San Francisco: Getting What They Wanted

Jan. 8: Mayor Breed swears in Chesa Boudin (Chron photo)

In November we commented on the election of Chesa Boudin to the District Attorney's office of San Francisco.

Mr. Boudin was a public defender and had never prosecuted a case. Clues to how he would run the DA's office lay in his upbringing by Weather Underground parents, adoption by Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, and his employment in Hugo Chavez' Venezuela.

Chesa Boudin has begun his term by firing prosecutors--which is his right, btw--as he starts to keep his "promise[s] to confront racial disparities in the criminal justice system, work to end mass incarceration, and hold police more accountable in cases of brutality."

Those fired include:

[Michael] Swart is a hard-charging homicide prosecutor known for his brash style in the courtroom. [Tom] Ostly was an attorney in the Crime Strategies Unit. He was in the middle of prosecuting a multimillion-dollar fencing bust announced last month by interim District Attorney Suzy Loftus.

Here's the nut: [bold added]

Boudin also promised to focus on violent crime, leaving many in the office questioning why he let go many of his most experienced felony attorneys.

Well, San Francisco voters elected him, and now they're going to get what he promised good and hard.

As for non-San Francisco visitors, never park your late-model vehicle there; it will be broken into with impunity, since there is zero chance of prosecution for property crimes. BTW, here is Mr. Boudin's solution to break-ins:

Boudin is proposing the city set up a private-public partnership to start a mobile auto-glass repair operation that would respond directly to the scene of burglaries and repair the broken windows on the spot for “a fraction of the cost” of window repair shops.

A Caracas in our Future?

Two juxtaposed stories in today's fishwrap illustrate why the City is circling the drain.

Violent beating of three seniors in San Francisco’s Chinatown sparks fear, outrage

The violent beating of three older men captured on video in San Francisco’s Chinatown over the weekend has sparked fear and outrage among some residents in the city’s Chinese-American community, who said they feel increasingly targeted following several high-profile attacks on the neighborhood’s most vulnerable residents....

Three victims, all men ages 63, 67 and 68, were left with varying injuries, police said. Two were treated at San Francisco General Hospital and later released. A third was checked out by paramedics and released at the scene...

No one has been arrested and no suspects have been identified in the attack.

And who is the official who will lead the fight against this recent wave of attacks against seniors?

How Chesa Boudin, a public defender who never prosecuted a case, won SF D.A. race

Boudin’s story is even more movie-worthy. His parents were left-wing radicals in the Weather Underground and served as getaway drivers in an October 1981 robbery that wound up killing three people. Boudin, 14 months old at the time of the incident, was adopted by Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, also Weather Underground radicals. He graduated from Yale and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes scholar.

Voters elected Mr. Boudin "despite never having prosecuted a case and having a controversial background that included an imprisoned father* and a stint working for Hugo Chávez, the late president of Venezuela who was criticized for trampling human rights."

*Not your run-of-the-mill imprisoned dad: "His parents were left-wing radicals in the Weather Underground and served as getaway drivers in an October 1981 robbery that wound up killing three people."

Hugo Chavez was the socialist who turned Venezuela, the wealthiest country in South America, into a hellhole where millions flee from starvation, disease, and crime. San Francisco currently has the highest per-capita income of all U.S. cities, and the progressives are in charge. Let's hope the parallel to Venezuela stops there, but the signs aren't hopeful.

Well, San Francisco voters keep electing progressives like Chesa Boudin, so there may yet be a Caracas (Wikipedia: "Caracas has one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world, with 111.19 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants") in our future.

Socialism's Fruits

National Socialism, 1944: [bold added[

The Dutch famine of 1944, known as the Hongerwinter ("Hunger winter") in Dutch, was a famine that took place in the German-occupied part of the Netherlands, especially in the densely populated western provinces above the great rivers, during the winter of 1944-1945, near the end of World War II. A German blockade cut off food and fuel shipments from farm areas to punish the Dutch for their reluctance to aid the Nazi war effort. Some 4.5 million were affected and survived because of soup kitchens. About 22,000 died because of the famine. Most vulnerable according to the death reports were elderly men.

Venezuelan Socialism, 2019:

(From Guardian video)

Venezuelan troops have barricaded a bridge on the country’s western border with Colombia in an apparent attempt to prevent the entry of humanitarian aid sent by opposition leaders trying to force Nicolás Maduro from power.

A starving population is a compliant population.

Venezuela: A Chance to Show What the Church Can Do

Venezuela's declining economic indicators (WSJ Graphic)

Following his election as President, Hugo Chávez was acclaimed by Hollywood, the press, and academia as he nationalized major sectors of the economy. Under Venezuelan socialism, aka the "Bolivarian revolution", he was able to raise the standard of living in the first decade of the 21st century (Wikipedia: "there were improvements in areas such as poverty, literacy, income equality, and quality of life occurring primarily between 2003 and 2007").

When oil prices fell, Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro clamped down further on what remained of private industry to maintain the level of government spending. Venezuela's downward spiral was predictable by non-partisan students of socialism, but the degree of the plunge has been horrendous.

Hordes of people, many with children in tow, rummage through garbage, an uncommon sight a year ago. People in the countryside pick farms clean at night, stealing everything from fruits hanging on trees to pumpkins on the ground, adding to the misery of farmers hurt by shortages of seed and fertilizer. Looters target food stores. Families padlock their refrigerators.

As cracks appeared in the Chávez edifice, opponents of socialism crowed vindication. However, in 2017 Venezuela's misery has reached the point where no one can derive satisfaction from ideological I-told-you-so's.

"Authorities have resisted offers of food and aid from abroad," so donations through the government are currently out of the question.

The Catholic Church is a possible avenue; the Episcopal Church is another. For decades organized Christianity has been struggling to show that it is relevant. Here's an opportunity to show what it can do.