Of all the one-party blue city disasters, Oakland is probably the biggest, a once-storied city full of beautiful old houses and a really great Chinatown, and is now farthest down the road to becoming Detroit.

After all, when you're the only city to lose In-N-Out Burger and your airport hotels based on unenforced crime, the only city whose major league baseball team insists on playing in some other city, and the only big city whose mayor is under indictment for corruption up the wazoo, you know the city's got problems. Gangs, illegals (Oakland is a sanctuary city), drug dealers, and smash-and-grab gangs all flourish in Oakland, along with a lot of murderers and muggers. The cops, considered bad guys by the recently recalled Soros district attorney, don't enforce much.

Someone wants to clean up the city, though, and has come up with the perfect tone-deaf leftist solution: Fining the victims.

According to ABC 7 News:

OAKLAND, Calif. (KGO) -- In Oakland, Chinatown merchants are raising the alarm after many are being hit with thousands of dollars in fines for graffiti on their properties.

Shirley Lou knows how this story goes. On any given day, the supermarket she manages is tagged. They paint over it and then it happens again.

"We cannot control. We clean up and they come again. So many times, but the city -- I don't know why they are charging me money," said Luo, manager at Won Kee Supermarket.

On Tuesday, she tried to pay the latest fine of $500. The city told Luo she owes $3,000, which includes late fees.

"It's not my fault. Not our fault. It's somebody go to the roof and mark so many graffiti," Luo said.

The only people who should be fined -- and forced to restitute the owners -- are the gangbanger criminals who are spraying the graffiti.

But that never occurs to these officials, who don't see them as actual deviants or criminals. The shop owners get slapped with fines, and in a city that's in a perma-recession owing to high taxes, no parking, and zero law enforcement, that's got to be draconian. The shops are barely out of lockdown, which hit them hardest.

But it's such leftist mentality going on here -- hit the victims, because the proliferating criminals are sort of a force of nature. What's more, criminals who spray graffiti aren't usually employable other than from their robbings, so we see the city going for the low-hanging fruit -- the people who earn money and already pay taxes. Those are the ones being targeted for this second harvesting from the city whose policies have put it into a $129 million fiscal deficit,with a $93 million operating shortfall, and facing bankruptcy.

They get mean when they go bankrupt, running out of other people's money, it's how socialism works.

The sad thing here is that they can't shake their socialism, even to clean up their crime-damaged city. They immediately target the capitalists, as if the people who make Oakland a nice place are somehow the bad guys to be whip-cracked down on by the state.

It's not the first time we have seen this mentality in action, either -- in Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass has been targeting fire victims for fines for not cleaning up the rubble of their former homes that her failure to fill the fire hydrants and clear brush left after the humongous fires in Altadena and Pacific Palisades created.

Horribly enough, as Oakland heads for another election to replace its corrupt and booted mayor, Sheng Thao, on April 15, polls show that Rep. Barbara Lee, a longtime far-left activist and aging Berkeley radical, is on track to win the election, bringing Oakland more of this.

Like Chicago did, what's left of Oakland is poised to pick the worst candidate, and carry on with this logic.

The shopkeepers in Oakland should just get out while they still can.

I am sorry for them and hope they can successfully fight somehow this outrageous miscarriage of leftist 'justice.'

Image: Screen shot from ABC 7 News video, via YouTube.