Some months ago, I wrote a post about magnet schools in Oakland. For the most part I was ignored, save for one person who took the time to inform me that such programs are illegal in California.

I didn’t do too much research after receiving this comment. Then, I ran across the following links:

http://www.greatschools.org/cgi-bin/ca/achievement/6397

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_High_School_(San_Francisco)

So, San Francisco has a fantastic, high-performing magnet high school that requires students meet certain academic requirements.

Why can’t Oakland do the same thing? For starters, this seems like something the teacher union would like. This school would not be a charter school, so its teachers would be in the union.

And, such a project would pull dollars back into the Oakland school district as parents shifted back to public school from private school. It’s common knowledge that parents with high-achieving kids in Oakland send them to private school if they can afford it.

I’m sure many parents would breathe a sigh of relief to have such an option available in this economy.

And, Oakland clearly has the facilities to spare to implement such a project. My understanding is that flight from the Oakland schools to charters and private schools has left many schools half-full.

I recently read on Katy Murphy’s blog about how  the union is planning a strike over wages. Maybe they could add a unionized magnet middle and high school to their list of demands.

I also saw a video where the superintendent of schools, Tony Smith, indicated that he wants to look for ways to fix the schools budget crisis. Maybe attracting back students with a magnet school could be part of the solution?

What’s the rationale for the city to have no magnet school anyway? It can’t be just liberalism — since San Francisco is plenty liberal and has Lowell. What’s going on here?

Oh and one other thing. If Oakland had better options for high-performing middle and high school students, that would increase property values (just look at the values in Piedmont). That would improve the city’s tax base, which would help schools as well.

Isn’t this a win-win?

How do they define a “struggling” student? It won’t surprise you to find out that this word is a synonym for “black and Latino” students.

Apparently, the School Governance Council — a community body which I hope has absolutely no say in the matter — voted nearly unanimously to support this reallocation of resources.

I have a few opinions about this, but my most important observation concerns global competitiveness.

Does it never occur to those Leftists out there that our country is in competition with others around the world?

This may shock liberals, but the primary reason why the United States enjoys such a high standard of living is not because Martin Luther King gave such nice speeches, not because Roosevelt packed the court and not because labor unions fought for higher wages for menial work.

Just look around you at all the technological marvels which make your life so easy. Cars, computers and cellphones are all the product of basic research — a significant part of which was funded by the government.

Basic research is one of the few areas where the government actually contributes toward an increase in relative GDP between one country and another. And, improved comparative GDP is the only reason why our country is considered part of the “first world” while much of the rest of the world lies in poverty.

The government’s contribution is critical — both in educating people and in funding research in promising new areas which are not yet clearly profitable investments.

This issue goes hand in hand with my general frustration about way education “battles” are cast these days in our country. People view education only as a way to raise up people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. While it can serve this purpose, it is vital to think of education instead as a way to raise the ladder as a whole.

So, I oppose cutting UC Berkeley’s budget just as much as the students who protested there last month. Sadly, though, the signs those students held aloft said things like “Save Our Janitors’ Jobs.”

These students don’t get it. The measure of our country’s competitiveness does not lie with the wages we pay our least-educated people. It lies with the value we place on promoting our best and brightest.

So, we should not fight to fund community colleges. We should fight to fund programs for the smartest kids at the top universities.

Our secondary schools should not worry so much about troublemakers or the “special needs” kids. They should instead fight for magnet and Advanced Placement programs to ensure the most able among us can gain the skills they need to pull us along.

This news from Berkeley reminds me of a scene from a Douglas Adams novel, where it turned out the Earth was populated by middle-managers and “telephone sanitizers.” There’s nothing wrong with having such people in a society, but they do nothing to make that society great.

Don’t these people understand that by closing science labs — even in the spirit of promoting equality — they are consigning everybody to a lower standard of living? It sounds to me like someone needs to re-read Atlas Shrugged.

These Leftists spend so much time working on solving the “racial achievement” gap, but I’d prefer just to call it what it is: racism.

After all, no one seems to mind when schools at every level throw untold millions of dollars at the best and the brightest athletes. For some reason, in the athletic sphere we seem to get it — some people have the skills to get things done, and others can’t make it.

Of course, in athletics, the racial mix is far different. I’ll let you do the math on that one.

Academics should be no different. And, thank goodness, for the most part it remains a meritocracy.

While most universities have been forced to accept unqualified candidates through quota systems, such efforts are pretty pro forma. To see this for yourself, just compare the makeup of UC Berkeley as a whole to that of an upper-division math or physics lecture hall.

Still, this news from Berkeley is disturbing. If this is the direction we’re heading I can’t see how we’ll continue to compete with other countries such as China, which are much more interested in cultivating their brightest minds than self-flagellating over past inequalities.

I drove down to campus that evening, with the sound of media helicopters roaring in the air. It took a few minutes to walk from my parking spot to the epicenter of the protests, but when I got there I could tell the trip had not been in vain.

There, I saw a phalanx of riot police surrounding Wheeler Hall and the main library. Across a small barrier from the cops stood maybe 200 protesters shouting various slogans — things like “Whose university? Our university!”

I walked all the way around the buildings to see that cops were positioned at every entrance to block the protesters. At one point, I saw an army of about 100 cops double-time it down the street to the east of the surrounded buildings. Their march looked every bit like a military maneuver.

As I followed behind this phalanx of cops, I started counting, and I telephoned a friend to get a bit of information. You see, I was much more interested in how much this police presence cost than in the protest itself. I knew — as everyone did — that the protest was a complete waste of time.

My friend informed me that, including benefits, an overtime police officer typically receives about $150 per hour of service. My quick count of the cop column totaled 100 officers. That means this little army cost the government about $15,000 per hour.

My first thought was that I would be very happy to join their little army for that kind of compensation. Who wouldn’t? There was no meaningful probability that the protest would become violent.

From what I could discern, the protesters don’t like the fact that the regents voted to increase student fees. They also seemed very upset that several unionized workers might lose their jobs — I saw specific signs in support of janitors and “those making under $40k.”

I wonder if the protesters ever considered that the very reason for the state’s reduction in contributions to the school is unionized employees like those the protesters support. And, to make matters worse, the worst offenders are the men and women who were standing across the barriers from them — the police officers.

As a matter of fact, every dollar of overtime these protesters caused to be expended on the police came — in one way or another — directly from the same pot of money which would have gone to fund the university.

I tend to agree with part of the protesters’ platform. Higher education — and by “higher” I mean places like Berkeley, not Cal State Dominguez Hills — is an extremely important priority, as it helps produce the technological advances which improve our lives.

However, the combination of this reasonable position with Leftist aims like “protecting union employees” leaves the protesters’ position hopelessly befuddled.

You can’t have it both ways. California has spent and spent and spent on ridiculous pension plans for its government/union employees. The state has bankrupted itself paying for cops and firemen, for the incarcerated, the poor and for education for the bottom rung of society.

And for what?

Here, at UC Berkeley, the absurdity of such spending comes home to roost. We as a society are investing heavily in our most useless citizens while underfunding institutions which are the keys to moving the human race forward.

So, as usual, I was left thinking to myself that both sides of the protest had it all wrong. The protesters don’t really understand the nature of the situation — or they just don’t care. And the cops absolutely don’t care. They’re just glad to be getting that overtime check.

Both sides do have one thing in common — they’d love to see higher taxes to pay for everything they want without cutting anything. Unfortunately, that seems to be the current plan across the land.

Higher taxes seem like a great idea until you realize several truths:

1. The need of those at the bottom of the income spectrum is limitless, and no amount of taxes will ever be enough.
2. Higher taxation drives out those with skills and high IQs, a process which is already well underway in California.
3. Raising taxes just delays the inevitable discussion of what investments society should and should not be making.

In my opinion, it’s simple. Cut funding for the poor and the stupid, and increase funding for places like UC Berkeley. A rising tide lifts all boats.

A sinking tide brings — well, you get the picture — Obamanomics.

It was a risky political stunt that allowed the Nazi Party to consolidate its grip on the German nation.

The sad truth is that Hitler was elected democratically. The Nazis took advantage of a weakness in the Weimar constitution that allowed proportionate representation.

After an election, the seats in the Reichstag were distributed among candidates of most if not all of the various parties based on the percentages of the votes tallied. Fringe, screwball political movements got their feet in the door this way. Ironically, this is how Israel works.

The Nazis had incrementally worked their way up to having  plurality after the election of 1932. But that wasn’t good enough. In the campaign Hitler had promised, “An end to politics.” They were compelled to eliminate all opposition in order for their agenda of German reconstruction to take place.

Hence the Reichstag fire. On February 27, 1933, a mysterious arson gutted the German parliament. The loudest voices blamed Communists and their ilk (non-Nazis). Hitler swiftly moved to arrest and imprison all political opponents, and thus the way was clear for complete domination and the promised end to politics.

The American Left (a.k.a. Democrats) has taken over the national government. As a consequence they are being righteously creamed in the court of public opinion. Nothing would help them more in their quest to consolidate power than for the next two national elections to be canceled.

Even during the Civil War we held national elections, but then there was less of a political imperative for the party in power to stifle metastasizing dissent. What the Democrats could use is some kind of “event” that would allow them to declare an extraordinary national emergency — the modern equivalent of the Reichstag Fire.

What kind of event? That’s a toughie. The domestic terror attack on the Oklahoma City Federal Building comes to mind. It would be easy to blame right wingers in the absence of tangible evidence. I’m sure Mr. Holder, the Attorney General, would be happy to help.

Plausibility for such a scheme rests on the fact that so many among us have already been stampeded by a fanciful hoax concerning vague trends in the weather.

Recently, while chatting with a friend about domestic politics he concluded that we are in a new civil war, though without guns.

Wars, however, go well beyond yelling, screaming, marching with placards and making evocative speeches. Should this be true — and trends continue — then some day the gloves will really start to come off.

What then? A precursor to our last Civil War was John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. Just a thought.

A couple weeks back, I dutifully put my money into the meter and pressed the button to receive a receipt. The meter made some clicking sounds, but nothing came out.

I pushed the cancel button in an effort to get my money back, but it was too late. The meter wrongly believed it had dispensed a ticket.

My immediate solution was to go down the street and use another meter. That one worked, but I had now spent eight dollars for my two hours of parking.

I returned to the first meter. There’s a phone number printed on them in case there are problems. I called the number from my cellphone and left my information on the voice mail system that responded.

A week later, I had heard nothing, so I called again, and again. In total I left four messages. I then tried calling the main switchboard to try and get through to whomever is responsible for broken meters. I made some progress, but Oakland’s bureaucracy quickly used up the time I was willing to spend on such a minor amount of money.

Four dollars may not sound like much, but this situation is reminiscent of the property-tax issue I blogged about several weeks back. Essentially, the city insists year after year on illegally charging me for Measure Y on a vacant lot.

On Measure Y, at least the city responds to phone calls, but they make it as difficult as they can to get a refund — requiring taxpayers to mail a signed form every year. They then require you to be available for the city to inspect the lot to make sure it’s vacant. Don’t they keep records of these kinds of things?

I know I shouldn’t be surprised. Oakland’s government is clearly set up as a mechanism to extract as much money as possible from taxpayers and funnel it to the politically connected. No one seriously argues that Oakland’s government is not corrupt.

As with most of Oakland’s civic services, this kind of behavior simply discourages people from having anything to do with the city. It’s just like the schools, the roads, the parks and everything else a reasonable family could care about. The best strategy is to avoid Oakland altogether: use private schools, bike in Piedmont and visit parks east of the tunnel.

I also think these new meters are an idiotic “innovation.” I have no problem with paying for parking. In fact, I support meters as they prevent all the spots from being taken — ignoring for the moment the fact that Oakland’s thousands of disabled-placard fraudsters ruin even this objective.

As an Oakland resident, I’d be much more interested in some sort of device like the one I use when I cross the Bay Bridge. I could simply attach it to my windshield and push a button on it each time I want to consume 15 minutes of parking. Then it would count down just like an ordinary meter.

I could charge it up online, and meter readers could use some sort of electronic device to sync it up whenever they come by my car. This would also ensure that the device hasn’t been hacked.

For that matter, such a device could be used region-wide. It could replace the rolls of quarters I still use in parts of the East Bay and the tag I have hanging from my rear-view mirror for Bart.

Of course, we all know the sad history of such types of systems. TransLink serves as a warning to anyone considering something similar.

And, opponents would counter, how would those visiting from out of town park? This is exactly the same argument that has kept toll-takers standing at most of the lanes on the area’s bridges, making traffic conditions worse and decreasing area drivers’ incentive to get FasTrak.

In truth, if one implemented a region-wide system, such a concern would be minimized, and all a driver would need to do is purchase some sort of pre-paid card prior to parking in the Bay Area. Such a card could even be printed off the Internet, exactly like a Southwest boarding pass.

There are actually two issues standing in the way of this kind of innovation. The first is corruption/stupidity — the city government only wants to buy products which require zero creativity and that provide as much as a kickback as possible.

The other issue is one common to government at all levels: fear. The politician’s primary goal is to continue to be reelected. As such, it makes no sense to support an innovative solution that could prove game-changing. It’s far better to focus on the incremental and the safe.

And that’s what we get in Oakland — the safest possible solution.

Except when it comes to public safety, of course. Be realistic!

The word “hypocrite” comes to mind, but somehow it seems too weak to describe the sort of malevolence we’re talking about here. No, I think this level of cognitive dissonance rises to the level of sociopathy, mixed with a morsel of mental retardation — we are talking about Ron Dullums after all.

So it goes in Oakland, where we have been treated this week to the delicious irony of a “leader” who demonstrates that fiscal incompetence is both a personal as well as a professional trait.

Yes, Dullums and his wife apparently owe $239k in back taxes, and they have refused to pay for so long that the IRS has placed liens against their property.

While there have been a few muted calls for Dullums to resign, I’ve been surprised by the lack of vigor in the condemnation of this state of affairs. I expect such things from the likes of J Douglas Allen-Taylor — who at this moment is probably working on an opinion piece for the Daily Planet explaining how Dullums is actually a hero for purposefully not paying his taxes to teach us a lesson about the risks of disobeying the government.

But I was surprised to see the following gem in a column by Chip Johnson, with whom I often agree: “Anyone can make a mistake, and if that’s all this is, then no harm, no foul.”

Underpaying by $239k a mistake? Sure, I could imagine such a thing for the likes of Bill Gates. But Dullums is not Bill Gates, a fact which is amply demonstrated by his inability to pay the money once the IRS notified him that he owed it.

Judging from Dullums’ nouveau-riche demeanor, I’d guess he’s spent every penny he’s made for some time — a trait he shares, not surprisingly, with the city he “runs.”

Still, such a high tax bill indicates that Dullums earned more than a million dollars during some recent span of his “career.” The notion that someone earning so much lacked the common sense or common decency to either buy a copy of TurboTax or hire a competent accountant is just embarrassing. What a pathetic, selfish little fool we have for a mayor.

That’s not even mentioning other items from Johnson’s piece which, though probably common knowledge, were news to me.

Apparently Dullums received a $60k salary boost from that of our previous mayor. For what? If you ask me, Dullums should return 100% of his salary and beat himself about the face every night for a week on Channel 10 as penance for his treatment of Oakland. Certainly the notion that we pay Dullums more than we paid Jerry Brown is an obvious farce.

Dullums required a driver as well? This one makes more sense, I guess, for a man who obviously would have difficulty reading traffic signs.

Some have suggested that Dullums resign, but such a move would be a mistake. I don’t know who would fill his slot, but I have a bad feeling it would be Jane Brunner, which wouldn’t be any better. Certainly, a Dullums resignation might provide someone equally bad with the advantage of incumbency.

So I say just let the man finish his term and fade away. Soon enough the 2010 campaign will begin in earnest, and Dullums will no longer be relevant.

I’d like to hear the Leftist defense of the repeated cases of liberal tax dodging that have been in the press in the past year. The most reasonable argument would probably be to say that everyone does it.

In my experience, this seems to be the case. I’ve found that a person’s propensity to avoid taxes has little to do with his location on the political spectrum.

It’s not surprising to me that all people would have an equal desire to safeguard their assets against the government. But from the perspective of a liberal, this position is more difficult to defend. Time and again liberals have told me that they support increased taxation because one group or another “needs” the “resources” that they can obtain no other way.

If that is the case, then how can a liberal square tax avoidance with his political beliefs?

In my opinion, the answer is simply that, like most people, liberals place a higher importance on their own well-being than that of society at large. In other words, they are just as “selfish” as the conservatives they assail.

The difference is that liberals take the intellectually dishonest position that they want “everyone else” to pay for the programs that they support. In contrast, conservatives admit to their own selfishness but then strive to treat everyone equally by reducing the burden on all.

And so it is that when you read about Dullums refusing to pay his taxes, what really should come to mind is the old liberal maxim: “When it comes to money, do as I say and not as I do.”

Or the old Dullums maxim: “If you’re going to use the public resources, you need the public benefit.”

Yes you do, Ron. Yes you do. Driver and all.

Sixteen years ago I was asked what I thought of Mrs. Clinton’s machinations on the health care front. I told the questioner that every member of Congress who backed the reinvention of American health care, as Mrs. Clinton was proposing, was booking a stateroom on the Titanic. What Americans want, I added, was for the price to go down and for there to be fewer other patients in the waiting room. Including the heretofore uninsured into the system and reducing the career appeal of the practice of medicine does exactly the opposite on both fronts.

In spite of sixteen years of further study and technologic advancement, nothing has changed. The American political establishment is proving once again that it is profoundly ill equipped to deal directly with such a complex and important subject. It is not just a lack of expertise on the technicalities of medical practice… but a disconcerting tendency to completely misrepresent the current situation. I just recently visited an old, old friend who is now the medical director of a regional HMO. I had some limited success in picking his brain on this matter. The following thumbnail statements may be useful in undoing some of the erroneous notions that pollute the debate:

1) The ranks of the “uninsured” do not represent anything like a crisis… and especially do not justify screwing around with the existing system. The Right has appropriately debunked the inflated numbers used by the Left. The burdens placed on hospital emergency rooms by uninsured drop-ins could be easily managed except for bureaucratic inertia and unrealistic state and local statutes. (More later)

2) The most profound problem facing American health care is completely ignored in the political arena today. Many doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other technicians… just like the rest of the population… are baby boomers who are approaching retirement. They are poised to go from being providers of health care to being consumers of such. To suppress price inflation and maintain a semblance of quality of care it is necessary to allow the supply of health care professionals to keep up with increasing demand. Fostering turmoil scares away the needed recruits. A simple improvement would be to make it easier to pay for medical school, etc. Grants, cheap loans and such are the normal fare of rational political involvement.

3) The Right errs in sounding the alarm on rationing and pulling the plug on grandma… but politics ain’t beanbag. Rationing is a fact of life in health care… as is the quandary of end of life decision making. The Left wants to make things worse in this regard… by creating a national monolith that would replace various medical ethics committees, hospital and HMO corporate policies and state laws. It’s a human dilemma… we have developed capabilities such as organ transplanting without also developing the concomitant wisdom to consistently make flawless decisions about how to best use these capabilities.

4) The several states have heretofore been the sole authority over medical practice. The inventors of America included a marvelous political safety valve called the federalist system in their grand design. Not only is it technically illegal for Congress and the Administration to essentially take over health care… it’s also not a good idea on practical grounds. Diversity of approach allows for beneficial innovation and limits the damage from well intentioned mistakes. Doctors, nurses, pharmacists, etc. can only practice with state licenses. Let the states remain in control, I say.

5) Health care can be broken down into three competing aspects: Financial… how to pay for everything. Technologic… the continually evolving influence of science on the capabilities of the system. And, ethical… the decision-making process by which finite resources are juggled. Within the medical community the financial aspect is considered to be the most problematic. Our ability to treat sick people is outstripping our willingness to relinquish ever more of our individual fortunes for that purpose.

6) In acknowledgment of political reality I suggest the establishment of a minimum standard of care. To divert uninsured drop-ins away from hospitals, portable triage clinics can be set up in parking lots. No doctors… except on line. Staffing by trainees (paramedic, nurse, med student, etc.) and a few nurse practitioners. Palliate the non critical. Isolate the infectious. Stabilize the critical. This does allow the camel’s nose of the Left into the tent. But it also dampens the zeal for which this agenda continues to be foist upon us.

I can’t imagine sending my kid to an Oakland public school — even one of the few good elementary schools sprinkled throughout the hills area. While economically, sending a child there would seem like a bargain, I simply am unwilling to put any faith or trust in these unionized teachers.

With few exceptions, every action I’ve seen the union take is designed to push up teacher pay, benefits and perks at the expense of students.

Put this in the context of an ultra-Leftist school board whose entire goal is to avoid any appearance of discrimination, and the school district has zero chance for success without some kind of wholesale change.

I have repeatedly asked a simple rhetorical question, one which has received deafening silence in response: Why does Oakland not have a single magnet school?

Surely, in a city as large and “diverse” as Oakland, the school district could find a set of 100 students per grade level who can handle work at an advanced level.

Such a school would benefit those at all income levels and would increase the allure of the city to prospective homeowners. Sadly, though, because a magnet school would disproportionately benefit those whose parents have more means and education, no one can have it.

Such class warfare seems pretty clever when it first passes the Leftist’s lips, but after a moment of reflection it’s obviously futile. All the wealthy parents do is enroll their kids at Head-Royce or Bentley or wherever. They don’t really mind spending the money, and it’s a good riff-raff filter.

For the Leftist who believes liberalism is about “helping people,” I’m sorry to point out that by making money the key to unlocking eduction, this system guarantees that the smart poor kid has no chance whatsoever.

I’ve viewed the city’s charter schools as at least a source of potential opportunity for the kids trapped like this by the well-meaning but evil Leftists.

Charter schools are not ideal mind you. As far as I can tell, they aren’t allowed to select students based on actual potential or achievement. Still, they do tend to get kids whose parents care more than the average parent, which is very important.

Still, the union is waging an all-out war on the non-unionized charter schools. That’s because the union isn’t your standard Leftist entity. Sure, they all vote Demoncat and support bigger government. But, when it comes to equality of opportunity, they’ll fight for their pay packets.

The bottom line is that the teachers union doesn’t really care about the substance of what their members do every day. As far as the union is concerned, they might as well be representing garbage workers.  Who cares if the garbage learns to read or function in a civilized society? The garbage can’t learn anyway. But, the garbageman can make more money, and that’s real important.

The most recent salvo in the war between the union and charter schools came with their refusal to support a parcel tax for schools if it might benefit charter schools.

Now, I don’t generally support taxes, but avid readers of this blog know that I do support parcel taxes because they disproportionately tax those at the lower end of the income spectrum. And, as a homeowner/investor in Oakland, I want to replace those people with the more well-to-do.

So, a parcel tax for schools sounds like a reasonable idea to me. Doubly so if it would go to support schools whose teachers actually want to improve educational standards.

Above all, I’d like to encourage readers who have smart kids to make sure and take them out of Oakland public schools. Don’t give these people a chance to hurt your kids.

Last year, Oakland’s Ad Valorem rate was 1.33% of the tax value of the property. This year, somehow it magically has risen to 1.41%. If anyone understands how this came to be, I’d be very interested in knowing. I was unaware the electorate had passed a bunch of large new taxes.

Just to revisit the topic for a moment, even in the liberal Bay Area, Oakland is all on its own in charging ridiculous property taxes. In Leftist Berkeley, the Ad Valorem rate is 1.26%.

That means that if you buy a house in Oakland, you’re stuck paying an extra $150 per year for every $100,000 in home value per year in property taxes.

Things get even worse if you just look a little to the east. In Orinda, which has basically the best school system in the state, the Ad Valorem rate is 1.08%. That is not a misprint.

So, by living in Oakland, you get to pay an extra $330 per year per $100,000 of house value, and you get to switch from having the best schools in the state to having schools so terrible that you pretty much are forced to send your kid to private school.

In case you’re going to jump all over me and point that the tax bill includes parcel taxes in addition to the Ad Valorem portion, that is true, and in Orinda you pay about $400 more in parcel taxes per year. So, if your house cost more than $120,000 or so, you’re losing in Oakland.

For most home buyers, the difference is far more stark. A typical $750,000 house makes the difference a totally prohibitive $2,500 a year. Who can afford that, and for what? The privilege of living in a city which spends no money on the kind of services a reasonable homeowner would actually want?

And no, the Oakland Housing Authority doesn’t count. Most homeowners I know wish they’d shut that thing down and kick everyone out.

The actual upshot of this policy is that Oakland presents a closed door to potential new homeowners. It’s fine for renters and those who have owned their houses for years — those people don’t pay much anyway because of the structure of Prop 13.

My assumption is this is also the reason people are willing to vote for whatever they support that causes this rate to go up — though, I have to say that most of the initiatives I’ve seen are parcel taxes, not Ad Valorem increases. As mentioned above, I’m not actually sure how that rate got so high in the first place.

This state of affairs should actually worry existing homeowners who aren’t paying much. It lowers the value of real estate in the city, since prospective homeowners must adjust their bids to account for the extra thousands per year they’ll be paying to the city.

Given Oakland’s absurdly high rates, I wouldn’t be surprised if this difference cost the average house $50,000 to $100,000 in value — and that’s before the well-documented $200,000 haircut that houses in nicer areas of the city suffer because the school district refuses to redraw boundary lines or set up a magnet school.

While I still have your attention on property taxes, let me bring another matter to your attention. I own a vacant lot in addition to my house in Oakland. Every year, the city illegally charges me the parcel tax for Measure Y on the vacant lot.

And, every year, I call and get a form sent to me which I fill out and mail to the city. The city then sends me a refund of about $90.

The city probably spends $100 every year dealing with my complaint and validating that the parcel is indeed vacant. Believe it or not, twice out of the past four years someone has actually come to verify that it’s vacant. I guess they forgot?

So, last year, I asked the gentleman at City Hall if maybe they could put a notation in their computer to simply stop charging me the tax on that parcel.

“No,” he said. “We don’t use computers for that.”

Need I say more?

Well, it happened. I was sitting down at my computer cranking out some right-wing screed, when I heard a knock on the door. It was three guys in matching jump suits. A fourth was down below in the driver’s seat of a waiting van. They insisted that I come with them. I began to think things over when a firm hand clenched my arm.

In the van there were three other “passengers” who, like me, were securely fastened to their seats. We drove for what seemed like hours. The heavily tinted windows obscured any view that might have given us a clue as to where we were going. We finally turned off the road up some kind of drive that was not nearly as smooth as the road. After some rattling and swaying we were there: “New Perspectives Adult Education Spa.”

We were marched into a reception area where we had transponders attached to our ankles. After the drive I was really thirsty and there was a table with an Igloo cooler and a bunch of paper cups. I walked over and filled a cup. I drank it down quickly and then noticed some empty Kool Aid packets in the waste basket.

When I came to I was lying on a cot in what looked like a barracks. The first thing I noticed was a severe burning sensation on my right ear lobe. I touched it and there was some kind of plastic tag fastened with a metal rivet or something. The next thing I noticed was the groaning of others as they awoke from their unexpected naps with new ear tags. Then I noticed the sound track — Pete Seeger singing “This Land is Your Land” was playing endlessly over loud speakers.

After a while the music stopped and the door opened. In stepped a middle aged looking man. He had a receding hairline that was tied back in a ponytail. He wore jeans and sandals, and a hand knitted pull over. “Good afternoon, gentlemen. I’m your group counselor, Sierra Kaminski-Brown.”

We all sat up on our cots as he continued to address us: “Is there anybody here who doesn’t know why you’re here?”

Being an inveterate trouble maker (some might say invertebrate) I raised my hand. “Mr. Ross, how could YOU of all people not know why you’re here? Don’t you remember writing that letter to the Chronicle?” I rolled my eyes, which one? I thought. “You know, the one second-guessing the CalTrans decision to completely replace the eastern span of the Bay Bridge because it would be cheaper than retrofitting the old span? Do you realize how many prevailing wage jobs could‘ve been lost had your suggestion been taken seriously?”

After that the room went quiet. He went to a “white” board at the front of the room. “We have a public policy crisis.” He wrote “Crisis” in big letters on the board. “Every attempt at straightening things out is met with dissent and controversy.” Then he wrote the word “Progress.” An inaudible cringe went through the room. “We can’t just stay where we are. We need to move forward. For that to happen we need to form ranks and… get with the program.”

Another cringe went through the room. “The purpose of this meeting is to emphasize the importance of the spirit of cooperation. You should all realize that your personal tendencies to dissent are being noticed.”

Out of the blue, someone in the back shot out “How do you expect to make us cooperate?”

“You’re here, aren’t you? This is your wakeup call. We don’t really want to incarcerate you, but you need to be aware of how much control we have… over what you do, how you do it. And, most importantly, what kind of influence you have on others.”

“This is fascism!” yelled another inductee.

“Now we’re getting down to important issues. We have nothing to do with fascism. That’s the style of right wing knuckle draggers such as yourselves. We’re just trying to fix what’s wrong. You’re not stupid. if you were, we wouldn’t be bothering with trying to help you through this transition.” He wrote the word “Perspective” on the board. “You’re not bad people. I bet most if not all of you are really good neighbors. You take in your neighbors’ mail and feed their cats and dogs when they’re on vacation. You all like helping people. The problem that we have now is that — well — you’re not helping.” Another cringe.

“Your problem is that you don’t visualize the big picture. Those corny notions of individualism and personal freedom are getting in the way of fixing the flaws in how society works. We have crime, poverty, bad nutrition, STDs. Personal freedom can’t fix these. We need new perspectives. Oh! Look at the time. We all have to go to the dining commons for the evening meal. We’re having tofu enchiladas, my personal favorite. Let’s all go and wash our hands.”