“They want systemic lawlessness. They want high retail theft,“ says Seneca Scott, founder of Neighbors Together Oakland. It’s ”managed decline from eviction moratoriums, managed decline from defunding police, managed decline from $950 you can steal from stores, not being able to catch people.”
“Mega billionaires are giving money to defend the police movements. The same individuals are the largest investors in AI autonomous security,” Mr. Scott said.
He has been documenting how Oakland, California became, as he describes it, an “urban hellscape.”
Once a progressive Democrat and labor organizer who represented thousands of union workers in California, he says woke ideology took over the labor movement and it stopped representing the actual needs of workers.
Watch the clip:
“That’s when I saw that we were being used by the mega-billionaire class as very useful idiots for a very nefarious agenda of control,” Mr. Scott said. He argues the elites are pitting the upper middle class against the lower class and promoting class warfare.
Now, Mr. Scott sees himself as a “post-partisan solutionary.”
🔴 WATCH the full episode (48 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S0113SenecaScott
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek: Seneca Scott, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Seneca Scott: Thank you, I appreciate it. Thank you for coming to Oakland, California.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about the reality in Oakland today and some of the very interesting changes which you are making happen. Before we go there, you have a very interesting and varied background, so please tell us about that.
Mr. Scott: Since we’re deep diving, I'll go back to the very beginning. I’m from Cleveland, Ohio. My parents actually have a memoir that talks about my conception. I was conceived in Isfahan, Iran in 1978. My parents, like many black Americans, had moved to the Middle East. They thought it was going to be permanent. They had set down some roots and were actually doing quite well for themselves. In 1979, my parents were forced to flee the country under duress and lost everything they owned. They came back to Cleveland, Ohio, where they had me very shortly thereafter.
I had a great childhood and upbringing in Cleveland, Ohio. I lived very close to both of my grandparents and most of my extended family. The biggest gifts my parents gave me were, one, not having any childhood trauma, and two, the strength that I felt from two very loving people praying for me every single day by name.
I went to Cornell University and played football and track, briefly. I got hurt freshman year and ended up deep diving into my major, the School of Industrial Labor Relations. At the time I thought I was going to be a sports agent because of my interest in sports. One summer, I went out to San Diego to be a union organizer for the United Domestic Workers with Ken Msemaji and Fahari Jeffers, rest in peace, who passed away last year. That began my career as a professional organizer.
During my senior year of college I actually worked full time on an organizing campaign in California for in-home supportive service workers, which would end up being the largest public sector group in the state with over 70,000 members, because a lot of people need in-home healthcare in California. I left Cornell to do that full time. I lived in Southern California from 2000 to 2014, and then I made my permanent move to Oakland.
I started working in Oakland in 2012 as the East Bay Director of SEIU [Service Employees International Union] 1021. I mention the overlap because it’s significant. Working at that high level position gave me a perspective to explain to people what has happened to Oakland, and explain how a place with such smart, intentional people fell off the rails so quickly.
During that time, we were making decisions for who got elected in Oakland like Dan Siegel, for example. We ran Dan Siegel for mayor. When I say we ran him, I mean the Central Labor Council, which is led by SEIU 1021, the largest public sector union in the Bay Area. They would decide which candidate to support, and that would be the Democratic candidate because of our influence over the party.
We wanted Dan Siegel, but he didn’t win against Libby Schaaf, who won her first term. But other people we ran won a city council seat. I made those decisions from Silver Lake, Los Angeles, because I didn’t live in Oakland at the time, but I worked here. I would travel back and forth like many top-tier union leaders who live wherever they want and travel on the workers dime to do our thing.
I’m incredibly proud of the work that we did at SEIU 1021. We actually helped people get back from the recession. We fought back furloughs. We had to negotiate these really complex scenarios for the public employee’s pension reform act, PEPRA. Pensions are a mess in California, so we’re going to have to reform them again soon. Back in 2012, there were a lot of complex negotiations. I led the negotiations for SEIU 1021 for every East Bay city, as well as BART [Bay Area Rapid Transit] and the City of Oakland.
That’s a lot of East Bay cities. If you were to name them, it would be Richmond, El Cerrito, Albany, Berkeley, Piedmont, Oakland, San Ramon, Union City, Fremont, and San Leandro. I did all that in two years as a union leader due to the fact that my staff couldn’t bargain because they weren’t trained enough.
Mr. Jekielek: How many people were you representing?
Mr. Scott: At the time, 55,000 workers were under my jurisdiction in the East Bay. I believe we had the largest, with maybe 15,000 in those various cities and sanitation departments, including BART, the public transportation. We had a BART strike in 2014 which was historic. The question was then raised nationwide, “Should public sector transportation workers even have the right to organize because of the economic disruption that happened?”
But we were vindicated because we were fighting for safety reasons. Then the workers who were replacing union workers died. Two people died, and that’s what ended the strike. The exact things that we said were unsafe, and that our workers were refusing to perform anymore because they were worried about dying, the scabs both died performing these things, so this supported the strike. Then I burnt out on the unions, mostly because I saw the theme of what was coming.
There was a growing disconnect from the needs of the actual workers who are always complaining that the union doesn’t represent them. They never see anyone. There’s a revolving door of labor reps and people aren’t trained. I saw all of that. Essentially, I had to do the bargaining that our labor reps were supposed to be responsible for, and that we paid them for.
On looking at their work, many of them didn’t have the knowledge, skills or ability to be successful. That is why so many people had bad collective bargaining agreements that they weren’t happy with. There was a lot of work to do and I just took it all on. Then I really needed a sabbatical, so I left in 2014 and moved to Oakland because I liked it so much. I said, “I’m going to move to Oakland, California, and just be a neighbor.”
Mr. Jekielek: You ran for mayor of Oakland in 2022. What happened there?
Mr. Scott: It started with the city council, but I never thought I would run for office. Even within the union I would always say, “I hate politics. Keep me out of it. I just want to organize the workers. On the political side, you guys do what you have to do. Just give me my COPE [Committee on Political Education] requirement and I’ll get it back to you.”
COPE donations for SEIU are the political dollars voluntarily given to the union. Unions cannot use dues monies for politics. That is absolutely illegal. No union uses dues money for politics.
Contrary to popular belief, unions have a PAC that workers voluntarily pay into. All the money you see being spent from labor unions, not the companies or the government or the Democratic party, actually comes from workers in good faith and trusting their unions to use their political dollars to help strengthen the union. That needs to be said because there’s a lot of misconception about how the unions are using dues money. It’s absolutely illegal to use it for political purposes. If that’s happening, you should report it.
During my time off, I became a business owner. I started a community garden, Bottoms Up Community Garden, which ended up becoming world famous. I started the Oakhella Festival, which is a very popular music festival. We produce some of the largest festivals in the city. I just continued with the organizing energy and started being on top of it in the neighborhoods.
But I have to pay taxes now. I have to call the city for services. I have to depend on my former union members for services as a taxpayer and as a neighbor. That’s when I began to see a lot of the issues that we had caused by our divestment from purely working situations and going into social justice stuff.
Covid hit and it was a big deal for me in my political evolution. Prior to Covid, I had still considered myself a progressive Democrat. I was not a member of DSA [Democratic Socialists of America], but I absolutely would tell people that my closest political inclination would be that of democratic socialism. I was a far-Left kind of guy. I wanted the working people to own the means of production and have more power and not be treated the way we are now, where we’re essentially controlled and dominated by our corporations and our government, which have now combined into what I call an emergent neo-fascism.
The elders from my neighborhood grabbed me by the ear and dragged me to the city council on the very last day to file and said, “You’re going to run for city council. Why are you not running for office?’ I said, “Get out of here. It’s not my thing.” But then they said, “You’re vocal. You are a quick study. You understand how these policies affect us on the ground. You have the experience from the unions. You understand the finances and how the city works. You should run for city council.”
Our elders and our children are our societal bookends. When they’re under duress and they’re being failed the way they are in Oakland and in cities across the country, things fall apart. It’s very important to me, through our gardening, that we make sure they are fed. We make sure they have a place to go that’s safe and beautiful and calm so they can get out of their house and essentially have a community third space.
Only one of the 10 commandments comes with a promise. Take care of your parents and you'll live a long life. That’s not just your parents, but also the elders in our community that we’re failing. I had to follow this commandment, so I ran for city council. I didn’t have any money. But I had a platform that said, “Neighbors together, we deserve better.” That was my campaign slogan for city council.
After the election, I turned that platform into a nonprofit, Neighbors Together Oakland. We sued the city of Oakland for failure to follow homeless policies that we had unanimously voted for. We started community organizing. I got back on the old horse, not for the union this time, but for myself. For the first time I was actually a constituent benefiting from my own organizing, rather than being an Ivy League-educated guy telling workers what was best for them and forcing our utopian elite vision on a society that did not have informed consent.
It changed things. That was when I really started to see what was going on with the Left. I was attacked for wanting common sense policies around drugs, things that were truly compassionate. Everything that progressives are doing right now to save their butts, I was viciously attacked for in 2021. That’s when I saw that we were being used by the mega-billionaire class as very useful idiots for a very nefarious agenda of control, and not just over working class people.
My prediction is that in the next 10 years, you’re going to see the upper middle class decimated. Those in control are going to take those gains and redistribute them to the lower class. You can see it right now. The lower class is actually making more money than they ever have before. If you’re actually looking at the numbers, for people who choose to go to work, McDonald’s is forcing up the minimum wage. They’re doing these things on purpose.
This is class warfare between the upper, middle, and lower class, but we’re all poor compared to the elites. I saw there was no left or middle or right. It was only up and down. Either you have integrity and solutions and you care about team human, or you have an agenda that fits in with the elite and with their total control of our society.
I can get into excruciating detail on this after we go through the political story. I decided to run for mayor because I didn’t see anyone who understood our city charter. Oakland is a dysfunctional city by structure. It’s not just the people, it’s the very structure. Jerry Brown actually bears a lot of blame for this.
Jerry Brown ran for mayor in 1998 on Measure X, which created what he called a strong mayor. Prior to 1998, Oakland had a city manager model. We’re a midsize city of about 400,000 people. There’s only two forms of government for cities, either you have a city manager or you have a strong mayor. The difference is that a strong mayor has legislative veto power over legislation and line item veto power over the budget.
Oakland’s mayor has neither, but they still call it a strong mayor. This is all because Jerry Brown just didn’t want to go to city council meetings. He passed the law so that he didn’t have to go sit through the boring meetings, because he’s Jerry Brown, and he’s a legend.
It was a mistake. Jerry, it was a mistake. He created a situation where Oakland has no clear delineation of power, so our governing structure is flawed. Oakland doesn’t have a controller to watch our money. There’s just so many things missing here.
I ran on structural changes to our city charter, adding a controller, and getting us back to 900 police officers, immediately. No one else was willing to actually name those things, although most of the leading candidates had agreed that those changes needed to be made. It wasn’t my groundbreaking research that exposed this.
It was pretty well known in Oakland that we had structural issues and that we needed to add an office of controller for more fiduciary accountability, but no one was willing to campaign for it. I ran for these reasons and also to pull the city back to the center, away from the zealots who had taken office.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s start with defunding the police, which is insane. However, around 2020 and onwards, many cities implemented it, including Oakland. How does that even happen? Please tell us about that.
Mr. Scott: They wanted to cut our police by 50 percent. But because of the few moderates we had left on council who were able to pull some maneuvers, it only got cut by $18 million. Here’s how it happened. Who was the major funder of this movement? This is where I’m going to get back to the mega-billionaires. Who’s the eBay founder guy who gave the most money? Lee Fang broke the story two months ago. Mega-billionaires are giving money to the defund the police movement. These same individuals are the largest investors in AI autonomous security.
New York City now has robot dogs walking around the subway station. The people who are making money from those are also invested in defunding police. This is literally a plot from the movie RoboCop, and it’s playing out in real time. It’s right here.
I don’t want to take credit for Lee Fang’s work because he did the investigation. If this is the first time you’re hearing this, go look him up. Mark Zuckerberg puts millions into defunding the police. But in his particular city, he puts millions toward his private security and police department.
They want systemic lawlessness and they want high retail theft. They stripped away all this money statewide, but now they’re adding back hundreds of millions to fight retail theft. But they caused the problem to begin with and it’s all manufactured. It is managed decline.
It is managed decline caused by eviction moratorium, managed decline caused by defunding the police, and managed decline caused by the $950 worth of merchandise you’re allowed to steal from stores without being charged. These petty crimes and not being able to catch these people contribute to a very dark pattern of poverty. It takes a poor person three years of good luck to get out of poverty.
You know what bad luck really is? Getting your window smashed or having your catalytic converter, or your bike, or your method of transportation stolen. This year alone, 12,000-plus Oaklanders have had their car stolen.
Mr. Jekielek: On one side you have these people that believe that defunding the police is the right thing to do in order to have this utopian vision.
Mr. Scott: Yes, the police are bad.
Mr. Jekielek: On the other side, you have people who want to implement a technocratic, computerized control system because it’s profitable for them or because they believe in it. Please explain that to us as you understand it.
Mr. Scott: I can’t speak for their motivation, but profit is always assumed. It is extremely profitable. Following the money is always one of the things you do. It’s just a worldwide agenda, and you can see it in the World Economic Forum. Again, people may look at us as if we’ve got one of those tinfoil hats on, but you can just look at what these elites actually say.
The most powerful people and most influential people control our commodities and our transportation mechanisms. Our defense contractors are meeting and literally telling you what the plan is. I think you should maybe listen.
It’s playing out right here on the streets of Oakland where we have no rule of law, but people are still doubling and tripling down that we need to abolish—not defund—they are moving to abolish the police and then the root causes of poverty. That would then lift us all up. Root causes is a code word in government meaning, “We’re not going to do anything about this problem.” That’s what they really mean.
Why do they create new root causes every day and want higher literacy rates for children who don’t even have nutrition? Why do you think we have child soldiers on our streets right now? Those are actually the new root causes that these woke policies have created. They’re directly responsible for the decline in education.
Did you know that for seven years straight, Oakland had the most advanced literacy rate for the state of California. From 2009 to 2016, Oakland’s literacy rates were increasing every year and they were winning awards. In 2016, the wokes took over and said, “We don’t like phonics. Phonics is racist. We’re going to choose a progressive reading system.” Fast forward to today, and now no one can read. Why do we allow these people to continue to reward themselves while they’re failing us and then blaming root causes? It is just absolutely insane.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s go back to the organizing part here, because these people have been voted in.
Mr. Scott: We have ranked-choice voting here, so are they really voted in?
Mr. Jekielek: These policies started in 2016, but then they came in hard in 2020 during the pandemic. That’s when you had your awakening, correct?
Mr. Scott: Essentially, this was all planned. We can look at the “Soros DAs,” as they are called, and we can follow the money. They all have the same talking points, no matter what city they are in. Let’s just look into defunding the police. Oakland has less than 700 cops, and we’re supposed to have 1000. We have dismal 911 times and we have no public safety.
Compare that to Boston that also has a robust defund the police movement. Oakland has 450,000 people and Boston has 660,000 people. Boston has over 2,200 cops. If you were to scale that to Oakland, we would have 1400 officers. We could absolutely talk about defunding police and putting more money into mental health services if Oakland had 1400 officers, because that’s 400 officers more than the FBI says we need. Okay, now we’re talking.
It’s not this cookie cutter thing where you can go to any city and say, “Defund the police.” Yes, in some cities you may want to take some money from a police force that’s underperforming and put it toward mental health services and other things that could help people. Those ideas are not bad in themselves. It’s when you apply them with no nuance or no data or proof that they can succeed that they start to fail.
They are absolutely failing in Oakland right now because businesses are failing every week due to rampant retail theft. They’re not protecting people. We’re getting mocked and gaslit by our leaders that the patches they put on are going to work, but they know they’re not going to work. They know what they want. They want us to tap out and say, “Bring in the robots, bring in the drones, bring in the cameras everywhere.” We will be begging for anything to make us feel safe. That’s the danger here.
Where is the safety supposed to come from? I’m not all in with the idea that police are going to save us either. Neighbors are going to have to save us, along with some self-help. We’re going to have to step up and protect our communities during this transitional period as we figure out what went wrong with our government politics.
Mr. Jekielek: Since October 7th, other people have said that their one big fear is that this will be used as an opportunity to usher in a digital control system and CBDC [Central Bank Digital Currency]. It is the same pattern that happened after 9/11 with the Patriot Act. People are afraid and people need safety and security. What is your view on that?
Mr. Scott: That is very true. That’s exactly what is happening. That fear is well-founded and that’s why you should be very careful in your approach to what public safety means. Public safety needs to be clearly defined. Nostalgia is dangerous. People are nostalgic for this old world where they thought the police could save us, as they watched cops do this on TV every Friday night. That world is gone.
We have some responsibility to parent better, and to have communities that are more intentional. You need to know your neighbors and hold your neighbors accountable for their safety and yours. That has to be a part of making our streets safe. Part of the solution for Oakland right now, and I’ve gotten a lot of heat for this, is soft martial law. When you have a big fire, what happens if your local fire department can’t handle it?
Mr. Jekielek: You ask for help.
Mr. Scott: Then what happens? They come from all around, and sometimes other states. When we had mega-forest fires in California, we’ve seen firefighters as far as Utah show up to California to help put out these forest fires. Arizona coming to California to help put out these forest fires. How come the same thing doesn’t apply for law enforcement?
Do you know how many federal law enforcement agents there are? Do you know how many guys are sitting on their butts right now in the Bay Area? You have DHS, you have Border Patrol, you have Customs, and you have ICE. I could name five more. Why aren’t they here standing post in Oakland?
It’s a small number of people doing most of the crime in Oakland. It’s not widespread with the average citizen yet. More and more people are entering that life every day because they’re forced to and they don’t see any repercussions. That’s natural.
But right now there are organized crews. If you want to take them out, have a curfew for a month. We get every law enforcement agent you can to post here. You can chase people down and reestablish law and order in the same way you would have to in a riot. In a riot you have to bring in the riot police, because the police that were there aren’t enough anymore. You’ve got to get control of a situation.
That’s the only alternative that would stop us from essentially moving into a surveillance state, an autonomous police state. Again, the people who are investing in defunding the police are investing in these autonomous police state robots.
Mr. Jekielek: This idea that you’re posing, some people might describe it as martial law for a month. Then they will say, “This is exactly what will be used to implement top down control.
Mr. Scott: They’re right. This is why I said we need to pull from other law enforcement agencies. They don’t want to stay in Oakland. They want to go back to their job. You’re pulling in people from other agencies for a fixed amount of time, That’s why I didn’t mention the National Guard. You need other law enforcement agencies of all levels, from the federal down to county. Whoever’s not doing anything right now needs to come help put out these fires in Oakland, the same way they do if there’s an actual real fire in a forest.
They stay for a month, and then they’re going to beg to go back to their posts. That’s how you can assure that they’re going to leave your city. Yes, those fears are real. But we’re in a situation right now where we need to hear other ideas as well. Because if your idea is to just let everybody rob and steal and plunder and call that social justice, that doesn’t work for me or my neighbors. We’re going to self-help. That’s what we’re going to do. We’re not going to allow people to steal our stuff.
Mr. Jekielek: Please give us a picture of what it’s like living in Oakland right now.
Mr. Scott: It depends on what neighborhood you live in, but I will speak for everyone and say that none of us feel safe anymore. At least three times a week in West Oakland, I have to smell toxic fumes from a fire. For three years now, we have had three fires a day, mostly from RV’s in homeless encampments. There are always fires, so I have to close my windows.
I routinely have to pass by scenes that look like Palestine or Bakhmut in Ukraine. I’m not joking. Just go to my Twitter feed and look at this urban decay where you have miles of burnt out vehicles stacked up like Legos, and trash everywhere.
Mr. Jekielek: The term fentanyl island comes to mind.
Mr. Scott: Fentanyl is just one of the many bad situations. This level of urban decay is unprecedented in American cities and it’s being ignored by our leaders, because they want to gaslight people and say that it’s not their fault. Oakland has never been this bad. Then you have people with their 90s nostalgia thing.
First off, what do the 90s have to do with now? Living in Oakland right now is like living in an urban hellscape. But it’s a beautiful city. It’s probably the most beautiful city I’ve ever lived in or visited, and I’ve been in a lot of them. You’re here right now. What do you think?
It’s beautiful. We have perfect weather. It’s sunny. We have proximity to all of Northern California’s best places and we’re a port city. We should be printing money, but instead we’re suffering and we’re living in hell right now. Anybody who’s telling you otherwise is either lying to themselves, or they want to make excuses for their failed ideology.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s go back to the unions now, because this is your area of expertise. Somehow labor unions went from representing people to representing a completely different constituency. How did that happen?
Mr. Scott: Right when I entered the movement, labor unions were moving away from a representational model of servicing the members they had through the 80s and 90s. Then there was a decline in private sector labor. Over the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, private sector labor went from half of the labor movement to only 7 percent of the U.S. labor movement. Now, 93 percent of the U.S. labor movement is from the public sector, not the private sector. It’s no longer the big, bad boss man that is stepping on us. The question now is, “Who is the boss?” It’s the taxpayer, so it doesn’t work.
There’s a big issue with public sector labor unions. They moved from a representation model to what’s called the organizing model because the unions needed members. They said, “We have to organize externally now. We’ve been focusing too much on just representing our workers. We forgot that there are many underrepresented workers out there that need representation, and we’re going to organize those workers into the union.”
That’s a good idea and I support that. Then they moved into what’s called the social justice model, and that’s when things went off the rails. The pervasive thinking became about the systemic injustices in America that affect every worker and that we now have to focus on those. Okay, but it’s not mutually exclusive, because it came from the actual wages and the working conditions of the workers that you represented.
You saw the biggest issues happening in 2020 in Oakland where many members started leaving the union because they felt the union no longer represented them, and because of the failure to protect them from the vaccines. Many people didn’t want to take the vaccine and they were either forced to take them or were told they had to leave. Many people felt unsafe.
Our public sector workers have to clean up these homeless encampments. They have to issue tickets and they have to work in these streets. Many of them felt unsafe and felt that the unions were not protecting them, and frankly, they were not. They were actually protecting the activists who were threatening to harm these workers for cleaning up those encampments.
Now they view everything through this social justice lens. But who determines what that social justice is? It’s the central labor councils and the labor movement. This is a problem right now. The labor movement and the public sector labor unions are the think tanks, the brains, and the foot soldiers of the Democratic Party. They are used to confuse people because the people trust the unions.
If you are a Lefty, you trust the Democrats to tell you who the good people are. Then these so-called good people are ushering in these insidious policies like defunding the police. Every working person that lives in these impacted neighborhoods clearly says, “We don’t want that,” but they do it anyway. They say, “We know what’s best for you.”
That’s the biggest issue with the union right now and this is also a reason why members are actually leaving in droves. You think they would have left after the Janus decision from the Supreme Court which said you didn’t have to pay union dues anymore. But most public sector labor unions grew slightly, or treaded water right after Janus. It was 2020 and the rise of wokeism that really put a stamp on this. We said, “This is actually really here and it’s scary. Where do we go from here in our local governments?”
Mr. Jekielek: I was looking at your Twitter feed about what happened on October 7th and the horror in Israel. It’s created a moment of clarity, where people are seeing this social justice in a different light. I’ve seen this in a number of places. Please tell us about that.
Mr. Scott: People are now entering politics out of self-defense and they are organizing. The first step to organizing is to educate, then agitate, and then organize. To educate, you would first ask, “What are the policies that are failing you? Who is responsible for writing and passing them? What decisions were made that led to those policies?” The more people find out about this, the more they say, “Oh, now I see what the play is.”
Right now we are organizing our neighbors. Oakland is extremely blessed to have very well educated, intentional neighbors who understand the intersection between food and families and art and culture and quality of life. We’re a beautiful neighborhood. We absolutely have the talent to give people more political will to run for office and see this through.
We need to stop depending on the mercenaries that these unions are feeding us or that the Democratic party is installing in our cities, pushing their agenda that has nothing to do with what we want in our city. Out of necessity, there is an awakening happening. It’s the mother of invention and people are organizing. This is the consequence of the cancel culture used by these people and the intense reputation destruction directed at their enemies. You do that for long enough, and there will be a tipping point where everybody says, “I don’t care what you say anymore.”
Mr. Jekielek: Do you think this might be the tipping point?
Mr. Scott: Yes, because no one cares anymore. Also, they’ve exposed themselves. The DSA-led woke movement has completely exposed itself in the past few months as being mostly white-led, racist, and sexist. We now know they are antisemitic as well. These progressives like to say, “Words are violence.”
They like to chastise people like myself and say, “Hey, your political ideology of post-partisanship is really covert Right-wing stuff. When you dog whistle these things, it’s creating a dangerous environment for trans people and other people.” They always talk about the environment that you are creating with your words and that rhetoric is important.
Now we’re seeing, in very real time, that the environment they are creating is leading to Jewish people feeling unsafe for their very lives. My alma mater, Cornell University, is in the national news right now for having to put out a statement against extremely alarming calls to action to harm Jewish people. Where’s the accountability for their dog whistles and creating an environment where we are ushering in a second holocaust in America right now?
They have fallen on their faces with their hypocrisy. They’re completely naked and we’re mocking them right now. We’re laughing at them and moving on to people who have common sense. The question is, “Has this been quick enough? Has the damage been set in?” I don’t have the answer to that question.
I’m worried that we may be a little bit too far behind the eight ball to stop this fundamental shift and what’s about to happen to America, all the way from the upper middle class going down. That’s why I say we’re building multiracial and multi-class coalitions, not working class coalitions. Because your upper class is about to become the working class very quickly if we continue the economic trajectory that we’re on right now in this country.
Mr. Jekielek: You provided one solution for Oakland. In one month, get rid of the bad actors with coordinated action from different law enforcement groups. People with this woke ideology are found in every institution, holding the levers of power and implementing all this policy, which isn’t very good for most people. What is the next step here?
Mr. Scott: What’s next is that neighbors need to knock on each other’s doors, and create organic third spaces like community gardens, community centers, or faith communities to talk and share their experiences. We absolutely have the talent amongst ourselves to draft policy. We have neighbors right now in our organization who are meeting with elected officials, drafting complex policy, and doing valuable research that will absolutely improve our ideas. We need to go back to having real debates.
I have run for two offices and I have yet to have a debate in Oakland. How does that work? We just don’t debate anymore. They don’t want their ideas challenged. They don’t want to be held accountable and have to show proof of concept that these policies are actually helping people. That’s one thing we need to demand—public debates. We need to make sure that we’re educating our neighbors.
But on the other side, it’s not about politics as much as it’s about mutual aid and the comfort of knowing the elders in their community are being looked after, that we’re intentionally parenting our children, both in the household as well as in the community, and that we’re reforming our schools. Our schools are a mess right now. These teachers are psycho. Not all of them, but a lot of them are using students for mental health therapy for their own problems and shortcomings and not teaching literacy or STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics].
Once the pandemic happened, if you were not privately schooled, you were falling behind. The next generation of American workers is not positioned to compete globally, and it’s going to have an impact in the near future. We have rampant illiteracy rates in America’s inner cities, and I don’t know what we’re going to do about that.
To fix it, we need to start teaching somebody how to read, and start growing food. We have four pillars in Neighbors Together Oakland, our nonprofit. The first is community safety. The second is local food systems. Then we have accessible housing. We don’t stay affordable because that’s politicized. What does affordable actually mean?
You have a homeless crisis where the average person is strung out on fentanyl and under mental duress, so they can’t afford anything anytime soon. We need to get them out of that RV or tent and find them shelter so that they can become healthy again, and so they can be a contributing member of society.
Finally,we need the thriving local businesses, and this is very important. We’re in the city of Oakland, California. Every city that has ever been founded exists for one reason—commerce. Cities are places of commerce. They are often the only places where poor people can have their ideas come to fruition, obtain generational wealth, and no longer be poor.
This is the place. Cities are places of economic mobility for the common person. They have always existed that way. The city government’s main job is to protect and encourage commerce, and to educate their constituents to be the next competitive generation in the workforce. Again, this is all for commerce.
We have a Chamber of Commerce in Oakland that doesn’t protect business. They have yet to stay a word about the eviction moratorium. Small housing providers and mom and pops in Oakland are now owed $100 million. There is no protection, and there is government-enabled theft. We’re not protecting commerce. We are allowing people to steal $950 from any store they want without repercussion. This is not protecting commerce.
Oakland missed a grant of $10 million that everyone else got, which we probably missed on purpose, just because they are ideologues who don’t want more police. They are not protecting commerce. We are a place that attacks commerce and attacks businesspeople, when essentially, this is what cities are for. We need to remember that and protect the commerce in our cities for all people, so that we have places to work and thrive. That’s the shift that people need to make.
What do cities exist for? They don’t exist for social justice. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. That is the first thing you learn in Economics 101—there is no such thing as a free lunch. That applies to every person that works to put that ham sandwich into your hand, from the farmer to the driver. If you get it for free, who didn’t get paid? Then how long would those people continue to do the varying occupations that brought you that sandwich? We all know where this leads, so why are we doing it?
We’re doing it because very powerful and wealthy people want total control of our cities, and they’re getting their way right now. We don’t have a lot of time. Go knock on your neighbor’s door and get to know each other and start fighting back. We can fight this while we still have a functioning democracy and democratic republic in America, even with the voter integrity issues.
Most people do not trust elections for good reason. Anyone who will call this person a Right-winger for saying you question elections, just look at Stacey Abrams. I absolutely believe that Stacey Abrams’ election was tampered with, in the same way I believe other elections have been tampered with. Neither political party is trustworthy, and now they’re now coalescing into a uniparty where they only protect the interests of the elite.
You know where there are no issues? It’s when it comes to whether we’re going to allow congresspeople to trade stocks or not. That’s a bipartisan issue. When it’s anything that has to do with lining their pockets, there is no issue whatsoever. Passing mega-budgets that are for war, or that are filled with pork, that’s no problem. These parties have become controlled opposition for the elite. They act like we have this political divide when we really don’t. It’s all about the elites and their quest for power and control.
It’s time for the people to become post-partisan solutionaries with their neighbors, fight for people who have integrity and ideas, and demand that politicians show that their policies actually work in the way that they are described. Get more involved in their local politics. That’s what we need to do in Oakland, California, and in any city in the country where you feel that you’re losing your way.
Mr. Jekielek: Getting involved locally, fostering community, reaching out to your neighbors is something we have lost. A theme that keeps coming up on this show is the need for local action, whether it’s political action or just creating community.
Seneca Scott, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Mr. Scott: Thank you for coming to Oakland. I appreciate it.
🔴 WATCH the full episode (48 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S0113SenecaScott
Epoch Original DVD collection:
Comments