing in the animal kingdom, which we are part of, gets a free lunch. Whether you’re a paramecium or a pigeon, you have to work hard for your sustenance. Hey, I didn’t design the system; something grander than me did, so if you think the system sucks, complain to the Supreme Engineer.

Communism doesn’t believe in a Supreme Engineer, which is why they’re so down on the notion of God. Marx, Engels and Lenin had no explanation for why life exists, and maybe no explanation is needed. They felt that believing in God was a waste of time. I’m not here to argue theology with anyone; whether or not God is real is up to you. But I do believe that this universe is not kind. Eat or be eaten: that seems to be the underlying law governing life. Had I been the Supreme Engineer, you can bet I would have made our universe a kinder, gentler place, where men didn’t have to struggle just to get a roof over their heads or have a bite to eat. But they do. And here is where Communism makes its tragic blunder.

The blunder is assuming that we’re all responsible for each others’ well being. I don’t buy that. I never assumed, growing up, that anyone would take care of me. I realized that if anyone was going to provide for me, it had to be me, not some generous State. I understood that America has Social Security, Medicare, food assistance and healthcare programs that, to some extent, make our lives a little easier than it would otherwise be without them. And for those entitlements, I’m enormously grateful. But I never for a moment thought that the government was obligated to give me everything I wanted or needed. I knew that, barring some miracle, what I would have in life was pretty much equal to the effort I put into achieving it. I realized that life isn’t fair (to quote JFK) and that it would be patently unfair to take what little I had and redistribute it to others who seemed to have a problem with working. Am I my brother’s keeper? Poetically it’s a nice statement. Realistically it’s ridiculous. Because living beings require motivations to work hard, and if the government is giving you free stuff, then what’s your motivation for getting off your butt and actually working?

What Communists, and I include most progressives in that category, fail to understand is that we humans are part of the universe, not separate from it. We can’t rewrite the rules. And this gets around to the pragmatic impossibility of true Communism: everything costs money. Yes, I hate that reality, and if I had designed everything, I would have eliminated what FDR called “the silly, foolish old dollar sign.” I hate that we’re all trapped in this capitalist system where everybody sees everybody else as a source of money. Yet here we are. What can we do about it?

It’s hard for me to understand just what Carroll Fife’s ideology is. I “get” that she broadly defines “rights” in a sense I believe is exaggerated. But she never explains how these “rights” came into being. Everything that exists must have a cause, right? So if the “right to housing” exists—and it’s central to Fife’s political work—where did it come from? If there’s no God, then did the “right to housing” suddenly pop into existence with the Big Bang? If it did, what else came into being with the creation of the universe? There are lots of things other than housing that I want and need: warm clothing, satisfying food, sex. If. there’s a “right to housing,” why is there not an equivalent right to sex? Clearly there is no “right to sex.” Why not? Why is there no right to sushi (which is very expensive) or to a nice cashmere sweater to keep me warm when the fog blows in? It may sound snarky, but the point is that, once you start compiling a list of “rights,” where does it end?

And who pays for it? Here, Communists have an answer: Taxes! There’s potentially an infinite source of money in society: all we have to do is tax people, which is really the equivalent of theft. The theory is, if there are, say, ten thousand people in Oakland who can’t afford a nice cashmere sweater, then all we have to do is raise that amount of money by taxing everyone. Let’s say a nice cashmere sweater costs $150. Multiple that by ten thousand, and it comes to $1.5 million. That’s not every much if you spread it out among the estimated 200,000 people who pay taxes in Oakland. True: but the Communists won’t stop at free cashmere sweaters. They want free healthcare, free childcare, free rent, free college education, free everything for the poor. I won’t even attempt to estimate how much that would cost, but let’s just say, conservatively, it would be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for each individual, for a total of hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Now we’re talking real money!

Where does Carroll Fife expect to find this money? She never explains, because apparently her mind doesn’t function in fully logical ways. But we can infer that her answer would be, again, Taxes! It’s as if she believes there’s a bottomless well of cash available to be had if only taxes were raised on every Oakland resident…and if there’s still not enough money to pay for everything, then raise taxes again.

Okay, so let’s play out this scenario. Eventually people get tired of taxes. Businessmen get tired of payroll taxes, homeowners get tired of transfer taxes and parcel taxes, consumers get tired of sales taxes. People start to move out of Oakland, in protest or desperation or both. Suddenly that cushy little tax base the progressives love evaporates. The golden goose stops laying. But now—in our scenario—Oakland still has unfunded liabilities. All those poor people still need those sweaters; they still need their subsidized apartments, their kids need childcare, they all need doctors and nurses, and of course we all still need police and fire protection. What happens when the well is dry?

I think you know. Bankruptcy. Which is where Oakland is headed. This is directly related to the latest news, as reported by Oakland Report, that Oakland has “the highest violent crime rate of any California city.” Normal people do not care to live in criminal societies; they pack up their stuff and move. What was once cutely termed “the tax base” turns out to be non-existent. It’s like the football that Lucy keeps snatching away from Charlie Brown. You can’t kick something that’s not there; you can’t spend money that’s not there, either, not if you want to have a city where people actually wish to live.

This is the fundamental mistake of Communism: it violates the natural laws by which all life is controlled. People do not like to share the results of their labor with those who labor not. Nor would I have it any other way. I sympathize with the progressives who want only the best for poor people. My heart is not hardened against the poor. Yet I’m enough of a realist to understand that we, as a society, cannot afford to underwrite the poor. There’s simple not enough of “the silly, foolish old dollar sign.” What can we do about that? We can’t simply print more money because inflation would go through the roof. At some point, we have to tell the poor, “Look, we really do feel for you, but there’s a limit to what we can do for you.” And we should promote the message, which I absorbed as a youngster, that no one is going to take care of us if we don’t take care or ourselves. For Carroll Fife, who seems to feel that she has a “right” to free stuff, like the house on Magnolia Street she stole with Moms 4 Housing, reality is irrelevant. As long as there’s a taxpayer with a single untaxed dollar left in Oakland, Fife will remain in the business of the Communist purveyor of free stuff.

Tomorrow: A closer look at Fife’s crazy Communism

Steve Heimoff

Racism in the workspace: myth or reality?

I read a lot of books by Black activists explaining their anti-racist work. This is because the issue of racism is consuming America and has been for a long time, and I want to understand just what their grievances are. I criticize these people rather frequently, so it only behooves me to listen to what they have to say and determine if it makes any sense.

The latest is a 2022 book by Daisy Auger-Dominguez, who’s made a great success in her career, having been a top executive in what she calls “inclusion practices” at such corporate giants as Google and Disney. Her book, “Inclusion Revolution,” maps out what she terms the “definitive roadmap for revolution” in the workplace in order to achieve “racially inclusive management.” It’s really a how-to for DEI in American companies, although it was written just before Donald Trump launched his current, successful war on DEI.

If there’s a single message that comes across in all these books, it’s that the authors believe passionately that DEI programs are a necessary antidote to the “structural” racism they believe runs through all American institutions. Their argument is always the same: from slavery to Jim Crow, from segregation and redlining to the [sometimes unconscious] negative attitudes White people have towards Black Americans, Black citizens have been handed a raw deal, and it is both morally and pragmatically correct for us to change these conditions so that Black people can enjoy the full benefits of American citizenship.

It’s obviously undeniable that Black Americans are in a state of crisis. There’s too much poverty and criminality, too much crime and sociopathic behavior, and it doesn’t seem to be getting better. From the point of view of a resident of Oakland, I would say the city’s gravest problem concerns its Black residents and how far they’ve fallen behind in so many measured categories. The authors I read—most of them serious academics—have all settled on an anti-racist agenda they believe will resolve our racial problems, and their philosophy or ideology has become an almost official part of the Democratic Party’s approach to policy. Government, corporations, educational institutions, charities, all have eagerly embraced this anti-racism work and made it central to their missions. Yet somehow, all this effort hasn’t yet resulted in major change, and the backlash it has caused is immense. The inequalities remain enormous between White (and Asian) achievement, on the one hand, and that of Blacks, on the other. Despite two generations of government-sponsored wealth transfer from Whites to people of color, those gaps in education, income, health, lifespan and so on continue to plague America. And now, DEI is on the ropes, having been reduced to a punchline.

I read these books with a sharp eye. Their logical inconsistencies leap off the page to me. You could describe my usual intellectual reaction as, “Yes, but.” The “Yes” means that I recognize the truth of what the authors say. Black people do have a tough time in corporate environments (which is Auger-Dominguez’s speciality). They’re often asked to “fit in” to an office that is culturally skewed toward White men. If they wish to retain certain hairstyles, clothing fashions and speaking patterns, they can further exacerbate the psychic distance between themselves and their White colleagues. This may be regrettable, but it’s true: in a collective work environment, everybody has to leave a piece of themselves on the way in and adapt to the greater norm. Otherwise cooperation is unachievable, and that’s as bad in an office as it is on a sports team.

The “but” in “Yes, but” is my sense that America does not have a race problem of the sort Auger-Dominguez writes about. There is an inequality problem but it isn’t because most Americans woke up one day and decided to be racists. The reason is far more complicated, and culpability cannot be removed from Black people themselves.

Auger-Dominguez’s dream is of a workplace where “all employees feel included, valued, and physically and psychologically safe.” But “a dream” is precisely what it is. Anyone who’s ever worked in a corporate (or government) bureaucracy knows that not “everybody” is always going to feel “included and valued.” (Of course, we need to insist on their personal safety, which is non-negotiable.) But psychologically, it can be a jungle out there. While it would be nice to work in Auger-Dominguez’s ideal workplace, it’s impossible. People will rub each other the wrong way, not just racially but in other ways, and the most a manager can do is try to keep a reasonable amount of mutual respect between co-workers, punish bad behavior, reward good behavior, and maximize his team’s chances of achieving their corporate objectives, whatever they are.

It’s Auger-Dominguez’s use of the R-word, revolution, that depresses me the most. American are quite tired, frankly, of revolution. We already fought one revolution (and one Civil War) and we hanker for a period of calm before being drafted to bleed for another revolution. But for Auger-Dominguez, the mere fact of going to the office every day is like reporting to the battlefield. Consider, for instance, the things Auger-Dominguez argues every worker should do every day at work: “start conversations about White fragility or calling out racially charged incidents” in the office. Engage in “challenging conversations about power, privilege, access and opportunity.” When you hear a colleague commit “a microaggression against a person of color…use that as an opportunity to educate.”

I can just imagine some of my former workplaces if I was that guy who was always talking about “White fragility.” Believe me, I wouldn’t be invited to many lunches! People hate complainers, and besides, the office is a workspace, not a 12-step meeting. It’s ironic, because Auger-Dominguez explicitly writes that “no one should have to spend all their physical and emotional labor figuring out how to navigate work spaces so they can survive.” Yet that is exactly what she’s telling us to do: become cultural warriors in the office. If you think that’s going to get you a promotion, think again. It could get you an command performance in Human Resources.

That’s my inevitable reaction to these books. I enjoy reading them but really, most of the time I just want to tell the authors, “Shut up already! Stop the carping, the griping, the constant complaining. People don’t dislike you because you’re Black, they dislike you because you’re a drag.” And that’s why the entire DEI movement, and the anti-racist agenda overall, has become the most discredited political ideology in America. The left has become scolds—angry, judgmental finger-wagging censurers, whose role in life is to admonish everyone for being a racist—everyone White, that is.

Based on my personal experience, all human beings want to be loved, and are capable of giving love in return. My recommendation to the anti-racism crowd is simple: Get over it. Stop being so damned sensitive. If you seek racism everywhere, you’ll find it—and you’ll also make lots of enemies. Somewhere deep inside her, Carroll Fife is probably a sweet, loving human being, but she’s so self-damaged her mind and heart with her obsession with racism that all anyone perceives is, yes, an Angry Black Woman. Is it racist to say that, or is it true?

Steve Heimoff