Tag: San Francisco

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ideological culture judiciary property rights

Must Your Town Become San Francisco?

San Francisco, homelessness, homeless, consequences

I love San Francisco. Such a beautiful city, I thought on a recent visit. 

But then I turned the corner and discovered, once again, that all-​important skill of rapidly averting one’s eyes. 

Where was an escape route?

The city by the bay, like other towns with mild weather, is always going to get more than its share of what we used to call hobos, or — more accurately — bums. Sleeping on the streets there must beat sleeping on Chicago streets in the winter.

Still, Frisco gives added benefits to those living on its streets. Indeed, vagrants can become less vagrant by setting up encampments in public, apparently wherever, toilet facilities optional. An impending Supreme Court ruling may push other cities in the same direction.

The case, Johnson v. City of Grants Pass, Oregon, has reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

Three vagrants challenged a Grants Pass ordinance prohibiting them “from using a blanket, pillow, or cardboard box for protection from the elements”; in other words, from setting up camp in the street.

In response, the Ninth Circuit blocked Grants Pass from enforcing the ordinance unless it provides shelter to those kicked off the street. Many towns cannot afford such expenditures, especially if the vagrant population is of any great size.

You get more of what you subsidize. If, obeying such rulings, towns do stretch budgets to prevent encampments, they thus encourage vagrants from nearby lands to move into town to get the taxpayer-​funded accommodations.

The Ninth Circuit decision applies to nine states. Now the Supreme Court will either throw out the decision; revise it; or, upholding it, begin to consign all of us in all states to the fate of San Francisco.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment

The Bums’ Rush

Gavin Newsom, Ji Jinping, China, San Francisco, propaganda

Californians have long been talking about cleaning up San Francisco from the waste laid to the city by its well-​compensated bums along with coddled criminals, entitled inebriates, and the happy homeless. 

And then last week it happened. The city got cleaned up and scrubbed down. Darn quick.

All it took was the arrival of the President. 

Of China.

Xi Jinping touched down just days ago for the Asia-​Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, at which our own Somnambulant-​in-​Chief also teetered around, so the clean-​up crews worked overtime to make a good impression.

There’s been a lot of speculation about it all. Couldn’t those who have been creating this filthy and dangerous environment on the streets of San Fran have been dealt with (and not pampered) a long time ago?

Many have remarked: so it’s Xi whom San Francisco Democrats really look up to? Not their own citizens? Everyday San Franciscans don’t matter? Only The Eastern King of Genocidal Totalitarianism?

“Is the president embarrassed,” a reporter asked National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on Monday, “that an American city needs to go through a total makeover to be presentable for his out-​of-​town guests?”

No real answer.

But what did the city do, exactly?

Moved the homeless out of the way, first. 

And then the streets were hosed off, the graffiti sanded or painted over.

Arguably, corralling the homeless from sector to sector of the city would be one way to disincentivize squatting, as would arresting and trying street-​dwellers for public drug use and excretion — for some things must be kept private, not engaged in helter-skelter. 

Things like defecating. 

Sexual intercourse. 

Shooting up.

Years ago, no one had to explain this to anyone.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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initiative, referendum, and recall too much government

SF Scheme Scuttled

San Francisco, taxes, income, GBI

The proposed tax was very popular. In San Francisco. It polled at nearly 75 percent in favor. 

But it possessed a fatal flaw. 

And worse.

The fatal flaw? The numbers didn’t add up.

Organizers spent nearly half a million bucks developing and promoting and getting the petition signatures to place Proposition K on this November’s ballot.

The notion? Tax Amazon sales within city limits to fund a guaranteed income scheme in the Golden City.

But then they learned — after it qualified for the ballot — that it was an incoherent tax-​and-​spend mess. Its chief pusher, John Elberling, admitted, reports The San Francisco Standard, that “he made mistakes in calculating how Amazon earns its revenue in the city.” And, The Standard continues, “the City Controller’s office found that the tax measure would actually harm hundreds of small businesses in San Francisco and cut revenue to the city’s general fund by about $10 million a year.”

So Elberling ate crow, admitting to error (and also, apparently, to misleading petition signers), and a judge removed Prop K from the ballot.

Whew. Disaster averted.

Alas, Elberling promises to “perfect” his scheme, and advance it again.

Which is ominous, for the core idea itself — adding on more taxes to fund a trendy-​but-​disastrous “guaranteed income” — is not the way out of California’s progressive-​induced nightmare. It’s just a vastly bigger version of what’s gone on before.

If Californians don’t develop more common sense about the limitations of salvation-​by-​government, they are doomed to repeat such folly.

That goes double for San Franciscans.

Who this time have a reprieve, thankfully.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly nannyism property rights

Vandalized, Scandalized

grafitti, San Francisco, crime, law

Store owners have another reason to get the heck out of that derelict-​enabling and increasingly unlivable town, San Francisco. The city fines businesses for the crime of being vandalized by graffiti artists.

This form of harassing property owners is nothing new, but the city had temporarily reduced enforcement during the pandemic.

The policy is unjust in at least two ways.

First, there should be no fines for being hit by graffiti-​vandals. It’s the vandals who should be punished, not the victims. Moreover, as Reason magazine points out, “Unlike accumulated trash, noise, or other standard nuisances, graffiti isn’t inherently offensive.”

Rather, it is the city that is being offensive by treating an owner’s property as if it were its own and penalizing owners if their property lacks the appearance that the city ordains.

Second, even granting the legitimacy of requiring property owners to clean up the graffiti, the policy as imposed is abusive. Businesses are being fined repeatedly for graffiti that they don’t magically remove at lightning speed and that the vandals, undiscouraged, simply slap back on anyway.

“I can’t even count,” Michael McNamara, manager of the restaurant Above Ground (now closed), told the San Francisco Chronicle last year. “The paint dries and you deal with another one.” The city had dunned Above Ground with at least three $300 bills for the graffiti.

Rewarding destructive behavior while punishing those whose way of work and life makes civilization possible is no way to run a city — but it is a way of running the good people out of town.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment ideological culture local leaders

Sorosian Justice?

George Soros, San Francisco, crime, justice

Criminal courts provide an old kind of justice, where individuals’ specific acts are judged and individuals, if found guilty, are punished.

“Social justice” is something else again — a daring, socialistic attempt to correct for all the ills “of society” or, more widely, “the cosmos.” That’s a huge agenda to stuff into the old practice, which, while never perfect, did serve, in its way, a noble social goal: curbing crime.

But when the social justice crowd infiltrated the old system in places like California, crime flourished. In early June, San Franciscans recalled their radical District Attorney and sent woke politics into a tailspin.

I’ve reported on this, but the story continues. As explained by Jack Phillips in The Epoch Times, the newly appointed replacement “district attorney in San Francisco fired at least 15 employees from the prosecutor’s office after her left-​wing predecessor Chesa Boudin was recalled last month.”

Heads rolled. And heads weren’t pleased. 

“I was unceremoniously fired without cause via phone by the Mayor’s appointed DA,” one prominent civil servant tweeted. “I am the highest-​ranking Latina/​LGBTQ member of the management team at that office. I will continue the fight 4justice.”

But what is that justice?

It’s a “fairer system,” said Chesa Boudin, the ousted DA, who objects to having been “scapegoated” for rising crime — but it’s sure hard to believe his pro-​criminal policies did not contribute to the crime wave.

Boudin’s brand of justice has been rumored to benefit from extensive promotion by billionaire George Soros. Soros’s office has denied supporting Boudin, yet The Epoch Times notes that Mr. Soros’s PAC funded, through an intermediary, Boudin’s recall defense campaign.

Most Americans want reforms to our justice system but do not agree with George Soros.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability education and schooling initiative, referendum, and recall

After Recall, Revival

San Francisco, dumpster fire

Is San Francisco waking up from its dystopian nightmare?

The egalitarians who have pushed the great city into absurdity have suffered another setback.

The earlier victory for sanity was won in a landslide election this February when parents recalled three members of the local school board for doing things like renaming 44 schools to conform to a left-​wing agenda, keeping San Francisco schools closed because of outsized fears of the pandemic, and using a lottery system to undermine the magnet school Lowell High.

The lottery ended Lowell’s merit-​based admissions, preventing the most qualified students from getting in unless they happened to get a lucky number. A step was thus taken toward reducing all students in the district to the same low academic level. Obviously, kids too behind or lazy to be even good students let alone top students would not suddenly become stellar academicians merely by winning a lottery.

The three board members ousted in February were the only ones then eligible to be recalled. Now the reconstituted board has voted 4 – 3 against extending the lottery system. The vote restores merit-​based admissions.

A victory, but way too narrow. One flipped vote and the district would be back to hobbling the best and brightest.

The three anti-​education board members who voted against the best possible future for the best students are Kevine Boggess, Mark Sanchez, and Matt Alexander.

They should be recalled or at least defeated in their next election. Since district parents are on the alert and active, there’s a good chance that this will happen.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The big stories of the week revolve around big government, which mean big theft, which is not unrelated to socialism:

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crime and punishment ideological culture

The Long Road Back

San Francisco, homeless, crime

Decades of wrongheaded policies have eroded San Francisco’s once much-​vaunted charm. 

These policies include onerous burdens on building construction; lax attitudes toward homeless folks’ tent cities and public excretory practices; and a green light for sundry criminal activities, including broad-​daylight theft.

The green light flashed statewide in 2014, when Californians passed Proposition 47, giving looters much less to worry about if caught stealing less than $950.

Remove a disincentive and you wind up with a huge incentive: thugs were emboldened; folks on the margin between criminality and civilized peace went the wrong direction.

In San Francisco, they were further emboldened when voters installed Democrat Chesa Boudin as district attorney in 2019. At least the election was close.

A recent recall election wasn’t so close, with some 61% voting to oust him.

In the cause of abetting criminals, DA Boudin did everything but serve as getaway-​car driver.

Right away, he fired several prosecutors, and The Epoch Times reports that soon “more than 50 prosecutors, support, and victim services staff had either been fired or had quit their jobs over Boudin’s progressive agenda.”

The agenda included ending cash bail, slashing incarceration rates, routinely releasing repeat offenders.

Although it has lost a lot, San Francisco still has piers and fog and that famously twisty road, Lombard Street. Residents have a ways to go to emerge from their ideological fog and perhaps must travel an even twistier road to reclaim their city.

By getting rid of Boudin — and three pretty rotten school board members in another recent recall election — San Franciscans have taken the first steps back to something like sanity. Which always makes next steps easier.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling initiative, referendum, and recall

Woke Board Broke

San Francisco, school board, recall

The pro-​education, anti-​indoctrination counterrevolution is chalking up a major win in . . . San Francisco?

Homeschooling — or at least private-​school schooling — sounds better every day. Pandemic-​rationalized permanent shutdowns of classrooms, along with the accelerating ideological assaults that many school boards are waging on behalf of gender fluidity, racist “antiracism,” regimented speech, etc., do more than merely suggest we find alternatives.

Yet, for one reason or another, many families are stuck with public schools.

But they are apparently not stuck with the very worst that public schools can impose. Last Tuesday, in the first recall election in San Francisco in some 40 years, fed-​up parents threw giant butterfly nets over three local school-​board malefactors and dragged them off stage: Alison Collins, Gabriela López, and Faauuga Moliga.

Instead of working to reopen schools, the board’s been busy these last couple of years killing merit-​based admissions at the magnet school Lowell High, scrubbing the names of dozens of schools to get rid of such blighted appellations as “Abraham Lincoln” and “George Washington,” and spending a million bucks to repaint a mural of the life of Washington. Last year, the district’s budget deficit swelled to around $125 million.

After the votes came in, other educrats in town scurried to the defense of the downfallen trio and prayed that their replacements would consist of more of the same.

But what parents can do once, they can do again, and not just in San Francisco. 

Kids, shake their hands. Your moms and dads are cool.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment folly ideological culture

Stop & Go on Crime

crime, Democrats, law enforcement

In last week’s news conference, President Biden seemed to wave a green light to Vladimir Putin: Russian military forces may make a “minor incursion” into neighboring Ukraine. Was Biden applying to diplomacy, I wondered, the permissive posture so many other Democratic officials have taken, domestically? Crime’s fine, if small enough. 

If so, Biden’s not leading — Democrats around the country are changing direction. 

“We are in a crisis,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced last month, declaring a state of emergency. “Too many people are dying in this city. Too many people are sprawled all over our streets. And now we have a plan to address it.”

Her approach? Simple: End the “reign of criminals” by taking “the steps to be more aggressive with law enforcement … and less tolerant of all the bullsh*t that has destroyed our city.”

The New York Times called it “a sharp break with the liberal conventions that have guided her city for decades.” 

“About time,” was California Governor Gavin Newsom’s response.

When Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner responded to questions about rising crime by arguing, “We don’t have a crisis of lawlessness, we don’t have a crisis of crime, we don’t have a crisis of violence,” former Mayor Michael Nutter expressed incredulity.

“How many more Black and brown people, and others,” Nutter wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “would have to be gunned down in our streets daily to meet your definition of a ‘crisis’?”

Still, upon taking office weeks ago, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg “ordered his prosecutors to stop seeking prison sentences for hordes of criminals and to downgrade felony charges in cases including armed robberies …” the New York Post reported.

“The identical platform,” noted a police supervisor, “has not worked out in San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia and Baltimore.”

Or anywhere else. Ever.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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