Free speech is crucial and must be defended.
The founding fathers recognized this and gave us the first amendment as a guard against tyrannical government, so that we are free to spread ideas even when those ideas are not popular with those in power.
It's common knowledge that San Francisco has thousands of homeless people living on the streets and a shortage of not just housing, but even temporary shelter space. San Francisco also has a government-run school system that includes over a hundred schools occupying public space, each with multiple buildings that are vacant and unused at night.
Ida Mojadad’s wretched March 28th San Francisco Weekly article on San Francisco’s “Development Impact Fee” is so factually erroneous that it deserves to be deconstructed for the propaganda it is. Far too often, reports in San Francisco are P/R repeaters, and I have noticed this type of fake news seems to crop up quite often when Supervisor Matt Haney is cooking up a kickback.
On a warm Summer day in July 1916, over one hundred thousand residents descended on Market Street in San Francisco to witness a parade for civic “preparedness” – an ostensibly grassroots and patriotic movement for American involvement in War in Europe, the Pacific, Mexico, or all three organized and funded by the “Law And Order Committee” of prominent California industrialists. As leaflets depicting babies on bayonets rained down, suddenly at 2:05 PM an explosion rung out in front of the shop of Tobacconist John Clifton at Steuart and Market streets. Six people lay dead or dying: George Lawlor, Lea Lamborn, Dr. George Painter, Mrs. Hetta Knapp, Arthur Nelson, and Civil War veteran Adam Fox. Four more would die in the days ahead. Forty were maimed – some crippled for life.
There has been an ongoing problem of collusion between government officials and municipal bond advisors who often actually write the bond bills for profit. And then deceptively work with government to sell them to an unsuspecting public. To address this issue, the California State Assembly passed AB-195 which was approved by Governor Jerry Brown and on January 1, 2018 became Law. Sections of that law governs the way local governments can present bond measures on ballots:
Section 18401 of the California Elections Code says election officials who allow non-compliant ballots to be put before the public are criminally liable.
As this complaint clearly shows, Proposition A was enormously non-compliant. The Libertarian Party of San Francisco (LPSF) was designated official Opponent of Proposition A by the SF Dept. of Elections. LPSF members called attention to these issues before the Ballot Simplification Committee. They were ignored.
Last month San Francisco lost one of its best leaders, perhaps the only elected official in the city truly worthy of that description.
"Prosecutors, with near unlimited resources and the full backing of the government, are trying to take away a citizen's freedom. That's a big deal and something we want to get right," he wrote in a 2014 op-ed piece in the Sacramento Bee.
I feel like I keep repeating myself. Last month, I wrote that Government Thinks You are Fat and Stupid and so they need to set hard rules to keep all of us lemmings from walking off cliffs. In that article, I discussed proposals by the state of California to further regulate and tax sugary beverages (something we already have to deal with here in San Francisco) in the name of public health.
This time, it’s The City here to tell you how stupid you are.
Governments continue the perpetual war in Oceania, Eastasia, or Eurasia—for us, tobacco, plastics, and soda—in order to keep the people distracted and to justify their own jobs. It seems that every election cycle, another major city floats a soda tax as a do-good measure to improve public health. I saw it almost happen in New York and then actually become law in Philadelphia, and it followed me out to San Francisco in 2016 (Prop V).
Here is a quick highlight reel of what that the LPSF has accomplished in the second half of 2018. Looking at all this together, it's clear that we are growing fast and accomplishing quite a lot with little resources. I'm very proud of the work that we've done and the progress we are making. THANK YOU again to all of our members, donors, activists, speakers, volunteers and friends. Without your support, this wouldn't be possible-- and with your continued support, 2019 will be even better!
This will be my final regular article for the LPSF Newsletter, and for a change, I’m going to go with a normal title and not one of my eclectic ones that often had folks scratching their heads. I have voted with my feet and moved to New Hampshire to be part of the Free State Project, an effort to convince 20,000 Libertarians to move to the “Live Free or Die” state to help push it in a more liberty-oriented direction. I’ve already jumped into activism here and joined the New Hampshire Liberty Alliance, which reviews the bills written by state legislators and fights against the statist ones and supports pro-freedom ones, and also my local “Porcupines” group.
