“As an adjudicated insurrectionist, Trump is an illegitimate president according to Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, and therefore every official act as president will be illegitimate.”
–Mike Zonta, co-editor of OccupySF.net
The 14th Amendment states: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
Call your Congressperson and your U.S. Senators at (202) 224-3121
The vacancy rate has yet to reach pre-pandemic levels. Photo: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
After years of promises, a meaningful wave of office-to-housing conversions is finally moving into the development pipeline.
Why it matters: Even as AI companies help fuel an office market rebound, nearly a third of San Francisco office space remains vacant, making conversions a key part of downtown’s recovery and the push to build more housing.
Driving the news: Three projects are expected to submit applications this month, marking the strongest evidence yet that a package of zoning changes, tax incentives and streamlined approvals is unlocking conversions that developers previously said didn’t pencil out, the Chronicle reports.
The projects, totaling roughly 300 units, include plans to convert office buildings at 901 Market St., 2300 Stockton St. and 150 Hayes St.
The big picture: Converting aging office buildings into homes has been viewedas one way to address two of San Francisco’s biggest challenges post-pandemic: a persistent housing crunch and high office vacancy rate.
Between the lines: A few hundredunits is modest compared with the city’s overall housing needs, but the latest plans represent an important milestone under the city’s new conversion framework.
For years, developers have argued the math rarely worked and such conversions couldn’t be profitable. Older buildings often require costly structural upgrades, while permitting, fees and taxes added more hurdles.
The city has spent roughly five years addressing those barriers by reshaping its rules and rolling out new incentives such as expedited approvals, fee reductions and a new program allowing qualifying projects to recoup part of future property tax growth to help cover construction costs.
What they’re saying: Developers told the Chroniclethat the changes have finally made these projects financially feasible.
If developers can buy a building cheaply enough, projects like 150 Hayes can produce apartments for $500,000 to $600,000 per unit — well below the roughly $1 million per unit cost of new construction, Jack Sylvan of SDG told the Chronicle.
What we’re watching: The projects could provide a blueprint for much of downtown’s aging and unused office stock.
Officials hope to create a repeatable model for converting aging, lower-rent offices in particular — the ones that often lack the amenities of newer towers.
Those buildings are often cheaper to buy and may be less attractive to companies seeking space amid the return-to-office push.
The closed San Francisco Centre mall, pictured in 2025, is a good fit for conversion into a campus for the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts.Carlos Avila Gonzalez/S.F. Chronicle
Last week, a deal to purchase the San Francisco Centre collapsed after the prospective buyers were reportedly unable to renegotiate an existing long-term lease held by the San Francisco Unified School District for a portion of the property.
What happens next for the poster child of San Francisco’s doom-loop era is anyone’s guess.
This is an intimidating site: 1.5 million square feet on more than 5 acres, with an emptiness that casts a pall on a neighborhood finally making strides toward recovery. It’s a big ask to expect a private developer to gamble hundreds of millions on a complicated downtown mall with lease issues and uncertain retail prospects.
But what if we stop looking at the abandoned mall as a real estate headache and start seeing it for what it could become?
I propose that the district’s Ruth Asawa School of the Arts be moved here. It’s an idea no less fanciful than former Mayor London Breed’s to locate a soccer stadium there. In fact, I’d argue that an art school may be the most logical reuse proposal on the table. Not only would the school finally get the arts campus it has promised students for years, but the city would also signal its commitment to rebuilding the local arts community.
Yes, there would be bureaucratic complexities with such a plan. But let’s not get too in the weeds and just think boldly for a minute.
Two public schools existed at the mall’s site in the 1800s: Webster Primary School and Lincoln Grammar School. After the 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed the schools, the land was leased for commercial purposes to support the school district financially. The district still owns a portion of the underlying land, so converting the site back into an educational use makes practical and historical sense.
It also solves a problem the city has failed to solve for decades. The School of the Arts, located on Portola Drive just below Twin Peaks and overlooking Glen Canyon Park, was supposed to be relocated long ago. Over the last 20 years, the district tried to create a new, state-of-the-art campus at 135 Van Ness Ave. But that effort stalled under the weight of seismic problems, historic restrictions and runaway construction costs. The effort was all but abandoned.
That’s a tragedy. Ruth Asawa is an academic jewel of the district. But it has been taken for granted.
My daughter graduated from the school in 2024. She had a great experience studying there with passionate and committed teachers. But the studio space where she and her classmates spent every afternoon was a windowless classroom with no heat and a leaky roof.
The building is crumbling; the school’s programs are underfunded; the dance department has no on-site studio, and students have to be bussed across town to a space for them to practice.
That’s not the kind of space that inspires creativity.
There aren’t a lot of things that fit well on the layout of a former department store, but an arts school is one of them. The giant floor plates of Nordstrom or Bloomingdale’s could become dance studios, black-box theaters, art galleries, recording spaces and classrooms. These stores’ high ceilings and flexible interiors are assets, not obstacles.
Moving the School of the Arts to the former mall would bring students to a central, transit-rich location with quick and easy access to cultural institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, the Warfield theater and Davies Symphony Hall.
Architect Owen Kennerly, principal of Kennerly Architecture, agrees that the School of the Arts would be perfect for the mall site. “You want a hybridized ecosystem here, not a monoculture,” he told me. “There could be a school, housing, arts venues, maybe a tech research component and neighborhood-serving retail. There’s a movie theater there, so it’s already a venue.”
Anders Carpenter, the higher education practice leader at the global design firm Perkins & Will, sees the whole area as an opportunity zone: “The mall, the Mint, the Pickwick Hotel — think about that set of street corners and what that could become.”
Carpenter’s firm has been working on UC School of the Law San Francisco’s Academic Village, a shared, urban campus integrating housing and facilities across multiple universities, and he sees it as a possible model for building out the San Francisco Centre. Perkins + Will transformed the Highland Mall in Austin, Texas, into Austin Community College, where, Carpenter said, “Sears is now the filmmaking department, JCPenney is now computer science, and so on. Malls have good infrastructural connective tissue and common spaces that make a ton of sense for education.”
Mall-to-school conversions aren’t that unusual. Grand Rapids Community College in Michigan converted vacant mall space into a flexible higher-education hub. On the peninsula, the Los Altos School District is turning former retail land into a new school campus. After the 2025 Palisades Fire badly damaged Palisades Charter High School, displacing more than 2,500 students just two days before the beginning of their spring semester, architects at the firm Gensler transformed an old Sears building in Santa Monica into a fully functional, temporary campus — in 30 days.
As Gensler’s managing principal, Randy Howder, told me, “Things happen when they have to happen. There was the collective will.”
As for doing something similar at San Francisco Centre, Howder said, “It’s challenging in a multistory urban site. Harder than, say, a typical suburban shopping mall but still well suited to an urban campus.”
Yet apart from the steel and glass dome, there’s nothing particularly precious about this structure.
“If you go back and look at construction photos from the 1980s, it’s really just a simple steel frame that could be stripped down and converted,” Kennerly said.
Carpenter said the idea of an arts school conversion was on “fertile ground.”
Actually pulling it off, he noted, wouldn’t be easy.
“Who is the entity tying all those things together? That’s one of the big questions.”
Yet there’s no denying that students would be great for the neighborhood. They’d provide daily foot traffic. They need to eat — a lot. And they shop.
A downtown school campus could bring exactly the kind of steady, human-scale activity San Francisco keeps saying it wants.
Meanwhile, School of the Arts’ current 22-acre Portola Drive campus, about the size of nine city blocks, could be redeveloped into housing, yielding potentially 2,000 units in one of the city’s most desirable neighborhoods.
About Opinion
Guest opinions in Open Forum and Insight are produced by writers with expertise, personal experience or original insights on a subject of interest to our readers. Their views do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Chronicle editorial board, which is committed to providing a diversity of ideas to our readership.
Allison Arieff is an Opinion Columnist and Editorial Writer for the San Francisco Chronicle with an emphasis on housing and transportation policy, design and urbanism.
She joined the Chronicle from MIT Technology Review, where she was the Editorial Director of Print. Arieff was previously Editorial Director of the Bay Area urban planning and policy think tank SPUR, and was a regular columnist for New York Times’ Opinion section from 2007-2020, focusing on cities, design and technology. She was the Editor in Chief and founding Senior Editor of the design and architecture magazine Dwell, which won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence during her tenure.
Kennedy Re-imagined Berkeley’s Future. Berkeley’s most fabled housing came from such legends as Bernard Maybeck, Julia Morgan and Walter Ratcliff. But the builder who has done the most to change the city’s landscape since the 1990’s is Patrick Kennedy. Kennedy won approval to build market rate housing in downtown Berkeley when none had been constructed since World War 2. He was arguably the first YIMBY, making arguments for building taller and denser infill housing that have become staples of the pro-housing movement.
Kennedy’s Panoramic Interests has built 699 units in Berkeley in 16 projects. It has 476 more units in 7 projects in the pipeline. No other builder comes close to matching Panoramic’s visual impact on the Berkeley landscape.
How did Kennedy do it? How did a person arriving in Berkeley in 1986 overcome five decades of the city’s anti-housing policies? Kennedy has surmounted seemingly insurmountable barriers to get housing built in both Berkeley and San Francisco. Could his approach be a model for others?
Here is how Kennedy’s Panoramic Interests succeeded.
The First YIMBY?
While Patrick Kennedy was attending Harvard Law School he decided he did not want to be a practicing attorney. He took a break to get a masters degree in real estate development from MIT. After passing the bar he went to work at BART in its real estate department.
Kennedy’s Berkeley legacy started when he built a three unit condo. He then built a 24 unit condo project at Shattuck and Hearst. Panoramic Interests went on to develop 473 units, most in large projects.
Kennedy was a 1990’s builder talking about housing in 21st century terms. He urged cities to “decriminalize housing development” and promoted “transit oriented development” decades before the YIMBY movement made these terms commonplace.
The Berkeley City Council ultimately had the power to approve or kill projects. It had not been swayed by pro-housing arguments in the past. Kennedy changed this dynamic. He did so by building political support among progressive groups supporting more housing.
Three constituencies in particular turned out at council meetings to back Kennedy’s projects: disabled activists associated with the renown Center for Independent Living, environmentalists connected with the Greenbelt Alliance, and UC Berkeley students. Kennedy did in Berkeley what Joe O’Donoghue was doing for the Residential Builders Association in San Francisco: they mobilized political support for housing projects so that naysayers stopped dominating hearings.
Kennedy aligned his projects with longtime council member Shirley Dean. Dean was the leading “moderate” on the council for years before serving as mayor from 1994-2002. She was an anathema to progressives. Progressive council members like Dona Spring almost consistently opposed Kennedy’s projects.
Kennedy’s Panoramic Interests became a political lightning rod. After progressive councilmember Carla Woodworth broke from the progressive consensus and backed a Kennedy project, the six term incumbent was defeated for re-election in 1996 due to her vote.
Kennedy was Berkeley’s first developer to use the state density bonus enacted in 1978. He suspects other builders didn’t know about it. Kennedy’s legal training likely contributed to his being a builder who always understood the legal landscape.
Kennedy sold all of this Berkeley properties in 2007. He and his wife wanted to move to San Francisco so he shifted Panoramic Interests focus there.
Kennedy’s Housing for the Unhoused
Kennedy built three projects in San Francisco. All in the South of Market. What would have been Panoramic’s biggest impact was never implemented: a cost-effective strategy for housing the unhoused.
In February 2017 Kennedy wrote a story for Beyond Chron touting a new strategy for reducing homelessness. As he described:
It is a multi-story, modular, prefabricated housing system that meets all of San Francisco’s building and seismic codes and eliminates many of the costly aspects of micro-apartment development. And because of its size, design , and use of technology, the MicroPAD® represents a complete modernization and reinvention the residential hotel.…the MicroPAD building system reduces development times by 40–50% and offers project cost savings of 30%-40% over conventional development.
After Kennedy contacted me about the MicroPAD we had several THC tenants visit a mock unit. They loved it. Mayor Ed Lee also loved the idea of our leasing these units. But he told me I had to get the San Francisco Building Trades Council sign off on a city-funded project using modular housing.
I pitched the plan to Michael Terriot, then the union’s head. I offered to condition the city’s support for modular housing for the unhoused on legislation banning it for other projects. But he did not want to open the modular housing door. So Kennedy’s cost effective strategy for housing the unhoused went nowhere.
I tried to revive the modular strategy in 2020. I wrote a story about how San Francisco could house 6000 homeless persons in two years. See “Solving San Francisco’s Homeless Crisis.” The city could have used Kennedy’s housing strategy instead of wrecking the Tenderloin’s Little Saigon by converting tourist hotels in the area to shelters. But the city again missed a major opportunity to meaningfully homelessness. These photos show the Berkeley project for the unhoused that Kennedy could have replicated in San Francisco.
Kennedy is not as positive on modular as he once was. He sees a problem with its use in tight infill sites due to traffic issues. But there remain enough viable sites for the Lurie Administration to examine the feasibility of Kennedy’s strategy. Kennedy thinks 2000 units is still doable.
Building in SF is “Impossible”
Kennedy describes building private market housing in San Francisco as “impossible.” He blames the city’s dysfunctional inclusionary housing rules. Not the percentage of affordable units—which Mayor Lurie and the Board is moving to sharply lower–but the extreme delays in filling these affordable units.
Kennedy’s project at 333 12th Street had 26 below market rent units. After 2 and 1/2 years, the Mayor’s Office of Housing filled only eight of the vacancies. This with a waiting list of 3000! Kennedy offered to provide staff to MOH to process applications for vacancies. They weren’t interested.
San Francisco could easily fix this problem by allowing the owners to fill their own vacancies. MOH would then monitor to ensure income limits have been met. Instead the city remains wedded to a Rube Goldberg-like placement strategy that keeps affordable units vacant, costs nonprofit owners desperately needed funds and pushes builders like Panoramic out of the city.
Returning to Berkeley
So Kennedy returned to Berkeley. In my 2018 book Generation Priced Out, I was very critical of Berkeley’s anti-housing policies for driving out the working and middle-class. But Berkeley has become one of the nation’s most pro-housing cities. Kennedy just finished a project on Francisco Street at Shattuck and has two approved North Berkeley projects left to build. All three are on the Northside, where little new housing has been built.
Patrick Kennedy has “never been more bullish about Berkeley.” His persistence in trying to get housing built has encouraged other builders. Kennedy and Panoramic Interests have provided Berkeley with a more vibrant and inclusive future.
Randy Shaw is the Editor of Beyond Chron and the Director of San Francisco’s Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which publishes Beyond Chron. Shaw’s new book is the revised and updated, The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco. His prior books include Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America. The Activist’s Handbook: Winning Social Change in the 21st Century, and Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century.
France’s annual July 14 military parade this year featured aircraft from 11 European countries and around 500 troops from Coalition of the Willing allies that have pledged to help with Ukraine’s post-war security in a showcase of support for Kyiv. The event marked President Emmanuel Macron’s last Bastille Day parade in his role.
Ukrainian fighter pilots and troops took pride of place in France‘s national Bastille Day celebrations Tuesday as a massive parade showcased support for Ukraine and symbolically flexed European military muscle.
On President Emmanuel Macron’s last Bastille Day as president, he hosted around 30 other leaders for an event that appeared aimed at showing both Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump that Europe is united and stepping up to defend itself.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was given an ovation from the assembled European leaders as he arrived and his country’s troops got the biggest cheers of the day from crowds on the tree-lined Champs-Élysées avenue. Zelensky and Macron shared repeated hugs at the end of the parade.
France’s biggest national holiday coincided with raging forest fires and a red-alert heatwave that forced the cancellation of traditional fireworks and firefighters’ balls.
Macron reviews troops for the last time at France’s annual military parade
Cover image: French President Emmanuel Macron speaks with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy as they leave after the annual Bastille Day military parade on the Place de la Concorde in Paris, France REUTERS – Benoit Tessier
Here’s what to know about Bastille Day this year:
It’s celebrated on July 14 because that’s the day Parisians stormed the Bastille fortress and prison in 1789, helping spark the French Revolution that overthrew the monarchy and sent King Louis XVI and his queen Marie-Antoinette to the guillotine.
Bastille Day holiday is central to the French calendar and national identity. Presidents use it to vaunt France’s accomplishments, mayors across the country host village festivals and families gather for holiday meals.
The centerpiece is the Paris parade beneath the Napoleon-era Arc de Triomphe and along the Champs-Élysées avenue, which inspired Trump to stage his own parade last year.
‘Coalition of the willing’
A huge French tricolor flag hanging below the monumental arch rippled in the wind as a military band on horseback rode down the tree-lined avenue followed by Macron standing in an open military vehicle to kick off the parade.
Spectators wore hats and brandished small fans to fend off the heat as a formation of air force planes roared overhead trailing red, white and blue smoke.
Zelensky joined Macron along with some 30 other heads of state or government in the special viewing area for the parade.
Ukrainian troops marched along the cobblestoned avenue, and Ukrainian co-pilots trained in France were on board two Mirage 2000B fighter jets alongside French air force pilots.
“I feel very proud for the fact that they’re here and for the fact that we’re marching alongside of them and I think it as well it will create better ties with them and NATO and to be a part of that history,” 21-year-old UK soldier Lance Cpl. Patrick Risso said of the Ukrainian involvement.
On the ground, the parade opened with around 500 troops from the ″coalition of the willing″ grouping of countries that have pledged to help with Ukraine’s postwar security.
Macron said Monday night that it’s a ″great honour″ to welcome to the parade ″all the partners in the coalition of the willing and our Ukrainian friends who will march with us and illustrate its strategic reawakening and our unity″.
The foreign fighters in combat fatigues and dress uniforms marched with their national flags, in a break with tradition – usually only one foreign country is invited to take part in the parade. It was the first time in some 20 years that British troops took part. Ukrainian forces got the loudest cheers from the crowd.
The parade set a record in terms of number of troops: The Paris military governor said 7,600 troops were marching this year, compared with 5,810 in 2025. Thousands of soldiers started taking up positions early Tuesday, many taking selfies as helicopters flew overhead.
Forest fires are raging in the Fontainebleau forest south of Paris and in areas of southern France, as the country suffers through its third heatwave this year.
As a result, authorities in some regions – including the French capital – banned fireworks and firefighters‘ balls customarily held around Bastille Day.
The Eiffel Tower‘s fireworks and drone show was maintained, however, and held Monday night, including a drone formation shaped like the Statue of Liberty – a gift from France to the United States that arrived in New York in 1885 to mark the US centennial, the end of the American Civil War, and friendship between the two countries.
San Francisco has changed profoundly in the past 25 years, and not always for the better. It’s safer: In 1990, the city had 102 homicides. In 2024, 35. But it’s also far more expensive, far whiter, far less diverse in general, and lacking in the underground, cutting-edge creative counterculture energy that attracted people like me in the first place.
The roots of that transformation go back to Aug. 9, 1995, when a company called Netscape, that made a browser for the World Wide Web, had its initial public offering on Wall Street. Suddenly, vast sums of venture capital poured into the city as the dot-com boom took over San Francisco life.
Massive fortunes were made over the next decades. Massive numbers of working-class families lost their homes to displacement. Homelessness increased, as even people with jobs were forced onto the streets by greedy landlords and soaring rents.
Tech companies like Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb broke the city’s laws with impunity, destroying the lives of cab drivers and turning rental housing into hotel rooms, while Mayor Ed Lee either looked away or encouraged the illegal startups. Developers built luxury condos downtown, and many were bought by international speculators who never lived there.
Now we’re living through another tech boom, this time in AI—and it appears the people who run the city haven’t learned the lessons of the past.
So it’s useful to reflect on that period between 1990 and today, and that’s what longtime journalist Jonathan Weber has done in his new book, City on the Edge. Weber and I don’t always agree on politics, but he’s an old friend and an excellent reporter, and the book covers the period with exceptional detail, told through some of the characters that defined the era.
I got to talk to Jonathan recently about the book and the history that both of us lived through. A transcript follows, edited for clarity.
48HILLSIt’s particularly interesting to talk about this because I lived through all of it, and you live through a lot of it.
At one point, I think you talked about how you kind of saw this as a, in a weird way, a sequel to David Talbot’s book, Season of the Witch.
JONATHAN WEBER I never explicitly conceived of it that way. Talbot’s book was great, and mine is similar in that it kind of covers an arc of time the city and, and in some ways, I kind of pick up a little bit where he left off.
48HILLSOne of the themes that comes through here that I have found really interesting is, you talk about the birth of the internet in San Francisco, and you also talk about things like Burning Man and how, you know, the early days, the early days of the Internet in San Francisco were a really creative time.
And it was a lot of young creative people, although not all.
My first experience was the internet with the internet was through the WELL, the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, which was founded by Stewart Brand, which is coming out of the ’60s hippies era and the Whole Earth Catalog, and then they got into this technology, and it was all about making connections.
And it was all about doing incredibly cool creative stuff. And then Netscape went public, and Mark Andreessen became a billionaire, and all of a sudden, from my perspective, having been here, the vibe changed completely.
It was no longer about being creative and fun and Burning Man. It was about getting rich and getting rich fast. And that really, that now we’re talking dot-com boom one, but that really changed San Francisco’s attitude kind of dramatically.
The people who moved here were not people who moved here to be creative. There were people who moved here to get rich quick. And the venture capitalists got involved. All this vast amount of Venture capital pours into San Francisco. And so maybe you can talk a little bit about that era and that change.
JONATHAN WEBER Well, I think that’s right. In the very early days in the early 1990s when the Internet, as we know it, first being developed, the World Wide Web, that was a time of great creativity and the kind of cultural dynamics of the city, the kind of tendrils of the counterculture that had marked and developed into a different kind of underground culture.
A lot of people who were interested in technology were also interested in that culture, people who were interested in the Internet often were explorers of some kind. We’re curious, we’re looking for new interesting things. And so there was a real kind of cultural affinity.
In those early days, there was a lot of idealism about what this tech would bring, and it was going to make a better world. It was going to connect and empower people. It was a new kind of economy, the new economy would be less hierarchical and more egalitarian, more inspiring. And then in the mid-1990s, as you mentioned, Netscape went public, and that’s referred to still in Silicon Valley as the Netscape Moment, when venture capitalists realized that this was a gigantic business opportunity.
And so a lot of money began to pour into the business. So, yes, I think that brought a very big and fundamental kind of change.
At the same time, it was a change that didn’t really happen quite overnight. I mean, the Netscape Moment was a moment. And then from that point, Venture Capital and the financial dimension of the tech industry was very important. But it wasn’t really the only thing.
And even in the 2000s, I would argue after the dot-com bust, there was a period of really a lot of creativity that was about the money, but not exclusively, not like it is now.
48HILLSThere was a period when people would fly into Burning Man in private planes and have these special rich people camps, where the young people who had made millions of dollars in tech startups would have people cook for them and take care of them. And it became a luxury vacation as opposed to an artist colony.
JONATHAN WEBER That’s why Burning Man is in a sense a character in the book, and it really is such a perfect metaphor for the city in so many ways, with that being one of them.
So in the city, there was a lot of resentment over rich people coming in and buying up the houses and squeezing everybody out and creating this kind of two-tier society in the city.
And so similarly at Burning Man, there was a very, very similar dynamic where, as you say, rich people came flying in with teams to cook for them and their own private camps and this kind of stuff.
And the organizers tried to outlaw some of that stuff. They’ve tried to crack down on that in, in different ways.
But first of all, it’s not that easy to do, right, to enforce certain kinds of rules. And then they do actually need those folks to keep the operation going, so they don’t want to piss them off.
48HILLS In the second tech boom in San Francisco, which I’d like your thoughts on, the city under Mayor Ed Lee stopped enforcing its own laws. I mean, every single Airbnb listing in San Francisco was illegal. San Francisco did not allow short-term rentals. Every single Uber ride was illegal. Every single Lyft ride was illegal. The Google buses were illegal. They were parking in the Muni stops.
I actually cornered a parking control officer at one point and said, look, that bus is parking in the Muni stop. If I do that, I get a$ 271 ticket. Why aren’t you ticketing them? And the guy said to me, because we were told not to. And basically, Ed Lee’s love of tech became this laissez faire thing where basically people were making a fortune by breaking the law. I know the tech industry loves to say move fast and break things, but they were breaking laws that the city had for very good reasons.
There are very good reasons why you needed a license to operate a taxi cab. There were very good reasons why you can’t have short-term rentals. It displaces renters. And, you know, Airbnb probably displaced 10,000 San Francisco renters while Brian Chesky became a billionaire. And that really, that kind of attitude—because we’re in the tech industry and we’re about to get really rich, we don’t have to follow the rules that everyone else follows. And that kind of became the ethos for a while.
JONATHAN WEBER I think that certainly in some of those businesses that you mentioned, the strategy was that cliche: better to ask forgiveness than ask permission. So the theory was that we’re just going to push ahead and, and, and do this stuff. And when people come to stop us, well, we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.
In the case of, of Uber in particular, you know, I do think that the city made its own bed in many ways because they were just unable to solve the problem of the taxis. Like, you couldn’t get a freaking taxi. Every person in San Francisco had known this for many years, and it was a constant source of irritation that you could never get a taxi when you needed it. And you had this ridiculous system where, they didn’t have a central dispatch, so you had to call, like, the individual companies. And it was preposterous.
And so that fact is what opened the door.
When Uber came along and, and then the city is like, no, no, you know, we got to shut this stuff down. But then the state PUC was like, well, but, but how are you going to solve the cab problem?
48HILLSBut the city didn’t say we’re going to shut this down. I actually met with the head of the Taxi Commission when Uber and Lyft were first starting. And she told me, these are illegal. These are dangerous. People are going to get assaulted. We cannot just let anybody drive a cab. And I want to stop this. But my boss Ed Lee said to let it go.
JONATHAN WEBER But again, people liked Uber, you know? People did not want Uber to be shut down. Then finally they hired Susan Kennedy and got the state to write the law that they wanted.
49HILLSBut the real killer of this is right before Uber and Lyft started operating. The city shifted its taxicab model. And instead of having medallions issued by seniority, they started selling them. And the city brought in like $50 million and they sold these medallions for $300,000. And the cab drivers took out loans. To buy these, like a mortgage. And then Uber and Lyft came along, and within a year, those medallions were worthless. And I feel bad for the cab drivers because the city didn’t enforce its own laws, but also did nothing for the cab drivers who were now in hock for the mountain of a mortgage that they could never pay off.
JONATHAN WEBER I mean, the city, this was screwed up royally.
48HILLSAnd landlords really liked Airbnb, too, because it was a way to make money and not have to worry about tenants. You just get rid of your tenants and you turn this into short-term rentals. You can make far more money.
JONATHAN WEBER Yeah. I actually don’t really know why the city didn’t really enforce the law.
48HILLSOh, I know why. Because, because it was a local tech company and Ed Lee said, don’t enforce these laws. I mean, literally the people in the Planning Department who oversaw this told me: We were not supposed to enforce this law. Because we’re encouraging tech companies and innovative stuff. And that led to thousands of evictions. Tenants lost their homes, but it was popular.
And then, of course, afterwards, after it became popular than supervisor David Chu worked out legislation to regulate it and allow it in certain circumstances. Which they could have done from the start. The first time they saw one of these things, they could have said, OK, no, you can’t do that. We are going to find you. But if this is a model that people want, let’s figure out how to regulate it. Instead, the Mayor’s Office let it go until it was out of control. And then the supervisors had to retroactively try to figure out how to regulate it.
JONATHAN WEBER Right, right. I agree. The law they ended up with is the thing they should have arguably started out with. Or some version of it. It’s not that strict of the law compared to New York. But it still seems to eliminate a lot of the Airbnbs.
48HILLSI want to move on to the latest, the AI boom, because I know we’re both fascinated by this. So now we have another whole tech boom. And it’s creating a different weird kind of problems. I mean, now it’s not apartments in the Mission where we’re seeing displacement. It’s a shortage of mansions. They can’t find enough $10 million houses for people who are coming out here and getting these insane salaries and people are trying to trade their house for Anthropic stock. And in a weird way, I’m reminded of the first dot com boom, when it’s like all these companies are raising money with really little business plan.
It just seems like there’s just an awful lot of VC money and speculation going on here. And it just seems to me it can’t last. What do you think?
JONATHAN WEBER Having seen my share of bubbles, it definitely has the feel of a bubble, if you look at any traditional valuation metrics, they don’t support the valuations of a lot of these companies.
These things are tricky. If you look at it from an investor point of view, the valuations aren’t really supported by any, any traditional metrics and all of this makes no sense. So most of the things that you could say about the current situation, you could also have said 18 months ago. In the meantime, people have made a lot of money.
The fact that it’s a bubble doesn’t mean you should sell everything now, you know, because it could go on and the bubble is where all the money is actually made. If it happens tomorrow, that’s a very, very different thing than if it happens in three years.
48HILLS One of the interesting arguments that I have with people about this entire period of San Francisco history and particularly with folks from the more conservative perspective is they say this was all a failure of the progressives in government.
The problem is we haven’t had a progressive mayor since Art Agnos. All this period you’re talking about, we had, we had Willie Brown. We had Gavin Newsom. We had Ed Lee, we had London Breed. All of them were at best moderates. And the mayor in San Francisco has, as you and I know, because I wrote a piece for you about it, has a tremendous amount of power.
JONATHAN WEBER Yeah, well, I guess, you know, my, my takeaway broadly is that the kind of moderate-progressive debate and the importance of that is kind of exaggerated in a way. My read is that for this entire period, from the election of Willie until 2024, you had his notion of kind of the “city family.”
And the progressives were kind of part of it, too. And so you can say the governance failures of the city are the fault of the city family, which is, which includes both progressives and moderates. You know, it was like a collective, it was a collective failure. Everyone shares some responsibility.
48HILLSI look at the Airbnb thing as a classic example where five progressives on the board of supervisors led by David Campos wanted to strictly regulate Airbnb, more on the level that they’ve done in New York and other places. The moderates, led by David Chu wanted to allow airbnb to, to operate with far less regulation. And that was a huge fight. And it came down to a 6-5 vote. And Airbnb got everything it wanted.
But it’s not because the progressives weren’t trying to regulate. They were just outvoted. They just didn’t have the power to do this. But I think there were a lot of people who are really fighting back against a lot of this stuff. And, you know, David Campos had a bill that would have limited evictions. And he narrowly got it through. And then the courts threw it out.
So it’s not like there weren’t progressives trying to make policy. It’s just they were either overridden by the mayor or they didn’t, they couldn’t, they couldn’t get the six votes. And I think Airbnb was a classic. Big Tech and real estate won. And it wasn’t that the progressives weren’t trying. They just failed. They didn’t have the votes.
JONATHAN WEBER Sure, yes. But do you really think that would have fundamentally changed the trajectory of the city? I mean, the things that people are really upset about don’t have anything to do with that.
48HILLSBut at the time they did, because the time we were seeing lots and lots of low income tenants thrown out of their homes so they could be turned into Airbnbs. This Airbnb fight was not about tech. It was about evictions. That’s what it was about. And I think we might have saved five or ten thousand renters if we had more strictly regulated Airbnb. And nobody at City Hall was on the side of the poor cab drivers. And I understand they made their own mess. But for the love of God, you can’t sell them a permit for $300,000 and then turn around next year and make it worthless.
JONATHAN WEBER Again, I would just emphasize that I think that sometimes the liberal/progressive vs. moderate divide, I think it’s outlived its usefulness. For one thing, as a category, especially now, I just never understood what “moderate” was supposed to mean exactly.
I think that in the same way that Gavin Newsom, in response to the criticism that we didn’t really get that much done while he were mayor, he would say, well, it was this obstructionist Board of Supervisors that wouldn’t let me do anything. So, the progressives say, well, there was these terrible mayors, and then the mayors say, well, it was these terrible progressive supervisors… Well, I say yes. It was both of you.
I disagree with my old friend Jon. There are two sides in local politics, and one side has made the situation far worse, and the other side has tried to make it better. But that’s a discussion for another time.
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.
Protesters demonstrate against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement outside of US Sen. Susan Collins’ (R-Maine) office in Biddeford on July 13, 2026.
(Photo by Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
“The one thing I know is they don’t want us coming together to stop this bullshit, and that is what we have to do.”
Democratic Senate candidate Troy Jackson was among the Mainers and progressives nationwide placing blame on Republican Sen. Susan Collins after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement shot and killed a 26-year-old Colombian man in the small southern Maine city of Biddeford Monday morning.
“Enough is enough. Susan Collins voted to send $70 billion dollars to ICE with no reforms. I’d abolish it altogether,” Jackson said on social media Monday, sharing footage of the ICE Out rally in Biddeford after the fatal shooting of Joan Sebastian Guerrero.
A former candidate for governor and Maine state Senate president, Jackson is among several Democrats vying to replace primary winner Graham Platner on the November ballot and unseat Collins, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee. Maine residents descended on her office in Biddeford after the shooting.
Some protesters in Maine stormed the offices of Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) in Biddeford, chanting, "Vote her out" after a Colombian man who had been ordered to leave the U.S. was fatally shot by an ICE agent while in his car on Monday. The shooting marks the second time in a week… pic.twitter.com/Li5oWjxWfN
“Susan Collins must be held accountable for funding this terror,” Jackson reiterated Tuesday, sharing his remarks from Monday night’s rally in Portland, about 18 miles northeast of where Guerrero—who was authorized to work in the United States and had a Social Security number, according to locate advocates—was gunned down by ICE agents reportedly looking for another man.
“This has got to end, and we have to abolish ICE,” the Democratic candidate said. “And as sad as I am, I’m also very angry… I’m angry that Mr. Guerrero’s not coming home tonight. I’m angry that he has a wife and a kid that will never see him again.”
“I truly, truly believe in power of solidarity—and we have to stand together,” he continued. “It is tough. It’s hard, I know it. They want to make it hard. But the one thing I know is they don’t want us coming together to stop this bullshit, and that is what we have to do. We have to remain vigilant. We have to stand up. We have to push back. We have to protect each other so that no more of these things happen.”
His name was Joan Sebastian Guerrero. He was a young father. His three-year-old daughter was in the backseat. He wasn’t the target of an investigation. He was driving to work.
“I don’t want to see this happen again, and the only way we can do that is by pushing back and making sure that we don’t have any more rallies like this, because it’s damn depressing, it’s damn heartbreaking, and it pisses me off to no end that we have to be in a world like this, but we can change it by standing together,” Jackson added, also urging donations to the Maine Solidarity Fund to help Guerrero’s family.
Collins on Monday called for “a full and impartial investigation” into Guerrero’s killing and shared that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told her that “the Boston office of the DHS inspector general has taken over the investigation of the Biddeford shooting in cooperation with the FBI.”
In addition to Jackson, various critics in Maine and across the country—including Nirav Shah and Jordan Wood, other Democrats running to replace Platner—have responded to the shooting by called out Collins for helping the GOP give ICE billions more in funding without reforms.
The fatal shooting has also spurred fresh calls from across the country to abolish ICE, which has injured and killed a growing number of US citizens and immigrants during President Donald Trump’s mass detention and deportation campaign.
New York City’s democratic socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, said late Monday: “This morning in Biddeford, Maine, a 26-year-old man said goodbye to his wife and daughter and left for work. Moments later he was dead, shot in the head by ICE agents, the second man ICE has killed in six days. ICE is killing our neighbors. ICE cannot be reformed. Abolish ICE.”
Guerrero’s killing came after ICE fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, Texas last week. The 52-year-old was from Mexico. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said Monday that her government is seeking criminal charges in his and other deaths.
When asked about the recent killings in Texas and Maine on Monday, US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)—a progressive facing some pressure to run for the Senate or even president in future cycles—pointed to Republican funding for ICE.
AOC: I said this a couple of weeks ago: I would not be surprised if, when ICE funding started up again, we would start to see more civilian deaths at the hands of ICE. And that’s exactly what has happened.
While Mullin supposedly told Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) that Guerrero had “weaponized” a car he was driving—similar to DHS claims after previous shootings that were ultimately discredited by video footage—in this case, the department said on social media that “the vehicle attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon.”
Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.) responded that “ICE murdered a 26-year-old in front of his wife and daughter. It’s just pure evil. This statement makes clear there was no threat whatsoever. Our taxpayer dollars are funding a fascist murder machine. Abolish ICE, and prosecute anyone who carried out, ordered, or enabled crimes.”
Collins announced Tuesday morning that “while the investigation of the Biddeford shooting is not yet complete, it raises sufficient critical questions that I spoke with DHS Secretary Mullin last night and urged him to cease all non-urgent vehicle stops.”
Amid reporting that the Trump administration has given that order to ICE, Shah quickly fired back: “Sen. Collins voted to fully fund ICE without any guardrails. A single late-night phone call isn’t going to cut it.”
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
US Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill) speaks during a press conference on the Iran war and its impact on gas prices outside the US Capitol on May 20, 2026 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
“Simply throwing more money at an out-of-control military operation is not strategy,” said Sen. Tammy Duckworth.
Senate Democrats appeared set to block President Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s sprawling, $1.15 trillion annual military policy bill in a procedural vote scheduled for Tuesday after the White Houseformally notified lawmakers of an extension of its illegal Iran war.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said she would oppose advancing the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) unless lawmakers agree to attach her amendment prohibiting any of the bill’s funds from going toward the war on Iran. Duckworth said in a statement that “simply throwing more money at an out-of-control military operation is not strategy. It’s a recipe for a forever war.”
“The Senate cannot authorize $1.14 trillion in defense spending—the largest defense budget ever proposed in our nation’s history—for Donald Trump to continue his illegal and disastrous war that Americans do not want,” Duckworth added. “The stakes couldn’t be higher, and I cannot support a defense authorization bill that doesn’t include my amendment to end this illegal war.”
The procedural vote on the NDAA is scheduled for 2:40 pm ET, and it needs 60 votes to advance—requiring the support of some Senate Democrats.
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who spearheaded earlier efforts to halt Trump’s Iran war using the War Powers Act, told reporters on Monday that “it’ll probably be hard to get there this week,” referring to the 60-vote threshold needed to advance the NDAA. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), who is seen as a critical swing vote, said Monday that she’s “undecided” on the legislation.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said he would vote no, calling the NDAA “essentially an Iran war authorization bill.”
“A totally unprecedented 50% increase in spending to fund the war without any meaningful restraints,” Murphy wrote on social media.
Just Foreign Policy, an anti-war advocacy organization, said Monday that no senator who has supported legislative efforts to end the Iran war should back additional funding for the military as long as the illegal conflict continues.
“The ceasefire has collapsed, US bombs are falling on Iran again, and oil prices are climbing… all after Americans were told this war was over,” the group wrote in a new petition urging lawmakers to “defend the Constitution, stop the Iran war, and vote NO on the NDAA.”
“Congress has additional leverage to force compliance: the power of the purse,” the petition continued. “If members block the NDAA… and reject any Iran war supplemental—Trump cannot ignore them.”
In addition to the $1.15 trillion NDAA, the Trump administration is pushing for at least $67 billion in supplemental Pentagon funding to “address urgent needs related to” the Iran war, which is now in its fourth month despite the president’s insistence in late March that it would be over “within two to three weeks.”
Late last week, Trump formally notified Congress of new “strikes against targets within Iran,” insisting the attacks were “consistent with” the War Powers Act.
Critics accused the president, who has never sought congressional authorization for the war, of cynically trying to restart the 1973 law’s 60-day clock after declaring the ceasefire with Iran “over.” The War Powers Act requires “automatic termination of the use of US forces engaged in hostilities 60 days after the president has reported (or was required to report) on the use of force.”
“Any assertion by the Trump administration that he gets 60 more days to act without Congress has no foundation in law,” said Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who on Monday unveiled a new war powers resolution aimed at ending the president’s assault on Iran.
“By forcing a new vote to end this war, we make it clear that Congress insists on the removal of troops from the region barring an authorization of force accompanied by a truly viable strategy—both of which have been lacking,” Schiff added.
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Resistance to Data Centers is increasing in the U.S.
An unprecedented wave of local resistance has disrupted seventy five mega computing facilities across the United States in just three months. Over eight hundred active grassroots coalitions have successfully organized to freeze one hundred thirty billion dollars in planned infrastructure developments.
D. The Stud Alley Photos That The Media Left Out, And What It Tells Us – July 6, 2026
As part of a day of global solidarity to save the life of Palestinian doctor Dr. Abu Safiya, there will be an action at the UC Regents meeting at the Mission Bay. You can sign up to speak at the Regents meeting. The Regents have taken action to stop Palestinian action and terminating faculty and staff who have challenged the genocide in Gaza.
Healthcare workers will rally at the Mission Bay between 8AM and 11AM and healthcare workers will speak out at the UC Regents meeting during public comment.
WHAT: We are gathering as Health Care Workers and community who demand the Freedom of Dr Abu Safiya and all abducted health care workers. He has been tortured by the Israeli police and is near death.
Healthcare Workers For Palestine will have a banner and flyers outside of the UC regents meeting.
An unobtrusive section of the proposed FY2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), carefully masked in opaque legislative language, is called The United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative. Which seems almost benign – what’s wrong with cooperation, right? Until you consider that the U.S.-Israel alliance is (a) an ongoing perpetrator of genocide and endless war and (b) already closely connected with each other militarily in matters of weapons, technology, intelligence, and more.
This section of the law, Section 219, requested by Benjamin Netanyahu, is indeed exceptional – and dangerous. Notably, it will, if enacted, establish a so-called Executive Agent (EA) who can overrule other Pentagon agencies, especially with regard to the transfer of technology and information between the two nations. It is meant to integrate Israel into US military supply chains, constituting a marked shift in the relationship between the two countries. Instead of Israel having to go through a Congressional process of review and oversight to receive U.S. funding, it would be merged right into the US war economy itself, moving from outside to inside the Pentagon. Once this is done, Israel’s influence in the U.S. will massively increase and will be very difficult and costly to reverse.
At a time when support for Israel is declining in the U.S., this appears to be a stealthy way to avoid continued public debate about aiding and abetting Israel and to cement an ongoing, tighter than ever, merging of the two militaries and economies.
This webinar will explore the implications and likely consequences of this proposal if it becomes law.
Presenters:
Ben Freeman is director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute.
Matt Hoh is a disabled Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq War and former Afghan War State Department Officer.
3. Thursday, 4:00pm – 6:00pm, Tell Target to Stand Up To ICE!
Metreon Target:
789 Mission Street. Meet on the sidewalk by the Mission Street entrance SF
Join us to say: Until Target acts to protect its workers and guests from ICE, we will not shop at Target! We will hold signs, hand out flyers, and explain why we must all boycott Target until they Stand Up To ICE. Bring a sign if you have one. This is a peaceful protest.
4. Thursday, 6:30pm, Organizing Meeting: No Coal In Oakland! No ICE In The Bay! No Cuts To Healthcare!
Oakland Peace Center | Shelton Hall 111 Fairmount Ave. Oakland
$5.00 Donation requested. No one turned away
While we face increasing attacks across the country, there are two projects that impact the Bay Area under consideration – a massive coal terminal in West Oakland, and an ICE detention facility in Dublin.
Join us to learn more and get involved to oppose these initiatives and hear about the latest update in the fight against the layoffs in the Alameda Health System.
5. Thursday, 7:00pm, Haiti and the Crisis in the Caribbean
518 Valencia St. SF
Join Haiti Action Committee, for an evening of education, strategizing, affirming our solidarity with Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and all peoples confronted by U.S. empire’s ever-growing aggression
Speakers:
Pierre LaBossier, Co-founder Haiti, Action Committee. Long time human rights activist who has worked tirelessly for the liberation of his homeland, Haiti and of all oppressed people.
Dr. Franke Ramos, Bay Area Activist and Educator, Long time Bay Area Puerto Rican independence activistand cultural worker committed to liberation and self determination
Corina Nolet, Co-Executive Director of Global Exchange. She returned from the March 2026 Nuestra America convoy to Cuba.
6. Friday, 10:30am – 12:30pm, Noisemakers Against Genocide Protest at the Israel Consulate
Israeli Consulate 456 Montgomery St. SF
Friday July 17th marks 1,014 days since the beginning of Israel’s siege of Gaza. For 1,014 days healthcare workers, teachers, humanitarian workers, journalists, faith leaders, families and children have been killed by Israel Offense Forces and settlers.
Join Noisemakers Against Genocide (NAG) and the Revolutionary Love Brigade in protest outside the Israel Consulate. Israel Consulate Out of San Francisco! Share your commitment to bearing witness to genocide.
Make good noise in protest of 1,014 days of genocide. Bring what you’ve got to make a ruckus, we love banners, drums, whistles, horns, flags and chalk. Free Palestine! We’ll have an open mic and a news roundup blast broadcasted to the downtown.
Bring your thoughts, poetry and prose. This week we will be honoring the memory of Gaza poets murdered by the IOF, those like the courageous Rafaat Alareer and Heba Abu Nada, and lifting up living Gaza poets such as Mosab Abu Toha and Abu-al Sheikh. These poets defy the cultural genocide intent on destroying their resistance. We invite you to bring a poem written by a Gaza poet to read.
This is held outdoors, please dress for the weather. We will have signs, candles, music, and snacks. We invite you to join us for 5 minutes, or for the whole two hours. This vigil is held on the the third Friday of the month. Pictures from our previous vigils can be seen here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/haightpeacevigil/
8. Friday, 7:00pm-9:00pm, Discussion: Pt.3 Declaration of Independence:Inventions & Distortions of Reality & History
Revolution Books Berkeley 2444 Durant Ave. Berkeley
Read this article and come with your questions and comments. revcom.us
Excerpt from part 3:
“What Was “Brought Forth” through the American Revolution Was Not a New Nation “Conceived in Liberty,” and Not a Nation “Dedicated to the Proposition that All Men Are Created Equal.”
What I have already indicated here (and examined more fully in the previous article in this series) reveals clearly that neither the American Revolution of 1776, nor the Civil War in the 1860s, was actually fought to establish, or to preserve, “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” The essential “liberty” brought about through the American Revolution was the removal of the constraints that the British empire enforced on the slave-owners and developing capitalists in the colonies, who were the “fathers” and basic beneficiaries of this Revolution.
And as for today:
Finally, and most importantly: The crucial question is not comparison with past oppressive and murderous countries and empires, or with other oppressive regimes in the world now (although U.S. capitalism-imperialism far surpasses its rivals now in terms of war crimes and crimes against humanity). The decisive question is: what is now possible for humanity, in terms of actual and fundamental emancipation—in opposition to the way that this system of capitalism-imperialism stands as the direct barrier to the achievement of unprecedented emancipation, and the fact this system is, in an all too real and terrible sense, force marching humanity toward the abyss.
9. Saturday, 2:00pm, “No Neutrals There, Labor Zionism, & the Struggle For Palestine” Book Presentation & Panel
Henry Schmidt Room ILWU Local 10 400 North Point St. SF
This meeting will be hybrid. You can also join by Zoom.
For Zoom, please go to the LaborFest.net web page and get the link.
Labor historian Jeff Schuhrke presents his new book “No Neutrals There, Labor Zionism, and the Struggle For Palestine”
He will be joined by Jeffry Blankfort, journalist and photographer who founded Labor Bulletin On The Middle East; Clarence Thomas, ILWU Local 10 retired Secretary Treasurer; David Newton, ILWU 10 leader and Michael Letwin with Labor For Palestine
Professor Jeff Schuhrke has published a book about the role of Zionism in the US labor movement. The book “No Neutrals There, US Labor, Zionism and the Struggle For Palestine” examines the history of the role of US unions in supporting the forma- tion of the Israeli state and the Histadrut and how debate and discussion about this role has been suppressed within the labor movement. The ILWU Local 10 has played a historic role in boycotting the Israeli ZIM shipping line from coming to San Francisco and the West
Robert Reich and Inequality Media Civic Action Jul 14, 2026 Justice for Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero. Justice for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. Justice for all of those targeted and killed by Trump’s militarized immigration forces. Abolish ICE. 1. Please continue to protect the vulnerable in your communities. Make sure they have Red Cards / Tarjetas Rojas from the Immigrant Legal Resource Center informing them of their rights. https://www.ilrc.org/redcards 2. Report ICE sightings to your local Rapid Response Network (RRN) to ensure the community is alerted and those affected receive legal support. You can also submit and track anonymously and locally using the ICE Activity Tracker. (When making a report, be sure to note the specific location — intersections or addresses — the number of agents, the types of vehicles, and whether anyone is being detained. Document the activity if it can be done safely from a distance.) https://www.iceinmyarea.org/ 3. Report all ICE activities in your area to your local newspaper, radio, and other local media. Take videos of what ICE is doing — again, doing it safely and from a distance. Share with your local media and ask them to pass it on to their affiliated national broadcast networks. 4. Contact your members of Congress and tell them your thoughts. They need to hear what you think. It’s their job! Call the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121. An operator will answer and route your call after you state the name of the lawmaker you wish to reach. Before calling, you can look up your specific representatives using your ZIP code on the House Finder Service or search for your elected officials on Congress.gov.) 5. Above all, do not be intimidated by ICE and the police state Trump and his assistant Stephen Miller are creating. Its purpose is to intimidate. We have a responsibility to one another and to future generations to resist it with the same sort of courage and commitment to democracy our founders summoned just over 250 years ago.
Congress is not merging the U.S. military with Israel, but lawmakers are actively debating provisions in the annual defense bill that would heavily integrate their technology and intelligence. [1, 2, 3]
Specifics on these legislative efforts include:
The “Deadly Merger” Provisions: Sections in the House and Senate versions of the Fiscal Year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)—such as Section 224 in the House—aim to create the “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative”. [1, 2, 3]
What the Bill Proposes: This initiative requires the U.S. Secretary of Defense to appoint an official to synchronize research, weapons co-production, and data fusion in high-tech warfare areas like artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, autonomous systems, and quantum technology. [1, 2]
The Opposition: Bipartisan lawmakers (such as Rep. Thomas Massie and Rep. Ro Khanna) have proposed amendments to strike this language, arguing it compromises U.S. sovereignty and entangles American forces in endless foreign conflict. [1, 2, 3]
Current Status: The broader NDAA, which contains these integration provisions, is currently stalled. Senate Democrats recently blocked debate on the defense bill over broader war funding issues and concerns regarding these integration clauses. [1]
Help Outreach Working Group lift the fog of corporate media. Donate to help us maintain this website and distribute literature on the street.
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 →
This Thursday, we invite you to join us in Bernal Heights for a progressive mixer to help network and build our progressive coalitions before the November eleciton. The Bernal Heights Democratic Club will host a special presentation by the Phoenix Project on “Billionaires and Astroturf in the 2026 Election”, followed by a mixer with... Continue reading →
Trump Regime Takedown: Every Saturday Saturday, March 7, 2026 12:00 PM 2:00 PM Tesla San Francisco999 Van Ness AvenueSan Francisco, CA, 94109United States (map) Google Calendar ICS Keep democracy alive every Saturday by showing up, taking a stand, and sticking together for the long haul. Standing together is better than standing alone. Let’s get together... Continue reading →
Meeting Agenda July 18, 2026 The San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee’s Endorsements Committee and Issues and Resolutions Committee will hold a joint meeting on July 18th, 2026 at 4:00 pm via Zoom to interview candidates for local elected office and ballot measure proponents and opponents for the November 3,... 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 →
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 →
