by Marvin Ramírez

A year after some bureaucrats not elected by popular vote (SFMTA) made the decision to experiment by transforming a very popular street frequented by many people from outside of SF and tourists, into a headache for commerce and community.

In a press conference on Tuesday, December 5, area merchants and the San Francisco Hispanic Chamber of Commerce denounced the abuses to which merchants have been subjected, such as the loss of clientele and employees due to lack of business.

Deciding that cars were not needed. and that bicycles were more important than those who pay taxes, these crazy people at the SFMTA created a bike path, especially for cyclists – disrupting the commercial stability of the area – stripping away vital parking spaces that are the lifeblood that keeps business alive.

Two lanes disappeared to form the exclusive bicycle path, so that they could cruise – to or from their jobs in the SF Shopping Center – on Valencia Street. And all to benefit these who do not pay any type of tax to maintain the streets or sidewalks, as do the vehicles that drop off and take business patrons. In addition, the life of many cyclists is without families who do not need motorized vehicles to get around. Why didn’t they choose South Van Ness Street for their experiment?

From being a street with tremendous commerce, with exquisite restaurants with a wide variety of culinary art restaurant, art galleries, and cafes, which resembled any tourist street in Amsterdam, where taxis could pick up and drop off their passengers in front of the establishments with their families or partners, now it is a dying Valencia street.

Today, ticket ogres loot your wallet if you stop to unload a passenger, or if you don’t put money in the parking meter before 10 p.m. A robbery, because it used to be until 6 p.m.

A large number of parking meters that were once regular, today are only for cargo trucks – most of the time not being used – stay empty. The rules of the game were changed so that there were more white zones for parking for 5 minutes, or yellow zones for loading. It’s what they have been doing throughout the city, eliminating parking meters on street corners and replacing them with red zones.

And if you remember the red stripes on Mission Street, which were painted to give an exclusive lane to buses and taxis, it was to speed up the passage of public transportation, but an official study showed that it only saved about 5 minutes. What they want is control.

It seems, but in reality it is so, that the municipal government has an agenda: eliminate private transportation with the excuse of protecting the environment. But they do not know that with this measure they are killing the livelihood of families who live from their jobs in these businesses that are now closing due to lack of clientele who are leaving because they cannot find parking.

But the city is shooting itself in the foot, because if there is no commerce there is no tax collection. Although it could be that they do it with an agenda: they want to recover taxes by criminalizing parking.

Of course, they take away where to park, and you, in the urgent need to park, have no choice but to do so in the red, white or yellow zone, exposing yourself to a fine.

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) is a department of the city and county of San Francisco responsible for the management of all ground transportation in the city. The oversee parking, traffic, pedestrians and others. But it is an autonomous body that not even the Board of Supervisors can control, and it is managed by unelected officials.

Before there were two lines on Valencia Street, one where traffic continued, while the other could be used for double parking by those who arrived in vehicles to drop off or bring passengers. There was no congestion. It made life easier for everyone. And commerce was vibrant.

People could turn left, but these crazy bureaucrats criminalized left turning, thus making driving on Valencia Street hell. You cannot turn left – from 16th Street to 23rd Street, and you have to drive to 24th Street.

Valencia Street was previously the envy of prospective merchants who wanted to find a vacant place to open a business. For those who were already installed, Valencia was a source of pride in commercial growth for them and the city, especially when everything was beginning to return to normal after commerce was devastated by the tears of the pandemic.

Someone told me about the 2030 Agenda, and about a satirical meme.

The satirical meme shows World Economic Fund President Klaus Schwab pointing to a list of “policies” under the heading “Agenda 2030.”

The list reads: “net zero carbon emissions, no fossil fuels, no gasoline cars, no jobs, no electricity, no borders, no meat, eating bugs, unaffordable green energy, endless blackouts, UN/WHO dictatorship.”

It is mere globalism. War on the people and the automobile.

Either they dismantle all this madness, or commerce will collapse.

by Paul Craig Roberts

The United States Government today bears little resemblance to the government created by the Founding Fathers. Many “reforms” contributed to the transformation of an accountable government to an unaccountable one. For example, the direct election of US senators and the expansion of the franchise from male property owners adversely affected the security of private property. Others point to the effects of wars. All of these played a role in America’s destruction. However, in my opinion the transformation of American government can be explained by events in three short periods of our history.

The founders saw the US as an association of states in which central power was limited and weak. The 10th Amendment gave governing to the states. President Lincoln’s war for the tariff destroyed states’ rights and led to the supremacy of centralized federal power over the states. Today what happens in specific states can be determined by votes in other states. Lincoln’s war lasted four years, and that was time enough for Lincoln to destroy the framework devised by the Founders.

The second devastating period was 1913. That year the United States took two hard blows. One from the creation of the Federal Reserve, and one from the establishment of an income tax. The creation of the Federal Reserve took control over money from the government and gave it to the big bankers. The income tax resurrected slavery. Historians have ignored that historically the definition of a free person is a person who owns his own labor. A slave or a serf is a person whose labor is owned in whole or part by an outside party. No person subject to an income tax owns his own labor. Once a person is violated in this way, all his other protections fall away–his privacy, his security in his home and documents, his protection against arbitrary arrest, self-incrimination, indefinite detention without conviction. No American alive today has experienced the freedom known to the Founders.

The third destructive period was the depression of the 1930s. This was the work of the Federal Reserve which permitted the money supply to shrink, thereby collapsing employment, income, and prices. The Great Depression produced President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. The New Deal transferred Congress’ lawmaking power to the new progressive regulatory agencies. Today when Congress passes a law, it amounts to an authorization for regulatory agencies to write the regulations that implement the law. For example, the 1964 Civil Rights Act expressly prohibited racial quotas, but the EEOC imposed racial quotas by regulatory means.

These three periods, comprising 15 years of American history or 6 percent of our time as a country, sufficed to destroy what the Founders created. Historians are blind, because history has been written for propagandistic reasons to serve agendas. Lincoln’s war for the tariff has been turned into a moral cause of freeing black slaves, something Lincoln denied while initiating and fighting the war. The year 1913 is described as a progressive turning in the direction of financial stability and equity or fairness. The New Deal is presented as measures that tamed the instability of capitalism. When Henry Ford reportedly said “history is bunk,” he wasn’t far off.

It is unfortunate that our political heroes, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and England’s Winston Churchill come under scrutiny at the very time that the countries are under assault for their evil past. It is now when we need belief to fend off assault that our idols are shown to have feet of clay. David Irvin’s Churchill’s War destroyed the artfully created reputation of Churchill. Now David T. Beito’s The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights completes the destruction of progressive hero FDR.

Like Lincoln, Roosevelt used war to achieve his agenda–the destruction of the British Empire and its replacement with the American Empire based on the US dollar taking the British currency’s role as world reserve currency. It is a paradox that liberals have regarded as a progressive hero a president, who squashed dissent and free speech, locked up American citizens of Japanese ethnicity in concentration camps, destroying their lives and allowing their properties to be stolen, and attacked the Bill of Rights that made Americans secure under the protection of law. As Beito’s exposure of FDR makes clear, the man was a tyrant who elevated executive power by stripping power from Congress and intimidating the Supreme Court.

Beito spent a decade researching and writing his book, and the voluminous notes and index comprising more than 25 percent of the printed pages attest to his thoroughness. The book is not one man’s opinion. It is a historical record.

If America had had historians different from the gullible and insouciant liberals, we might still exist in the freedom and liberty that the Founders gave to us.