For Barbara Lee, free money is always available. It can be obtained via bribes, pay-for-play, political contributions (three words for the same thing), Congressional allocations or, best of all, philanthropic donations. Lee, like all progressive Democrats, sees money as something that’s her entitlement, to pay for anything she wants.
Well, that may have been true in the past, but no more. The federal spigot has been turned off. The money that financed everything from the New Deal to the War on Poverty to the spending sprees of the 1990s and 2000s has dried up. So Lee’s promise to solve Oakland’s problems by “pursu[ing] philanthropic investments” is hollow, if not delusionary. It’s also in direct contradiction to her vow to be “practical” in her goverance. Someone needs to whisper in her ear, “Barbara, dear, there is no philanthropic money available for Oakland. At least, nowhere near enough to make a dent.”
Lee’s cavalier attitude towards money stems from her upbringing as a Black person of poverty. For Lee, the answer to lack of housing, healthcare and food always came down to expecting the government to provide it. God forbid anyone should have to work to earn their own money! No, it had to come from Uncle Sam because—well, just because. Lee never felt the need to explain it, except for the lame excuse of “400 years of Jim Crow” or something like that. “Housing,” she argues, “is a human right.” But for progressives, everything is a human right! Therefore, a government that fails to provide everything is a government that has failed—and deserves to be overthrown, “by any means necessary,” in the words of Lee’s Black Panther mentors.
Lee has backed off her more strident demands for revolution since she entered the genteel parlors of electoral politics, but fundamentally she’s still the same old girl she used to be. She, like all progressives, continues to identify success in terms of how much money she can spend for her causes. This is the ultimate elevation of process over outcome, but there’s a downside. The amount of money spent is irrelevant. If Barbara Lee got $10 billion in donations from philanthropies—which will never happen—I guarantee you her administration would never be able to account for where it went. It would disappear into the black hole of the progressive Democratic labyrinth that has been created in Oakland, where it seeps to the most crooked grifters America has ever known. But perhaps that’s Lee’s point: As long as she keeps their grift going, they’ll continue to support her. It’s a Devil’s bargain in which we, the people, get screwed, and the Black community continues to be mired in the dysfunction of a welfare mentality.
Steve Heimoff