Since the Burton Machine, Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple seized power in late 1975, the size and scope of San Francisco government has exploded. Along with this tsunami of government has come the ubiquitous bloat and outright corruption. When it comes to waste, fraud and abuse, there has been far too much of it going on in San Francisco to thoroughly cover in a mere article – a multi-volume book could be written. San Francisco can now safely be added to the list of the most corrupt cities in America, right up there with New York and Chicago. Including my personal stories, this article goes over some examples.
This article and video will be the last before the release of my upcoming book “The Fall of San Francisco.” It’s looking like it will be available next month. To stay informed, please join my email list at my website peterakirby.com
The year that the Burton Machine seized power (1975), the population of San Francisco was around 700,000 and the total city budget was about $4.1B in inflation adjusted dollars. In 2019 the San Francisco annual budget weighed in at $13.5B in inflation adjusted dollars, even though the population had only grown by about 100,000 people. So, since the time that the Burton Machine seized power, the city budget has more than tripled while the population has only increased by about 14% and as we know, this gargantuan city budget has not created a thriving San Francisco. The opposite has occurred. Are you sensing an inverse relationship between general prosperity and the amount of money collected and spent by government? You should be.
At the time of this writing there are hundreds of government agencies listed on the City’s official websites. To go over all of them would be extremely tedious, so let’s just take a look at a short list of choice examples, shall we? There is the Human Rights Commission, the Office of Transgender Initiatives, the Commission on the Status of Women, the Food Security Task Force, the Asthma Task Force, the Bicycle Advisory Committee, the Immigrant Rights Commission, the Local Agency Formation Commission (a board that makes boards), the Medical Cannabis Task Force, the Office of Cannabis, the Marijuana Offenses Oversight Committee, the Cannabis Oversight Committee, the Child Care Planning and Advisory Council, the Power Plant Task Force, the Human Services Commission, the Underwater Basket Weaving Advisory Committee (ok, I made that one up), the Local Homeless Coordinating Board, the Municipal Green Building Task Force, the Our City Our Home Oversight Committee, the Real Estate Fraud Prosecution Trust Fund Committee, the Graffiti Advisory Board, the Refuse Rate Board, the Guaranteed Income Advisory Group, the Housing Code Enforcement Loan Committee, the Inclusionary Housing Technical Advisory Committee, the Retiree Health Care Trust Fund Board, the Workforce Investment Board, the Street Artists and Craftsmen Examiners Advisory Committee, the Sugary Drinks Distributor Tax Advisory Committee, the Sweatfree Procurement Advisory Group (please don’t ask), the Urban Forestry Council, the Adult Day Health Care Planning Council, the African American Arts and Cultural District Community Advisory Committee, the African American Reparations Advisory Committee, the Ballot Simplification Committee, the Reentry Council, the Single Room Occupancy Task Force, and the ever-popular Unreinforced Masonry Appeals Board. In almost all of the official descriptions of these agencies, the City makes note of ethnicity, gender and the like; but that’s not racist or sexist or anything. They’re also constantly emphasizing diversity, equity and inclusion, which, of course, only apply if one agrees with the City’s politics.
~ ~ ~
In the late 1950s Phil Burton was behind the passage of CA state bills which allowed non-citizens who had lived in the U.S. for at least 25 years to get state pensions. He was also behind bills that gave non-citizens other state benefits. This was the beginning of providing all sorts of government benefits to non-citizens as well as to illegal aliens.
Since 1989 San Francisco has been a ‘Sanctuary City.’ This generally means that city government is precluded from cooperating with federal officials in routine matters of an individual’s immigration status. These policies attract illegal aliens to San Francisco.
Another outgrowth of the Burton Machine has been San Francisco city government producing official literature in languages other than English. Doing that worked well for the Burton Machine as it caused many non-English speaking US citizens residing in San Francisco (and being courted exclusively by the Burton Machine) to cast their votes. There were lots of them living in Chinatown. This was a key element of the early success of the Burton Machine. Today all San Francisco government literature (especially voting materials) is available in at least 8 languages other than English: Cantonese, Spanish, Tagalog, Burmese, Japanese, Korean, Thai and Vietnamese.
Chemtrails Exposed: A New Manhattan Project: second edition
Now the latest trend in San Francisco is that of non-citizens being directly involved in the electoral process. San Francisco voters approved Proposition N in 2016 which allows non-citizens to vote in local school board elections. This has been upheld by the courts. Now a non-citizen has been appointed to oversee San Francisco elections. As a result of voters approving a 2020 ballot initiative allowing non-citizens to serve on San Francisco’s boards, commissions and advisory bodies, a woman named Kelly Wong, who came to America only 5 years ago, has now been appointed to the San Francisco Elections Commission.
All of this bending over backwards for immigrants writ large is a negative for San Francisco. First of all, the only thing that should ever be done with illegal aliens is deportation. Illegal aliens disrespect our country and violate our laws the moment they cross our borders. They have no standing in this country and should not be given any type of preferential treatment. As far as legal immigrants go, they should be the smartest and best-educated people that their countries have to offer, not just anybody. This is not what happens today. What happens today is that San Francisco just immediately accepts and coddles whoever drops by – regardless of immigration status or what an individual has to offer – and almost all of them immediately start receiving some type of government benefits. This drags society down as these immigrants (legal and otherwise) take almost all of the non-skilled labor positions, often underbidding American citizens. Many homeless people living on the streets today are there because they have been squeezed out of the job market by immigrants. Many of these unskilled positions have also been traditionally staffed by young people, often working their way through college, which is how society is supposed to function. The loss of available unskilled labor positions and the growth of the amount of money going into government benefits has a suffocating effect on society and we now see the effects of it all.
A particularly troubling aspect of American citizens being squeezed out of the job market occurs when it happens to American military veterans. If you didn’t know, a large percentage of people living on the streets today are veterans of the U.S. military. When they are discharged from the services, they are ready to hold a regular job, but their service in the military has left them without skills that are needed in the civilian job market. In a properly functioning society, they would simply find unskilled labor readily available and support themselves that way. But in most American cities today, those unskilled positions are not available to people who aren’t willing to work for slave wages. In fact, a whole exclusionary culture has grown up around these unskilled positions. These jobs go to their friends and outsiders are not needed or wanted. God forbid that our military veteran has some kind of disability. In that case, there is little to no chance of him finding a job. Then the only thing he sees is the downward spiral of drug addiction. These are people who put their country first and now their country has kicked them to the curb.
The only language in which official government documents should ever be printed is English. Producing government literature in a multitude of languages fractionalizes society rather than unifying it. For a society to function properly, its members need to be proficient in a common language. A divided house will not stand. A good example is the world of science. International scientific conferences are held in English. The world’s top scientific journals are printed in English. This is not because science is racist. It is because English is the most complex and nuanced language in the world. For those who speak it and speak it well, it provides the orator with the tools necessary for expressing the most complex ideas in a way that other languages simply do not provide. If we as a society are to excel, we should all be able to easily communicate with each other in the language that gives us the best way to do so. Legal immigrants should be solidly encouraged to speak and write English as fluently as possible because doing otherwise keeps people in the culture they came from, rather than them becoming highly functioning American citizens.
~ ~ ~
Due to an overabundance government, for many decades San Francisco has been a terrible place to start a small business. Out of 66 cities studied, a 2019 report by the Arizona State University Center for the Study of Economic Liberty found San Francisco to be the most difficult American city in which to run a business. Small businesses are the foundation of a thriving economy and when government effectively shuts them down, we get San Francisco today.
Another study found that it costs a whopping $22,648 in city government compliance costs alone to start a restaurant in San Francisco. Among the other major American cities studied, these costs averaged around $5,000.
Then there is the famous case of a local businessman who simply wanted to open an ice cream shop in the Mission District. Sounds like a pretty simple operation, right? Not in San Francisco.
In order to start the permitting process, he first needed approval from the Planning Department. Part of this process is giving neighbors within 150 feet of the proposed business a 90-day window to lodge an objection. An objection was filed from another ice cream shop owner already operating in the area. This triggered a hearing at the Planning Commission, which took another 2 months to commence. In the meantime our entrepreneur had to hire a lawyer and hold off on making any necessary improvements. The Planning Commission approved his plans, but then came San Francisco’s notorious Department of Building Inspection.
The Department of Building Inspection at the moment just happened to be in the middle of a transition from a paper-based record keeping system to a computerized system. The transition was botched and they subsequently decided to revert back to the paper-based system. This botched transition caused an increased workload for their staff and resulted in a backlog of 3,000 requests for permits. Our prospective ice cream shop owner was caught up smack in the middle of the tsunami.
A couple of months later a city building inspector found about 30 issues that needed to be dealt with. An architect needed to be hired. By this point our San Francisco native with two kids had been paying $7,300 per month in rent. Between the lawyer, the architect, rent and other costs, he was in the hole about $150K and figured that he would need to sink another $50K into the shop to get it open. He still needed further approvals from a mechanical plan checker at the Department of Building Inspection, as well as approvals from the Fire Department, the Department of Public Works and the Department of Public Health. It appears that he gave up, losing $150K with nothing to show for it. This is but one readily available, documented example. There are probably thousands of other similar cases. I’ve heard the stories time and time again. San Francisco ruins lives.
It should be noted that there has been some movement here since. In 2020 San Francisco voters approved Proposition H which implements zoning changes that make it easier for small businesses to open and expand. Proposition H also requires streamlined permit processing for eligible small businesses. Something called First Year Free has also been implemented. First Year Free is a program designed by the Mayor and Board of Supervisors that waives license, permit and business registration fees for one year for new businesses.
~ ~ ~
There’s no shortage of outright corruption in San Francisco. If you want to verify this, simply search the term ‘San Francisco corruption convictions’ and see what you get. We’ll go over some of the things just lying around on the surface here, but, as you know, when you see a few cockroaches, there’s always hundreds more in the wall.
In early 2016 former state senator from San Francisco Leland Yee was sentenced to 5 years imprisonment for using two of his political campaigns as racketeering conspiracies involving a broad array of criminal activity. Although many people claim that conspiracies simply do not exist, Yee’s co-defendant Keith Jackson, a former San Francisco Board of Education president, pleaded guilty to the same charges and got 9 years in prison. There were 26 other defendants in the case.
Yee’s political career had always been in San Francisco and he held elected office for 26 years. His first elected position came in the late 1980s on the San Francisco Board of Education, where he served as president during the second of his two terms. He was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1996. He was first elected to the Sate Senate representing San Francisco in 2006 where he was subsequently elected to a second term. At the time of his arrest, he was a member of the State Senate and running for Secretary of State. He had previously ran for Mayor of San Francisco in 2011.
Along with bribery and money laundering, Yee and Jackson’s racketeering conspiracy involved weapons trafficking. The weapons trafficking charge is particularly notable because Yee had previously advocated for gun control.
An ongoing and wide-ranging federal corruption investigation began in early 2020 with the arrest of the then head of the San Francisco Public Works Department Mohammed Nuru. Nuru had held the position since 2011. About two years after his arrest, Nuru pleaded guilty to bribery charges and was later sentenced to seven years in federal prison. In the words of a US Attorney, Nuru, “…shook down contractors eager for City business, trading his authority and influence for millions of dollars in cash, construction work, travel, meals, and gifts.” Nuru presided over an extensive web of corruption involving bribery, kickbacks and fraud that went on for over a decade. Nuru was also the chairman of the regionally powerful Transbay Joint Powers Authority.
Among other convictions stemming from this continuing investigation, on July 17, 2023 a jury convicted the former general manager of San Francisco’s Public Utilities Commission Harlan Kelly, Jr. of bribery and bank fraud. At the time of this writing, he has yet to be sentenced.
In late 2020 a former member of San Francisco’s Immigrant Rights Commission named Florence Kong pleaded guilty to bribery and making false statements to law enforcement. In early 2021 Kong was sentenced to one year and a day in prison and ordered to pay $95K.
A woman named Sandra Zuniga was the director of the San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services as well as the director of the city’s Fix-It Team. In 2021 she pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering with her then boyfriend Mohammed Nuru. In late 2023 she was sentenced to three years of probation.
A company named ReCology has had an exclusive contract to collect San Francisco’s refuse for decades. The company has admitted to long-running bribery schemes involving Nuru and agreed to pay $36M in criminal penalties as well as $100M restitution to their customers.
Other convictions arising from the Nuru investigation include a former bureau manager of the San Francisco Public Works Department, building inspectors and the former president of San Francisco’s Building Inspection Commission.
Even Mayor London Breed is implicated in all of this. Besides the fact that she has routinely worked with most of these convicted individuals over the years, Mayor Breed dated Nuru before she held public office. Additionally, in mid-2021 the Ethics Commission ordered Breed to pay $22,792 for violating campaign finance laws as a result of gifts received by Breed from Nuru while she was mayor. The Mayor might be the next arrest.
~ ~ ~
What is going on with these so-called ‘Community Ambassadors’ in San Francisco? Have you heard of this? The city sponsors this program where little government minions are outfitted in luminescent vests and go out harassing citizens as they see fit. They ostensibly are there to be some sort of neighborhood ombudsmen providing people with assistance in matters ranging from safety escorts to reporting hazards to promoting cultural diversity and preventing implicit bias. If you read their official description online, you might think that these Community Ambassadors are here to solve all of the world’s problems, but the only experience I have ever had with one of these Community Ambassadors was far from uplifting.
It was 2017. I was driving the cab and had just picked up a couple at Fisherman’s Wharf. They wanted to go to Union Square with a stop at the bottom of the crooked block of Lombard, which is on the way. Going from Fisherman’s Wharf to Union Square and visa-versa is the most common type of fare in the San Francisco taxicab business.
As we pulled over and came to a stop near the bottom of the crooked block, something I had done at least 100 times before with no problems, I soon noticed that a man was approaching the cab from the sidewalk on my right. As my passengers exited the car to briefly take a few photos, the man angrily knocked on my front passenger side window. I pressed the button and the window came down. The man immediately started berating me about how I was blocking his driveway. Apparently I was blocking his driveway, but he was not actively going in or out of his garage at the time. He just wanted to complain. Understanding this, I figured that I would simply deal with this guy as I waited for my passengers to return. There was nowhere else to park. For my protection I pulled out my phone and started filming.
As I was arguing with this man on my right (he was quite animated), one of these Community Ambassadors came walking across the street from behind me on my left. As soon as this Community Ambassador got close enough, he stuck his hand inside my open driver’s side window and attempted to grab my phone right out of my hand! He succeeded in only knocking the phone to the floor and I immediately picked it up. As I went about making sure that the phone was videotaping, this Community Ambassador tried to grab my phone out of my hand AGAIN! Once more he only knocked the phone out of my hand and it fell to the floor of the car’s interior and once again I picked it up. That’s two counts of attempted robbery by this government minion in a luminescent vest. All the while the other guy on my right is shouting at me and even opening my front passenger door! I was being tag-teamed by a crazy person and one of these Community Ambassadors!
I somehow managed to get the guy on my right to close my front passenger door, which I quickly locked. In the meantime our Community Ambassador had used his two-way radio to call for help and had made his way over to the front of my vehicle. This Community Ambassador informed me that he was going to keep me here until a meter maid arrived to give me a ticket for blocking this guy’s driveway. I, of course, was having none of it.
My passengers returned to the cab and took a seat in the rear. I attempted to pull away, but this Community Ambassador was standing in front of the cab, blocking my path. I was honking the horn and yelling at him to get out of the way, but he continued to stand there. I somehow was able to push him gently with the car until he finally moved out of the way enough to allow me to pull into the street and drive off. We continued on to Union Square. Both my passengers and I were gobsmacked at the behavior of this Community Ambassador.
Later that day I found a contact email address for this Community Ambassador program and wrote to them about what had happened. They got back to me and I had a phone conversation with a person that was apparently administering to the program. This person told me that they would address the issue with the offending Community Ambassador. I have no way of knowing if anything was ever actually done about it.
I could have filed criminal charges against this Community Ambassador. The entire incident was videotaped by my phone as well as by a dash-cam mounted in the cab. I had video evidence of him attempting to steal my phone twice. But I decided to not pursue it. It simply wasn’t big enough of a deal to me to go through the whole criminal justice process. I’ll save that for when I really need it. But this incident makes for a good story and illustrates the fact that this Community Ambassador program is not always what it appears to be. Again, this was my only interaction that I have ever had with any San Francisco Community Ambassador and it was not a good one.
This Community Ambassador program is not something that needs to be or should be funded by government. These Community Ambassadors are paid by the government to do things that citizens in a prosperous society do naturally, without pay. That’s why our focus should be on creating a prosperous, highly functioning society. Then, and only then, will all the problems be solved. This Community Ambassador program is just more of the government usurping the role of the citizen.
It is not safe for Community Ambassadors to be reporting crime and then continue being on the street. It’s not safe to even talk to some people on the street at all. Many of these Community Ambassadors are being put in very dangerous situations with little training or backup. In this way this program opens the city up to unnecessary legal liabilities. This is just more of government putting people in harm’s way and causing as much trauma to the population as possible because (although they claim the opposite) these Community Ambassadors probably serve to exacerbate dangerous situations more than deescalate them. There’s been at least one report of a Community Ambassador selling drugs.
There’s another similar program in San Francisco called Urban Alchemy. This one involves ex-felons who often clean up the streets and sidewalks. That is much appreciated, but this is a dangerous program because these Urban Alchemy guys (known as ‘Practitioners’) are also engaging the street people. They state on their website that they engage in public safety activities as well as providing interim housing and community outreach. Urban Alchemy guys are being put in danger on the streets and there’s too much potential here for Urban Alchemy guys (they look to be over 90% men) becoming the danger. Stuff like this is common in Third World and communist dictatorships. The city of San Francisco has created a legion of paid minions, many of them career criminals, that roam the streets acting as quasi-police. What could go wrong?
There’s already been some violence associated with Urban Alchemy. Last year an Urban Alchemy Practitioner was arrested and charged with attempted murder after allegedly shooting a man outside of the homeless shelter where he worked. In 2022 another Urban Alchemy Practitioner survived after being shot in the shoulder in broad daylight.
~ ~ ~
I’ve been completely engulfed in the tsunami as well. I started driving a taxicab in San Francisco in 1996 at 25 years old: the youngest age allowed at the time. In 1998, for $123, I put my name on the San Francisco taxicab medallion waiting list.
The taxicab medallion system was something that essentially allowed for profit-sharing among San Francisco’s more senior cab drivers. The way it worked was that a taxi driver put his name on the waiting list, then, when his name got to the top of the list (in usually about 20 years), he was offered a medallion. Our qualifying driver would pay a one-time, nominal fee of about $2K and he would receive his or her San Francisco taxicab medallion. (I’m leaving out some details here for the sake of simplicity.) Then our driver would take his or her medallion to their taxicab company of choice and sign an agreement that allowed said taxicab company to create one taxicab using our driver’s medallion and corresponding medallion number. Medallion numbers are the big, three or four digit numbers one sees in multiple locations on San Francisco taxicabs. Creating another taxicab in the company’s fleet means that there is another car out there on the road generating revenue even when the medallion holder is not driving it. Deals differ between cab companies, but in return for another car in their fleet, the taxicab company would commonly pay the medallion holder a little over $2K per month. For our driver, that was an extra $2K+ per month on top of what he or she makes actually driving the cab themselves. That’s how taxicab drivers could afford a middle-class existence. That’s how taxicab drivers could buy a house, put kids through college and go on vacation every once in a while. The medallion system was a good deal for cab drivers as well as for society at large and it exists to this day in some form or the other in most all major American cites. It was a good deal in San Francisco until the government kicked their taxicabs straight to the curb in favor of a global corporation.
Uber first began operating in San Francisco around 2010. This was the same year that the city of San Francisco began selling medallions rather than giving them away for a one-time, nominal fee. As of 2010, the price of getting a medallion went from about $2K to $250K. This meant that most drivers now had to qualify for a long-term loan and make an original down payment of at least $12K. In the face of gigantic, new competition that enjoyed little to no regulation, the heavily regulated San Francisco taxicab drivers were now facing decades of debt.
The City insisted that all of this was a great thing for taxicab drivers because now the rules had been changed so that a retiring medallion holder, after paying off his loan, could sell the medallion to the next buyer. Under the previous system, the medallion simply reverted to the city and the medallion waiting list. What they didn’t talk about too much is that when a medallion is sold in this way under the new system, after taxes and fees, a medallion seller actually only ends up getting about $160K. So after paying well over $250K for a medallion when factoring in decades of loan rates and fees to the regulators, a medallion seller then is to get only about $160K.
At first, most medallion buyers (and there were quite a few of them) netted about an extra $800 per month. This $800 was the difference between how much the taxicab companies were paying them each month for their medallion and how much they had to pay each month for their medallion loan. But as time went on, Uber quickly gobbled up large portions of the San Francisco taxicab business. This made medallions less and less valuable as Uber and Lyft drained vast amounts of money out of the San Francisco taxicab business. This caused the monthly amount paid by taxicab companies to medallion holders to go down and down. Medallion buyers were soon in a situation where they were paying more in monthly medallion loan payments then they were getting from the taxicab companies. In a few years, so much money had been sucked out of the San Francisco Taxicab industry that taxicab companies were paying nothing to medallion holders. The people who bought at $250K still had to make their loan payments (usually about $1,500 per month), but the asset they were paying for was worth nothing.
A taxicab driver who bought at $250K could not even sell their medallion on a pro-rated basis because nobody was buying medallions. Why would the next guy want to enter into a deal to pay $250K for a worthless asset? The market for San Francisco taxicab medallions was completely frozen with many holders facing financial ruin.
It was around this time that I was writing editorials about all of this and sending them to the San Francisco Examiner. The three I sent in were all published. As part of my investigations at the time, I contacted the person in charge of regulating the San Francisco taxicab business and she assured me that everything was fine because no medallion buyers had defaulted on their loans yet. Of course, a few months later, the medallion loan defaults began. Medallion holders who had bought at $250K simply stopped making their monthly loan payments. Their credit and their financial futures were now forever ruined. After all the assurances, San Francisco had just ruined their lives for them.
The city agency directly responsible for all of this is known as the San Francisco Metropolitan Transit Agency and ever since the S.H.T.F., the San Francisco Metropolitan Transit Agency has been blaming everybody except themselves.
And what about all of San Francisco’s rhetoric about helping people of color? News flash: most San Francisco taxicab drivers are not white. Most of the people who just had their lives ruined were people of color. And what did the city do about it? They did nothing. The city just let the situation sit there and fester for years as hundreds of people’s lives went straight down the tubes.
The institution that bore the brunt of all of this was the San Francisco Federal Credit Union. The San Francisco Federal Credit Union was the exclusive provider of taxicab medallion loans and when medallion holders started defaulting on their loans, the San Francisco Federal Credit Union was screwed to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. The San Francisco Federal Credit Union sued the city of San Francisco, but, in the immortal words of my former boss at Luxor Cab, suing the city is like suing God. Although they apparently still remain in business, the San Francisco Federal Credit Union lost the case and had to eat a gigantic bravo sierra sandwich.
I was offered the opportunity (if one can call it that) to buy a medallion. During all of this, my name reached the top of the medallion waiting list and I went about taking the necessary steps to get the final government approval, which I could then take to the San Francisco Federal Credit Union and apply for a loan. I had no real intention of buying a medallion because I knew it was a terrible deal. I simply wanted my approval for a medallion to be on the official record in case things improved and acquiring a medallion somehow became a good deal once again. That never happened, but I remember when I got the certificate necessary for applying for the loan. It was handed to me by a bureaucrat who congratulated me and encouraged me to run right over to the credit union and apply for the loan. I could not hide my bewilderment and promptly did nothing of the sort. I still hold my certificate to this day.
As far as I am concerned, the city is guilty of breaching my contract with them. The deal I signed up for in 1998 was to get a medallion for a one time, nominal fee. I paid $123 for that right. I still have the returned check. I was counting on that deal to secure my financial future. But between the time that I contracted with the city and the time that I was given the opportunity to acquire a medallion, the city had drastically changed the deal without my consent. If the city had acted appropriately, then people who signed on to the medallion waiting list before 2010 would have been given the original deal. Only drivers signing up for the medallion waiting list after the deal changed should have been subject to buying a medallion for $250K. But as we now know, the city of San Francisco does not act appropriately and taxicab drivers don’t have money to launch lawsuits against the city and because of all this, San Francisco ruined my financial future.
The San Francisco taxicab business is largely a mystery to me today. Although I did a 2001 comprehensive documentary on the subject titled San Francisco Taxicab, which is available on my Rumble channel The Abstract, I left the business in 2018. Since my departure, I understand that the city has been doing all kinds of weird things with medallions as they have finally made attempts to clean up the mess they made. I see taxicabs around town with medallion numbers preceded by different letters such as K or S, but I don’t know what those letters mean. I have lost interest in the subject.
I could make a convincing argument against Uber here, but that would be slightly beyond the scope of this article. There’s a video about that on my Rumble channel as well. The bottom line is that the city of San Francisco destroyed the San Francisco Taxicab business and my financial future along with it.
References
“San Francisco Appoints First Noncitizen to Serve on Elections Commission” an article by Azul Dahlstrom-Eckman, published by KQED, Feb. 15, 2023
“Doing Business in North America” a report by the Arizona State University Center for the Study of Economic Liberty, 2019
“Barriers to Business: How Cities Can Pave a Cheaper, Faster, and Simpler Path to Entrepreneurship” a report by the Institute for Justice, 2022
“Bid to Open S.F. Ice Cream Shop Turns into a Bitter Saga Because of Byzantine Small Business Rules” an article by Heather Knight, published by the San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 2, 2020
“Taking Care of Business: San Francisco’s Plan to Save its Small Businesses” a report by the City and County of San Francisco 2022-2023 Civil Grand Jury, 2023
“Former State Senator Leland Yee Pleads Guilty in Corruption Case” an article by Bob Egelko and Evan Sernoffsky, published by the San Francisco Chronicle, July 1, 2015
“Jury Convicts Former San Francisco Public Utilities Commission General Manager of Felony Bribery and Bank Fraud Charges” a press release by the United States Attorney’s Office, Northern District of California, July 17, 2023
“Former State Senator Leland Yee Sentenced to Five Years’ Imprisonment on Racketeering Conspiracy Charges” a press release by the United States Attorney’s Office, Norther District of California, Feb. 24, 2016
“Former San Francisco Public Works Director Sentenced to Seven Years in Federal Prison” a press release by the United States Attorney’s Office, Northern District of California, August 25, 2022
“Bribes, Bling and Trash: Breaking Down the Key Players in SF’s Corruption Scandal” an article by Noah Baustin, published by The San Francisco Standard, Feb. 1, 2023
“Public Contractor Sentenced to Prison for Bribing a San Francisco Public Official and Making False Statements to Federal Law Enforcement Agents” a press release by the United States Attorney’s Office, Northern District of California, Feb. 12, 2021
“Ex-San Francisco Official Gets Probation for Role in City Hall Corruption Scandal” an article by Michael Gennaro, published by Courthouse News Service, Dec. 14, 2023
“Ethics Commission Fines Mayor London Breed $22,792 for Violating Campaign Finance, Ethics, and Gift Laws” a press release by the San Francisco Ethics Commission, Aug. 13, 2021
“Transparency and Accountability” a post by London Breed, published on Medium.com, Feb. 14, 2020
“‘Community Ambassadors’ Selling Drugs Downtown” a post by r/sanfrancisco, published by Reddit.com, 2023
“Urban Alchemy Worker Charged with Attempted Murder After Alleged Shooting Near Work. He Was Fired Before Nonprofit Knew” an article by Mallory Moench, published by the San Francisco Chronicle, Mar. 28, 2023
“Tenderloin Residents Plead for Help After Nonprofit Worker Meant to Keep Streets Safe Shot in SF” an article by Luz Pena, published by ABC7 News, Mar. 23, 2022
Peter A. Kirby is a San Rafael, CA researcher, author, and activist. Please buy his book Chemtrails Exposed: A New Manhattan Project available now exclusively at Amazon. Also please follow his TruthSocial feed or join his email list at his website PeterAKirby.com.
Become a Patron!
Or support us at SubscribeStar
Donate cryptocurrency HERE
Subscribe to Activist Post for truth, peace, and freedom news. Follow us on SoMee, Telegram, HIVE, Minds, MeWe, Twitter – X, Gab, and What Really Happened.
Provide, Protect and Profit from what’s coming! Get a free issue of Counter Markets today.