The Roots of Oakland's Discontent

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan's actually a radical progressive who showed herself completely unprepared for governing. She grew up at the bosom of an extreme left-wing community that now hates her.

Here's this at Los Angeles Times, "The roots of Oakland's discontent run deep: The Occupy protest is the latest chapter in a long tradition of dissent."

Events of the last several weeks have raised knotty questions — about how this racially and economically divided city became home to the most active Occupy effort outside of Manhattan. About whether Quan, once celebrated as Oakland's first Asian American mayor, can salvage her career. And about the future of the tent city and its steadfast occupants, who hope to spend the foreseeable future making a stand on Frank Ogawa Plaza.

Some of the answers seem to lie in Oakland's history as a center of liberal protest, others in the decades of strained relations between residents and a Police Department now operating under court oversight.

Police have arrested Occupy protesters throughout the country. They have taken down tents and tried to evict campers in places like Denver, Minneapolis and Atlanta. But beyond the original New York encampment — whose protesters have marched on Times Square, the Brooklyn Bridge and Goldman Sachs headquarters — the most attention grabbing-effort in the nation has been Oakland's.

It would be difficult to find a city more tailor-made for a protest against income inequality than this one.

Wealth is largely clustered in its rolling hills, poverty and crime in its hard-scrabble flats. Across the bay is flossy San Francisco, whose unemployment rate is just over half that of her beleaguered sister to the east. Nearly one-fifth of the city lives in poverty, and the median household income is almost 20% lower than the state as a whole.

At a meeting called Thursday night to address the fate of Occupy Oakland, Councilwoman Nancy Nadel described her home town as a "split society. We don't have much of the 1%, but we do have 30% of our people who have Ph.Ds and 30% who can't read above fourth-grade level."

And for many of Oakland's struggling residents, the juxtaposition of the rag-tag Occupy encampment against the graceful City Hall is telling.

"These people in these buildings, they don't care about the people, the lower class," said Darryl Cook, who came downtown with his wife this week to run an errand.

Cook, a 48-year-old truck driver, said he has had trouble finding work because of a criminal record from a drug habit kicked years ago. And he thinks Quan "needs to get. She needs to resign."

His wife, LaTonya, decried everything from underfunded public schools to shuttered youth centers. Of their city's politicians, she said, "Y'all caused this."