The Byrds – Topic Nov 8, 2014 Provided to YouTube by Legacy/Columbia I Wanna Grow Up To Be A Politician · The Byrds The Byrds ℗ Originally Released 1971 Sony Music Entertainment Inc. Released on: 1990-12-12 Composer, Lyricist: R. McGuinn Composer, Lyricist: J. Levy Auto-generated by YouTube.
Lyrics
I want to grow up to be a politician And take over this beautiful land I want to grow up to be a politician And be the old U.S. of A.’s number one man
I’ll always be tough but I’ll never be scary I want to shoot guns or butter my bread I’ll work in the towns or conservate the prairies And you can believe the future’s ahead
I’ll give the young the right to vote as soon as they mature But spare the rod and spoil the child to help them feel secure And if I win election day I might give you a job I’ll sign a bill to help the poor to show I’m not a snob
I’ll open my door I’m charging no admission And you can be sure I’ll give you my hand I want to grow up to be a politician And take over this beautiful land
I’ll make you glad you got me in with everything I do And I’ll defend until the end the old red white and blue
I want to grow up to be a politician And take over this beautiful land And take over this beautiful land And take over this beautiful land
Yes, tenant unions are legal and protected under California state law, which prohibits landlord retaliation against tenants for organizing. In Berkeley, tenants have a legally enforceable right to form tenant unions and bargain with their landlords, particularly after the passage of Measure BB in November 2024. Landlords are required to participate in good-faith negotiations with tenant unions regarding issues like rent increases and building habitability.
State-Wide Tenant Organizing Rights
Protected Activity: Organizing or participating in a tenant union is a protected right under California law.
No Retaliation: Landlords cannot legally evict, harass, or penalize tenants for forming or joining a tenant association.
Tenant Unions in Berkeley
Measure BB: In 2024, Berkeley voters approved Measure BB, which established a legally enforceable right for tenants to form and participate in tenant unions.
Bargaining Power: Under Measure BB, tenant unions in Berkeley can negotiate with landlords on various issues, including rent increases and habitability, and can petition the city for rent reductions if landlords fail to bargain in good faith.
Building Size Requirements: The right to form a tenant association applies to buildings with ten or more units.
Forming a Union: To form a tenant association, at least 50% of the occupied units in a building must sign a petition.
Landlord Obligations in Berkeley
Good Faith Conferral:Opens in new tabLandlords are legally required to meet with tenant associations and confer in good faith to address tenant concerns.
Mandatory Meetings:Opens in new tabLandlords must attend at least one quarterly meeting with the tenant association and remain at the meeting for at least two hours.
Vacant gas station at 400 Divisadero St. in San Francisco on Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2025. Craig Lee/The Examiner
A long-stalled project to redevelop a vacant gas station bordering the Haight Ashbury and Hayes Valley neighborhoods has helped inspire the latest effort to reform San Francisco’s permitting process.
For years, The City’s housing boosters have held up the unsightly property at 400 Divisadero St. — a choice piece of real estate near the Panhandle and several public-transit lines — as a prime example of San Francisco’s inability to get homes built.
The project even became a flashpoint in last November’s District 5 supervisorial race when a political-advocacy group supporting challenger Bilal Mahmood paid for a billboard overlooking the gas station that read “That car wash should be affordable homes. Bilal Mahmood will fix it.”
Now, Mahmood — who defeated former Supervisor Dean Preston in that election — has introduced legislation that he says will help fix bureaucratic road blocks holding back 400 Divisadero and many other projects in The City that have been mired in lengthy delays due to a lack of financing.
With high construction and borrowing costs putting a serious squeeze on San Francisco developers, projects have slowed to a snail’s pace in recent years. In response, Mahmood said, his office has been meeting with builders to try to answer a burning question.
“How do we actually eliminate the red tape that is kicking these projects while they’re down and ensuring that we continue to make more momentum?” he said.
What Mahmood has hit upon is a proposal announced earlier this month that he said attempts to reform permitting requirements that only compound delays, contributing to what he terms a “housing death spiral.”
As things stand now, The City requires builders to use construction plans that adhere to the current building code, which sets standards for buildings’ plumbing, electrical utilities, physical structures and more.
But given that San Francisco updates its building code every three years, that requirement can mean that as code changes pour in, stalled projects — some of them held up for years on end — might need to make costly revisions to their original proposals.
Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, pictured speaking in support of Mayor Daniel Lurie’s “family zoning plan” from in front of City Hall on Sept. 11, 2025, has introduced legislation that he says will help fix bureaucratic road blocks holding back housing construction in The City that has been mired in lengthy delays due to a lack of financing.Craig Lee/The Examiner
Mayor Daniel Lurie and Supervisor Bilal Mahmood announced the new process just months after an ongoing plan in the Tenderloin was shorted $4 million in the city budget
Preservationists warn that if city leaders succeed in their plans to spur new housing growth, many historic buildings could soon face demolition
Mahmood’s legislation would allow projects to move forward in accordance with the building code that was in place at the time of their original applications. The change would bring San Francisco in line with standards set by the state, Mahmood said.
A separate measure in the legislative package — which is expected to go before the Board of Supervisors in October — would also loosen rules that currently require projects that have already won permits but have not yet finished construction to reapply each year.
“That will save the project time and also save staff time inside City Hall as well,” Mahmood said.
A little more than 71,000 homes are working their way through San Francisco’s housing pipeline, according to a data portal maintained by the Planning Department. Of those, more than 80% (57,000) have earned initial approvals but have not yet made it through The City’s full process of design and review for construction plans.
In its current form, the redevelopment plan for 400 Divisadero calls for the construction of an eight-story apartment building that would include 203 new units of housing. While the project has been in the works for about 10 years, a combination of financial setbacks and political wrangling over the plan have prevented it from moving past the early stages of development.
Amir Massih, who leads 4Terra Investments, the development company behind the project, said that if passed, Mahmood’s proposal would allow construction to proceed under a 2016 version of The City’s building code. In turn, he said, that would reduce the construction costs by as much as 7%, or about $5 million.
While 4Terra Investments is still working to complete pre-construction planning for the 400 Divisadero project, Massih said such a financial boost would significantly improve the chances that the proposed apartment complex would eventually get built.
“The closer you can get your project to the point where you’ve removed all of the brain damage that you’ve got to go through to get your project to be construction-ready, the better shot you have of being able to get financing and get investment,” Massih said.
Correction: This article has been updated to clarify the status of San Francisco’s building projects that have earned initial approvals but not yet begun construction.
EXCLUSIVE: Zohran Mamdani Talks to Mehdi About Death Threats, Trump, Netanyahu, Cuomo, and More by Mehdi Hasan
The Democratic mayoral candidate for New York tells Zeteo that Democrats “need to fight” this “authoritarian administration” and stop “celebrating” Israel’s prime minister.Video and Read on Substack
In what should surprise nobody who is paying attention to the reality of the local housing market, a new report by People Power Media shows that San Francisco has allowed far too much new housing that most residents can’t afford, and that new market-rate housing has been associated with gentrification and displacement.
The detailed report uses a new housing database that’s more accurate than what the City Planning Department uses, since it looks not just at what’s been permitted but what’s been constructed. PPM is a member of the Race and Equity in All Planning Coalition.
The report shows that:
● The City built only about half of what was needed for affordable housing and double what was required for unaffordable, market rate housing, based on analysis of both publicly reported data and data from our New Housing Dataset.
● The City over-reported its numbers for affordable housing, and is inconsistent about the numbers they report regarding fulfilling housing production goals. Median income households in nearly all People of Color Neighborhoods in San Francisco pay more than they can afford for Rent. The opposite is true in all of the Predominantly White Neighborhoods, where new market rate housing is in line with median household incomes.
● Essential workers and minimum wage workers who work in San Francisco cannot sustainably afford to live in the new housing that developers are building in the City where they work.
● The neighborhoods with the worst cost gaps are the Tenderloin, Chinatown, North Beach, Nob Hill, South of Market, and the Western Addition.
This chart shows the neighborhoods with the deepest gap between median income and new housing prices
The report also states that between 2015 and 2022, developers put up market-rate housing all over the city, not just on the East Side; that most of that housing is not affordable to working-class people—and that new market-rate housing is associated with the displacement of existing vulnerable communities:
● New developments increase the prices for both market rate housing (based on comparables) and affordable housing (due to increasing Area Median Income).
The report concludes that
Rather than using zoning and regulatory mechanisms solely to encourage market rate development, the public sector as the sector that is accountable to the long term needs of its constituents, must prioritize resources and programs for building and preserving permanently affordable housing at a scale sufficient to meet the needs unmet by market rate developers.
The researchers discovered that some of the data the city has submitted to state regulators is flawed or incomplete:
Since some entitled or permitted projects or buildings are never completed, or they completed construction after the end of 2022, the City’s reported numbers do not actually reflect what was built during the period of this study. Our Comprehensive Data in this report focuses on what was actually, physically built during these eight years.
The city artificially inflated the number of affordable units built, in part by including Accessory Dwelling Units that actually rent at market rate.
Using neighborhood-level income data, the reports looks at the areas in the city where the gap between median income and the cost of housing is the highest. It demonstrates that in neighborhoods that have high populations of people of color, the gap is enormous—and the new housing that has been built has done little or nothing to help.
In fact, the report states, the new luxury housing can make the situation worse:
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How the Sales Comparison Approach plays out is that if an existing older apartment building is going up for sale, and it is adjacent to a new market rate building, the sales price of the older building would be compared to that of the expensive new market rate building and other buildings around it. The higher the value of the buildings that surround that property, the higher the comparables. Thus, with property values assessed in this way, it creates a dynamic in which introducing a market rate building with several new units marketed at higher prices causes the prices of surrounding buildings in that neighborhood to increase whether they are old or new. The surrounding buildings’ values all increase when the new building comes online. The higher prices in the new, market rate building– the increasing rents and home prices, the influx of wealthy people, and the displacement of people who cannot afford the rising housing costs– are all contributors to the dynamics of gentrification.
Rents for affordable housing in San Francisco are set by a household’s income, as measured compared to the Area Median Income. If the AMI rises because more rich people move into luxury housing in the city, that raises the price of even subsidized housing:
As wealthy people move into San Francisco, as well as the surrounding areas, AMI levels increase for the whole region. Real incomes below the median don’t increase, but incomes above the median do increase. The increase in people with high incomes pulls the median income up. HUD uses AMI levels when calculating rental or sales prices of affordable housing.
That’s consistent with what the National Bureau of Economic Research found recently: The price of housing in urban areas has less to do with the supply than with the number of rich people moving into the area.
The study concludes that simply removing obstacles to luxury housing, which is the main strategy that the city and the state are taking right now, won’t solve the affordability problem.
Again, that’s consistent with the data. If San Francisco wants to take displacement, affordability, homelessness, and the housing crisis seriously, it needs to rely much more on public-sector solutions, and not on the private market.
From a People Power Media press release:
“This new report affirms what our advocacy has always said: San Francisco’s housing crisis is not about a lack of housing—it’s about a lack of affordable housing. The market is producing housing as a commodity, not as a basic human need. That’s why it’s failing to serve the people who live and work here,” said Jeantelle Laberinto, community organizer at People Power Media.
“The policies in our current housing cycle are set to repeat the outcomes of the last: all of the power is being handed over to the market – and this is what the market does. It prioritizes profit over people and fails to provide housing for San Franciscans. As long as developers and investors drive our housing production, we will continue to see housing that excludes communities of color, low-income residents, and essential workers,” saidDyan Ruiz, co-founder of People Power Media.
Mayor Daniel Lurie’s new zoning plan relies almost entirely on private-market deregulation. This detailed, meticulously researched study suggests that approach is doomed to fail—with some terrible consequences for existing vulnerable communities.
48 Hills welcomes comments in the form of letters to the editor, which you can submit here. We also invite you to join the conversation on our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Tim Redmond has been a political and investigative reporter in San Francisco for more than 30 years. He spent much of that time as executive editor of the Bay Guardian. He is the founder of 48hills.
Assemblymember Jasmeet Bains took PAC money from 53 corporations that also donated to the incumbent Republican she’s running against. She said a progressive challenger pointing that out is a form of violence.
Assemblymember Jasmeet Bain (D-Bakersfield) works at her desk at the Capitol in Sacramento, California, September 12, 2023.
A Democratic congressional challenger in a key swing House district in California likened an ad from her primary opponent about her corporate donors to “political violence,” in an early sign of the potential fallout of Charlie Kirk’s murder on campaign rhetoric.
Dr. Jasmeet Bains, a state assemblymember who is running in California’s 22nd Congressional District, made the comment in a Facebook post after a fellow Democrat running for the seat, a college teacher and auto repair shop owner named Randy Villegas, released an ad criticizing her corporate contributors. Both Democrats are challenging Rep. David Valadao (R-CA) in a Central Valley seat that will be very competitive, whether California voters pass new congressional maps or not.
“My opponents, Democrat and Republican alike, have taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from the same corporations that are ripping us off, making our health care, housing, and groceries more expensive,” Villegas says in the ad. Bains is not mentioned by name, but her image appears.
Campaign finance disclosures compiled by the Working Families Party, a supporter of Villegas, which the Prospect verified, show that both Bains and Valadao have indeed received direct contributions or corporate PAC donations from the same 53 corporations, including AbbVie, Amazon, Anheuser-Busch, AT&T, Bayer, BNSF Railway, Charter Communications, Chevron, Comcast, Eli Lilly, Exxon Mobil, Google, Honeywell, Johnson & Johnson, KPMG, McDonald’s, Merck, Paramount, Pfizer, Phillips 66, Sempra Energy, Southern California Edison, Union Pacific, UnitedHealth Group, Walmart, and Waste Management.
These companies donated at least $258,600 to Bains throughout her State Assembly career, while donating over $1 million to Valadao in his congressional campaigns. Bains, who entered the CA-22 race in July, has not disclosed her federal donations yet because the quarter is not over.
Hours after Villegas released the ad on September 18, Bains posted a message to Facebook that began: “As political violence increases in America, I myself have experienced a heightened level of it.” Bains then alleges that she, a woman of color, is being attacked because of her identity. (Villegas, incidentally, is Mexican American.) “What gave a man the permission to resort to spreading lies just because his campaign is going nowhere,” Bains wrote, using the word “lie” four times without articulating what the lie was. She was only referred to in the ad in the context of her political donations, which are public and documented.
Bains followed this up with two otherFacebook posts expressing anger over being called out with what she claims are “lies,” while highlighting her own work providing health care and claiming that any attack on her is “an attack on all healthcare providers.” In one post, she writes, “Throwing punches at me makes you look ridiculously phony especially when you have nothing in your resume that could match up to half of what I’ve done.”
As a Sikh woman, Bains has experienced online attacks on her race and religion in the past, but the flurry of Facebook posts came directly after the ad and referenced her primary opponent. The campaign did not respond to a direct question about whether she was associating criticism of her campaign donors with political violence, in the wake of Donald Trump’s attempts to cancel journalists and late-night talk show hosts who criticize him.
A Bains campaign spokesperson responded to a series of questions from the Prospect with this statement: “Dr. Bains has a strong voting record focused on solving California’s cost of living crisis and increasing access to health care. That is why she is the only Democrat in the race that can flip this seat blue, and the polling and support from her community proves it … the Valley needs fewer candidates that talk and more candidates that win.”
THE 22ND DISTRICT COVERS LOTS OF FARM COUNTRY and several oil and gas sites in the center of California. It is over three-quarters Hispanic, and the median age is barely over 30. CA-22 has a poverty rate of almost 23 percent, more than twice the national average, and one of the largest populations on Medicaid of any congressional district in the nation.
Despite this favorable demographic set for Democrats, Valadao has been representing the area since 2012, save for one two-year term in 2019-2020. He won back the district in 2020 despite Joe Biden defeating Donald Trump there by 13 points. Now, Valadao’s vote for the GOP mega-bill that cuts Medicaid by nearly $1 trillion, after initially saying that Medicaid cuts were a red line, has threatened his re-election hopes.
Valadao’s opponents have largely resembled the kind of frontline challenger the Democratic Party is comfortable with: centrist and corporate-backed. This hasn’t exactly touched off a flood of engagement in politics: The district is marked by catastrophically low turnout, barely scratching past 100,000 votes in the last midterm election in 2022, with 113,000 in 2018 and only 79,000 in 2014.
Villegas got into the race in April promising a different approach. “I’m running because I’m fed up with the status quo of politics we’ve seen,” said the son of Mexican immigrants who worked at swap meets and the family auto repair shop growing up. Like Bains, he also has an advanced degree—his Ph.D. led him to become a political science professor at the College of the Sequoias, a community college in Visalia, while also running the auto shop.
Progressive Democrat Randy Villegas, challenging in CA-22, released an ad criticizing his opponents’ corporate campaign funding.
In the second quarter of 2025, Villegas raised a healthy $250,000 from over 4,000 individual donations. He rejects the idea that frontline candidates must move to the right on a host of issues to win in purple districts, instead foregrounding an economic populist message. “This is not a fight about left vs. right, this is about bottom vs. top,” he said, connecting the Democrats’ loss of working-class voters with the way in which money has overwhelmed politics and how elected officials have been bought off. “If you look on paper, this should have been a Democratic seat a while ago, but nobody’s giving them a reason to vote for them.”
In an interview, Villegas repeatedly highlighted rejecting corporate PAC money, taking on monopolized sectors like the agriculture industry in his district, and standing with workers and residents over special interests. He aligns with the spurt of working-class candidates running in difficult races this year; his campaign video was made by the same group behind Graham Platner, the Senate candidate in Maine, and Dan Osborn, the independent Senate candidate in Nebraska. The Working Families Party has described Villegas as a top priority for 2026.
“Tell me who you’re with and I’ll tell you who you are,” Villegas said, referring to a slogan that his mother often said. “Tell me who you’re taking money from, and I’ll tell you who you support.”
When he got in, Villegas didn’t know he would be thrown into a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party. But the entry of Bains, a physician, has created that dynamic.
BAINS WAS SEEN AS A BIG RECRUITMENT WIN for the Democratic establishment when she announced in July. She quickly received a number of endorsements from three statewide officers, eight members of the California House delegation, and two labor unions (SEIU California and the electrical workers’ local in the region) upon entering the race.
This is despite, or maybe because of, Bains being among the most conservative Democrats in the legislature during her two terms in the State Assembly. Most notably, she was the only Democrat to vote against an oil price-gouging law in 2023, losing her committee assignments as a result. “The bill was to address price-gouging of consumers,” Villegas said. “It shows disrespect for working-class people who are struggling.”
It was not the onlypro–oil and gas vote Bains has taken. Several oil companies drill in the Kern County section of Bains’s district. She received a maximum donation from the Western States Petroleum Association PAC shortly after the price-gouging vote, and accepted $54,000 from oil and gas interests in 2024.
The corporate coziness doesn’t stop with Big Oil, even on issues of affordability that will likely dominate the campaign. Bains voted against a bill to limit corporate landlords from owning more than 1,000 single-family properties. She voted against stronger tenant protections. She voted against giving the state attorney general authority to block private equity purchases of medical providers. She voted against disclosure of pesticides on pretreated seeds sold in California. She voted against requiring employers to create a workplace violence plan. And separately, she recently voted against ACA 8, the bill that put Prop 50 on the ballot to rewrite congressional maps in reaction to the attempted Republican gerrymander in Texas and elsewhere. (The new CA-22 map would be slightly more friendly to a Democrat but still quite competitive.)
Rep. David Valadao (R-CA) speaks with a reporter as he walks to a vote at the U.S. Capitol, September 18, 2025.
In addition, Bains chose not to vote at least 40 times, which in the California legislature is partially akin to a no vote. These skipped votes include a recently signed law barring ICE agents from wearing masks, a law requiring notification for pesticide use near school locations, and a law banning a type of cancer-causing chemical known as PFAS in consumer products (on this bill, she initially didn’t vote, but supported the bill on final passage). Villegas took particular umbrage at the lack of support for the ICE masking bill, considering that he has family members who are undocumented.
Money, like the 53 corporate PAC donations to Bains that mirror contributions to Valadao, sits behind these votes, Villegas argues. “Politicians like my opponents are bought and paid for,” he said.
Though the expectation is that the establishment has lined up for Bains, Villegas claims the situation is different on the ground. He touts the support of the three county central committee chairs in the district (Kings, Tulare, and Kern), and if Prop 50 passes and the district extends to Fresno County, he would have that party chair’s support as well. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) has endorsed Villegas as well.
“We’re going to move working-class voters,” Villegas said. “We’re going to get young people to vote when they’re so disillusioned. It’s OK to have disagreements within the party. It’s OK to have different policy priorities. But we have to decide, are we going to be party of the working class or the party of billionaires?”
David Dayen is the Prospect’s executive editor. His work has appeared in The Intercept, The New Republic, HuffPost, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and more. His most recent book is ‘Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power.’
Finnish President Alexander Stubb addresses the United Nations General Assembly in New York City on September 24, 2025.
(Photo by United Nations/screen grab)
“The composition of the UN still largely reflects the world of 1945,” said Alexander Stubb. “As the world has changed drastically, so should the decision-making at the UN.”
Finnish President Alexander Stubb on Wednesday renewed his call for expanding the number of permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, abolishing veto power, and stripping voting rights from states that violate the UN Charter.
“Today, the UN is struggling to fulfill its central promise of delivering peace and stability,” Stubb said during his UN General Assembly address. “Countries have increasingly taken the liberty to break the rules of international law, and to use force to gain other peoples’ territories, and suppress other nations.”
Noting Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, Israel’s obliteration of Gaza, and wars in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Subb asserted: “War is always a failure of humanity. It is a collective failure of our fundamental values.”
“Last year in this very hall, I argued for a reformed Security Council,” he said. “A council where currently underrepresented regions would have a stronger voice through permanent seats at the table.”
“The number of permanent members should be increased at the Security Council,” Subb proposed. “At least, there should be two new seats for Asia, two for Africa and one for Latin America. No single state should have veto power. And, if a member of the Security Council violates the UN Charter, its voting rights should be suspended.”
Under Stubb’s proposal, all five permanent Security Council members would likely lose voting rights: the United States bombs countries and alleged drug traffickers in violation of international law while backing Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Russia is invading and occupying Ukraine, Britain and France back Israel’s genocidal war, and China persecutes people within its own borders.
“Finland strongly supports the UN and wants it to succeed,” Stubb said. “Therefore, we stress the need for true reform to enhance the organization’s credibility, relevance, and efficiency. This will ensure that the UN can act.”
“The UN needs to focus its efforts on its most important goals: ending and preventing wars, protecting human rights, and acting as a catalyst for sustainable development,” he added.
Last week, Finland voted in favor of a UN General Assembly resolution condemning Israel’s occupation of Palestine, which the International Court of Justice last year ruled is an illegal form of apartheid that must end as soon as possible. The vote on last week’s resolution was 124 in favor, 14 against, and 43 abstentions. The ICJ is also weighing a genocide case against Israel filed in December 2023 by South Africa.
“The occupation that began in 1967 must end, and all permanent status issues must be resolved,” Stubb said during his Wednesday speech.
Stubb then turned to the current situation in Gaza, where Israel’s US-backed 720-day genocidal assault and forced starvation has left more than 241,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing and millions more starved, sickened, and forcibly displaced as Israeli forces push to conquer, occupy, and ethnically cleanse the coastal strip.
“Civilians in Gaza are experiencing immense suffering,” he noted. “The deepening humanitarian crisis has reached unbearable levels and represents a failure of the international system. At the same time, Hamas continues to hold the hostages it has taken and many have already lost their lives.”
“An immediate ceasefire is needed in Gaza,” Stubb added. “Humanitarian aid must be granted safe and unhindered access. The hostages must be released.”
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Protesters hold signs that say “No deportations” and “Protect our neighbors, keep families together” at an interfaith prayer vigil in front of 630 Sansome immigration court. Photo by Mariana Garcia
In weeks of attending asylum hearings at San Francisco’s immigration court, Mission Local reporters have seen dozens of people arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement without ever getting a lawyer’s help.
Then there are those who may encounter ICE agents on the street, and don’t know their rights. Or family members whose relatives are arrested and sent to detention centers, but who don’t know how to look them up.
We put together this resource guide for asylum seekers, people with Temporary Protected Status, and anyone in need of immigration counsel to answer the questions: How can you prepare if you or a loved one are detained by ICE? And what comes after?
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We consulted with attorneys to create this, but this is not legal advice and you should always speak to a lawyer.
If you encounter ICE
Know your rights
Catherine Seitz, legal director at the Immigration Institute of the Bay Area, said that, first and foremost, “People should make sure that they are informed about their basic rights.”
You can access free, online know your rights presentations along with written materials from the American Civil Liberties Union to help navigate different scenarios. In particular, says Seitz, you have a right to keep your door closed if ICE shows up at your home or work.
To enter, ICE needs a judicial warrant, which must be signed by a judge and issued by a court, not an administrative warrant which is signed by an ICE agent. Here is an example of the difference between the two:
This is what a judicial warrant looks like. It must be issued by a court and signed by a judge. It must also show your correct name and address. Courtesy of ACLU Northern California.
This is what an administrative warrant looks like. It is issued by the Department of Homeland Security. It must be signed by an immigration officer to be valid. Courtesy of ACLU Norther California.
In any encounter with ICE, says Jazmin Preciado, an attorney with Centro Legal de la Raza in Oakland, you have the right to remain silent. Any information you share with ICE agents can be used against you in court.
If you are arrested, Preciado advises talking as little as possible, and refusing to sign any documents until you have legal representation. “Zip it and wait until you’re in front of a lawyer. It doesn’t matter how much they probe.”
Make a plan
The Immigrant Legal Resource Center has developed a template for creating an emergency preparedness plan. Talk to trusted loved ones to develop a plan of action for what you will do in the case that you or someone you know is detained.
For parents with children, Seitz says this means making sure you’ve “talked with someone about who they want to take care of the kids.”
Make sure that trusted contacts have access to critical items like A-Numbers, car keys, and house keys before you attend asylum hearings and other ICE check-ins.
Asylum seekers have left their cars parked on the street while attending immigration court and then been detained with no way for a friend or relative to move the car. Others have gone in without giving their house keys to anyone.
If you do have to go to court, Faith in Action provides court watchers in San Francisco who will accompany you. You can reach their community response hotline at 206-666-4472.
If you are not represented by an attorney, there are sometimes volunteers at immigration court known as Attorneys of the Day, who are certified by the Bar Association San Francisco.
Call for assistance
If you witness a deportation, Seitz says that “the best first step is to call a rapid response hotline and let them know that the person has been detained so that a rapid response attorney can go down to the detention center and try to meet with the detained person as soon as possible.”
An attorney might ask you for the detained person’s A-number, date of birth or country of origin.
The San Francisco rapid response hotline can be reached at 415-200-1548. This is a 24/7 hotline that can be used to report ICE sightings at home, at work or in public spaces.
If you are detained, Seitz recommends calling a person who can communicate with rapid response on your behalf, instead of calling the hotline directly.
“Make sure you have at least one phone number memorized, so that you can call somebody and let them know that you’ve been detained.” Seitz adds, “have that person call the rapid response because [a] detained person is going to have very limited access to the phone.”
More resources forfree and low-cost legal aid in San Francisco are available on this list maintained by the Office of Civic Engagement & Immigrant Affairs.
If you know someone who has been detained
If you know someone who has been detained and is being held by ICE, this Online Detainee Locator System helps you to keep track of a loved one’s whereabouts. If you have their nine-digit A-Number and country of birth, you can find out whether they are in ICE custody and what detention center they are being held at.
If you do not know the person’s A-Number, you can also search with their first and last name, country of birth and birthday. According to the website, family members and attorneys “may be able to obtain additional information about this individual’s case” by calling the Enforcement and Removal Operations office.
The two closest such offices to San Francisco are Mesa Verde in Bakersfield (661-328-4500) and the Golden State Annex (661-792-2731).
Help us cover ICE in San Francisco
Mission Local has been covering immigration enforcement in San Francisco day in and day out — on the streets and in the courts.
As the Trump administration invests $170 billion in ICE, we want to make an investment of our own: $300,000 — $100,000 a year for Trump’s remaining three years — to hire a full-time immigration reporter.
Mariana Garcia is a reporting intern covering immigration and graduate of UC Berkeley. Previously, she interned at The Sacramento Bee as a visual journalist, and before that, as a video producer for the Los Angeles Dodgers. When she’s not writing or holding a camera, she enjoys long runs around San Francisco.More by Mariana Garcia
Organized Money Sep 23, 2025 Organized Money Podcast This week is an All-Star lineup of behind the scenes interviews from the American Economic Liberty Project’s 2025 Anti-Monopoly Summit. Sen. Chris Murphy (D–CT), candidate for Colorado Attorney General David Seligman, Lina Khan, Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT), and CEO of Cost Plus Drugs Alex Oshmyansky join to give voice to the movement. There’s no video for the interview portions, so just relax and enjoy the audio, or get some miles on the treadmill. Transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14… Organized Money Socials: https://x.com/OrgMoneyPod
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) speak to the media following a Senate policy luncheon at the U.S. Capitol on September 16, 2025 in Washington, DC. Congress is edging toward a shutdown as Republicans push a short-term “clean” funding patch opposed by Democrats demanding health care provisions, while Thune and Schumer spar over who is to blame. Photo by Kent Nishimura/Getty Images
They’re funded by real estate and Silicon Valley and—in a total inversion of reality—keep taking credit for Mamdani’s primary win.
BY ADAM JOHNSON SEPTEMBER 24, 2025 (Therealnews.com)
It’s clear that the Democratic Party, and the Liberal-Left more broadly, is in total disarray. As the Trump administration continues to erode liberal norms, worker protections, due process, free speech, and civil liberties, there’s a broad consensus that the most impactful way to push back against Trump’s unprecedented power grab is at the ballot box in 2026 and 2028. The stakes for these elections couldn’t be higher, and thus the approach Democrats take to do so couldn’t be any more salient. Attempting to get ahead of this narrative, and steer the party away from anything with even the vaguest whiff stench of Left populism, are a recent constellation of think tanks, PACs, and “movements” designed to keep the fundamentally neoliberal, billionaire-approved Democratic Party fundamentally neoliberal and billionaire-approved.
But simply appealing to the status quo wouldn’t be credible after the Democratic Party has fallen to their lowest point in over 40 years (if not 100). So these factions are creating pseudo-worldviews and political frameworks that are meant to appear bold and forward-looking, but are ultimately just a rebranded defense of the party establishment. And we know this because, to the person, they are funded by the same billionaire donors that have shaped democratic politics for decades and are working in concert with party leaders looking to deflect blame for their own repeated failures.
There have been several centrist efforts hatching in the marshes of DC this year, but for the purposes of this essay we will focus on three high-profile ones that launched in 2025: the so-called Abundance Movement, Majority Democrats PAC, and the Searchlight Institute. They differ somewhat in approach and branding but all operate under the same false premise: that Vice President Kamala Harris lost to Trump last November not because the party had become too centrist, or too inauthentic, or spent decades alienating labor, or campaigned too much with Liz Cheney, or threw too many constituencies under the bus, or was backing a horrific, generation-defining genocide. Instead it was because Harris—and the party brand in general—had somehow gone too far to the Left. The evidence for this premise, as I will lay out, is wanting. But it’s become conventional wisdom in elite liberal circles, first and foremost, because it lets everyone in elite liberal circles off the hook.
Indeed, it’s an exceedingly convenient narrative for the billionaires backing these factions. Post-2024 loss, if I’m a Democratic consultant or “strategist” wanting to hoover up money to “rebuild the party” and polish my personal brand, I won’t find much funding by telling wealthy liberal donors that the problem with the party is that it sold out the working class and didn’t do nearly enough during the Biden years to win them back, or that it needs to embrace bold redistributive policies like Medicare for All or stronger labor unions, or that it needs to embrace Sanders-Mamdani-style politics of class conflict, less hawkish foreign policy, and unapologetically progressive stances on “social issues.” Obviously, this would not only prevent me from getting millions to start my own “institute” or “movement” and being featured in glossy puff pieces in the New York Times, it would actively upset these donors and effectively ice me out of funding networks.
Thus, the buyer’s market for supposedly new “thinkers” and “movements” that will repackage the existing power structure as edgy, bold, and new is hotter than ever. Enter: these three projects.
THE ABUNDANCE MOVEMENT – BROAD NETWORK/BUZZWORD
Unlike the other two factions on this list, the Abundance faction isn’t a specific group, but a deliberately vague, supposedly post-ideological worldview that, its supporters claim, can include everyone from socialists to the far right. In practice, however, the movement is textbook neoliberalism. Primary boosters of this “movement” include Silicon Valley and Wall Street-funded organizations like the Niskanen Center, Arnold Ventures, Open Philanthropy, Emergent Ventures, increasingly many elements within the Koch Brothers network, the overtly rightwing American Enterprise Institute, and a smattering of other billionaire-backed organizations and passthroughs. Henry Burke of the Revolving Door Institute recently published a detailed report laying out each blade in the sprawling carpet of astroturf.
Since its two primary thought leaders, the New York Times’ Ezra Klein and the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, published their book, Abundance in March 2025, the movement, such as it is, has received largely fawning, uncritical coverage in our media due in large part to the movement’s so-vague-as-to-be-unobjectionable premise. Their pitch goes something like this: The reason why liberalism is falling out of favor is because it “no longer builds” anymore. It’s a tempting solution and one that not only rejects class politics as a path out of the woods, but embraces its opposite: further enriching and empowering the wealthy through deregulation so they can “innovate” and “build” us back to prosperity. They will sometimes throw in “building state capacity” rhetoric as an appeal to left-leaning types to throw them off the neoliberal stench, but it’s—at best—an afterthought.
If this sounds like “the Good Things Plan”, a politics so generic and devoid of serious rigor that it can basically be anything to anyone, that’s because it is. This genericness, combined with its total lack of class politics and heavy emphasis on deregulation, is a major reason why it has sucked up so much billionaire money and elite media buy-in. Adding urgency to this dynamic, and a good explanation for the gobs of Silicon Valley cash backing it, is the rapidly increasing AI energy demands that the US can, by its backers’ own admission, only meet by massively “streamlining” safety, climate, and environmental review for new energy production, including that of new fossil fuel extraction. Which, once again, worked out well for those in power.
MAJORITY DEMOCRATS – PAC
A rebrand of previous centrist initiatives, Majority Democrats pins the blame for Democratic Party woes on “woke.” They vaguely gesture toward the Democrats shedding support in the working class, but largely chalk up this loss to “cultural” factors (see: changes that won’t offend billionaire donors) rather than the party takeover by corporate forces.
“These Younger Democrats Are Sick of Their Party’s Status Quo,” reads the obligatory New York Times launch puff piece, framing the astroturf effort as an organic youth movement. “Majority Democrats, a new group of elected officials from all levels of government, has outsized ambitions to challenge political orthodoxies and remake the party,” the New York Times informs its readers.
How exciting! What bold new subversive project is Majority Democrats doing to win over working class and younger voters? Ending US support for genocide in Gaza? Medicare for All?
Again, when one needs to repackage More Of The Same donor-friendly politics but make it seem new and fresh and subversive (most often in opposition to a fictitious Woke Establishment), there’s really only one place to go: become more bigoted.
Alas, the New York Times piece is light on specifics. There’s a lot of “trading best practices” and “debating and developing ideas,” but little moral or political vision on offer. (“Majority Democrats has yet to issue policy prescriptions,” The Times notes, as if it’s an afterthought.) The group is said, however, to be embracing the advice of “Seth London, an adviser to major Democratic donors,” which is a somewhat incomplete biography in that it omits that Seth London is a multimillionaire venture capitalist. But, we are told, he has access to donors, which is not seen as a conflict of interest that could, perhaps, undermine their nominal aim of “winning back working-class voters.” Instead, this access is presented as a mark of Seriousness.
In paragraph 19, the New York Times spells out what’s really going on:
“In some ways, the group’s structure resembles that of the Democratic Leadership Council, the once-influential group that successfully pushed the party to the middle in the Clinton era.
But while many of the officials involved in Majority Democrats similarly come from the center-left, organizers insist there is no ideological litmus test to join.”
Once again, they are aware of the branding problem of neoliberalism and its previous avatar, the Democratic Leadership Council. They want to gesture towards it to assure wealthy donors it’s a fundamentally centrist project, but throw in vague rhetoric about how they “don’t have an ideological litmus test” despite all its members being down-the-line pro-Israel centrists.
Again, when one needs to repackage More Of The Same donor-friendly politics but make it seem new and fresh and subversive (most often in opposition to a fictitious Woke Establishment), there’s really only one place to go: become more bigoted. There’s two general philosophies on how best Democrats can “win back working-class voters”: (1) what we can generally call the Bernie-Mamdani wing, becoming more aggressively Left, economically populist, and more anti-war (which the working class overwhelmingly is); or (2) turn up the racism, transphobia, and anti-immigrant dial from 5 to 8 without any Left economic populism. Which one of these paths is more likely to appeal to wealthy donors? The answer, and thus the rhetoric and diagnosis of Democratic failures from these factions, is obvious.
SEARCHLIGHT INSTITUTE – THINK TANK
What if Democrats’ brand is in the toilet not because wealthy donors, Silicon Valley, or Wall Street have outside influence on their policies and made them divorced from Labor, pro-“free trade,” and run by dead-eyed lawyers, but it was, instead, because far-Left activists were manipulating the party behind the curtain and forcing candidates into taking unpopular positions? This is the general theory being promoted by Sen. John Fetterman’s former Chief of Staff Adam Jentleson and his team of centrist operators, who last week launched the Searchlight Institute, a new “think tank” making a similar pitch to that of Majority Democrats PAC: that Democrats’ central problem is they have become too Woke. Specifically, Jentleson pins Harris’ loss on “the groups,” namely the ACLU, which asked Harris in 2019 if she supported healthcare for incarcerated trans people, which she did—a stance, it is now dogma in elite circles, that significantly contributed to her defeat by Trump, despite this claim having little to no empirical basis. But it vaguely feels true and, most essential of all, blames a fairly powerless constituency instead of the consulting class and their billionaire patrons.
This latest effort to rebrand neoliberalism, like Majority Democrats PAC, is clever enough to gesture towards populism, but does so in a superficial and class-flattening way. Indeed, the ever-cynical Jentleson keeps attempting to take ideological credit for the success of New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani, despite the fact that Jentleson never supported his candidacy and has been openly hostile and smug towards the pro-Palestine movement that made up the backbone of Mamdani’s early, evangelical volunteer core.
In the New York Times obligatory launch puff piece for Searchlight, published last week, they would, per usual, allow these centrist operators to advance the entirely unfounded idea that Mamdani’s primary win somehow proves their centrist theory of change works because something something “affordability.” (Abundance partisans use this gambit as well, because Mamdani said he is open to market-rate housing, despite the fact they oppose basically everything else in his platform. But victory, as they say, has a thousand fathers.)
Since Ms. Harris’s loss, many in the party have adopted a more economic-focused message while avoiding social issues. Some prominent Democrats, like Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, have backtracked on prior support for transgender rights and open immigration policy. The most prominent liberal candidate to capture the party’s imagination this year, Zohran Mamdani, decisively won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York with an intense focus on the affordability of housing, groceries and child care.
Reading this, one would think Mamdani, like Newsom, also “avoided social issues,” but he very much did not. In addition to being openly combative with ICE during the campaign, repeatedly pledging to defend trans New Yorkers, and promising to defend abortion, Mamdani put on fundraising events with Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia Gaza protest leader targeted by Trump. Indeed, Mamdani is exhibit A on how one marries robust Left economic populism and progressive “cultural” stances seamlessly, without needing to throw either under the bus. But the New York Times, without any basis, accepts Jentleson’s dishonest narrative and presents Mamdani as the opposite.
This is a popular sleight of hand, and one also advanced by influential centrist pollster David Shor: the conflation of “focusing on affordability” grounded in clear class-oriented left populist politics—in Mamdani’s case born out of the Democratic Socialist of America—and what Jentleson and Shor are doing when they say Democrats need to “focus on affordability,” which is mainly a rhetorical box-checking exercise untethered from broader class politics. Neither Jentleson nor Shor push for renewing labor, bringing union leaders into the fold, or pushing for major redistributive policies that would meaningfully empower the working class such as Medicare for All—all of which Mamdani does. They instead act as if the working class can be tricked into voting Democrat with tweaks around the margins, more acceptance of bigotry, and better “messaging” that uses the right “affordability”-adjacent language.
In paragraph six, the New York Times casually mentions the rub with Jentleson’s Searchlight Institute: “The organization is subsidized by a roster of billionaire donors highlighted by Stephen Mandel, a hedge fund manager, and Eric Laufer, a real estate investor.”
The use of “roster” and “highlighted” implies there are several more billionaire donors. TRNN emailed Searchlight to find out who these other billionaire donors were. Searchlight did not reply to our request for comment.
But this is the buyer’s market right now: DC operators and careerists seeking support from a handful of mega-donors to “remake the Democratic Party” into an equally zionist, slightly more populist-sounding, exceedingly more racist and transphobic version of its 2024 self. And our media, ever indifferent to the broader structural forces backing these overnight “groups” and “movements,” treats all of this as largely organic, with no class interests, much less conflicts of interest. Everything is presented as good faith, simply Concerned With Pragmatic Necessities of Winning, and neoliberalism is rebranded as something novel and grassroots. And everyone in party leadership, big donor circles, and the wealthy consultancy class in power gets to, once again, remain in power.
Canvassing with Swing Left for Prop 50 Saturday and Sunday mornings Join here Time Weekends 9:30am – 1pm PDT Location 94114 San Francisco, CA 94114 Map About this event As partisan gerrymandering in states like Texas threatens to undermine democracy, California is stepping up with Proposition 50, the Election Rigging... Continue reading →
This Sunday’s Town Hall: Announcing This Week’s Progressive Town Hall: Every Sunday at 4pm ET/1pm PT RSVP HERE Join PDA activists online from across the country to discuss the importance of progressives reclaiming the American story from the MAGA right, an issue of heightened importance as we’re now within one... Continue reading →
We protest Heritage Foundation EVERY MONDAY (Join us!!!!) By admin | September 2, 2025 | Uncategorized Cliff Cash Comedy Premiered Jul 26, 2025 Every Monday at The Heritage Foundation 214 Massachusetts Ave. Washington D.C. 4pm protest 6pm pizza Every Friday at Fox News D.C. 400 N. Capitol St. Washington D.C. 4pm protest 6pm pizza We are... Continue reading →
Bay Area Coalition phonebanks for Prop 50 Tuesdays & Saturdays RSVP Yes On Prop 50 | Special Election Phone Banks Virtual Phone Bank Time Tuesdays and Saturdays 2pm PDT + 1 more time Location Virtual event Join from anywhere Hosted in San Francisco, CA 94102 About this event Proposition 50 Vote... Continue reading →
See the Stories of People Who Are Homeless Older adults, 55 and over, are the fastest growing population entering homelessness. Their numbers are on pace to triple by 2030. Gain an intimate view into the growing crisis of older adult homelessness. Tickets range from $0 to $10. Details here. Join us... Continue reading →
One Million Rising: Strategic Non-Cooperation to Fight Authoritarianism Virtual Event · Hosted by No Kings Time Wednesdays 8 – 9:30pm EDT Location Virtual event Join from anywhere About this event Across the country, authoritarian forces are getting bolder and more dangerous. Trump and his allies are not hiding their agenda: mass deportations,... Continue reading →
THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 2023 AT 2 AM – 4 AM PDT How to create trust in a group? Details Event by Extinction Rebellion Empathy Circles online EMPATHY CAFE Duration: 2 hr Public · Anyone on or off Facebook How to create trust in a group? This is the question that arose in our... Continue reading →
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This is what a judicial warrant looks like. It must be issued by a court and signed by a judge. It must also show your correct name and address. Courtesy of ACLU Northern California.
This is what an administrative warrant looks like. It is issued by the Department of Homeland Security. It must be signed by an immigration officer to be valid. Courtesy of ACLU Norther California.
