“Council members Nikki Fortunato Bas and Carroll Fife spearheaded the push to defund the Oakland Police Department.” That was the headline of the June 24, 2021 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle. This occurred just as Oakland’s infamous summer of murder was starting, when 134 people were slaughtered on the city’s streets. So great was the outcry against this carnage that a majority of the City Council, who had previously indulged in anti-police rhetoric, including Sheng Thao, voted at summer’s end to fund an additional police training academy. But two Council members voted against it: Yes, Bas and Fife.
Why? In an interview with National Public Radio, Bas offered up what had already become her standard formula for defunding the police.
1. “Our public safety system is broken.”
2. “It is not keeping everyone in Oakland safe.”
3. “What we need to do is refund and reinvest our precious public dollars in our community.”
4. “That means addressing the root causes of violence and poverty and also investing deeply in violence prevention.”
This is the Bas/woke catechism. She trots these clichés out whenever she can, in response to every question. Never mind that the American people have finally understood how fake this narrative is. But Bas continues to spout it because it got her elected and now keeps her in power.
Like most of you, I’m appalled that Bas won election to the Board of Supervisors. I’d really hoped we’d seen the last of her. But somehow, at the last minute, she managed to edge out John Bauters by a few hundred votes. It only goes to show the importance of every single vote in every single election.
When I consider Bas’s tenure on the City Council, especially as its president, here’s what stands out:
- Her repeated attempts to defund the Oakland Police Department
- Her brazen incompetence at managing Oakland’s budget
- Her obsession with, and addiction to, racialized identity politics
- Her tolerance of homeless encampments, and
- Her collusion with the most dangerous, unstable Council members, including Fife
In any other place in America, Bas’s record would have disqualified her from holding any position of power, elected or appointed. The Fifth District of Alameda County, which she will now represent, includes Albany, Berkeley, Emeryville, Piedmont, and West Oakland, North Oakland, Rockridge, Grand Lake, and portions of the Fruitvale, Manzanita and Dimond District neighborhoods. Many of these neighborhoods are relatively or downright wealthy. Their White residents like to think of themselves as well-educated, tolerant progressives. They love to signal their virtue by voting for far-left politicians like Bas.
The funny thing is that these same voters would be the first to call 9-1-1 if they saw a suspicious group of Black men outside their house at night. These are the smug wealthy who put “Black Lives Matter” signs in their yards and windows. They feel sorry for Black people, they feel shame at being part of a culture that once legalized slavery, and they think that Black people are somehow kept down by a gigantic, rightwing White conspiracy funded by racist billionaires. Of course, they’re not ashamed of their own high incomes, or of the low wages they pay the people of color who clean their homes and rake their yards.
Woke politicians, like Bas, never accomplish what they promise. Is Oakland better off since Bas was elected to the Council? From my perspective, we’re much worse off. Oakland, under Bas’s leadership of the Council, is dead broke; a declaration of bankruptcy isn’t far off. Downtown has been destroyed and may never recover. Home prices are collapsing because no one wants to live here. Crime continues to be rampant. The streets are filled with garbage. Homeless slums occupy entire blocks of certain parts of the city. There is no transparency in government; half the meetings of city departments occur behind closed doors, with no records or accountability. We have no idea what promises Bas makes to what unions in exchange for their money. Nobody in their right mind would dare to walk International Boulevard, San Pablo Avenue, the Lower Bottoms of West Oakland, or even in Lakeside Park after dark. By every measure of a city’s health, Oakland is mortally ill. There are many people to blame, but no one more so than Nikki Bas.
And yet there she is, about to assume great power as a Supervisor. Here, from her campaign website, are what she says are her goals, i.e., more clichés: “I will bring an unflagging commitment and engage the community to serve every resident by expanding affordable housing and effective solutions to homelessness, accessible healthcare, good jobs, and safe communities.” Blah blah blah, just more noise from a grifting politician. Bas will not solve “homelessness.” She’s had years of opportunity to do so and has failed. Bas will not make housing “affordable.” If she knew how to do it, she already would have. And there will be “no safe communities” because Bas’s bankruptcy of Oakland means the police department will be further weakened.
I wonder if, in some malicious way, Bas, Fife, Thao and Kaplan secretly connived to bankrupt Oakland. I can see the four of them, gathered around Thao’s dining room table, passing a joint while they plot. They couldn’t destroy the Oakland Police Department—their top goal—while the city still had money, so what if they simply drove Oakland into insolvency, taking all the money away so that defunding OPD would become fiscally necessary and politically acceptable? It’s just another version of “by any means necessary,” the radical old Black revolutionary philosophy that justified even murder. Of course, bankrupting Oakland has meant causing lots of pain to innocent citizens (but not to Bas & Co. personally), but you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, right? So if Oakland has to lose hundreds of retail stores, and downtown has to die while dozens more Black men are murdered, it’s a small price to pay for social equity, in Bas’s warped, angry fantasy world.
Steve Heimoff