by Marvin J. Ramirez
Marvin Ramirez
The avalanche of destruction of the budget deficit crisis is doing its job, as many essential programs will be wiped out in San Francisco, soon. Today’s recession and tomorrow’s depression is now being felt.
However, regardless of the prognostics, the activist community is not standing still waiting to happen. Dozens of people from different organizations rallied at the Civic Center Plaza on Thursday, Dec. 11, to expose the damages the cuts proposed by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom will inflict on the most vulnerable sector of the community.
For each of the programs that are being targeted, the organizers erected a symbolic funeral on the lawn of the Plaza.
An open letter to the Mayor, and a list of alternatives to the cuts, were delivered by the Coalition on Homelessness, which held a procession and walked to the Mayor’s office on that day.
The San Francisco Health Department is proposing $17 million in cuts to critical services while new Mayor’s Office staff is being excluded from the ax, according to a coalition communicate.
The coalition claims the mayor is utilizing his power to halt spending in a time of budget shortfall, choosing to exclude budget priorities proposed by the Board of Supervisors during the summer.
“The Mayor must put on the brakes before he runs over fragile community members with this mid-year budget cut,” said James Chionsini of Planning for Elders in the Central City.
Many in the homeless shelters are new homeless families, but many are turned away for lack of space.
“We are asking today that you go further. We have identified over $61 million in alternative cuts to the city… that will not cost lives,” wrote Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness in San Francisco.
The financial crisis we are witnessing is all over, all over. And I mean all over, state, national and worldwide. And the situation is not going to get any better, as President-elect Barack Hussein Obama admitted earlier this month.
And if anyone knows, the government does not have any money, it has not had any since the Great Depression in 1933, when money – the unit of measurement of gold and silver – was removed from circulation by Congress, and replaced with a medium of exchange called Federal Reserve Notes (the dollar), which is not real money and has no real value, as it cannot be exchanged for gold or silver.
The fake currency we have been using for about 85 years for exchange and which our government has been borrowing since the Depression in the 1930s, is about to see its fi nal days. How do I know? Because I read alternative news on the internet.
The fiscal budget proposal our government submits every year is for the purpose of borrowing from the private bank called Federal Reserve Bank. And guess how our beloved government promises to pay?
By counting on our brothers’ and sisters’ forced coopera- tion through the increase of parking fi nes, moving violations, confi scation of the cars from the undocumented for being unlicensed, by using the police department as collectors.
So all the trillion plus in bailouts the feds are now instituting to save private banks, guess who will be charged to pay it? We the people.
Can you see the picture? There is no way we the people are going to be able to pay for all that. Not the City of San Francisco, neither the State of California are going to be able to pass the bill on to us, because we don’t have money either. Even if they increased the parking meters to $100 for every time your meter expires, or to $500 when you fail to make a full stop at a stop sign, and so on. Maybe the government should just confiscate your paycheck altogether and give you a stipend for your private expenses and keep the rest of your salary to pay for their borrowing.
As the situation continues, the government will have to file for bankruptcy, just like other states in the U.S. have done, as well as other countries.
So no matter how many protests or mock funerals are held around the country, it won’t help to bring those services back to life.
Let’s just pray that the bankers, who are responsible for this financial fiasco, and who are in the process of foreclosing on the country and the rest of the world, do not kill us with their army, in an effort to ‘reduce population,’ because the worst is yet to come.
But please, do not panic. Keep buying and selling in your local neighborhood, so we can keep the money locally, and so help each other within the community. Oh, and keep piling up food reserve, because you’re going to need it.
