What does Sheng Thao say Oakland’s #1 priority is?
1. Balancing the budget?
2. Fighting crime?
3. Bringing retail back?
4. Ending encampments?
5. Restoring public trust in government?
A case could be made for any of these. Or all of them. Instead, here’s what Thao says, in her final budget statement before she leaves office (thanks to the Recall):
THAO’S TOP POLICY PRIORITY FOR FISCAL YEARS 2023-2025
“Centering equity is an intentional effort to prevent exacerbating racial disparities and to reduce racial disparities wherever possible.”
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Equity. That’s Oakland #1 policy priority, according to Thao. Well, if you’re wondering why we, the people, fired Thao, it’s all wrapped up in that statement.
Whenever you hear the E-word, know that it’s wokespeak for racialized politics. At a time in history when Americans are fed up with race-hustling, the wokes keep on hammering us with it. We don’t care about Thao’s and Bas’s and Fife’s and Kalb’s obsession with skin color, we care about our streets. We want them safe, and clean, and devoid of tents and crazy people. But Thao & Co. see racists under every bed, behind every lamppost, and in every White person. They desire, not equality of opportunity as the Constitution requires, but equality of outcome—a metaphysical impossibility.
There’s another thing the E-word stands for, and that’s theft: the seizure of your money and its transfer to people of color. That’s all “equity” is or ever has been: the redistribution of wealth. Karl Marx started all this with his Communist slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” It means that productive members of society, the able ones, must subsidize the least productive members, the needy ones whose “needs” are determined by a commissariat of bureaucrats such as Thao, Fife and Bas.
What are those needs? Whatever the bureaucrats decide. Whatever their funders tell them. And since the bureaucrats are in charge of the money collected through taxes, they get to divvy up the dough in whatever manner they want. When they decide what people of color need in order to have “equity,” they pass legislation mandating it, and if there’s not enough money to pay for it, they impose new taxes targeting mainly White people, who are the productive class. Never mind whether or not their programs work: nobody measures the results, and even if they do, or claim to, there’s so much cheating by bureaucrats and nonprofits in Oakland that any results they reported wouldn’t be worth the paper they were printed on. That’s also equity: a kleptocracy of racial wokes running a hoodlum state.
We have to understand that there’s a permanent cabal of racialist agitators who make a living from stirring up racial resentments. These are the people who routinely show up to comment at City Council and Police Commission meetings. It’s the same faces every time: if you watch KTOP regularly, as I do, you see them offering their tired, predictable demands. You see Fife nodding in agreement, Kalb drooling, the Empress Bas sitting sagely in her center seat as her jesters trot in and out. This ship of fools and clowns can’t figure out how to save Oakland but they sure can pass “equity” laws. Well, someday soon “equity” will be as passé as slavery, with which it has much in common: namely, the unjust and unConstitutional promotion of one class over all others.
I do not mean to suggest that our communities of color are not in crisis, and in need of some jolt to shock them into recovery, a sort of cultural defibrillator that restores them to normalcy. This is a vastly complicated topic, but the wokes wish to apply simplified, one-size-fits-all ideological approaches that cannot work. The reasons for the dysfunctionality we see in many Black communities can’t possibly be reduced to “If we only throw enough money at it, we can solve the problem.” No, we can’t. It requires much, much more. Most of us are reasonable enough to want to have this conversation, but wokes won’t allow it, and when they’re in charge, they can have their way. Any reasonable explanations are deemed politically incorrect and are canceled—smothered at birth, as they are here in Oakland. Until we can have honest conversations, such as the type we have here on this blog, there can be no progress, but only retrogression.
Steve Heimoff