“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 story of the improbable becoming possible — told by the people who slept in the park.
About The Series
In 2008, a Wall Street crash gutted millions of lives. It took until 2011 for the Left to answer — a call to protest went out, thousands came, and they tried to build an anti-capitalist village in a small Manhattan park.
Told through the voices of activists who camped in Zuccotti Park for almost two months, Occupy! An Unfinished Uprising gets inside a movement that grew fast, felt transcendent and chaotic at once, and then violently flamed out. The press called it a failure. It changed the national conversation about capitalism, gave us the language of the 99%, and trained a generation of organizers.
As Occupy’s 15th anniversary arrives this September, it’s a reminder that collective action can still reshape what looks impossible.
The editorial board recommends voting no on San Francisco’s Proposition B, which would enable the first step in creating a city-run public bank.S.F. Chronicle illustration from Getty Images elements
San Francisco isn’t exactly a city known for the transparency or efficacy of its expenditures. The city has a $16.9 billion budget and no shortage of ways to get that money out the door — with decidedly mixed results.
And yet Proposition B, a City Charter amendment on the November ballot, would potentially launch an entirely new municipal entity to disperse taxpayer money.
The details are complex.
Prop B would allow for the creation of a Municipal Finance Corp. — the first step toward starting a city-run public bank. It would be a nonprofit, non-depository institution able to provide or arrange financing for affordable housing, home ownership, small businesses, climate infrastructure and environmental-justice projects. After at least three years of operation — and only after securing state and federal regulatory approvals — it could then transition into a full public bank.
Governance would be divided among professional boards and a public oversight commission. The Board of Supervisors would appoint four of the initial nine Municipal Finance Corp. commissioners, the mayor would appoint two, while the treasurer, controller and city attorney would each appoint one.
Prop B provides no funding. The Controller’s Office, citing a 2023 working group viability report, estimated that the city would have to come up with $310 million to $460 million to establish, capitalize and operate a public bank.
That’s quite an outlay at a time of federal funding shortfalls and perennial budget insecurity.
So, why now?
Some context is helpful. In 2019, California enacted Assembly Bill 857, the California Public Bank Act, which allows cities, counties and joint powers authorities to establish their own local public banks. The initial licensing window for the legislation will expire in 2029, so several cities and counties in the state are scrambling to launch their respective public banking efforts before the deadline.
Trinity Tran, the executive director of Public Bank LA, an organization that has been working to establish a public bank in Los Angeles since 2017, told the editorial board that the establishment of a municipal finance commission would prove that it could “responsibly use public dollars for public good and then after a few years, scale that up to a public bank.”
The idea of a public bank designed to support social and economic justice is a noble one. But good intentions do not automatically make a good institution.
The Housing Trust Fund, for instance, provides direct support for building, purchasing and rehabilitating affordable housing, as well as down-payment assistance and programs intended to help people avoid losing their homes. Prop C on the November ballot would increase the city’s annual contribution to this fund, eventually, to $125 million and extend it through 2058.
Then there are housing bonds, which San Francisco funded to the tune of $300 million in 2024.
Meanwhile, the Office of Workforce and Economic Development and the Office of the Treasurer operate millions of dollars in small business loan and grant programs.
These redundancies are among the reasons Mayor Daniel Lurie told us he doesn’t support Prop B: “Creating a new institution, rather than investing those resources directly in housing, small businesses and other critical needs, is irresponsible.”
Prop B’s sponsors, including Supervisor Chyanne Chen, countered that unlike most existing funding mechanisms, a public bank would provide an ongoing source for needed projects. Its dollars would recirculate in the community as loans were paid off and then disbursed to the next recipient.
But would they?
Larry Marso, an attorney who worked as a mergers and acquisitions investment banker at Morgan Stanley, pointed to the Los Angeles Community Bank — established in 1995 with $430 million in federal funding — as a cautionary tale. Focused on rebuilding neighborhoods following the 1992 Los Angeles riots, the bank faced heavy criticism from federal and local housing officials for poor management, severe political meddling and rushing into non-compliant deals. The bank aggressively pushed to fund high-risk, ill-conceived projects, had an astronomical loan default rate and was forced to close by 2004.
Banks, Marso told the editorial board, “need to loan to a wide variety of people in a wide geography who are under widely different conditions. It’s called diversification. You have to diversify your loan portfolio.”
Prop B directs San Francisco to do the exact opposite.
Proponents note that North Dakota’s public bank has operated successfully for over 100 years. But that bank invests not just in feel-good green and socially just projects but fossil fuels. That’s not a model San Francisco should be holding up.
Moreover, Prop B’s authors arguably set the effort up to fail by being overly prescriptive. The 25-page measure cements into the City Charter a wide variety of dubious micromanaging — including a host of citizen oversight commissions and advisory committees of the ilk that voters said they wanted to move beyond when they passed Prop E for commission reform in 2024.
“This is the perfect example as to why we have these problems with our charter,” Sean Elsbernd, president and CEO of the local think tank SPUR, told the editorial board. “There is so much detail that doesn’t need to be in there.”
Elsbernd believes, as do we, that Prop B’s authors could have simply authorized a public bank in San Francisco and instructed the mayor and Board of Supervisors to pass legislation implementing it. This would have allowed for more flexibility.
San Francisco already has other ways to raise and deploy capital for social good. It can issue bonds. It can expand the Housing Trust Fund. It can partner with community-development financial institutions and nonprofit lenders. It can streamline approvals, reduce unnecessary fees and help affordable-housing developers control costs — all priorities of Mayor Lurie’s administration. These methods are more immediate and easier for voters to evaluate.
A bank, public or private, cannot make construction costs disappear or eliminate the risk that a borrower will default. If a project genuinely needs a subsidy, a loan is not a substitute for one. It merely changes who carries the risk.
About Opinion
The editorial positions of The Chronicle, including election recommendations, represent the consensus of the editorial board, consisting of the publisher, the editorial page editor and staff members of the opinion pages. Its judgments are made independent of the news operation, which covers the news without consideration of our editorial positions.
And with a public bank, that risk would ultimately belong to the public.
San Francisco doesn’t need to create complicated new mechanisms and hope they work. It needs to strengthen the institutions we already have. Vote no on Prop B.
The editorial positions of The Chronicle, including election recommendations, represent the consensus of the editorial board, consisting of the publisher, the editorial page editor and staff members of the opinion pages. Its judgments are made independent of the news operation, which covers the news without consideration of our editorial positions.
Election Defense Scenarios is a field guide for protecting democracy. This resource walks readers through eighteen detailed scenarios — from voter roll purges and redistricting attacks to armed intimidation at polling places and post-election certification battles — giving organizers, poll workers, community leaders, and everyday citizens the knowledge they need before a crisis hits. Each scenario draws on real historical examples from Georgia to Belarus to Tuskegee, showing not just how threats unfold, but how ordinary people have successfully pushed back.
What makes this guide indispensable is its refusal to inspire helplessness. Rather than cataloguing threats for their own sake, every scenario pairs clear-eyed analysis with concrete, actionable responses grounded in law, history, and proven organizing strategy constantly asking “What would you do?” Because the best time to prepare is now.
Using the Scenarios The People’s Election Playbook
(scenarios roughly ordered by timing) BEFORE ELECTION DAY Scenario 1: Redistricting to Erase Representation Scenario 2: The Voter Roll Purge Scenario 3: ID Requirements Close to Election Day Scenario 4: Mail-In Ballot Deadline Changes Scenario 5: Drop Box Sabotoge/Bomb Threats Scenario 6: DOJ Election Fraud Investigations
ELECTION DAY Scenario 7: Last-Minute Voting Location Chaos Scenario 8: Mass Voter Challenge Campaign Scenario 9: Disinformation Flood: Place, Time, Day Scenario 10: Armed Civilians at Polling Places Scenario 11: Federal Agents at Polling Places
AFTER ELECTION DAY Scenario 12: Recounts and Ballot Curing Scenario 13: SCOTUS Overturns Counting Scenario 14: Canvassers Refuses to Certify Scenario 15: Federal Seizure of Ballots Scenario 16: Congress Refuses to Seat Winners
SPECIAL SCENARIOS Scenario 17: DC: Override of Home Rule Election Scenario 18: Puerto Rico: Federal Interference
The only good thing about the Missouri GOP’s increasingly desperate attempt to steal a congressional seat is that they are forced to do it openly, which allows everybody to see what an anti-democratic and morally corrupt bunch they are.
Missouri is known as the Show Me State, and its Republican officials are currently showing the country how to steal an election. Here is how they are trying to do it, what it says about the GOP, and why it should infuriate anybody who believes in democracy.
It all started last year, when the state legislature passed a gerrymandered map with the goal of disenfranchising Black voters in Kansas City. Previously, Missouri’s House delegation consisted of six Republicans and two Democrats. While that 75-25 percent split isn’t a fair representation of the population of a state in which 60 percent voted for Donald Trump (a 5-3 split would be), that’s not awful in an age of extreme gerrymanders, especially because Democrats are mainly concentrated in two urban districts in St. Louis and Kansas City.
But it wasn’t good enough for Missouri Republicans.
That is why they eagerly followed Trump’s call to rig congressional maps across the country in the GOP’s favor in an effort to hold on to the House majority and allow the president to shirk any kind of accountability for running roughshod over the rule of law.
The result was a redistricting effort that “cracked” Kansas City, which means that, instead of leaving it in a single district that Democrat Emanuel Cleaver had held for more than 20 years, they placed parts of the city in three others in which Republicans were favored to win.
However, Missouri’s constitution grants the state’s citizens the right to have a say in the matter if enough of them petition the government to do so. In that case, a referendum would be placed on the ballot of an upcoming election to allow the people to decide.
That is precisely what happened in this case. The group People, Not Politicians collected 300,000 signatures to put the new map to a vote this fall before it could be used.
Obviously, this didn’t sit well with Missouri’s GOP officials, which is why they tried to declare the group’s effort null and void. And, to escape judicial scrutiny, Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins waited until the last moment to do so.
As a result, Missouri held its primary using the new map.
However, the state’s Supreme Court last week ruled unanimously that this was illegal.
“The referendum petition was legal, sufficient, and timely, and the secretary incorrectly concluded otherwise,” it stated and declared that the old map must be used for the midterms.
Missouri’s Republicans, still desperate to steal that one seat and running out of options to do so, then petitioned the US Supreme Court to review that ruling.
They argued that it would be unlawful to use one map for the primary and another for the general election.
“Never before in American history has a court overturned a congressional map after a primary and before a general election,” stated Missouri’s Attorney General Catherine Hanaway (R). “This unprecedented decision clearly violates federal law and has thrust our state into a full‑fledged constitutional crisis.”
As we pointed out last week, what she conveniently failed to mention is that this is a crisis of the GOP’s own making.
In any case, on Tuesday, the US Supreme Court declined to get involved when Brett Kavanaugh, who oversees emergency requests from Missouri, denied a request to overturn that ruling.
So, to summarize, at this point, both the state’s and the nation’s highest courts had weighed in on the matter and ruled, despite the GOP’s best efforts, that the old map should be used for the midterms.
However, shortly after the US Supreme Court opted to sit this one out and left in place the unanimous decision of the state Supreme Court, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Missouri said, effectively, “You know what? Let’s just use this rigged new map.”
And, even though the higher courts said otherwise, this is the ruling Missouri Republicans want to go with. They quickly announced that they would now use the new map in the fall, no take-backs!
What does this mean for the midterms? We honestly don’t know. There is a good chance that the Supreme Court(s) will get involved again, but it may also be too late at this point, which was obviously the GOP’s point all along in waiting to illegally reject the referendum initiative at the last minute and in now immediately embracing the only ruling that went in their favor even though it came from a lower court.
Here is what we do know: The sordid actions of the state’s Republicans are an affront to democracy, and they should be ashamed of themselves for trying to rig the upcoming election and circumvent the rule of law at every single turn to do so.
Or, to put it differently, Show Me political corruption at the highest level and I’ll show you Missouri.
Klaus MarreKlaus Marre, a former congressional reporter, is a senior editor for US politics at WhoWhatWhy. He writes regularly here, and you can also follow him on Bluesky and Substack.
by Randy Shaw on September 8, 2026 (BeyondChron.org)
Raman Offers Change
Will Nithya Raman join Boston’s Michelle Wu, Seattle’s Katie Wilson and New York City’s Zohran Mamdani in becoming a new generation of progressive mayors? It sure looks that way. Mayor Karen Bass’s missteps and a lot of mayoral bad luck have boosted Raman. Voters are calling for change. Re-electing incumbent Mayor Bass does not serve that goal.
Background on the Race
Soon after Councilmember Nithya Raman announced on February 6 she was running, I wrote “Can Nithya Raman Upset Karen Bass in LA Mayor’s Race?” I concluded, “Raman’s path to victory depends less on fervent support for her and more on a cross section of the electorate opposing Bass’s re-election.”
That’s exactly what is happening.
Those unhappy with Bass’s response to the Palisades/Malibu/Altadena fires are not giving her four more years. And after these fires receded into the political background a terrible fire at the Lineage warehouse in June devastated heavily Latino Boyle Heights.
The aftermath of that explosion has been horrific.” Media reports of giant rats and a terrible stench caused by 85 million pounds of frozen food rotting near a residential neighborhood. The fire burned for a week. It again showed Bass as unable to protect city residents.
Those impacted by the Lineage fire and its aftermath are unlikely to vote for Bass. These disasters support a larger narrative about Bass’s failure to effectively run the city.
Bass has made many missteps. Her ad to promote the city’s ability to fix potholes floundered when the pothole she publicly claimed she would fix was covered by a car. Nevertheless, her campaign team thought voters would be impressed by Bass’s pledge to remove such obstacles in the future.
Instead, the ad promoted her administrative incompetence. As described on Reddit, “Mayor Bass publicly responds to pothole repair request…by not repairing the pothole.”
Bass has waffled on new housing production. Despite the city’s desperate need for new housing, she exercised the city option under state law to delay building apartments in key neighborhoods until 2030.
I detailed opposition by wealthy neighbors to this essential project on a city-owned parking lot in Generation Priced Out, my book about the housing crisis. While the path to starting construction may finally be clear, Bass’s wavering on key issues has become all too common.
This mayor’s race is about competence and laying the groundwork for Los Angeles’s future, not ideology. That’s why many conservative and moderate voters will cast ballots Raman.
Homelessness
Mayor Bass implemented an Inside Safe program to get people off the streets. She hoped that her efforts would help her re-election.
My experience in San Francisco mayor’s races taught me that accuracy about a city’s approach to homelessness is greatly outweighed by public perceptions. Los Angeles voters do not perceive Bass as reducing homelessness despite all the money spent.
In contrast, the 50% drop in Raman’s district will convince many voters that she can improve upon Bass’s record in reducing homelessness. Bass’s campaign is attacking Raman for votes on homelessness as its know that the July report could prove costly with voters.
Endorsements
Mayor Bass has an overwhelming number of progressive endorsements. This includes Raman’s fellow progressive council members and most labor unions.
Yet many endorsements were made prior to Raman announcing her candidacy. And there is a difference between a union endorsing Bass and mobilizing members to elect her.
Last week Raman secured the endorsement of UNITE HERE Local 11. President Kurt Peterson stated “Nithya has stood with us and our members through many fights. We believe [she] is the right person to help us solve the city’s problems.”
Petersen said “Unite Here had the largest ground operation of any union in the state during primaries in June and knocked on more than 300,000 doors. Our endorsement means a lot more than a press release.”
The Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) also recently endorsed Raman. It too will bring more bodies to the challenger’s field campaign.
A Desire for Change
Not since Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign have we seen a national, state and local election cycle more driven by a desire for Change. And this focus goes beyond progressive mayoral candidates. San Francisco’s moderate Daniel Lurie won election vowing major changes and his popularity has continued as he creates a more positive vibe in the city.
This desire for Change is how Raman gets the moderate and conservative votes she needs. Do voters really want Karen Bass running Los Angeles for another four years?
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.
by Randy Shaw on September 8, 2026 (BeyondChron.org)
San Francisco voters have two marquee races in November: the Wiener-Chan congressional contest and the Yekutiel-McCoy D8 Supervisor battle. In both cases the differences between candidates are so clear that voters can easily pick their favored candidate.
Here’s how we see it.
Wiener-Chan
San Francisco’s 2024 mayor’s race had one clear progressive, Aaron Peskin. He ran against four moderates: Mayor Breed, Daniel Lurie, Mark Farrell and Ahsha Safai. Moderates spent millions offering voters non-ideological reasons to back their preferred candidate.
The Wiener-Chan congressional race is different. What separates the two is clear. At this point its less about persuasion than turning out their supporters.
I wrote on October 27, 2025 —- Can Connie Chan Defeat Scott Wiener?— that “Chan will need money to get her message out. Never having run outside of D1, she has nowhere near the financial backing and name recognition as Wiener.” I added, “Nancy Pelosi would not back a candidate in San Francisco and then not ensure the campaign had sufficient funds.”
I sure got that right. But there’s a big difference between Pelosi raising money for Chan and claims that the speaker emeritus is “running” Chan’s campaign.
That accusation has a racist tinge. It suggests that a working-class Asian-American immigrant wouldn’t be doing so well in the polls unless she had transferred control of the campaign to Nancy Pelosi. This racist take ignores that Chan won two elections in D1 when most pundits saw her losing. D1 was then redistricted in 2024 to make sure Chan lost. She still won. Chan obviously knows how to run winning campaigns.
Huge Difference on Housing
Wiener and Chan have dramatically divergent views on housing development. Scott Wiener has done more to promote new housing construction than any legislator in California history. Connie Chan opposed the Wiener upzoning bills.
There are other issues in the race— AI regulation, relationships with tech, and whether the city should elect its first gay or first Asian American congress member. Wiener has always been identified with the city’s moderates and Chan with the progressives, which adds another clear dividing line.
But most voters will pick the candidate who shares their views on housing.
Yekutiel vs. McCoy
This has been a very curious D8 race. The media has focused entirely if not exclusively on Brad Chapin’s allegations that Manny Yekutiel sexually abused him at a party in February 2020.
Where the candidates stand on key D8 issues has been largely ignored. Last week the media lampooned Yekutiel’s proposal for a citywide underground transit system. Yekutiel also wants to see 10,000 new housing units built in his district. Apparently many reporters are suspicious of candidates offering a bold vision for San Francisco’s future.
Yekutiel’s detailed plan to fill retail vacancies in D8 was ignored by most media despite this being a major district issue. It’s as if the media’s quota for D8 stories has already been filled with stories on the claim of sexual abuse.
Those who believe the claim disqualifies Yekutiel have three choices: Gary McCoy, Darshini Patel, and Michael Nguyen. I see this as a Yekutiel-McCoy race. There are vast differences in the careers of these two candidates.
McCoy was the Vice President of Policy & Public Affairs at HealthRIGHT 360 when that group opened the Linkage Center in UN Plaza in 2022. He is among the most high-profile spokespersons for the harm reduction approach to drug activity.
McCoy’s support for a plan to attract drug users from across the city to UN Plaza proved a $20 million disaster for the city. The Tenderloin, Mid-Market and SOMA have yet to fully recover. Some of those who came to San Francisco to enjoy the illegal safe injection site found their way to the Castro. Voters who support opening future safe injection sites in the city have a clear choice for McCoy.
Manny Yekutiel is best known for Manny’s, a politically-oriented social gathering space in the Mission. Manny has raised millions of dollars for San Francisco through his Civic Joy Fund, which he started with Daniel Lurie. He is running as a small businessperson focused on boosting public safety, building housing and growing the city’s economy.
As with Wiener-Chan, the D8 race revives the longstanding progressive-moderate split. Voters who identify with either political faction have a clear choice.
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.
by Martin Bennett on September 7, 2026 (BeyondChron.org)
This Labor Day it’s essential to highlight that reducing inequality is the main purpose of labor unions through collective bargaining for living wages, comprehensive benefits, and improved workplace health and safety conditions.
Moreover, unions provide a political voice for their members and lobby for legislation, such as restrictions on child labor, a minimum wage, the forty-hour week, and Social Security, that benefit all working people.
Recently, the California Labor Federation, representing 1300 affiliated unions with 2.3 million members, endorsed Proposition 40, the California Billionaire Tax Act on the November ballot.
Prop 40 is a one-time 5% wealth tax spread over five years on California’s 250 billionaires who lived here on January 1, 2026. Prop 40 defines wealth as the value of stocks, bonds, trusts, and specified property holdings, minus outstanding debt.
According to the California Budget and Policy Project, if approved, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth would decline from $200 billion to $190 billion.
Why is such a tax necessary?
First, wealth inequality has soared nationally and in California. A report by UC Berkeley economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, and Jasper Boll of the Paris School of Economics, finds that from 1982 to 2026, California billionaires’ wealth has skyrocketed by 38-fold to $2.3 trillion, while the real family income of the average California family has merely doubled.
Second, the measure would generate about $100 billion in revenue that the state desperately needs because of the massive Trump tax cuts for the wealthy last year and the slashing of health care funding (H.R. 1).
The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that up to 1.6 million California Medi-Cal recipients could lose health insurance. Eighty-three California hospitals are at risk of closing, and up to 145,000 health care workers could be laid off, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center. Ninety percent of the Prop 40 revenue will backfill these health care cuts, with the balance dedicated to public education.
Third, Zucman, Saez, and Boll claim that billionaires pay less in taxes than the average taxpayer, relative to income. They calculate that between 2018 and 2020, across all local, state, and federal taxes, billionaires paid just 24 percent of their income in taxes, whereas the typical taxpayer paid 30 percent.
The main reason is that both the federal government and California tax investment income or capital gains (about 72 percent of billionaire wealth) only when stock is sold.
Most billionaires earn very little in salaries, such as Zuckerberg’s, which is $1 a year. They borrow tax-free against their colossal wealth to pay for ongoing expenses.
The billionaire tax provides a remedy by taxing all wealth regardless of whether it has been realized or not.
The argument opponents make is that if Prop 40 passes, billionaires will leave the state, resulting in the loss of capital and jobs. However, there is no historical evidence to support this assertion.
Sociologist Cristobal Young, author of The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight (2017), studied 13 years of millionaire tax records nationwide and found that only 2.4 percent of millionaires moved to another state annually, compared with 2.9 percent of the population at large.
Young also researched California millionaires after the voters in 2012 approved the largest tax increase ever on top earners. Two years after the ballot initiative, the state experienced a loss of just .04 percent of millionaire residents.
Studies reached similar conclusions for other states boosting taxes on the wealthiest, including New Jersey in 2020, New York in 2021, and Massachusetts in 2022
Why?
The research has found that 60 percent of California millionaires are older than 50 years; most have children and are socially and professionally tied to where they made their money. With children in school, property ownership, and extensive professional and social connections, they are unlikely to move for tax reasons.
Moreover, California tech billionaires depend on skilled professionals who are graduates of UC and CSU, and on innovation that is a byproduct of the exchange of ideas among tech workers across companies clustered in places like Silicon Valley and San Francisco.
California billionaires benefit immensely from the publicly financed infrastructure of universities, transportation, and healthcare. It’s time for them to pay their fair share to offset the pending catastrophic health care cuts.
Martin J. Bennett is Instructor Emeritus of History at Santa Rosa Junior College and a consultant for UNITE HERE Local 2. He is also a delegate to the North Bay Labor Council AFL-CIO.
America now has a witches’ brew of government and corporate surveillance. None of it was necessary.
When the attacks of September 11, 2001, stunned America 25 years ago, the Prospect had just moved to Washington and brought on a new executive editor in Harold Meyerson. In about a week, we managed to assign and edit an issue that was one of our best ever. The cover line was “Defending an Open Society.” The articles in that issue challenged the widespread assumption that we were now in a new normal, in which the vulnerability of an open society had been horribly revealed. Painful as it might be, America supposedly had to sacrifice some liberty to regain some security. Then as now, that premise was disastrously wrong. But over 25 years, America ended up needlessly sacrificing both. At the time, it seemed that the ability of a cell of terrorists to pass unnoticed, and to seize and weaponize not one but four jetliners almost simultaneously, demonstrated the pathetic vulnerability of the United States. But as testimony to the 9/11 Commission later revealed, American counterintelligence knew everything it needed to know in 2000 and 2001 to prevent the 9/11 attacks. The problem was that the White House under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney was obsessively focused on Saddam Hussein and didn’t want to know about al-Qaeda in the U.S. Richard Clarke, director of counterterrorism for the National Security Council, had urgently requested a meeting of NSC principals on January 25, 2021, in a memo during Bush’s first week in office, to develop a comprehensive strategy against jihadists in America. He was rebuffed. Over the next several months, Clarke’s team assembled evidence of a planned attack, pilots being trained, and sleeper cells, but the White House kept fending him off. Had the Supreme Court not intervened to steal the election for Bush, and had Al Gore been president, Clarke’s urgent warning would almost surely have been taken seriously and 9/11 never would have occurred. We had all the counterintelligence surveillance we needed. We just didn’t have a president who was paying attention. In the panic that followed the attacks, a wish list of every previously rejected bad idea for warrantless surveillance and spying on Americans was hastily assembled. This became the USA PATRIOT Act. It was rushed through Congress in a fervor of misplaced patriotism and signed on October 26. It passed the House 357-66, and the Senate 98-1. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, the lone Senate dissenter, warned in a powerful floor speech, “Preserving our freedom is one of the main reasons that we are now engaged in this new war on terrorism. We will lose that war without firing a shot if we sacrifice the liberties of the American people.” Among other odious items in the administration’s anti-terrorism bill, as Georgetown Law professor David Cole wrote in the Prospect’s 9/11 issue, were provisions to make aliens “deportable not for terrorist activity but for peaceful and nonviolent associational activity … It would authorize the Immigration and Naturalization Service to detain immigrants indefinitely on the attorney general’s say-so, even when they have a legal right to live here permanently and cannot be deported. And it would resurrect the doctrine of ideological exclusion by allowing aliens to be denied entry for their speech.” All of this, of course, prefigured President Trump’s grotesque anti-immigrant measures.
Meanwhile, one of the genuine vulnerabilities that did need attention—international money laundering by terrorists—was remedied by the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020. But the same politicians who support surveillance of citizens and consumers are big supporters of crypto, which is a gift to terrorists and criminals who launder money. One of the little-noticed consequences of the post-9/11 hysteria has been a diabolical symbiosis between government surveillance and corporate surveillance. What Shoshana Zuboff was the first to call surveillance capitalism has now become ubiquitous, as platform monopolies like Amazon and Google vacuum up customer data to sell targeted ads, screw rivals, and use personalizing pricing. As the big tech monopolies pursue these surveillance strategies, experience gained in the national security establishment is highly prized. At least 200 people from counterintelligence posts have gone to work for Google, Facebook, and Amazon. They include Caroline Atkinson, President Obama’s deputy national security adviser for international economics (2011–2015). She subsequently became head of global policy at Google. Robert Kimmitt, general counsel and executive secretary of the National Security Council, went to Facebook. Brian Walsh, special assistant to the president and senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council, went to a senior post at Amazon Web Services. And dozens more. And the revolving door works both ways, with Trump’s top science, technology, and national security staff coming from Big Tech. What both sectors have in common is a commitment to surveillance. None of this makes Americans more secure. It makes us more vulnerable.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz did not appear alarmed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s threat on Wednesday to sue the outlet over its new reporting that Netanyahu was explicitly warned about the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack that killed more than 1,200 Israelis and led to the Israel Defense Forces’ destruction of Gaza.
After Netanyahu sent a “warning letter” saying he would file a libel lawsuit against Haaretz and journalists Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval over their Tuesday report, the newspaper said simply in a post on social media, “Haaretz stands by its reporting.”
The newspaper based its reporting on accounts from three senior foreign sources, reporting that in September 2023, now-deceased Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar had told an intermediary trusted by both Hamas and Israeli intelligence agencies that an “earthquake” would be coming to Israel.
The warning reportedly came after Sinwar had grown frustrated with deadlocked talks over an exchange of Israeli and Palestinian prisoners.
Sinwar told the intermediary to convey a message to the United Arab Emirates, with whom Netanyahu had developed close ties, “that I am preparing the mother of all surprises. A terrifying operation. Something extraordinary.”
UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed then gave a warning to Netanyahu in a 45-minute phone call weeks before the attack, according to Haaretz.
Netanyahu lashed out at the newspaper in a social media post, saying the reporters “fabricated a false story against the prime minister that never happened and was never created.”
“The Prime Minister’s Office, the National Security Council, and the military secretary meticulously reviewed the prime minister’s call log for those days—and found no trace of it whatsoever,” said Netanyahu, who is behind his top opponent, former military chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, in polls ahead of legislative elections set for October 27.
Netanyahu’s official social media account also confirmed he had instructed his lawyers to file the libel lawsuit. He blamed security officials for failing to alert him to the October 7 attack early enough after it had begun, repeating a recent claim that they feared he would launch an aggressive response to the attack and set off a war.
“If, instead of fearing a miscalculation, they had instructed the IDF, the Shin Bet, and the standby units to preempt the blow, and if they had updated Prime Minister Netanyahu in time, the terrible massacre could have been prevented,” said Netanyahu’s official account.
Netanyahu has been attempting to account for his actions on October 7 recently, releasing his full schedule from the day of the attacks last week. The log showed he did not speak to IDF officials until several hours after the attack began.
Researcher Shaiel Ben-Ephraim compared Netanyahu’s threat to sue Haaretz to his angry response earlier this year to a report by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, which included testimony from 14 Palestinians who said they had been sexually assaulted in Israeli prisons or during attacks by the IDF or Israeli settlers.
Netanyahu claimed the Times’ reporting was “blood libel” as he threatened to take legal action in May. Thus far, he has not followed through on the threat.
“This will likely end up just like the time he threatened to sue The New York Times,” said Ben-Ephraim, “and didn’t because every word was true.”
On Tuesday, four Israeli opposition leaders called for an independent commission to investigate the October 7 attacks, citing a “series” of revelations about Netanyahu’s actions and reported inaction ahead of the assault.
“Netanyahu and his partners in the October 7 government are unfit to continue in office,” they wrote. “We will work in coordination and with the required responsibility to prevent them from leading to another disaster.”
The prime minister has long resisted calls for an independent investigation, agreeing earlier this year only to a proposal in which half of the commission’s members would be selected by Netanyahu’s own government, in violation of Israeli law—a suggestion that one opposition leader, Yair Lapid, called a “shameful farce” that was meant to “help the prime minister duck responsibility.”
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An election worker processes mail-in ballots at the Los Angeles County Ballot Processing Center during California’s state primary election in the City of Industry on June 2, 2026.
(Photo by Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images)
“Trump is threatening not just our ability to mail our vote but our right to decide our future and the direction of our country.”
A group of young voters on Wednesday crashed a meeting of the United States Postal Service Board of Governors and demanded that they not carry out President Donald Trump’s executive order to disrupt the mail-in voting process.
The voters, which were organized with the help of Sunrise Movement, walked into the Board of Governors’ meeting in Potomac, Maryland, and asked members if they would commit to delivering all ballots sent through the USPS for November’s midterm elections.
Stella Lovelady, 24, approached the board members holding a sign that read “Let Us Vote,” and said she is “worried that Donald Trump will prevent millions of people from voting by mail.”
“I’m worried young people’s voices won’t be heard in November because their ballots won’t be delivered,” said Lovelady. “Trump is threatening not just our ability to mail our vote but our right to decide our future and the direction of our country.”
Alex Ames, a 24-year-old voter from Georgia, asked the board members to “commit to us, to the public today, that you will mail every ballot out and not cave to Donald Trump’s political demands.”
Amber McReynolds, chair of the Board of Governors, thanked Ames for her input but informed her that she was intruding on a private meeting.
“We understand it’s a meeting but this is also an emergency,” Ames responded. “Ballots have already started getting mailed out. And if there’s a new emergency screening system that hasn’t been practiced before and all these ballots get tossed out, young voters, potentially millions of people, will not get their ballots in November.”
Shortly after this, the young voters were escorted out of the meeting.
Earlier this year, Trump signed an executive order that instructed the United States Postal Service to not deliver ballots in any states that have not given the federal government access to its voter lists.
However, that order is currently tied up in court, and both Wisconsin and North Carolina last week began mailing out ballots to voters.
Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of Sunrise Movement, said that the president’s attempts to restrict mail-in voting show he is “desperate” and “has decided the only way he can win is if possibly millions of people can’t vote.”
“The American people won’t let that happen,” Shiney-Ajay emphasized. “We’ll defeat this wannabe dictator in November like we did in 2020—with our votes, our voices and our peaceful actions.”
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Public Banking Coalition monthly meetings Next call: Nov 11 Excitement is building for public banking and once a month, PBI hosts an hour-long Public Banking Coalition online meeting to share the excitement and successes. Find out the latest updates on the advances being made all across the country from local advocates themselves... Continue reading →
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September General Membership Meeting *We will be voting on November Election endorsements for state propositions!* Date: Tuesday, 15 September, 2026 (third Tuesday of month) Time: 7-9 PM *NEW* In-person Location: Women’s Building (3543 18th St), Audre Lorde Room Remote: Via Zoom Link Here
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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 →
Robert Kuttner
