It will not shock me if, in the next six months, four of Oakland’s biggest employers—Kaiser, PG&E, Clorox and Blue Shield—announce they’re leaving town, bringing their thousands of employees with them and administering the final death blow to our beleaguered city.
The Big Four companies just made an unprecedented announcement: they’re collectively putting $10 million into a private security system to keep their employees safe. So bad have conditions on the street become that the companies say their workers aren’t safe even going out for lunch. The money will go for “on-demand buddy escorts” and other measures.
Sadly, everyone knows it won’t work: too little too late. But when the companies finally bail out of town, they’ll be able to say, “Hey, at least we tried.”
The most infuriating thing about all this is the way Sheng Thao is congratulating herself on it. “I applaud [the companies’] engagement as true civic leaders to improve conditions for everyone in the Uptown/Downtown community," she said, professing her “deep love and commitment to this beautiful city…[L]inked arm in arm…we will be successful in quickly bringing safety, growth and vibrancy back.”
Thao has practically broken her arm patting herself on the back for her sagacious leadership, when the reality is this: Sheng Thao, you and your woke colleagues on the City Council got us into this epidemic of crime. You are to blame. You thought for years you could recklessly accuse the Oakland Police Department of misconduct. You thought you could hurl baseless accusations of racism against the city’s White residents. You thought you could challenge the underpinnings of civilized society without repercussions. You thought you could win elections by carrying water for the service unions. You actually thought you could defund the Oakland Police Department!
But you were wrong. Your calculations have been proven ignorant and debased. And now, the city you purport to lead is disintegrating into a garbage dump of crime, filth and inhumanity, as the whole world watches in horror. But you have yet to issue an apology for your responsibility in bringing about this tragedy.
This matter of Thao refusing to acknowledge her war against the police while she was on the City Council testifies to her moral turpitude. I never expect our elected leaders to be Buddha or Mother Theresa or to be perfect in any way. They’re only human. But Thao’s mistake was so massive, so consequential (resulting in the death of a city) that the only decent thing for her to do is to hold a press conference, admit how wrong she was, apologize to the people of Oakland and to the Oakland Police Department, and beg for our forgiveness.
I don’t know why she won’t. Maybe she doesn’t think she made a mistake; if so, then she doesn’t have the judgment to be mayor. Maybe she thinks people will forget the past, as they usually do. Maybe, like her predecessor Libby Schaaf, she’s already thinking of higher office, and that if she apologizes, her political opponents of the future will clobber her for it. Whatever her reason, it’s an insult to intelligent people. We know what Thao did. We know why she did it. We know how she did it. We know whom she did it with: Fife, Bas, Kaplan, Kalb and the whole Klown Kar of wokes.
Thao, every time a business shuts down or leaves Oakland, your fingerprints are all over the murder weapon. We will neither forgive you nor forget your crimes. No matter how much you pretend to be a born-again police supporter, we know you’re not. You’re an ambitious, hustling politician who thinks you can fool most of the people most of the time. We’re going to show you that you can’t get away with it.
I challenge the media—the San Francisco Chronicle (especially the racist Justin Phillips), KQED radio, Oaklandside (Darwin, are you listening), the East Bay Times and all the rest--to ask Thao a simple question every time you interview her: Mayor Thao, will you apologize for trying to defund the Oakland Police Department?
Steve Heimoff