“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
Abortion in Israel is legal and highly accessible, with over 99% of requests approved by mandatory termination committees. It is free for women aged 20–33 and in specific circumstances (e.g., rape, health risk, age under 18 or over 40). The process requires approval from a committee, but procedures are in place to allow it throughout most of pregnancy. Wikipedia +2
Legal Status
Legalized in 1977: Abortion is not an absolute right but is legal under specific conditions.
Committees: Women must appear before a committee to get approval, though reforms in 2022/2023 have aimed to digitize and ease this process.
Conditions: Approval is given if the woman is under 18 or over 40, if the pregnancy results from illegal/forbidden relations (like rape), if the baby has a defect, or if the pregnancy risks the woman’s physical/mental health.
“Married” Clause: While unmarried women can get approval easily, married women technically must meet one of the criteria above, though many cite mental health risks to get approval. Haaretz +4
Cost and Funding
Free for 20-33 Year Olds: The state funds abortions for women within this age range.
Subsidized or Free: For others, if it fits the committee’s criteria, it is heavily subsidized or covered by national health insurance.
Cost: If not covered, the cost is around 1,500 shekels (~$370). Haaretz +1
Recent Reforms As of late 2022, Israel eased regulations allowing for abortion pills at local clinics and reducing the need for in-person committee appearances. AP News
A surprising look at the big business of owning small businesses and what America’s franchise economy means for its workers.
Walk into a McDonald’s anywhere in the United States, and it will be identical to every other McDonald’s in the country. Yet, that particular store is almost certainly owned and operated by an “independent” franchisee. While McDonald’s presents an image of centralized uniformity to the consumer, it shows a different face to the small business owners operating its stores under its control and the workers preparing its product to its standards. How then does McDonald’s—and its big business peers—manage to be two things at once?
In this revelatory work, economist Brian Callaci shows how franchisors have altered the legal treatment of corporations in their favor through a decades-long crusade of lobbying and litigation. Their efforts subsequently unleashed a slew of legal and economic sins upon the US economy and labor force, allowing multinational corporations to control continent-spanning empires while outsourcing employment and scapegoating legal responsibilities onto small businesses. The result: the unfettered growth of some of America’s most recognizable businesses, at the aggregate expense of America’s workers.
Remarkable in both its scale and synthesis, Callaci’s story is the first chronicle of this business movement—initially resisted by US courts before experiencing a dramatic reversal of fortune after decades of campaigning by some of America’s most established entrepreneurs. An urgent and erudite history, Chains of Command reveals how the US labor market was tamed one small business at a time.
The Lam Family College of Business at San Francisco State University will move into UC Law San Francisco’s Academic Village this July, with classes starting a month later.Craig Lee/The Examiner
San Francisco State University is expanding into a new home in the heart of The City with help from another local institution.
The university’s Lam Family College of Business will relocate from the west side to UC Law San Francisco’s Academic Village on McAllister Street, it announced last week.
The 14-story complex includes retail and academic spaces, as well as housing for nearly 700 graduate students. SFSU will lease 3,200 square feet of teaching and office facilities from UC Law, in addition to sharing classrooms with the school.
The graduate business school will move into its new digs in July and classes for the fall semester begin one month later. In placing students at an urban core comprising San Francisco’s Civic Center, Mid-Market and Tenderloin neighborhoods, school leaders said students will have improved access to internships, networking opportunities and other career advancements.
UC Law’s Academic Village is already home to campuses filled with students, faculty and staff from other Bay Area academic institutions. SFSU will be joining a complex that includes the University of San Francisco and UC Davis, among other members. The facility opened in October 2023.
Lam Family College of Business Dean Eugene Sivadas said the new relationship reflects the institutions’ “shared commitment to The City, student success, access and public impact.” SFSU students in select business programs will be able to use the Academic Village’s classrooms, conference rooms, library and study spaces. They will also be able to use support services for residential life and campus events.
In addition to those amenities, the building comes with lounges, on-site dining and fully-furnished apartment-style living for students and employees. Graduate business students and alumni will be eligible for discounted tuition if they enroll in UC Law’s Master of Legal Studies, a program designed for professions whose work intersects with the law.
Graduate business students will be placed in a collaborative environment where Sivadas said they “can connect their learning directly to real-world opportunities.” SFSU’s new downtown location will put graduate students closer to prospective employers and industry partners, as well as transit systems operated by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency and BART. Sivadas said students are also moving closer to The City’s hub for economic and civic activity.
UCSF aims to address the increasing number of cases of colorectal cancer in young people, which has become the leading cause of cancer death in young people
The Freelon Apartments will have units for low-income individuals and families, while providing residents with programs and services
In a statement, UC Law SF Chancellor and Dean David Faigman said SFSU will be “an excellent addition to our Academic Village.” In collaborating with other academic institutions, Faigman said UC Law has brought “vibrancy and energy to the heart of the city.” The school’s students and associated programs “will benefit from the interdisciplinary opportunities that will arise,” he said of the SFSFU relationship.
While building on its presence in The City, SFSU said the relationship with UC Law will help the university better meet the needs of San Francisco’s evolving workforce. Through internships and other opportunities, students will get hands-on experiences that can possibly shape their professional aspirations, education leaders said. In a statement, SFSU President Lynn Mahoney said the new campus will help “build connections, gain experience and achieve their goals for meaningful careers and upward mobility.”
Located at 198 McAllister St., UC Law San Francisco’s Academic is a 14-story mixed-use complex including retail and academic spaces, as well as housing for nearly 700 graduate students.Courtesy UC Law San Francisco
Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, whose District 5 includes the school, said the downtown campus “is exactly the kind of investment” needed by the Tenderloin, Civic Center and Mid-Market areas.
By bringing students into the neighborhoods and connecting them with local companies, Mahmood said there will also be opportunities to increase foot traffic in the surrounding area, support small businesses and find other creative ways of stimulating economic activity, be that through events or other gatherings.
“This is how we grow an inclusive economy: by expanding access, diversifying opportunity and ensuring the benefits of progress are felt by the communities who live here,” Mahmood said.
As SFSU wraps up the spring semester, Sivadas said he already has an eye on the fall because his school is “excited for students to engage with The City’s energy, innovation, community organizations and with UC Law students.”
A Universal Basic Income (UBI) has long been proposed as a way to cushion the blow of jobs lost to automation. Under that model, everyone receives a modest monthly payment – enough to cover basic needs and prevent extreme poverty.
But Elon Musk has gone further. On April 16, he posted on X:
Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI.
Rather than a subsistence stipend, Universal High Income (UHI) would be a level of income allowing ordinary people to live well in a world where machines do most of the work. Musk has also said that AI and robotics are the only things that can solve the massive U.S. debt crisis.
That sounds promising, but where will the government get the money to pay the UHI? Critics say any government that tried it would go bankrupt. There are also other concerns, which will be addressed in Part 2 of this article. Here we will look at the financial underpinnings: why UHI is even thinkable, why AI forces a reexamination of how money enters the economy, why the current system cannot scale to meet what is coming, and the implicit transition needed to meet that challenge.
Why the Current Money System Cannot Scale
The national debt of the U.S. government just topped $39 trillion. China’s is $18.7 trillion. Japan’s is $8.6 trillion. Those of the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain are each in the multi-trillion-dollar range. Collective global debt now stands at $353 trillion, 305% of the world’s annual economic output. So even if, hypothetically, everything produced in the world in a year were applied toward liquidating the debt, it still would not be enough to pay it all off.
In fact the debt can never be repaid, because of the way money currently enters the system. Nearly all of the money supply today is created by banks when they make loans. Banks do not lend their existing capital. The loan itself creates the money. The bank adds the loan amount to the asset side of its balance sheet and balances that sum with the same amount on the liability side. When the borrower withdraws or transfers the funds, either the bank takes them from its reserves in “vault cash” or the Federal Reserve debits the bank’s digital reserve account at the central bank. But the lending bank typically has funds coming into its reserve account at about the same rate as they are going out, so its reserves are continually replenished. Thus a very small reserve account can support a much larger money creation engine. For decades before the Fed discontinued the reserve requirement in 2020, it hovered at around 10%.
The chief problem with this debt-based system is the interest, which the bank does not create in its original loan. For a typical long-term loan, interest can double the total tab or more. Where is the money to come from to pay this added liability? Across the system as a whole, it must either come from more borrowing or from existing funds. In the case of governments, that means issuing interest-bearing bonds or tapping taxes and other revenues. The interest on the debt compounds, meaning the government is paying interest on interest. This makes the debt increase exponentially, until it is mathematically unsustainable. Then bankruptcies occur, of banks or even whole governments. Booms turn into busts, and the cycle begins again.
Today, interest on the federal debt is the second largest budget line item after Social Security, exceeding $1 trillion. Meanwhile, workers are losing jobs to AI/robotics, shrinking the income tax base. The system is clearly unsustainable.
How to Raise Demand to Scale to the Upcoming Supply
A Universal High Income would replenish the shrinking tax base by replacing the lost wages of unemployed workers. But where will the money come from to pay the UHI? The only sustainable solution is for the government to issue it interest-free. That does not mean through the Federal Reserve, which creates money in the same way banks do: it buys federal interest-bearing securities with accounting entries. The Fed collects the interest, which it is supposed to return to the Treasury after deducting its costs. But since 2008, its costs include paying interest on the reserves of its participating banks, which consumes its profits. (See my earlier article here.)
The only interest-free, debt-free solution that will actually increase the money supply sufficiently to match the projected productivity of AI/robotics is for the money to be issued directly by the Treasury.
This is not a radical new idea. It is authorized in the U.S. Constitution, which provides in Article 1, Sec. 8, that “The Congress shall have Power To … coin Money [and] regulate the Value thereof .…” Abraham Lincoln used government-issued “Greenbacks” to avoid a crippling debt to British-backed bankers. Debt-free government-issued money was also the funding mechanism by which the American colonists succeeded in creating a thriving economy and liberating themselves from the oppressive yoke of the British Empire.
In his 1729 pamphlet “A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency,” Benjamin Franklin argued that a lack of currency was a tax on industrious farmers and producers, and that a reliable, locally issued paper currency was the “oil” for the gears of trade. The “Nature and Necessity” of this currency was to facilitate the movement of goods between neighbors. Franklin observed that the British strategy of keeping the colonies short of cash was a method of economic suppression. By forcing the colonies to use gold and silver, which were constantly drained back to London to pay for imports, the Crown kept the colonies in a state of permanent debt and low productivity. When the money supply matched the productive capacity of the people, universal prosperity resulted without inflation.
This logic evolved into the “American System of Political Economy” championed by Henry Carey, economic advisor to Abraham Lincoln. He wrote:
Two systems are before the world… One looks to pauperism, ignorance, depopulation, and barbarism; the other in increasing wealth, comfort, intelligence, combination of action, and civilization. … One is the English system; the other we may be proud to call the American system, for it is the only one ever devised the tendency of which was that of elevating while equalizing the condition of man throughout the world.
In the context of the 21st century, the “oil” that best lowers the friction of trade is debt-free government-issued money similar to Lincoln’s Greenbacks and colonial scrip. Rather than implementing a radical financial innovation, we would be returning to our roots.
Inflation or Deflation?
The chief objection to the colonies’ paper “scrip” was that they tended to over-print, so that “demand” (money) outstripped supply. Too much money chasing too few goods produced price inflation. But in the 21st century, we will soon have the opposite problem: too little money chasing too many goods. Machines don’t need food, clothing, shelter, transportation, medical treatment or other services. So who will buy those goods and services?
Money needs to be issued to human consumers, and not just to a few wealthy human consumers serving as debt brokers thriving on interest. To create sufficient demand for the voluminous output of AI/robotics, it needs to go to the whole national population, evenly distributed. Not only can UHI work in that sort of abundant supply without producing price inflation; it is actually essential to prevent deflation.
In a conversation on X, Musk wrote:
In a normal economy, issuing more money simply increases the dollar price of the existing output of goods & services, meaning people do NOT get more stuff. If AI/robotics massively increase goods & services output, then you actually MUST issue dollars to people or there will be massive disinflation.
As paraphrased on Yahoo Finance (reposted from Benzinga), Musk wrote that handing out more dollars becomes a problem only when the economy’s supply of goods and services fails to surge alongside the money supply. His claim is that AI and robotics could lift production so sharply that the bigger risk would be falling prices, not rising ones.
But aren’t falling prices a good thing? In this case, no. Prices would be falling due to a lack of demand, meaning producers can’t find customers for their products. They wind up laying off workers and eventually going bankrupt. When spread across the whole economy, the result is a deflationary spiral: prices fall, businesses lose revenue, and the economy contracts, not because production is inadequate but because purchasing power is insufficient. The result is recession or depression. In the Great Depression of the 1930s, food was rotting in the fields while people were starving, because they were out of work and had no money to spend.
Job cuts from AI are already happening. According to the same Benzinga article:
Evidence of near-term strain is showing up in corporate announcements: employers disclosed more than 27,000 job cuts linked to AI in the first quarter of 2026, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The outplacement firm said that figure was up 40% from the same period a year earlier.
Robert Reich reports that wages are around two-thirds of the typical corporation’s total cost, and that in the first four months of 2026, big U.S. corporations cut over 128,000 jobs.
Speaking remotely to the Abundance Summit last week, Musk told XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis that the global economy is on the verge of an explosion so massive it defies historical precedent.
“I’d say the economy is 10 times its current size in 10 years,” Musk said, before quickly clarifying that the growth could be even more explosive. “Greater than,” he added, framing the projected shift in economic output as a “fairly comfortable prediction.” …
Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near, sees AI reaching Artificial General Intelligence (human-level intelligence across virtually all domains) by 2029, and full transformative abundance by 2045.
Other experts question these time projections, but a radical transformation of traditional manufacturing and trade is likely to happen sometime in the reasonably near future. The question is, will the money system transition soon enough to rescue all the laid-off workers from homelessness and famine?
The Sovereign Wealth Fund Alternative
There is another model for distributing the gains of automation, one that can be phased in gradually as the AI workforce expands. It comes from Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. In an ironic twist, Altman and Musk, who jointly founded OpenAI in 2015, are now locked in a high-profile legal battle over whether Altman diverted Musk’s $44 million investment to transform what was conceived as a nonprofit “for the benefit of humanity” into a highly lucrative for-profit enterprise.
That dispute aside, Altman’s alternative model for sharing AI-generated wealth is a national sovereign wealth fund seeded by the profits of AI and robotics. His proposed American Equity Fund would take public stakes in the companies and technologies driving automation, capture a portion of the resulting productivity gains, and distribute them as universal dividends. The Fund would not replace a Universal High Income but would complement it.
This approach has several advantages. It ties payments directly to real output, scales automatically with productivity, and can be introduced gradually, avoiding the shock of issuing large payments before the supply side has fully expanded. It would resemble the Alaska Permanent Fund, which distributes oil revenues to residents, except that here the resource would be the most powerful general-purpose technology since electricity.
Conclusion: A New Monetary Logic for a New Productive Era
For centuries, money has been issued as a claim against the future productivity of human labor, repaid from the income that labor generates. The logic of this debt-based system collapses when machines become the primary producers of goods and services. Then the limiting factor becomes purchasing power — the ability of human beings to access the abundance their own technologies create. That requires a monetary architecture that expands with output rather than debt, and distributes income not through wages alone but through mechanisms tied to the productive capacity of the whole system.
Universal High Income and a sovereign wealth fund are two ways of doing that. One ensures a stable floor of demand; the other ensures that the public shares in the gains of automation. Both would be grounded in real production. But for the public to have access to those gains, the money supply needs to expand in proportion to the expanding pool of goods and services. This can be done by restoring the innovation our forefathers baked into the Constitution: debt-free money issued by the government itself.
How to fund a UHI without triggering inflation or driving the government into bankruptcy is the first objection critics raise, but there are others. They argue that people would stop working or stop learning, that society would collapse into idleness or chaos, that life would lose meaning without jobs, that the government would have the power to control how people spend their money. Will a UHI ring in the promised utopia or lock us into a state-controlled digital prison? Part 2 of this article will address those concerns.
A rendering shows the Fresno Station for the state’s high-speed rail project. It would reconnect downtown and Chinatown via an elevated pedestrian crossing. Image: Courtesy ARUP
A massive headache that awaits California’s next governor, and their successor in either 2031 or 2035, is seeing the state’s long promised and bedeviled high-speed rail project come to fruition. First proposed three decades ago, the initial segment to go into operation is now estimated to open in 2032 at the earliest.
Even then, it will be a shortened route providing service solely in the Central Valley between Merced and Bakersfield. Extensions to Gilroy in the Bay Area and Palmdale north of Los Angeles have a target date of 2038, with costs estimated between $87 to $91 billion depending on if the Merced station is included or not.
Eventually, the system is supposed to run from San Francisco and Sacramento in Northern California all the way south to Anaheim near the Disneyland resort and San Diego. The Bay Area terminus has long been planned to be inside the Salesforce Transit Center, which will require burrowing a tunnel through San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood in order to get trains to the downtown transportation hub.
When he first took office in 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom scaled back funding for the project, which led to the focus being on the 171 miles currently under design and construction in the Central Valley. Earlier this year he heralded it generating 16,400 well paid jobs, 70% of which went to local residents.
Of the 494-mile San Francisco to Los Angeles/Anaheim segment, 463 miles are now fully environmentally cleared and construction-ready. State leaders have also committed $1 billion from California’s Cap-and-Invest program to the high-speed rail project through 2045.
“California is building the nation’s first high-speed rail system, and we’re proving it can be done. We’re laying the foundation for cleaner, faster, and more connected transportation while investing in communities and creating good-paying jobs. California isn’t waiting for the future. We’re building it,” Newsom had touted in February.
Nonetheless, concerns about the state’s ability to complete the project remain. A report in March from the Legislative Analyst’s Office flagged that “staying on budget may be difficult, particularly given the history of the project, its size and complexity, uncertainty regarding federal tariffs and other policies, and the relatively small contingency amount assumed in the project budget.”
The project has long garnered support from LGBTQ transit officials, elected leaders, and those supportive of public transportation. Among them is lesbian Fresno City Councilmember Annalisa Perea, whose city is set to have a high-speed rail station.
“I am a big supporter of the California high speed rail project,” Perea, now running for a state Assembly seat this year, told the Bay Area Reporter last summer.
Friday Newsom named his former chief of staff when he was San Francisco’s mayor, Steve Kawa, a gay man who now lives in Cloverdale, to the California High Speed Rail Authority Board of Directors. He also named to the oversight body for the authority San Francisco resident Jason Elliott, another chief of staff to several of the city’s mayors who served as Newsom’s deputy chief of staff in his gubernatorial office.
As part of its questionnaire the B.A.R. sent the candidates running to succeed Newsom, as the Democratic leader is termed out come early 2027, one question inquired if they would support the high-speed rail project. Among the remaining Democratic contenders in the race who returned it, former congressmember Katie Porter of Orange County and San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan both told the B.A.R. it is too late for the Golden State to abandon it.
“I’ve always said: I’d like to spend more time riding high speed rail than building it. I am going to take a fresh look at this project when I become governor and figure out what the pathway forward is,” replied Porter. “I am going to push hard to get it done, but I also understand the reality that the project is over budget and behind schedule. Without support from the federal government, we need to explore new funding sources to support the project.”
She added that, “I’m encouraged by other developments in the state, like the Brightline high speed rail project in Southern California. We should be looking at other partnerships, financing opportunities, and innovative ways to deliver high speed rail to all of our cities and residents.” (That privately managed project aims to build a 218-mile passenger rail service between Las Vegas and Rancho Cucamonga, California.)
Mahan told the B.A.R. that, “High speed rail is an example of everything that has gone wrong when it comes to building in California. It has taken too long, cost too much, and frankly we are right to not trust that this will ever get done using the current plan. But the answer isn’t to walk away – it’s to make it work. We have to start treating it like a delivery project. That means better governance and planning, tighter oversight, cost discipline, and creating realistic benchmarks so we can show that we are actually able to finish what we start before asking taxpayers to commit more resources.”
The other top two polling Democrats in the race have voiced support for the project. At a gubernatorial debate hosted by two California Fox affiliates earlier this year, former congressman and state attorney general Xavier Becerra noted, “Japan has it. Europe has it. China has it. We’re going to have it too. We’re just going to do it smart. We’re not going to have these cost overruns. And we’re going to make sure it runs efficiently because Californians need to have access to high-speed rail.”
Billionaire-turned-politico Tom Steyer replied, “Who isn’t for high-speed public transportation? But we can’t pay any price for it.”
The lone Republican at the event, former Fox News host Steve Hilton, denounced the project. “They’re not even talking about completing it for another decade or so. No of course not. We can’t send good after bad. We have to invest that money in real things that help families,” he said.
Fellow GOP candidate Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco also opposes the project. In a Facebook post last June he criticized it for being “years behind schedule and tens of billions over budget – all for a train nobody will ever ride. Instead of wasting even more of your money on this, let’s spend infrastructure dollars on things we actually need more of – like water storage!”
Lt. gov contenders vow support No matter if Newsom’s successor serves one four-year term or eight years as governor before being termed out themselves, the high-speed rail project will be a concern for the leader of the Golden States for decades to come. With the state’s lieutenant governor positioned to launch a gubernatorial campaign of their own, the B.A.R. also asked the 2026 candidates seeking the top two elected statewide position where they stand on high-speed rail.
(The Democratic incumbent, Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis, is term-limited from running again this year. She had launched a bid to become governor but then pivoted to run for election as the next state treasurer.)
Two of the Democrats in the race returned the B.A.R.’s questionnaire. Gay former Sausalito city councilmember Janelle Kellman supports high-speed rail but cautioned “we need to get disciplined about delivery, governance, and value. California needs modern, low-carbon mobility, and high-speed rail can be part of that future. But the project must be managed as a major public works program: clear milestones, credible cost control, practical timelines and accountability for service providers.”
In light of the Trump administration clawing back more than $4 billion in federal funding for it, Kellman called for “a diversified strategy” when it comes to funding high-speed rail.
The state still needs to “aggressively compete for federal infrastructure dollars where available and keep applying for grants even if prior funding was pulled,” replied Kellman, adding it also needs to “protect and optimize existing dedicated state funding streams (including climate-related transportation funds where legally appropriate).”
She also plugged “value capture and station-area development partnerships so that communities that benefit can help fund delivery,” in addition to “private capital participation only where risk is appropriately allocated and governance is transparent.”
Former Stockton mayor Michael Tubbs, who went on to advise Newsom on poverty issues, told the B.A.R. that having high-speed rail connecting California’s different regions “would bolster the economy and uplift communities. Much like with the billionaire’s tax and how we find funds to address the housing crisis, we need to find creative ways to raise revenue––whether through closing things like the ‘Walmart loophole’ or split-roll proposals like Prop 15.”
He was referring to the one-time 5% billionaires’ tax being eyed for the November 3 statewide ballot and how large corporations cut their employees’ wages and hours so they are not required to pay for their health care as mandated by the federal Affordable Care Act. Proposition 15 was a failed 2020 statewide ballot measure that would have taxed commercial or industrial properties based on their current market value rather than their purchase price.
“From the Lt. Governor’s office, I’m most interested in exploring how we can use land leasing on public lands to unlock revenue for the state while also building much needed affordable housing,” Tubbs added.
There are birthday parties, and then there are gatherings that feel more like living history, where music, activism, and decades of cultural memory converge into something larger than a celebration.
The event doubles as a benefit for the Seva Foundation, the global nonprofit co-founded by Ram Dass, Larry Brilliant, and Gravy himself. Their mission is simple: restore sight and prevent blindness for millions around the world.
The results speak volumes—more than 75 million people have had their sight restored or protected through Seva’s programs. Cataract surgery, one of the most common procedures they support, costs about $50 and takes roughly 15 minutes, meaning that proceeds from each ticket (starting at $47 plus fees) contribute directly to life-changing care.
For performers like Maria Muldaur, the night is not just about honoring a friend, it’s about tracing a shared history that stretches back to the roots of American counterculture. “I’ve known Wavy Gravy since way before he was Wavy Gravy,” Muldaur says.
Her memories drift back to the Beatnik scene in New York’s Greenwich Village, where poetry and music spilled out of small coffeehouses and into the streets.
“There were a lot of little funky hole-in-the-wall coffee houses where there were a lot of Beat poets reciting poetry, and sometimes guys playing jazz and so forth,” says the singer. “So I would sneak out and go down to hear people like Allen Ginsberg and all the other Beat poets of the day. One of my favorites was a guy named Hugh Romney.”
Long before the name Wavy Gravy became synonymous with a certain kind of joyful activism, Romney was already carving out a presence that blended humor and insight. “Romney had a really droll, tongue-in-cheek quality that really appealed to me,” Muldaur says.
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As the ‘60s unfolded, Romney’s transformation mirrored that of the culture itself. The sharp-suited Beat poet evolved into a tie-dyed prankster, joining forces with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and becoming a central figure in a movement that sought to upend norms through humor, psychedelia, and radical empathy. Thus was Wavy Gravy born.
Ram Dass, Robin Williams, Wavy Gravy. Photo by Peter Simon
“Everybody knows his history and the psychedelic epiphany that turned him into the cultural icon that he’s become,” says Muldaur. “He has devoted his life to bringing light, laughter, and good spirits into whatever proceedings were going on. He was always a force for good.”
The event lineup itself reflects decades of musical history, bringing together artists like Muldaur, Cat Power, Todd Rundgren, Harper Simon, and many others for a rare night of collaboration.
Behind them, a house band anchored by Larry Campbell and Tony Garnier, longtime members of Bob Dylan’s circle, connects the present to a lineage that includes Jackson Browne, Willie Nelson, and Mavis Staples.
For Muldaur, the Bay Area has long been central to the universal story of music and transformation. “Ah, it was love, love, love,” she says when asked what brought her there.
In the mid-‘70s, as her signature track, “Midnight at the Oasis,” climbed the charts, she fell in love with bassist John Kahn, a key figure in Jerry Garcia’s extended musical family. Moving to Mill Valley with her daughter, Jenni, to be with Kahn, she quickly became enamored with the area.
“I’m in love with Mill Valley and the whole Bay Area,” she says. “I never looked back.”
Maria Muldaur
The move placed her at the heart of a musical community that blurred the lines between performance and spiritual experience, particularly during her time with the Jerry Garcia Band.
“Jerry didn’t just play guitar, he conjured up a spirit that was very infectious,” says Muldaur. “It was something else that he was pulling in and channeling… like being part of something as Jerry built a staircase to heaven.” The performances embodied a shared transcendence. “At a certain moment, the whole crowd would erupt into a wave of joy and ecstasy,” Muldaur adds. “It was a very communal moment.”
A sense of connection extended beyond the stage. Muldaur recalls a Thanksgiving night spent waiting in line to see Close Encounters of the Third Kind, when Garcia’s presence drew recognition rather than chaos. “He was this humble, normal guy who didn’t put up a vibe of armor,” says Muldaur. “When fans approached him, he just said, ‘Yeah, man, I hear it’s a great flick.’”
By refusing to separate himself from others, Garcia created a space where respect replaced frenzy, a dynamic that echoes in Gravy’s own approach to life and activism.
Even now, decades into her career, Muldaur remains in motion, recently completing her 44th album and continuing to perform widely. “For an 83-year-old gal, I’m still chugging along,” she says with a laugh.
Yet the upcoming celebration holds a particular resonance. “We all love Wavy, and we’re going to give him the best birthday party he’s ever had,” says Muldaur.
Her admiration extends beyond friendship into something deeper—a recognition of the values that have guided his gentle, humorous style and his work with the Seva Foundation.
In a time she describes as dark, the opportunity to gather, sing, and contribute feels especially urgent. “Just by coming to the party and enjoying the music, you are contributing to a good cause,” Muldaur says.
Harper Simon
For singer-songwriter Harper Simon, the event represents both continuity and renewal. “Wavy is a great American, and Seva is such a heroic foundation,” Simon says. “I’ve always been really impressed by Seva. I was very pleased they asked me to do this big show for his birthday.”
His connection to Gravy stretches back to his teenage years, after the two met at a benefit. “He’s been calling me and checking up on me for years,” says Simon. “I’d visit him whenever I traveled through San Francisco. We’ve always kept in touch.”
That enduring relationship has carried into Simon’s role in shaping the event, helping bring together artists, including acts like The Moldy Peaches, whom he regards as very much in the spirit of Gravy.
Simon acknowledges that, for the most part, the cultural landscape has shifted significantly since the height of the counterculture era that Gravy helped define. “In the ’60s and ’70s, counterculture dominated mainstream culture,” Simon says. “That’s not the case today; it’s more niche. But it’s still alive and vibrant.”
Its endurance, he suggests, lies in its adaptability—in the continued use of humor and absurdity as tools for serious engagement. “You could even point to someone like Sacha Baron Cohen as part of that lineage that Wavy trailblazed,” says Simon.
Both Muldaur and Simon—who recently executive-produced the Pavements mockumentary and is currently working on new music—return to the idea that this event is about more than performance. It’s about the shared experience of participating in something that affirms connection and purpose.
Wavy Gravy with Jackson Browne
“A sense that the values we held so dear still matter,” Muldaur says when asked what she hopes audiences will take away. “People need to feel that sense of community, to get together, know they’re not the only ones feeling these things, and give each other hope and encouragement.”
Simon echoes that sentiment, emphasizing both the emotional and tangible impact of participation. “They should feel good about supporting Seva,” he says. “They should also feel warmly toward the cultural achievements of that generation and recognize how much we’re indebted to them.”
Perhaps the most fitting image of Gravy at 90 comes not from a stage or a spotlight, but from a moment Muldaur describes with quiet affection.
“He has one of those chair lifts that comes down the banister,” she says. “The last time we visited, we heard him going ‘Whee!’ all the way down the stairs, like a kid.”
It’s a small detail, but it illuminates his refusal to let age or circumstance diminish joy. Even as a nonagenarian, he meets life with laughter—not as an escape, but as a form of resilience.
WAVY GRAVY’S 90TH BIRTHDAY: A BENEFIT FOR SEVA Sat/16. The Masonic, SF. Tickets and more info here. VIP ticket info here.
Joshua Rotter is a contributing writer for 48 Hills. He’s also written for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, SF Weekly, SF Examiner, SF Chronicle, and CNET.
Saikat Chakrabarti, Scott Wiener, and Connie Chan at the San Francisco Congressional District 11 candidate forum in January 2026. Credit: Scott Strazzante/San Francisco Chronicle via AP Photo
SAN FRANCISCO – At a coffee shop in the Castro District on a gray Saturday, state Sen. Scott Wiener ran through a list of elected officials who came from this city’s often-cutthroat political scene. “Nancy Pelosi, Phil Burton, Jackie Speier, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, Willie Brown … Jerry Brown too,” he says. “The politics here are intense and brutal at times, and so San Francisco is an amazing training ground to do hardball politics, and San Franciscans demand that their elected leaders fight hard and deliver.”
Wiener wants to follow in that tradition by winning California’s 11th Congressional District, which is almost entirely composed of San Francisco, and filling the seat Pelosi is vacating after nearly 40 years. The race to replace her has been as ruthless as you might expect. But on a visit to the city where I met with all three major candidates, I found some key departures from the national narrative.
For example, Wiener’s work on housing legislation in California has won support from the abundance faction that is often at odds with progressives focused on the relentless influence of corporate power. But Wiener is also carrying one of the main bills in the state legislature this year to prevent anticompetitive conduct from Big Tech, passed legislation in 2024 to crack down on pharmacy benefit manager middlemen, and endorsed a bipartisan housing bill that some abundance types have opposed. He even expressed discomfort with investor purchases of housing. “The more we move toward mass mega-ownership, you really do get into situations where you have Wall Street pressures that end up screwing renters,” Wiener says. “The humanity is immediately stripped out.”
Most national commentary on the 11-candidate field has focused on Wiener and Saikat Chakrabarti, the progressive co-founder of Justice Democrats who wants to generate a bottom-up political revolution among a restless population dissatisfied with the status quo. Yet Connie Chan, a San Francisco county supervisor, has picked up many of the state and local endorsements you would expect from a progressive leader: the California Teachers Association, National Nurses United, the state Working Families Party, the San Francisco Labor Council, the California Federation of Labor Unions, and the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club. She believes her focus on bread-and-butter issues and support among the city’s large Asian American population can pay off.
And while the race has been described as a test between experience and rhetoric, between work horses and show horses, another factor is the obvious but too often overlooked question of Big Money. Wiener has a cryptocurrency mogul running a super PAC on his behalf, and Chakrabarti is drawing on his own fortune gained from being an early-career employee at Stripe. Sometimes in a brawl between two flavors of Big Money a less-tainted challenger can sneak through.
Two of these three will almost certainly make the November runoff, so even the idea that the June primary will settle the matter is misguided: The discourse will carry on for months. But in this race we do see a microcosm of a party that’s thinking about offering something new to voters, delivering on promises, standing up for working people, and figuring out what to do about the control of politics by those with wealth and power.
I crisscrossed the city in one weekend day to talk to each candidate and see what they’re emphasizing in their campaigns.
The Working-Class Tribune
I started my day in the Richmond District, where I lived for a few years during the first dot-com boom in the late 1990s. Then as now, the neighborhood was dominated by Asian markets and independent shops, with a heavily immigrant population. It’s a little more conservative than the rest of the city but also far more modest in income compared to elite enclaves like Seacliff to its north. That morning, I picked up a dim sum breakfast of sesame balls with red bean paste for three dollars.
Off a tree-lined street, Connie Chan’s campaign was gathering in a playground for a lit drop with the local Building Trades union. “She’s the choice of labor in San Francisco,” one of the union members, a retired trucker named Art, told me.
Chan was born in Hong Kong and settled in Chinatown with her single mom and younger brother when she was 13. At the time, she spoke no English. But she picked it up quickly, and after college she worked at community groups around the city and volunteered teaching Chinese. She entered politics as a legislative aide for a local supervisor and held numerous city jobs, including under then-District Attorney Kamala Harris. This is her second term as a county supervisor, serving as Budget Committee chair and on three other local commissions.
Credit: David Dayen
Despite running a distant third in most recent publicpolls of the race, Chan’s campaign has an answer to that: the poll excluded monolingual Chinese speakers, who are numerous in the Richmond District and across San Francisco. The campaign sees those voters as their base. A San Francisco Chronicle poll has Chan basically tied with Chakrabarti for second; with the top-two format, that would be all it would take to get her into the general election and a one-on-one matchup with Wiener.
As union members picked up their lit, Chan bounded up to the table. It was the first of three stops for her on the day. She chatted up the crowd, including an Asian couple who brought their teenage son to canvas on his birthday. “That’s just what you want to do today, right?” Chan teased.
“I know this is a congressional race but fundamentally this is a San Francisco race,” she told me earlier in an interview. “You do see someone like me, who does not come from money, have the backing of workers and unions and is able to win.”
Throughout our conversations, Chan constantly steered the conversation toward topics that would be considered hyper-local: whether to allow cashless stores, a years-long controversy about a park abutting the ocean that closed a portion of the Great Highway and led to a supervisor recall, or the Alexandria Theater at 20th and Geary, a now-empty former movie palace that Chan worked to convert into a mixed-use apartment complex. She says voters are focused on three questions: “How can we afford life, how can we stay in San Francisco, and will we have democracy tomorrow?”
At the canvass kickoff, Chan and I talked about what she called an “illegal” war with Iran, how the war and its effect on supply chains have put pressure on local small business, and her policies on artificial intelligence (“I have two guiding principles: safety and not displacing the workforce”). As Budget chair, she created a $400 million reserve fund to backfill federal cuts to essential benefits, and a separate fund for immigrant legal services. In Congress, she wants to focus on financing affordable housing, lowering costs of health care and education with free city college as a model, and finding a path to citizenship for immigrants.
She also related the dynamics in San Francisco to the rising oligarchy we see across the country. “There’s the PayPal mafia,” she said, referring to a group of expats from the early days of the payment processing company that included Elon Musk, David Sacks, and Peter Thiel. “Their chant is ‘Move fast and break things.’ They look at San Francisco and think, ‘How do we break you, the working people?’”
Some see Chan as the more authentic voice of the city’s left in the race. (She also has mainstream support; Pelosi hasn’t endorsed, but Sen. Adam Schiff, a key Pelosi ally, has endorsed her.) But getting that message out takes money. As of the most recent campaign finance disclosures, she is lagging far behind her opponents in fundraising. And while labor and the Asian vote are strong factions, they are only fragments of the electorate. Can she succeed?
“Only in San Francisco, someone like me can run for Congress,” she insisted. “We ran in 2020 and 2024 and won both times, running against candidates supported by billionaires and their PACs. I have that same optimism and attitude.”
At the kickoff, she put it more clearly to the crowd. “When you send Connie Chan to Congress, you are sending all working people.”
The Man Who Gets Things Done
Wiener, meanwhile, is 6 foot, 7 inches (a fact he used in his introductory ad in this campaign) and was easy to spot getting his coffee and breakfast in a café near the legendary Castro Theater. He has lived in San Francisco for almost 30 years, or what some locals would call a transplant. He worked for several LGBTQ and Democratic organizations, including the critical San Francisco County Central Committee, before being elected to the Board of Supervisors and then the state Senate.
When running for the legislature, Wiener was told that Sacramento is a place where good ideas go to die. “I said, ‘I’m going to prove you wrong,’ and I did,” he says. “I passed over 100 laws, including some blockbusters, and I’ve defeated some of the most powerful corporations on the planet. Sometimes they defeated me … [but] when you were defeated, you went back.”
Scott Wiener at the 2026 California Democratic Party State Convention in San Francisco in February 2026. Credit: Jeff Chiu/AP Photo
This is Wiener’s value proposition: he’s persistent and creative enough to break through dysfunctional policymaking bodies and make progress. For a Congress that seems like it can’t tie its own shoes at times, that’s a selling point. Yet some of the fights he’s mounted have not endeared him to critics in the crucible of San Francisco politics. And Wiener leans into that. “I’m not one of those politicians that feels the need to be loved by everyone,” he says bluntly.
Wiener’s most high-profile controversies have been on housing, where he has strived to increase supply, antagonizing resistant cities and those who see it as disproportionately deregulatory. There are deregulatory lines that he won’t cross, however. “I don’t want to see a situation where private equity is owning a huge piece of single-family homes in this country,” he said, while endorsing the stalled bipartisan federal housing bill that some in his ideological camp have condemned for forcing investor sales of so-called “build to rent” properties after seven years. While he thinks rental stock of all kinds is important, the benefits of the bill, like not requiring manufactured homes to have a chassis, matter more, he said. Wiener added that junk fees in housing were a problem requiring regulation, and it is worsened when Wall Street-aligned landlords prioritize returns for shareholders over tenants.
Much of Wiener’s legislative record has been mainstream progressive stuff: public transit funding, criminal justice reform, public health access, immigration protections, phase-out of single-use plastics, child care expansion, caps on out-of-pocket costs for insulin, bans on surprise ER billing, and a number of LGBT rights bills. He wrote the law requiring federal officers like ICE operating in the state to remove masks. When a judge tossed it out because it didn’t also apply to state officials at the request of Gov. Gavin Newsom, Wiener reintroduced it with the state ban.
He has a similar agenda for Washington and would likely be an active lawmaker with his hands in a lot of projects. He expressed to me the need to expand the Supreme Court to ensure that those laws, and other vital needs like campaign finance reform, would not be overturned. But being a progressive in America is not the same as being a progressive in San Francisco, where Wiener has faced criticism on a variety of fronts.
After local pressure, Wiener became one of the first Jewish elected officials to call the situation in Gaza a genocide, something that led him to step down from chairing a legislative Jewish caucus. He told me he would have voted with 40 senators to block arms shipments to Israel, and that he opposes offensive weapons sales to the country; he would allow defensive weapons but Israel would have to buy them, without the use of taxpayer dollars. “It pains me to say that,” he said. “Israel is home to half of all Jews on the planet. It matters to Jews globally. And the Israeli government is an abomination, and it has been for a long time, and it has fueled instability in the region. It is making Israelis less safe.”
Closer to home, Wiener has been enmeshed in a number of controversies involving big money. Labor union SEIU un-endorsed him for his opposition to a local measure on the ballot in June called the “Overpaid CEO Tax,” which would increase taxes on businesses whose CEO is paid more than 100 times the median earnings for their employees. SEIU threw their endorsement to Chan. Wiener has also said he opposes SEIU’s statewide billionaire wealth tax, which will be on the November ballot, arguing that a one-time tax for an ongoing budget hole (in this case created by Trump administration cuts to Medicaid) isn’t practical. He has elsewhere endorsed taxing the rich by reversing the Bush and Trump tax cuts.
Wiener has billionaires in his corner, including Trump donors. Chris Larsen, CEO of blockchain company Ripple (a major Trump inauguration donor), has given $100,000 to an outside Super PAC called Abundant Future, which has thus far spent about a half-million dollars attacking Chakrabarti. Y Combinator’s Garry Tan is also a donor to that PAC. Chakrabarti has also highlighted dozens of corporate PACs who have donated to Wiener over his state legislative career. (None of them have given to his congressional campaign, where Wiener is rejecting corporate PAC money. And some have criticized Chakrabarti for supporting tech-friendly moderates in San Francisco before running for office.)
In response, Wiener said that Chakrabarti listed about 30 corporate donations out of his 10,000 donors across campaigns in the last decade-plus. “You can go around when you have no track record and cherry-pick donations,” he said. “My lifetime [Chamber of Commerce] score is 16 percent. My lifetime California Labor Fed score is 97 percent. My League of Conservation Voters score is 97-98 percent. I have one of the most pro-labor, pro-environment, pro-consumer records in the entire legislature.”
“I have gone to war repeatedly with Big Tech,” he added. “I’ve gone to war with Big Oil repeatedly, I’ve beat them and they’ve beat me sometimes. I’ve gone to war with the health insurance industry, with the [pharmacy benefit managers]. I passed net neutrality law, that was war with the telecoms and the cable companies. And so my voting record and the work I’ve done, I stick up for people over some of the most powerful corporations in the history of the world.”
Even critics of Wiener would consider him relentless, and his theory of the case is that Democrats win by providing tangible results for families. “This has been brewing for decades, where the federal government has told the middle class and working class to go screw themselves,” he said. “There’s a handful of policies that if we enacted them the way that they should be enacted, people’s lives would be so much better … Democrats need to focus on rapidly delivering.”
The Revolutionary
Bernal Heights is at the southern end of San Francisco, and from the top of the lovely circular park you could look down on practically the entire city and the bay. About 45 volunteers had shown up here to canvas for Chakrabarti, and they were far younger than Connie Chan’s group of union members. By this point in the campaign a couple weeks ago, Chakrabarti volunteers had already knocked on 364,000 doors and talked to 128,000 voters.
Credit: David Dayen
“There are two futures: one where corporations own it all, and one where the people rule,” Chakrabarti told the crowd. “This work you’re doing is what makes our vision possible.”
A native Texan who has been in and out of San Francisco since 2009, Chakrabarti left Stripe and joined the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016. He later founded Justice Democrats and joined the organization’s most successful recruit in 2018, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), as her chief of staff. That was a quick and turbulent tenure, and some have characterized AOC’s lack of an endorsement in the race as a signal that he was in fact fired. But he continued on devising a progressive agenda, founding a nonprofit called New Consensus that advocates for strong industrial policy and a clean energy transition.
“For decades now, we basically have had this ideology running the country, where profit alone drives the economy, and we can’t do anything about that,” he told me on the sidelines of the canvassing kickoff. “People keep voting for anybody running on sweeping economic change. They just know this is not cutting it. We need something dramatically different.”
Like everyone in the race, Chakrabarti wants to ameliorate the cost-of-living crisis and tackle official corruption in Washington and in campaigns. “They are just trying to buy votes to run our government,” he said of super PACs attacking him. But his campaign is largely powered by his fortune made as a tech engineer. About 93 percent of his $5 million campaign haul is self-funded. Wiener in our discussion emphasized that a public financing system for elections should include limits or bans on self-funding.
“I mean, it’s really a terrible system right now, right?” responded Chakrabarti, who mentioned that he has more individual small-dollar donors on his campaign, about 10,000, than all his opponents combined. “I could either do the thing Scott Wiener’s doing and spend a lot of time calling big donors for money, and frankly, they wouldn’t donate to me because my politics is one of going in there and taxing them and changing the party. Or I can put my own money in, and then I do have the freedom to do things like talk about controlling AI and taking on the crypto industry.” He said that he endorses full public financing of elections.
On the issues, Chakrabarti has focused on breaking the bipartisan foreign policy consensus, where presidents of both parties expand the military budget, project power, and inspire hatred, while Congress walks away from its responsibilities to manage war powers and rein in runaway appropriations. He wants to repurpose military assets like the Army Corps of Engineers to build domestic capacity. And he wants to end multinational exploitation of just-in-time logistics to hollow out our industrial base. He has a new AI policy that imagines a public option for the technology (one poised to buy out other assets in the event of a bubble collapse) to ensure that gains are distributed broadly, including from a wealth-sharing fund. The last one has earned him super PAC opposition from interests tied to AI.
Chakrabarti has been criticized for having only scant legislative experience and no record of achievement. But he addressed what is often a blind spot for candidates for office, the implementation part of governing, and the planning institutions (like public banks) necessary to make policy work.
He also cited his ability to build bottom-up movements that have pressured politicians on subjects like Gaza and universal health care. “A lot of these politicians are worried about primaries popping up that are going to challenge them,” he said. “At the beginning of Justice Democrats, it was like fewer than 60 people co-sponsoring Medicare for All. And we started a project to say we’re going to primary anyone who doesn’t support this. And we got it up to over 100. Threatening political power does change the political landscape faster than anything else.”
That challenge to the Democratic establishment underscores everything Chakrabarti is doing. He sees a path for mass mobilization of public resources and a mission-driven politics, similar to the New Deal in the U.S. or Asian economic development in the 1970s. It requires, in his view, use of new communication tools, leadership driving the mission, and institutions to coordinate it. And he sounded very much like Wiener in terms of the focus on delivering: “When you get the country into that mission, when you get at least half the country bought into this larger vision of where you’re going, you then have to do things that are showing daily progress.”
Hasan Piker’s new favorite candidate was gaining surprising traction challenging self-described ‘Ron DeSantis Democrat’ Jared Moskowitz. Then DeSantis vaporized the district.
Democratic Majority for Israel hastily got out of the Second District race after realizing the beneficiary of its spending had disavowed the group. It’s back under a different name.
As Gov. Janet Mills recovers from her anemic Senate bid, she’ll have to decide how to handle Graham Platner, the all-but-voter-anointed Democratic nominee.
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David Dayen is the executive editor of The American Prospect. He is the author of Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power and Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud. He co-hosts the podcast Organized Money with Matt Stoller. He can be reached on Signal at ddayen.90. More by David Dayen
(L-R) Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein, and musician Michael Bolton pose for a portrait during a party at the Mar-a-Lago club, Palm Beach, Florida, February 12, 2000. Photo by Davidoff Studios/Getty Images
The press conference for Epstein survivors we covered earlier this year felt claustrophobic.
It was the afternoon before President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address in February. The women who had suffered at the hands of the world’s most infamous predator were crammed into a small meeting room in the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, DC.
They had gathered to demand acknowledgement that evening from both Congress and the President. The venue was so tiny, there was barely room for the survivors to gather around the podium.
The assemblage stood in stark contrast to what we found in the emails we had been poring over after the Justice Department released an often-opaque database of documents gathered during several investigations of the historic sex predator.
Based on what we’ve read, Epstein and his associates inhabited a world of material and social abundance. They weren’t constrained or forced to plead for anything. Their lives were full of easily obtained wealth, which afforded plenty of space to commit crimes.
This contrast reveals what this scandal is ultimately about: not just one man’s crimes, but the unimaginable inequality that made asking for tens of millions of dollars as easy as writing a poorly worded email. In fact, all Epstein had to do to enrich himself was to ask.
Consider what Epstein sent to media mogul Mortimer Zuckerman in July of 2014:
I’m happy to hear from you, happy to see your stock at the 120 level. an increase in over 100
million in new net worth in only a few months. (how long did it take for the first 100?) I
assume, by your email, that as I predicted, you have not found a solution to your very complex
problem that meets all of your needs. I’m really sorry. I cherish our friendship and I know the
feeling is mutual. That being said, we have been down this road many times before.
Here Epstein is flattering Zuckerman, extolling his apparent exponential increase in net worth as the result of an exuberant stock market. A few sentences later, he proposes a cut for himself to manage the newly appreciated riches. A whopping $40 million.
my fee has always been and will continue to be 40 million dollars. payable up front now. and refunded in part, if unsuccessful. As you recall, I have already found hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars of issues, charity clauses etc. as per our past emails. You have in the past, in your words been unable emotionally to come to grips with paying large fees. I respect that view as I respect you. If you still have hesitations lets not even begin again…
The request is rendered in a dense, grammatically erratic block of text—no detailed explanation, no detailed justification for the fee. It’s an amazingly casual request, given the amount of money at stake.
Zuckerman didn’t take the bait. But the exchange is par for the course in a world where the top 1 percent’s share of wealth continues to grow without limit.
In the early 2010s, Epstein persuaded private equity magnate Leon Black to hire him to manage his so-called “family office” ironically called Elysium, the Greek utopian afterlife where the heroic and righteous spend eternity. Family offices are employed by the ultra-wealthy to manage their fortunes in lieu of an independent investment firm. Here is Epstein’s pitch for a $15 million fee to run it:
you said, i have no trouble paying you for value. I am glad. I am glad you say that but it appears when the time comes you change your mind. you take a 600 million dollar tax savings 1.5 billion dollar Deduction and pay less than 15 m
And later, pushing Black for more:
i asked about the large transaction and the past year and he said he had relied on you to tell him the 20m for the 600 million benefit was the right number
Again, Epstein proposes a stunning sum with no accounting of services rendered.
It was a pattern of casual requests that caught the attention of the Senate Finance Committee. In a letter to the executors of Epstein’s estate in 2023, Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-OR) asked for more details on why extracting huge sums from Black was so uncomplicated.
“The Committee also requested an explanation of how compensation amounts for Epstein were decided in payments made on an ad hoc basis where no formal services agreement was negotiated,” wrote ranking member Wyden.
The cost of idle wealth
But the emails reveal something else beyond the fluid mechanics of fee extraction. They also document what extreme wealth actually purchases: time, immunity, and the operational freedom to commit crimes on an industrial scale.
This is why a significant number of the emails we reviewed have nothing to do with finance at all. They concern logistics—the movement of private planes between New Mexico and Paris, the scheduling of lunches with billionaires, the maintenance of a network of apartments used to house young women. Cash transfers to unnamed recipients abroad in need of visas and airfare. The mundane administration of a trafficking operation, rendered in the same casual shorthand as a request for $40 million.
From: Jeffrey Epstein<jeevacation@gmail.com> On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 8:21 AM
“And tomorrow I’m organizing a dinner for some new russian girls there.. See you at 10 with…”
On Dec 30, 2010, at 3:27 PM, visas@rnto.org wrote: to: Jeffrey Epstein
Hi
The quickest official turnaround time with the Russian Consulate is 3 business days. We can do it sooner using our personal connections. The charge will be as follows if you decide to do that:
1. Same-day service $1000.
2. Next-day service $600.
3. 2-day service $500
4. 3-day (regular) service $320.
Let me know your decision.
Thank you.
Visa section
Russian National Group
From: Redacted
To: Jeffrey Epstein <jeevacation@gmail.com>
Sent: Sun 8/5/2012 11:25:41 PM
“I have 2 russian girls for you to meet, one 21, another 24. One skinny, another curvy and supercute… Both exited. Let me know whe” [sic]”
No investment memos. No PowerPoint decks. No evidence of the financial genius his associates later claimed.
That absence is significant. When wealth is concentrated enough, it doesn’t require justification or effort—and apparently, neither do the crimes it enables.
Investigators in Palm Beach, where the Epstein saga first catalyzed, determined he had three encounters per day with underage girls. That process included managing a household staff, authorizing cash withdrawals, and coercing victims to recruit more victims.
We asked Danielle Bensky, a survivor who was lured by Epstein with promises to help her mother who was suffering from brain cancer. She told us the emails revealed the potency of Epstein’s power, which she had not fully grasped until the documents were released.
“He had incredible power,” she said shortly after a roundtable discussion on Capitol HIll with other survivors and Congressman Ro Khanna (CA-17).
“It was always in the background, but we never saw it written in black and white. And to see in those emails how deep the power goes, I think it explains a lot.”
That’s the key point. A society that affords a single man the excessive power, wealth, and spare time to rape children is clearly incapable of conveying economic fairness to the rest of us.
That’s why the Epstein scandal won’t die, even if Epstein did. We are all still living in the world that made him possible. The emails reveal how it was constructed at our expense.
Senior Investigative Reporter & Capitol Hill Correspondent Stephen Janis is an award-winning investigative journalist, author, and documentary filmmaker whose work has shaped accountability journalism in Baltimore and beyond. As a Capitol Hill Correspondent and senior reporter at The Real News Network, he continues to uncover the systems behind inequality, corruption, and power while turning complex investigations into stories that inspire reform and public engagement.
Congress is back in session TOMORROW, so we need you to call your Republican senator(s) and Republican representative TODAY to demand they reject $70 billion in funding for ICE and Border Patrol. Republicans officially unveiled their reconciliation bill last Monday, which includes these slush funds for Trump’s mass deportation machine and $1 billion for his gaudy ballroom. Some Republicans are already wavering, so let’s keep up the pressure.
Phonebank for Jasmine Clark, Indivisible’s endorsed candidate for Congress in GA-13 on Wednesday, May 13 or Monday, May 18 (both events at 5:30pm ET/2:30pm PT). Jasmine’s primary is just over a week away, on May 19, and we’re excited to support a candidate who will take Trump’s regime head-on to defend abortion access, restore voting rights, protect public health, and build an accountable government that fights for working families. Learn more about Indivisible’s primary program below. Electoral phonebank events paid for by Indivisible Action. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate committee.
Even as US consumer sentiment hits record lows, gas prices remain stuck above $4.50 per gallon, and millions of Americans face cuts to basic assistance, Republicans in the US Senate are going to try to pass a massive spending bill that includes $1 billion for President Donald Trump’s proposed luxury ballroom.
As Punchbowl News reported on Monday, Senate Democrats are planning to put the ballroom project in the spotlight and make supporting it as uncomfortable as possible for their Republican colleagues.
In a letter sent to fellow Democrats, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) slammed the GOP for giving priority to the president’s vanity project amid economic suffering caused by his policies.
“At a time when Americans can’t make ends meet, Republicans say ‘Let them eat cake,’” Schumer wrote, “and then hand Trump a billion dollars to build a ballroom to serve it in. Americans do not need a ballroom. They need relief.”
Schumer went on to blast his GOP colleagues as “Ballroom Republicans” who are “asking working families to pay the price while Donald Trump pockets the perks.”
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) similarly drew a contrast between the economic pain being felt by Americans with Trump’s desire for a luxury ballroom to be constructed at taxpayers’ expense.
“Gas is over $6 a gallon in many places,” Murphy wrote in a social media post. “Farms are going bankrupt. Billions are being wasted on a war that’s making us weaker. And this week, Republicans will spend their time trying to get taxpayers to fund Trump’s parties.”
Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said that the proposed ballroom “perfectly sums up what Trump really cares about,” noting that “while Americans are paying more for gas and millions are losing their healthcare, Trump can only think of his vanity ballroom.”
During a Monday appearance on MS NOW, Boyle said “there is no way in hell I am going to vote for $1 billion of taxpayer money to a stupid, unnecessary ballroom,” and vowed to reverse the cuts to Medicaid that Republicans made last year with their budget law. The cuts are projected to result in 10 million Americans losing their insurance.
"There is no way in hell I am going to vote for $1 billion of taxpayer money to a stupid, unnecessary ballroom that is nothing but a vanity project for Donald Trump." @CongBoylepic.twitter.com/jgRUpuN7h8
— Progressive Caucus (@USProgressives) May 11, 2026
\According to Punchbowl News, congressional Republicans behind the scenes have been quietly pleading with leadership to remove funding for the ballroom from the budget bill, as they think voting to fund the president’s project would be politically toxic for them this fall.
“The ballroom security money is the biggest problem for the reconciliation bill, and it caught lots of GOP lawmakers off guard,” Punchbowl News explained. “Moderate Republicans in both chambers are privately raising objections, bristling at the political downside of blessing Trump’s controversial ballroom project.”
The Trump administration is apparently aware of Republicans’ objections, and Punchbowl News’ Laura Weiss reported on Monday that the White House is dispatching Secret Service Director Sean Curran to address lawmakers’ concerns during a Tuesday luncheon.
Weiss noted that Republicans in swing districts “are privately balking at the reconciliation money for securing” the ballroom, but added that the Trump administration “really wants it.”
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