Watch, if you can, this little girl’s theatrical performance at what seems to be a public event, maybe a City Council meeting. She is, what, about ten years old?
Thank you Oakland for destroying our home values
Oakland was on track for an economic resurgence in the 2000s. The dot.com crash of the early decade was bad, but barely impacted home prices, which continued their decades-long rise. The housing bubble of 2008-2009 was more serious, and homes lost much of their value; but by 2012 home values had begun another rebound. Around 2015, when Libby Schaaf came to power, “progressives” on the City Council secretly communicated in closed session. Their constituents were getting priced out of the city. Gentrification was everywhere. Pretty soon Oakland would be all White and Asian. They progressives had to do something for BIPOCs! But what?
A distant early warning for Oakland
When I was an undergraduate in college, my best friend and I took a long automobile trip one summer. We decided to drive as far north as we could, from Massachusetts. While in the middle of nowhere around Hudson Bay, a hill appeared out of the fog. It had a dusty road leading up to the top, so we decided to explore it. To do so we had to pass through a tall chain-link fence, but the gate was open, and no one was around.
Oakland is like the old Soviet client states of Eastern Europe
My interest in World War II always aroused my curiosity about the fall of the Iron Curtain in East-Central Europe, in 1989, and the demise of the Soviet Union two years later. The more I understand these world-historic events, the greater the lessons I discover for our own political situation here in Oakland.