Virtually alone among Bay Area big cities, Oakland defiantly continues to allow the worst encampments to despoil the city. From Lakeside Park to Mosswood to East 12th Street and the despicable mess along the Estuary, your pro-homeless government is resisting doing what everyone else is doing: Cleaning up the slums.
The latest is Fremont, which “approved a ban on camping and the storage of personal belongings by unhoused individuals” on Tuesday, according to East Bay Insiders. As one Fremont City Council person put it, “Being homeless is not a crime and this proposed camping ban is not criminalizing homeless people. However, being homeless does not mean that person is above the law and can do whatever he wants.”
Can I get an amen?
The next time you hear some miscreant like Cat Brooks or Carroll Fife babble about “criminalizing homelessness,” repeat those words: “Being homeless does not mean that person is above the law and can do whatever he wants.”
Good lord, it’s taken long enough for Americans to understand this simple truth. But not Oakland! These crazed ideologues—people like Brooks, Fife, Sheng Thao, Nikki F. Bas, Dan Kalb and Pamela Price—will become further and further marginalized, as their radical beliefs are recognized by normal Americans as unacceptable.
And now a word about the so-called “movement” to draft Barbara Lee as Mayor of Oakland. Please, if there’s a God, no! Barbara Lee is the ur-mother of every failed progressive in Oakland. She’s harped on race, race, race forever, and still is obsessed with it. Something’s not normal there. What has she ever done for Oakland in her 26 years in Congress? Name one thing, I dare you. Lee has been coasting since Sept. 14, 2001, when she voted against allowing George W. Bush to use military force in response to the Sept. 11 terror attacks. It made her famous, but it’s the only noteworthy thing she ever did as a Congressperson. Whether or not you agreed with her is irrelevant: the fact that she’s done nothing since is enough to make her ineligible for any further political role in Oakland. Lee is an old radical in the Black Panther-Black Liberation style, and now there’s this drumbeat of woke influencers, like Darwin BondGraham at Oaklandside, the San Francisco Chronicle, and our new mayor (gag, I can hardly say it) Nikki F. Bas, trying to sneak her in the back door so that the Schaaf-Thao-Bas regime can continue uninterrupted. Yes, the same regime that has brought Oakland nothing but misery. Lee would be merely the next part of that disaster movie. This is a coup happening in real time, before our eyes. We must resist.
If you know how to contact your City Council person, do it. Tell them “NO!” on Barbara Lee. I don’t know that there’s any feasible candidate out there who could responsibly run Oakland, but I do know that Barbara Lee will only get Oakland into worse trouble, if that’s even possible.
Steve Heimoff