Why does Oakland’s Department of Race and Equity make it nearly impossible to find out their annual budget? I’m a good investigative reporter and yet I can’t dig up this information, which I have a right to know as a tax-paying citizen.
So I’ll make the assumption that DRE is funded in the tens of millions of dollars every year. Since we all know that Oakland is broke, I have a suggestion: eliminate DRE (along with all the other useless departments) and use the money to increase police hiring and retention. And fill those damned potholes!
DRE is one of those scams Oakland specializes in. Over the decades, racialist “progressives” have seized control of Oakland government and created all these departments aimed at achieving what they call “equity.” That means equal outcomes for everyone, which of course is impossible and unnatural, but that doesn’t stop the racialists from demanding it anyway.
DRE was proposed to the City Council by former Councilmember Desley Brooks, whom you might remember for her scandals. Among those were Brooks’ physical assault on Elaine Brown, a former Black Panther. Brown sued Oakland and Brooks, and a jury awarded Brown $3.75 million—money we taxpayers had to fork over for Brooks’s thuggery. As a result of that and other embarrassing stunts, Brooks lost her bid for re-election to our friend Loren Taylor.
Desley Brooks was part of the same cabal of Carroll Fife, Pamela Price, Nikki Bas, Sheng Thao and Cat Brooks—the gang that seeks to destroy Oakland in order to make it run down, and thus more “equitable.” DRE’s fundamental principle is, in fact, unachievable: to achieve “equity for all people regardless of race, class, gender or language spoken.” What these DRE types demand is that every person in Oakland have the same standard of living, earn the same amount of money, have the same quality of life, the same educational evaluations, the same healthcare, the same housing—in short, that every difference between people be razed so that no one is better off than anyone else. As they put it, DRE’s mission is to “create a city where racial disparities have been eliminated.”
This is an insane hallucination, obviously. Karl Marx and Joseph Stalin also dreamed it, with catastrophic results. It’s never been done in human history because it doesn’t allow for a diversity of talents and abilities, which is how nature works. She scatters her seed indiscriminately; not everybody is created equal, in terms of ability and ambition. One might wish it otherwise, but wishes can’t change reality.
Since their goal is fundamentally unachievable, the far left has always resorted to dictatorial fiats so that they can jam through measures, such as income redistribution, on the people. Governments in progressive cities like Oakland impose and collect taxes and then spend the money on their equity programs. They have enormous power over our lives; these racialist progressives, or wokes, believe in seizing as much money as they can from the private sector (you and me) through the various taxes they impose of us, and then reallocating the money to entities claiming to speak for the “marginalized” communities, whose donations, dominated by the service unions, are their lifeblood. But as we’ve seen in Oakland for many years, all this does is create grift, graft and corruption, while preserving a dissolute culture of crime. Meanwhile, a woke-fascinated media, too lazy to do true reporting but happy for their one minute on the nightly news, never bothers to investigate the criminal activities occurring under their noses.
Mind you, I have nothing against “Big Government” of the sort the Right loves to denounce. Big Government has given us LGBTQ rights, women’s healthcare (until SCOTUS took it away), and all sorts of good things. But I mind it when Big Government in Oakland is mentally obsessed with racialist modes of thought, which accomplish nothing of value for people of color or anyone else, except possibly to employ many of them in city jobs to fill the vast useless bureaucracies that woke government creates.
There are, like it or not, underlying truths in life. We’re not all created equal. In the game of life, those more fitted to compete will be the “winners,” if you define winning in economic terms (which, by the way, I don’t). Some people are brilliant and will overcome any challenges (I’m thinking of Barack Obama, Beyonce and Steph Curry). Some people eschew the rules of the game and then complain when they find themselves left behind. These losers are the ones the racialist politicians demand be given money by redistributing public funds. But this is counter to Nature, and I think most of us know it. It’s immoral to take hard-working people’s money and give it to undeserving people in the name of “equity.” Surely the woke racialists would help their communities a lot more by urging them to raise children in two-parent households and for those children to get the best education they possibly can, and to avoid the pitfalls of gangs, dangerous drugs, and looking to crime for easy money.
So let’s abolish DRE. A waste of time and money. Let’s stop putting race at the center of every political conversation in Oakland. Let’s stop electing grifting hustlers like Fife, Price and Bas to public office, and instead put our trust in people who know how to build up Oakland’s economy, instead of tearing it down.
Steve Heimoff