
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
California is infamous for a lot of nuttery. One of the more unique government examples may be the state’s boycott of any state that protects religious freedom or in any way dissents from the radical leftist agenda.
The city of San Francisco was boycotting the majority of the United States — 28 states that did not pass the city’s criterion regarding anti-LGBTQ laws, anti-abortion laws, or restrictive election laws disproportionately affecting people of color.
In the intervening seven months, that tally has grown: The city presently cannot contract with businesses headquartered in 30 states, nor can city employees visit those states on official business.
Money is tighter these days and San Francisco was losing money because of its boycott of America.
“While it is difficult to measure how the City’s contracting costs have been affected … researchers have found that full and open competition for contracts can result in savings up to 20 percent,” reads today’s report.
With no one else joining its unilateral boycott, San Francisco decided to surrender to America.
“It’s not achieving the goal we want to achieve,” said Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who sponsored the legislation that repealed the whole boycott. “It is making our government less efficient.”
A central goal of the boycott was to put pressure on other states, but a recent report by City Administrator Carmen Chu’s office found that only one state had been removed from the list and none ever said they changed their laws because of San Francisco’s. Additionally, the report found that the law made city contracting a more cumbersome and expensive process.
An earlier report from the board’s Budget and Legislative Analyst found that implementing the boycott had cost the city nearly $475,000 in staffing expenses. And the city was approving a large number of exemptions to the boycott anyway: Departments granted 538 waivers for contracts worth $791 million between mid-2021 and mid-2022, the report found.
Even San Fran managed to bow to the inevitable.
San Francisco will no longer boycott 30 states that passed conservative laws after city officials determined that the restrictions were too costly and had little impact other than adding more bureaucracy.
But wasn’t adding more bureaucracy the whole point?
Does this mean that the rest of America will end its boycott of San Francisco? Dont count on it.
lolol, my laugh for the day. The Board of Stupidvisors discovers elementary economics 🙂
Seriously, things in San Francisco got so bad that they kind of hit bottom, and some of the new crew are better than the older ones.
Al those states should continue their own boycott of SF and not do business with them. They need to feel the pain.
S.F. is already feeling the pain. It has something like a 40% commercial real estate vacancy rate, out of control homelessness and drug use, and such extensive and unpunished crime that numerous stores are closing. But its residents don’t seem to care, preferring to elect people with delusional beliefs that preclude them from being “judgmental” by ending the rule of law and providing the maximum into autonomy, especially to people with severe mental illness. The pain just isn’t bad enough yet to penetrate their smugness. Needs to be turned up to 11.
Teach all blue states capitalism, buy or trade nothing with them.
Yes, they need to hit rock bottom. The pain needs to be felt long term not short term. I agree.
What was once a great city has turned into another liberal hell hole.
In fairness to SF, commercial real estate is now on the verge of catastrophic collapse across the nation. But if they have a 40% vacancy rate already, it’s probably safe to say SF led the way.
Once there was a fine city on a beautiful peninsula between the Pacific Ocean and a great natural harbor bay. It enjoyed a remarkable climate with amazing summers, mild winters, ocean fog, and glorious sunrises and sunsets. Art patrons commissioned great buildings and one of the great parks of the world where once there were only sand dunes. Civic government prohibited the building of great eyesores, and the highest rooftop in town was on the Mark Hopkins Hotel, where one could enjoy a cocktail in a genteel setting. Walking the streets and riding the cable cars offered citizens and visitors experiences unmatched by any other city on earth.
Then came a cultural revolution in the late 1960s. The forces that had created this genteel and gracious place spun apart, and seedy districts acquired a patina of appeal to a new hip generation. Business forces enabled the construction of self-important tall buildings that taxed the urban infrastructure, made the city center inhospitable, and spoiled the skyline. In a generation, the city was transformed. To the south, the silicon revolution produced huge wealth, and much of the city became a bedroom community for highly compensated immigrants with no love for the past.
My grandfather was chief civil engineer of SF from the late 1930s to early 1950s. There was a lot of corruption but he managed to keep it in check, such as proving in court that shoddy engineering projects were unsound. But after he retired in the mid-1950s things started to go downhill.
One of the worst things that irritated me was the Jefferson Airplane singing “We built this city on Rock and Roll”. Rock and Roll had nothing to do with building SF, it was uncorruptible engineers like my grandfather.
I am sure you know the old saw about the architect, the structural engineer, and the civil engineer arguing about God’s design of the female human body. I have to admit to having practiced all of these professions…
I have to admit I practice on a lot of female bodies. 🙂
excellent, beautiful and tragic summary of events
Thank you. I visited that city before the Transamerica Pyramid was started. I bumped into France Nguyen at the old Tadich’s restaurant, and had to be told who she was by my hosts. I entertained clients years later at the Compass Rose Bar before Westin debauched the Saint Francis Hotel. Alas, the works of men do not endure long.
Politicians catered to the lowest denominator of cultural norms, and the streets of the city became pestilential – third world in character – a place that environmental and health officials would condemn, in a rational world. Families, like families across the land, no longer worshipped on Sunday mornings and visited the parks and restaurants afterward. Tourists came, and went away disgusted. The wealthy lived as the wealthy do in banana republics, guarded from the crime and filth, but only willfully ignoring the poverty surrounding them.
And, just as in those benighted places, the government continued to enforce the very policies that fostered the filth, disease, dependency, and crime that ruined a once great city.
Vulgar, decadent, obnoxious gay pride parades not workin’ out for ’em, huh?
“San Francisco will no longer boycott 30 states that passed conservative laws.” This is because, in order to prosper & survive, these 30 states did not need SF. The SF boycott was the epitome of the SF Marxist-elitists’ illusions of importance & relevance to everybody else. They are not important nor are they relevant.
Losing all those Summer Tourists is starting to show itself and done without any Violence
So can I still find gentle people there, if I come wearing flowers in my hair?
lol, I wouldn’t risk it 🙂
You can find weak people there – the SF politicians and “social influencers.”
Gentle people are everywhere. Summertime being a love-in? Not so commonplace, any more. But one suspects your point is that the “Summer of love” was a lie, and as an eyewitness, I can affirm that the popular image of that season was far from accurate.
I should say, that there is an egregious case currently in San Francisco, a former fire captain was bashed in the head with a metal pole by a homeless psycho, which penetrated the fire captain’s skull and put him in hospital in serious condition. But the homeless psycho has been released, and the fire captain may be charged with using pepper spray to try and defend himself.
Now, I don’t know the guy personally, but there used to be a strong Italian community in San Francisco, and loyalty by the city government to former high up fire officials. So that seems to have gone out the window with the current leftist government.