Barbara Lee is clueless when it comes to Oakland’s reality. When she expresses surprise that Oaklanders worry about crime (because Oakland, in Lee’s hallucination, doesn’t have a crime problem), we’re supposed to admire her positive thinking.
But Lee is really crazy in many of her policies. Consider, for instance, her view on the federal minimum wage, which currently is $7.25 (although many states peg it far higher). During her abortive campaign for Senator (in which even the conservative Republican candidate, Steve Garvey, got three times as many votes as she did), Lee said she would raise the minimum wage to $50 an hour.
I don’t recall any public outrage after that, probably because it wasn’t widely reported, and no one took Lee’s candidacy seriously at that point or any subsequent point. But think about it: every clerk, every janitor working for the federal government would make $50 an hour if Lee had her way!
Well, it never happened, and now Trump is firing federal employees. But Lee’s preposterous suggestion highlights some of the reasons why she’s utterly unqualified to hold any executive position. For Lee, the federal government is the ultimate DEI employer. For Lee, the answer to poverty is simply for the federal government to hire every unqualified, untalented person in America—at $50 a hour, plus the healthcare and retirement benefits that go with federal employment. For Lee, never mind that this would cost $1 trillion, or $17 trillion, or $43 quadrillion dollars; the amount is irrelevant. For Lee, coming up with the money is easy: just tax “billionaires” and all will be well. For Lee, taxes are just another way of leveling the playing field, of redistributing wealth in America. Lee would not call herself a Communist, but the political philosophy she espouses amounts to the same thing.
The honorable way for the 78-year old Lee to end her long political career would be to bow out of the mayoral race, endorse someone moderate like Loren Taylor, and retire to some cozy little cottage in the country somewhere. But instead Lee, who’s never had a proper job outside of government, is stubbornly insisting on continuing her cushy paycheck by becoming our next mayor. It’s astonishing to me that she has any support at all, but the unions have always lined up to throw money into Lee’s trough, and they’re doing it now, including SEIU, Oakland Education Association, IFPTE, California Nurses, Alameda County Building Trades Council. The secret deals that Lee makes with these unions will never be revealed to the people, but these quid pro quos are never healthy for the taxpayers. They’re rooted in cynicism and contempt for our fragile democracy, or what’s left of it in Oakland.
Steve Heimoff