The thing that strikes me about the Thao scandal is how tawdry it was. All pay-for-play is tawdry, for it arises from the basest motives of money, deception and power. But there’s something so amateur hour about this case that it leaves me breathless.
The incriminating text messages the perps thought wouldn’t be recovered. The deals they tried so clumsily to cover up. The sleazeball mobsters out of Damon Runyan. Dopey cigar-chewing thugs who thought they could bribe a mayor and get away with it. A desperate, crooked mayor who needed cash and was happy to be used. A City Council that looked the other way, because they were all swimming in the same sewer. And a press obsessed with race.
This is the system that gave us Sheng Thao. And Carroll Fife. And Nikki Bas. And Dan Kalb. And Pamela Price. These are the piranhas that gather in back rooms with union mafiosas and tell them their going price. The mafia chiefs in turn make their demands. The deal goes down. No one knows. The public has never found out how corrupt Oakland government is. Until now.
A good place to start reform would be for current and future candidates to announce they will take no donations from unions. There’s no such thing as clean union money. It’s all tainted. Whomever union money touches is debased. The union bosses don’t care about people of color, per se. True, they want to tell their Black and Latino unskilled workers how hard they’re working to achieve “equity,” but what they really dread are all those (mostly) women leaving the union. What they really want to protect are their salaries and perks. It’s a hell of a way to make a living, but a posh house in the Hills and a new Mercedes go a long way toward salving the guilty conscience of a union boss.
I’m plenty pissed off. These corrupt, petty people have been scamming Oakland for years. For all I know, they still are. What deals are going down in the Districts today? Carroll Fife is so corrupt she’d sell City Hall to AASEG if she thought she’d get away with it. Rebecca Kaplan puts on a big show about morality and ethics, with her little yarmulke, but she’s just Hyman Roth, in a bad suit. Nikki Bas: let me see your campaign files. What are you hiding?
Transparency is demanded of you, Bay Area journalists. You need to work much harder. Your newspapers, radio and TV stations are dying, because you’re no longer trusted by the public. Has dedicating your career to race mongering been good for you? What has it accomplished? The public doesn’t buy it. Perhaps, in your heart, you don’t either. Maybe you think, “Oh, well, in for a dime, in for a dollar.”
But no. Go out and grow a pair. Look into the unions, Darwin BondGraham. Look into the unions, Sarah Ravani. Look into the unions, Mike Mibach. Look into the unions, Center for Investigative Reporting. And before he amasses too much power, look into Kevin Jenkins and the unions. Look into the unions…
Steve Heimoff