Decoding "Empower Oakland"
Loren Taylor's Conservative PAC
A little less than a year ago the Chronicle did a story on the new organization that Loren Taylor was founding with his own money to let people know why he should really be your mayor.
Now he says he has turned it over to a tech entrepreneur, Gagan Biyani, to be more effective online and embed it into social media. And just perhaps to make it appear that it isn’t a PAC for him and his buddies. But is it?
The first thing Biyani tells you in his first interview is that he has talked to 2 groups, Oaklanders and Oakland police. I'll leave that there.
But wonder of wonders, local FOX News has chosen to do a long piece on this new organization's desire to do voter education including a voter guide for the November election.
If Betty Yu of KTVU News decided to run stories on local Oakland voter guides, she could probably run one a night-including my own-for more than a month, there are that many activists/journalists and regular folks who are engaging in voter persuasion and education efforts through voter guides.
Or you could call KTVU News to find out why they choose this propaganda group, this PAC or whatever they’re calling it tomorrow to highlight- NEWSROOM: (510) 874-0242.
In the Chronicle article last fall, Taylor reportedly complained about Ranked Choice Voting, “Taylor has since criticized the city’s voting process and said ranked-choice voting doesn’t work. “ Mind you he ran against a large group of candidates including the incumbent the one time he did run for council. He won using RCV. ‘Nuff said.
Yu does a cute Jimmy Kimmel trick to “prove” why voters need to be educated about November’s ballot. She asks them if they know what's on November’s ballot but unlike Kimmel's victims, they answer honestly that they don't.
Little wonder that they don't. I don't either because there is no ballot yet. We have until mid August before all candidates will be signed up and ballot measures will be named. The ballot won't arrive in the mail until October.
We do, however, know some of the important issues that will already be included—and of particular interest to Taylor and the tech group which compares itself to GrowSF— the pssible recall of the mayor and district attorney.
You’ll remember that Neighbors Together Oakland was the organization running around town holding tiny rallies with big signs denouncing our first elected Black city attorney and our newly elected Hmong mayor.
If you ask candidates now who aligns with that group and if they're members, they'll all deny it. It seems to have lost some caché when they refused to follow legal guidelines in reporting their funders, whom it turns out, they have good reason to hide.
But also as damning as that is their spokesperson Seneca Scott, who is not only homophobic, viciously so, but misogynistic and threatening. He even appeared at a press conference the mayor held to report back from her mother's funeral, yelling sexually-tinged insults at her as she tearfully explained her loss.
So now has this same group of angry corporate landlords, real estate developers [speaking of whom, did Carl Chan disappear back into Alameda where he resides?] and right-wing techies, they morphed into a mild mannered voters’ ed non-profit?
[One imagines a red-faced Chris Moore going into a voting booth throwing off his landlord chains (he compared it to slavery) and coming out… what..mild mannered besweatered Warren Logan…a middle-aged technocrat millionaire…or as one angry Nextdoor ranter retorted when I asked him if he supported the runner-up, Loren Taylor…who's she?]
Dunno but they all run around saying things like Gagan Biyani's quote to Betty Yu. He asked, by way of voters’ ed, “who has voted historically to pass harsh legislation preventing the police from doing their jobs?”
Well that's easy- nobody! How you gonna educate folks if you know nothing about how Oakland is governed? The city attorney back in 2003 realizing we were on the verge of a never-ending damage-payout train and the takeover of our largest department, OPD, by the Feds, entered into an agreement of consent with them instead.
It turned out to be a longer lasting task than anyone imagined because it ran until Ron Dellums admin before OPD began to take oversight seriously; and they were able to outline specific measures to reduce racial profiling task by task.
[With every two steps forward, we have often taken 1 step back but now we seem to have reached a plateau of better trained officers who recognize they have a responsibility to serve all members of our community and could move forward if we could find enough officers to hire and a way to afford them.
However, even yet, we are finding corruption in command staff and a lack of interest in rooting it out. Former chiefs Leronne Armstrong and Darren Allison have been implicated in these newer revelations. ]
Whatever does Empower Oakland mean by “harsh regulations”- oversight to prevent beating of suspects, planting drugs on them? Please read The Riders Come Out at Night to get the skinny what it was like before oversight/regulations were put in place. I ceratinly hope Empower Oakland does not want to take us back. Even our Democrtic presumptive nominee Kamala Harris has declared, we won’t go back! And she’s from Oakland!