“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
Annie Karni, Congressional Correspondent – The New York Times
Stephan: Every Black Republican Representative is leaving the House. The Republican Party has become a White Supremacist cult. Here are the facts.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries speaks at the Congressional Black Caucus’s press conference. Credit: Brooke Sharp / Medill News Service
Eight years ago, Kevin McCarthy, then the House Republican leader, embarked on a push to recruit more Black Republicans to run for Congress, arguing that the G.O.P. needed to diversify to survive.
By 2022, his efforts had yielded modest success, helping pave the way for four Black Republicans to be elected to the House that year, which boosted the total number of Black Republicans serving in Congress to five, including Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina.
That progress is about to be erased.
All four Black Republicans in the House are leaving Congress next year: Three are seeking statewide office, and one is retiring because redistricting in his state effectively boxed him out of his seat. The exodus is a reflection of the striking and persistent lack of diversity in the G.O.P. ranks of Congress, something that Mr. McCarthy has acknowledged is still an issue even years after his efforts to address it.
Stroy Moyd tried to open his comedy club at various locales in San Francisco, to no success. Then he looked at the Mid-Market neighborhood. Now he’s among a new wave of entrepreneurs bringing new life to the beleaguered area.Carlos Avila Gonzalez/S.F. Chronicle
Of all the places Stroy Moyd imagined opening San Francisco’s first Black-owned comedy club, Mid-Market was last on the list.
After two years, more than 80 locations toured and repeated rejections from landlords unwilling to bet on a young Black entrepreneur without deep pockets, it was the only place where he heard “yes.”
The Function Comedy Club and Cocktail Lounge sits across from the mostly vacant former Twitter headquarters at 10th and Market streets, a stark symbol of the neighborhood’s boom-and-bust cycle that spiked before the pandemic with venture-backed tech and private equity groups taking over buildings that had been home to nonprofits and social services. Now many of those buildings are empty and storefronts boarded up. Nowhere to be found are the sort of buzzy restaurants, bars and boutiques that fuel nightlife and draw crowds to the main drags of neighborhoods like North Beach or the Marina.
Moyd may not have planned to be here, but he is part of a small, determined wave of entrepreneurs betting on Mid-Market at a moment when much of the city’s focus is on reviving other corners of downtown. It’s an early sign of something like an organic rebirth as some in the neighborhood are vying to shift its identity away from a failed tech hub into an arts and theater district. Mid-Market is already home to five major theaters that, in a good year, attract upward of a million people to everything from Broadway musicals to hip-hop concerts.
“If you look at a thriving arts and culture district, it encompasses the entrepreneur, the denim maker down the street, the restaurateur, the guy who pours his love and soul into his cafe and is a welcoming third space to people,” said Fernando Pujals, executive director of the Mid-Market Business Association and Foundation. “All the bones are here.”
Years after the start of the pandemic, many of those invested in the neighborhood say conditions are finally improving. Yet the commercial retreat from Mid-Market is still visible on nearly every block.
The once-bustling Twitter building is now 96% empty. A 65,000-square-foot Whole Foods has been shuttered for three years after closing abruptly amid safety concerns. The historic Hotel Whitcomb remains boarded up after sustaining tens of millions of dollars in damage during its use as a pandemic-era shelter for the homeless. Office vacancy in the surrounding district hovers around 45%, with retail not far behind. It was so bad that during the depths of the pandemic, some in the local real estate community wouldn’t bring clients to the area. A gaping hole occupies the northeast corner of Market and Van Ness, which a developer excavated for a 47-story mixed-use project that was put on hold three years ago.
Mid-Market has been here before. After the Great Recession left the corridor lined with empty storefronts, city leaders offered tax breaks to lure tech firms in a bid to bolster its economic base. The Financial District’s offices had to reach near capacity before the city’s attention shifted to Mid-Market, downtown’s main artery connecting City Hall to the Embarcadero. Even then, it took a relentless focus from City Hall to attract investment to the neighborhood.
For a time, it worked: Companies moved in, housing was built, and the neighborhood flickered to life briefly with the promise of a dense, around-the-clock downtown corridor. There were bike shops and restaurants — one business sold handcrafted toffee and another offered flights of chai. But even before the pandemic emptied offices, that momentum had begun to slip. Today, with many of those same firms gone in search of cleaner, safer surroundings or contracting their operations in the era of remote work, Mid-Market has largely returned to where it started before the 2009 tax break.
And yet, a different kind of risk-taker is beginning to fill the void: Entrepreneurs like Moyd, often with fewer resources and less institutional backing, are moving into the very spaces others abandoned — drawn to the possibility of building something new, and hopeful that others will follow.
“Ideally, this strip would be full of shops, food and bars,” Moyd said. “But that takes a lot of effort, energy and consistency.”
He pointed to the millions of dollars in grants and funding that has been doled out to lure businesses to the Financial District and other parts of downtown. Earlier this month, a new group formed by corporate and philanthropic leaders to back Mayor Daniel Lurie’s downtown revitalization strategy unveiled a $25 million business revitalization fund providing grants and loans to small businesses activating a commercial corridor north of Mid-Market.
“They need to move that over here,” Moyd said. “In order for this neighborhood to do well, we need the city of San Francisco behind us.”
Diana Ponce De Leon, of the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, said the city is actively recruiting businesses to the Mid-Market area, helped a nonprofit buy a building and is providing grants to support businesses moving into vacant storefronts. An entertainment zone created between Fifth and Sixth streets was activated with block parties last year.
“We are leveraging everything we have in the area,” she said. “I feel the energy is there. People are interested. It feels cleaner. We still need to bring back the foot traffic.”
With or without the city’s help, businesses are starting find their way back into the neighborhood. Walk by the southwest corner of Seventh and Mission into the night and you might hear music drifting from the Roar Shack, an arts space run by the Living Earth Show, a nonprofit that creates and performs experimental chamber music. It’s the first new independent music venue to enter the neighborhood in years.
The Roar Shack fills the space vacated by nightclub Mr. Smith’s, which closed in 2019. Building owner Max Young, who also operated Mr. Smith’s, said the block had become so overrun with drug dealers and loiterers that he felt it was unsafe for patrons and staff. The two office suites upstairs, which had been occupied by tech companies, also emptied during the pandemic.
Now the whole building is full again, with two new startups taking space on the upper floors. The streets are much cleaner and the drug-dealing less conspicuous.
“The Mid-Market story is kind of rewriting itself right now,” Young said. “It’s not perfect. It’s not Disneyland. But it’s a huge difference from where we were.”
A few blocks to the west, the massive food hall on the ground floor of the former Twitter building that was nearly empty a year ago is filling up with a new generation of vendors selling empanadas, gnocchi, boba, caprese sandwiches and açaí bowls.
“A year ago I was like, ‘What am I even doing here?’” said Joy MacDonald, who manages the market. “Now it’s cleaner outside, there are more people walking by. We get a lot of people coming in and saying, ‘I haven’t been here in years.’”
Ground floor activation was often an afterthought for both new residential and office towers, but for Mid-Market’s recovery it will be key, said Benjamin Kochalski, a partner with TMG Partners, which has a long history of investing and developing in the neighborhood.
A neighborhood’s recovery “doesn’t start on the 30th floor of a building,” he said, adding that Mid-Market’s offices are unlikely to benefit from increased office tenant interest until higher-demand space in the Financial District is absorbed.
“It’s not ‘main and main’ as it relates to office space,” said Chris Pearson, senior vice president of development for Hudson Pacific Properties, describing the neighborhood’s competitive position for attracting the latest wave of tech startups. Hudson Pacific recently filed plans to convert one of its two Mid-Market office buildings into housing.
Organizations like the Mid-Market Foundation are stepping in to act as the intermediaries between the neighborhood’s landlords and small-business tenants. Pujals, the foundation’s director, said the organization helped subsidize the Roar Shack’s first year of rent.
The group keeps a database of all of the neighborhood’s ground floor commercial vacancies, and a list of landlords willing to provide concessions or support. Between Fifth and Seventh streets, the foundation has identified seven turnkey spaces ready for occupancy.
There has been “incremental” progress, Pujals said, along with setbacks. The Red Tail Wine Bar, which the foundation also supported in opening at 992 Market St., closed after just a year of operation in Mid-Market.
One of the challenges to revitalizing the neighborhood’s ground floor ecosystem is its large number of sizable cold-shell spaces, which require significant up-front capital to activate.
Pujals believes that with focused investment, both the arts and tech can flourish side by side in the neighborhood despite the fact that museums and arts venues across downtown have been struggling.
“If we were to lean in and center investing and fostering this creative economy in the neighborhood, I think that you would see a secondary wave of office lease up as the broader downtown begins to fill up as well,” Pujals said.
That thesis is being tested in real time on the northern edge of Mid-Market, where nonprofit Community Arts Stabilization Trust purchased the historic Warfield Theatre at 988 Market St. for $7.3 million last year, about half of what the building sold for in 2015. With public radio station KALW as the anchor tenant, CAST has been working to transform the nine-story building into “Warfield Commons,” a hub for arts, culture and media nonprofits. Today, the building is 90% leased.
A block away, landlord Shervin Shoustary recently landed a robotics startup as a new tenant at 965 Mission St. Shoustary said tours with AI and robotics companies are increasingly resulting in signed leases at his building, and credited the city’s focus on public safety and cleanliness in the area. “We are seeing great results,” he said.
Julian Dash, owner of the Holy Stitch sewing factory at 1059 Market, has seen this cycle before: First comes the blight and vacancy, then the priced-out creatives that leave their “thumbprints” on disinvested spaces, driving property values up, he said. “The suits usually follow.”
A 15-year fixture on Market Street, Dash has watched waves of attention crest and recede on Mid-Market, where he has occupied multiple storefronts. Dash described himself as one of Mid-Market’s “longest-standing activators.”
Previous efforts to breathe life into Mid-Market failed because they resulted in services and businesses that proved inaccessible to the very communities that are essential to its vitality, according to Dash.
“My base rent is like $6,000 per month. Next door, the same ground-level space is going for $20,000,” he said, referring to a property that once served as a former adult entertainment venue before it was replaced with a modern eight-story new development — or as Dash put it, a “fancy, stereotypical condo building.”
The rent sought for that building’s languishing, 7,100-square-foot ground floor storefront is still lower than the city’s average for retail spaces, which according to Costar, is about $40.65 per square foot. But, for Dash, the stubborn vacancy next door is “indicative” of Mid-Market’s biggest problem: “Maybe some things are being forced into a district that wasn’t built for that.”
Dash believes the businesses that find success in Mid-Market are those that serve as “assets to the community.”
“I fix people’s clothes and give young people a place to learn, and my business is growing,” he said.
With many questions still surrounding tech’s office needs in post-pandemic San Francisco, some of Mid-Market’s institutional landlords appear to have shifted strategies. Hudson Pacific, which once rented its 22-story office tower at 1455 Market St. to Uber, is now banking on a different type of office tenant to fill the void: public agencies.
The landlord signed a long-term lease with the city to backfill vacancy in the building — the deal provides the city with the option to purchase it next year.
“It’s a 1.1-million-square-foot building. If that were to just sit there empty in perpetuity, it’s going to drag the rest of the market,” Pearson, of Hudson Pacific, said. “To have actual tenants in the building now with city employees occupying it, is going to help lift all ships in that area.”
The deal with Hudson Pacific ushered in a potentially broader shift that some city officials are now actively exploring. Mid-Market Supervisor Matt Dorsey recently nixed a deal that would have allowed the San Francisco Employee Retirement System, the city’s pension fund, to exit its longtime offices in the neighborhood and relocate to the Financial District.
“I have been saying for many years that San Francisco’s most underutilized resource is Market Street,” said Dorsey, while addressing a roomful of early-stage founders, techies and researchers inside of the newly launched Frontier Tower at Sixth and Market streets earlier this month.
The 16-story tower, once valued at $62 million and home to flexible space provider WeWork, was languishing with vacancy just a few years ago, leading to its sale at a 90% discount in 2024. It has since been reborn as an underground tech coworking hub with more than 700 members — proof that Mid-Market still appeals to the startup world.
Dorsey said that he believes technology will continue to play a big role in Mid-Market, alongside the city. He plans to call a hearing to determine what the city “can do with its assets to put skin in the game on Market Street.”
“I want to make sure that Market Street is a showplace from the Castro to the Ferry building, and people will wonder why it took this long,” Dorsey said.
David Seward, chief financial officer of UC Law San Francisco, agreed with Dorsey that “the city should take some responsibility for mitigating some of the damage.” The law school, which has invested $500 million in building an academic village just off Market Street in the Tenderloin, was part of a 2020 lawsuit over the dangerous conditions on the sidewalks and in the doorways, calling it a public health menace.
“The emptying of the Twitter building was negative. Whole Foods’ decision to pull up stakes was negative. And some of that was driven by city policies that were adverse to activation of the community,” he said. “I believe Mid-Market is the key to the Tenderloin’s revitalization and for Union Square as well.”
Mid-Market, to others, is a proving ground. Tech may have a reputation for being fickle about the neighborhood, but the new generation of future-minded optimists building the city’s latest innovation hub at one of its most challenged intersections is betting on creating something more enduring.
“One of the great things about San Francisco is that it’s a city that constantly reinvents itself, and Mid-Market in particular has always been the pivot point in the city — it’s the center point,” said biotech founder Elliot Roth, a member of Frontier Tower. “How do you enable positive change in the city? You don’t want to do something that’s just a brief, momentary interjection. You want something that’s sustained and builds for the long term.”
J.K. Dineen covers housing and real estate development. He joined The Chronicle in 2014 covering San Francisco land use politics for the City Hall team. He has since expanded his focus to explore housing and development issues throughout Northern California. He is the author of two books: “Here Tomorrow” (Heyday, 2013) and “High Spirits” (Heyday, 2015).
Laura Waxmann covers the business community with a focus on commercial real estate, development, retail and the future of San Francisco’s downtown. Prior to joining The Chronicle in 2023, she reported on San Francisco’s changing real estate and economic landscape in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic for the San Francisco Business Times.
Waxmann was born and raised in Frankfurt, Germany, but has called San Francisco home since 2007. She’s reported on a variety of topics including housing, homelessness, education and local politics for the San Francisco Examiner, Mission Local and El Tecolote.
Even when the White House Correspondents’ Dinner goes smoothly, it’s a huge embarrassment to journalists. And in the wake of Saturday’s shooting that interrupted the event, the spectacle of journalists cozying up to politicians is likely to get even worse.
Notice that Trump said “we.” He’s not supposed to be in charge of the event – he was a guest of the press – but he will surely use security concerns to big-foot the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) and dictate the terms of his return appearance, unless someone has the sense to call the whole thing off.
WHCA President Weijia Jiang of CBS News has been deferential to Trump despite his ongoing campaign to feed the 1st Amendment into a wood-chipper. (See my newsletter from two weeks ago with a sample of Trump’s outrageous attacks on the press.)
As Jiang wrote in a first-person piece published yesterday, she welcomed Trump’s appearance this year because she hoped it would “restore some normalcy between the Trump administration and the press. Maybe I was naïve, but I wanted it to be a room we don’t see enough of in Washington: a bipartisan one.”
Jiang said Trump told her after the shooting, “I saw a room that was just totally unified.” She added: “Unity isn’t a word we hear much these days. But that’s how I felt, too.”
Arrrrrrg. The press isn’t supposed to seek unity with politicians. It’s supposed to seek the truth. That’s easier to accomplish – and to get the public to believe – when you’re not clinking champagne glasses with the people you’re reporting on. Jiang and other WHCA members may have good intentions, but if so, they’re such myopic journalists that they don’t understand the authoritarian threat we face. Or maybe they realize it, but refuse to pass up the opportunity to wear expensive clothes, eat tasty food, and boost their social standing – democracy be damned.
In any case, it appears that the co-stars of Washington’s next buddy movie are Trump and Jiang. At his post-shooting news conference, the president had high praise for the WHCA chief, calling her “madam chairman,” and let her ask the first question.
Plans for a dinner do-over are unclear. Jiang wrote: “Trump insists we are having the dinner again in 30 days. Let’s see.” Some Washington journalists think it would be best not to attempt another dinner this year, but Trump tends to fixate on his stupidest ideas. If the dinner does happen, look for the WHCA and the White House to work in lockstep, billing it as a patriotic gesture – an act of “unity.”
Will the event return to the Washington Hilton or will Trump push for another venue? He was quick to note that the Hilton was “not a particularly secure building” and argued that the shooting showed the need for his beloved ballroom, which he has tried to ram through, despite a legal challenge.
Beyond the arrangements for an “even nicer” makeup dinner, there are more reasons to think Saturday’s gunfire will work to Trump’s advantage with the press.
The gunman’s anti-Trump political views are already being used by the right to depict political terrorism as a left-wing problem, when it’s actually more common on the right. If journalists don’t accept the right’s spin, Trump will accuse them of covering up leftist violence.
Also, I fear the shooting will create a stronger emotional bond between Washington journalists and the people in power. It’s human nature for people who go through a harrowing event together to become closer. Politicians and the press – two groups that have a naturally adversarial role in our society – shared a jarring experience in which they faced a common danger. I’m not saying the shooting is likely to make Trump more empathetic – he’s still Trump, after all – but it might lead to a less aggressive posture by the journalists of the WHCA.
And it’s not as if White House reporters were tough on Trump before the shooting. They frequently treat his comments with wide-eyed gullibility, even though he’s the most prominent public liar of our time. They regularly normalize and sanewash his unhinged behavior.
“You know why I do it?” he said. “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so that when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.”
If journalists accept that version of “unity,” we’re doomed.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has played a key role in helping Trump trash America’s global standing, yet Politico cited his “savvy handling of foreign conflicts” in a story last week as if it were an established fact.
US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) speaks during a hearing of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on April 22, 2026.
(Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
“We cannot allow unlimited outside spending to distort our elections or drown out the voices of working people.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders is leading a coalition of Democratic senators pushing for the party’s leaders to require candidates to swear off billionaire- and corporate-backed super PACs, or political action committees, in this year’s primary elections.
Five of the senators are members of a group of Senate Democrats known as the “Fight Club” that has formed to oppose Schumer’s preferred candidates in contested Democratic primaries, many of whom are closely aligned with the party’s traditional corporate backers.
While the senators applauded the DNC’s resolution last month broadly condemning the influence of dark money in party elections, calling it an “important first step,” they said Democratic leaders needed to take more “concrete steps to curb the influence of dark money,” particularly the artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency industries and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
“Corporate-funded super PACs are shaping the 2026 elections as we speak, and the scale of their resources is unprecedented,” the senators said. “Crypto-aligned groups are preparing to spend $200 million, and AIPAC-affiliated groups already control more than $90 million. The AI industry has already spent over $185 million this year alone. These sums are being deployed to influence Democratic primaries and overwhelm candidates who rely on grassroots support.”
April’s broad anti-dark money resolution was passed by the DNC in lieu of one that directly singled out “the growing influence” of AIPAC, specifically over its more than $100 million spending blitz in 2024 to oust progressive candidates. Despite a dramatic shift toward opposition to Israel among Democratic voters over the past three years, that resolution was voted down by a DNC panel.
AIPAC continues to dump massive amounts of money behind its preferred candidates. The senators’ letter notes that “in Illinois alone, outside groups spent over $50 million in recent Democratic primaries.” Nearly half of that money was spent by AIPAC, which secretly funneled money to support its candidates using shell groups that appeared to be unaffiliated.
The group has used similar tactics in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Ala Stanford, a candidate for Pennsylvania’s 3rd District in Philadelphia, was recently revealed to have received $500,000 worth of backing from AIPAC through a super PAC despite claiming to have received no support from the Israel lobby.
Meanwhile, in Maine, a clique of Republican billionaires who back Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine)—including Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman and Palantir CEO Alex Karp—also recently dropped $2 million to fund an ad campaign seeking to hamper the chances of the Democratic Senate primary front-runner Graham Platner.
“We cannot allow unlimited outside spending to distort our elections or drown out the voices of working people,” the senators said in Sunday’s letter.
Super PACs like AIPAC, AI and crypto are buying elections with billionaire money.
We'll never address the major crises facing our country as long as that continues.
We must overturn Citizens United and kick billionaire-funded super PACs OUT of Democratic primaries NOW. pic.twitter.com/weZGwx0izI
The senators noted Schumer’s past statement that overturning the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which opened the door for the flood of corporate money into elections by allowing individuals to independently spend unlimited amounts in support of candidates, was “probably more important than any other single thing we could do to preserve this great and grand democracy.”
They said that while reversing the ruling remained a “critical long-term goal,” the party “has the authority—and the responsibility—to act now with clear, enforceable rules.”
“National and state parties should require all Democratic candidates to sign a pledge opposing billionaire- and corporate-backed super PAC spending on their behalf in Democratic primaries,” they said. “The DNC, state parties, and committees working to elect Democrats to the House and Senate have many potential tools at their disposal to enforce that pledge, including withholding endorsements for those who make endorsements in the primary, and they should use whatever tools necessary to do so.”
Sanders has said that simply requiring candidates to take a pledge is not enough and that party leaders need to be diligent about holding them to it.
“If the Democrats are going to be honest and consistent in terms of their concerns about money and politics, they’ve got to clean up, in my view, their own house immediately,” he said in an interview on Saturday. “That means getting super PACs out of Democratic primaries, congressional as well as presidential.”
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Join May Day Strong’s Mass Call ahead of Friday’s day of action (Weds 8pm ET/5pm PT). You’ll hear from organizers mobilizing across the country about the importance of economic disruption as a tactic in fighting authoritarianism and how you can take part in the day of action this Friday (If you haven’t already, find a May Day event near you. There are already more than 3,000 events planned across the country.)
Tell your Republican representative: No more bankrolling ICE brutality. After keeping the DHS shut down for months because they refuse to enact reforms that Americans overwhelmingly want for ICE and Border Patrol, the GOP is trying to use a legislative process known as budget reconciliation to shovel as much as $140 billion more into the coffers of those agencies — on top of the $170 billion they got in last year’s Big Ugly Bill. The House could vote as soon as tomorrow to advance this package, so if you have a Republican representative, call them today to tell them you don’t want another penny of your taxpayer dollars funding these violent agencies.
Join Fight Back With Friends (Tues, 6:30pm ET/3:30pm PT) Fight Back With Friends is a monthly program that empowers you to connect family and friends with civic action. Tomorrow, we’ll talk about how you can support folks in your circles to show up on May Day, with all the tools, tips, and scripts you’ll need to be effective and make an economic impact across the country. And don’t worry if you’re new to Fight Back With Friends! We’ll have a full training after we walk through the call to action to help you become familiar with the process.
Demand that your representative say NO to the regime’s efforts to expand its domestic spying capabilities. Section 702 of the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is a War on Terrorism-era relic that skirts the Constitution to allow warrantless domestic surveillance by the federal government — but it’s set to expire, or be reauthorized, this week, possibly as early as tomorrow. Tell your representative: They can either greenlight AI-fueled warrantless mass surveillance, or uphold the Constitution. And after you’ve emailed your representative via the link above, please follow up with a call.
Tell your senators and representative: No ICE concentration camps, anywhere. The regime has been scouting and purchasing commercial warehouses to expand its network of ICE prison camps — but local, state, and legal opposition has successfully stopped or slowed 13 such projects. As Saturday’s Communities Not Cages day of action made crystal clear, Americans absolutely do not want to be a nation that warehouses humans, anywhere. Ever. Follow up on that amazing day by telling your Members of Congress to publicly oppose new warehouse-style camps and any public spending to build, renovate, or operate such facilities.
As a journalist, I’m always doing two things: Reporting and writing. My reading falls along the same lines. I read one kind of book because I’m interested in a topic and want to mine it for details, context or ideas (reporting). I read a second kind of book because I want to see how different people are making and telling stories (writing).
The first kind of book is pretty specific to what I’m working on and tends to be works whose main job is to inform. Sometimes that means academic tomes that maybe five other people have read, but I also read a lot of popular history, especially histories of California. The second kind of book is much more wide-ranging—fiction, nonfiction, essays etc.
Obviously the two piles blend together a lot; anytime you read a book, even a bad one, you see someone do something you hadn’t thought of before, and it informs how you approach your next piece. Here are some books (and an art show) that I read or consulted or was inspired by while writing my new book Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America. Warning: They are all over the place, but are a mix of books about housing, cities and places, and works whose narrative methods I found intriguing and useful.
For this generation of housing writers, it is the work against which so much else is measured. Desmond calls himself a sociologist and is a professor at Princeton, but actually he’s a journalist who at a relatively young age has established himself as America’s preeminent chronicler of poverty. Poverty is a tough topic. It’s always there, always sad—and always hard to say something new about. Evicted sparked a national conversation about the never-ending shame of having so much want in a country with so much wealth. By shifting perspectives from a landlord who is exploiting tenants while struggling to maintain a middle-class lifestyle to renters who are constantly on the edge of homelessness, the book sees no boogeymen but only a rotten system that we’re all caught up in one way or the other.
My current favorite book. In a world in which seemingly every reporter is opining too much and tweeting too much and first-person essaying too much, MacFarquhar is a relative enigma. She’s not a hermit or anything; you can find interviews and TED Talks and whatnot. But she steers clear of the first person, leaves out most interview quotes, and tries to inhabit her subjects by using free indirect speech. The effect of these decisions is to elevate her vision while reducing her presence. It’s original, brilliant and makes for some of the best writing I’ve seen in any form.
Methods aside, Strangers Drowning is a timeless story about extreme altruists—do-gooders whose lives are so dedicated to helping people that they end up sacrificing most of their personal, professional and family lives. It seems weird to call such a cerebral book a rollercoaster, but the emotional progression of reading it is intense. You start the book feeling like a selfish piece of garbage. Toward the middle you’re convinced that her subjects are defects who have been cursed with the mirror image of psychopathy. By the end you just go “people are crazy, man,” and leave it at that. It’s a journey into the soul that becomes a journey into the mind and leaves you scratching your head at the remarkable complexity of kindness. I’ve bought maybe ten copies of this book to give out as gifts, and gave two to sources during the reporting of Golden Gates.
Every reporter who has expressed even a modest interest in history has at some point had an editor say some version of “this is a newspaper not a library.” Hannah-Jones has become one of the most decorated journalists of her generation by breaking that rule, most prominently with The New York Times’s 1619 Project, and here in Living Apart, which is essentially a long magazine article turned eBook.
The premise of this piece is how the federal government neglected to enforce the 1968 Civil Rights Act by refusing to use the cudgel of Housing and Urban Development infrastructure money to force exclusive suburbs to build affordable housing and curb restrictive zoning practices. This decision, originally made by the Nixon Administration, continued for four decades, perpetuating segregation long after fair housing—passed in the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination—was the law of the land.
Given that this piece was published in 2012, the trick of the story, like a good amount of Hannah-Jones’s work, is to pull history into the present by showing how decisions made decades ago continue to guide us today. The most remarkable thing about the reporting is that it leaves zero question that the Nixon Administration knew exactly what it was doing in neglecting to enforce fair housing. They also knew this decision would cause great harm to American unity and have consequences for many generations.
In a batch of talking points for the president, George Romney, Nixon’s HUD chief and the father of Senator Mitt Romney, warns that de-segregationist housing policies are needed to prevent “our nation from being torn apart.”
President Nixon refuses, but understands the consequences. “I realize that this position will lead us to a situation in which blacks will continue to live for the most part in black neighborhoods and where there will be predominately black schools and predominately white schools,” Nixon wrote in a memo Hannah-Jones unearthed.
This is one of those “both buckets” pieces. I consulted it several times while writing Golden Gates, first for the housing stuff, but also to guide my thinking on how to make Chapter 4, which starts at the close of World War II and ends in the early 1980s, resonate today. My solution was to weave in the story of a developer who moved to California as a 10-year-old during the state’s 1960s population boom and started his career during the housing crisis of the 1970. Later, the book catches up with him as 65-year-old developer today, to show just how little had changed.
There’s nothing I can say about Joan Didion that hasn’t already been said, so let me take this opportunity to say that I don’t care how many times you’ve read Slouching, you haven’t experienced it in full until you’ve heard Diane Keaton’s reading of the audiobook. I missed my BART stop listening to it because I got so carried away by her voice.
For years I’ve wanted to write a brainy essay about the differing ways in which Joan Didion and Jane Jacobs handle the chaos of youth and urbanity, but it’s never really gelled and therefore remains more of a feeling than a coherent thought. The writers are just so different, and their fields of study so distinct. And yet, in my mind I always pair them because of the opposite emotions I walk away with after reading them. Whereas Didion sees chaos everywhere, Jacobs—who is a better pure reporter—sees the underlying logic of systems that appear disorderly on the surface. There’s a basic optimism in that: Messy stuff works. People are adaptable. Life goes on. One of the most discouraging things about politics is the way people become advocates for policies over outcomes, which means the same batch of advocates can sometimes be the cure and other times be the disease. Jacobs was an advocate, but she’s also fluid and thoughtful, presenting guidelines for good urbanism yet allowing that they have to flexible and malleable for cities to remain vibrant.
I read Karen Russell the way novelists read poets: To see where the boundaries are. Fiction or nonfiction, writing is a bizarre exercise. You encounter a person, idea, dream or scene or emotion, then try to recreate the same details and feeling with a bunch of marks on a page. And you do this in hopes of forging some strange telepathy with people you’ll never meet. It’s hard stuff, so even though I’m squarely into journalism, I still find it enriching to spend time reading novelists and short story writers who are opening new pathways. It reminds me that nothing is impossible, that the word “indescribable” is bullshit, and that however much difficulty I’m having rendering some scene, someone else is struggling with something infinitely more difficult.
In terms of my reading experience, I liked the title story of Vampires most, but the one that made the greatest impression on me is “The Barn at the End of Our Term.” It’s a story about President Rutherford B. Hayes being reincarnated as a horse. If you asked me to explain why I found this interesting, I couldn’t do it. But Karen Russell could, because she can do anything.
Look, everyone needs to unwind with a little detective fiction now and then. And if you’re going to do detective fiction, you might as well dive into one of America’s greatest literary traditions, which is detective fiction about LA. There’s so much out there—Raymond Chandler, Michael Connelly—but I always come back to the Easy Rawlins series.
Easy is a stereotypically complicated protagonist, and his best friend is a sociopathic murderer, but once you get past all that, you realize that some of the best stuff in these books is all the domestic juggling Easy has to deal with in the midst of his detective work. Property is central to this story and Easy’s evolution as a character. He’s struggling with the mortgage in the first book, upgrades to landlording in the second, and by the time of White Butterfly is a small-time mogul who has gone to some lengths to hide this fact. Real estate is a hustle that a stunning number of people—rich, poor and middle—have all got their hands in. In this way Easy is just another ordinary American trying to find his way to passive income.
The New York Times called this a “nonfiction masterpiece.” It is nothing short of that. The premise of the book—democracy in crisis—is the sort of amorphous topic that seems impossible to execute in nonfiction. There’s just so much going on. But Packer unpacks his tale one character at a time, and in doing so manages to accomplish his audacious goal of constructing an “inner history” of America.
The main stories are deep and well-told—the decline of a factory town, the growth of Silicon Valley, a starry-eyed optimist turned cynical political consultant—and along the way Packer gives readers a kind of cultural download via short, interlude biographies on subjects including Oprah Winfrey, Sam Walton, Raymond Carver, Andrew Breitbart and Jay-Z. Like all the best writers, you know exactly what Packer thinks without ever hearing him say it. The effect of reading this book is not unlike the effect of fading into a nine-minute Prog Rock song with multiple solos and time signature changes. You wonder how something so vast and complex can work while simultaneously appreciating that somehow it just does.
On the surface, it seems like a risky idea: The history of one year in New York, tracing crime, the mayoral election, and baseball. New York is a big and important place, but it’s not so big or important to make an easy sell of a book about a World Series whose outcome is well-known or a local election whose results most of America doesn’t care about. And yet, Mahler pulls it off. What makes this book so great, beyond the depth of reporting and the easy, vivid writing, is that it’s less a story about New York than a story about the nadir of American cities. Reading the book—the city teetering on bankruptcy, the Son of Sam murders, the 1977 blackout and looting—you wonder how the place can ever recover.
With hindsight, however, we know that shortly after the story closes, New York and big US cities across the country begin a slow recovery that 40 years later would result in the gentrification fights we see today. This makes Mahler’s book feel like a prequel to the modern American city, and the experience of reading it is a reminder of the adage that predictions are hard, especially about the future.
I suspect that in the year 2040 or so, someone (maybe me), could write a great book about how the San Francisco of 2019 or 2020 told us much about where America, cities and the economy was headed. In a way I tried to do that with Golden Gates, but as time goes on the implications will become clearer and gift some future author with a wealth of political and cultural detail of the sort that Mahler mines so expertly.
“Throughout history, the treatment and arrangement of shelter have revealed more about a particular people than have any other products of creative arts. Housing is an outward expression of the inner human nature; no society can be fully understood apart from the residences of its members.”
So begins Crabgrass Frontier, the definitive history of American suburbs. The book was published in 1985 but remains the best look at suburbanization and its consequences for American society. I suppose that’s not surprising, since an event as epochal as suburbanization would be expected to have staying power. Jackson goes through the whole thing, tracking suburbs from pre-history through early America and the Postwar boom. The suburbs, then and now, are built on transportation. As the book progresses, Jackson lays out how each successive leap of mobility opens more land—linear carriages and trains gave way to geometric freeways—available for urban development.
What’s most remarkable about this work is its capacity to look forward. At the end Jackson predicts that inner-city crime rates will fall precipitously and that over time far-flung suburbs would become poorer and less desired as central cities become safer and richer. Pretty bold prediction in the mid-1980s, but it was spot on, and we’re now living with the consequences.
The Color of Law is framed as something between a very long essay and a legal argument. In the introduction Rothstein lays out his case for America’s racially homogeneous neighborhoods being a consequence of de jure segregation (segregation by law or public policy) versus de facto segregation (segregation resulting from private practices). It’s a fascinating framing. As I read the book, I kept thinking about a theoretical court case in which black Americans could sue their government for the vast wealth transfers that occurred via lost housing wealth. How many trillions would it add up to?
Thus, while my tastes gravitate toward sprawling, character-driven books, the power of this one flows from the simplicity of the argument and Rothstein’s relentless focus in proving it. Rothstein did not discover racism, and he didn’t discover the Federal Housing Administration’s redlining guidelines or restrictive covenants either. Various authors, historians and essayists have trod this ground several times before. But the way he assembles this history is unique and abundantly helpful. Page after page and example after example he leaves zero doubt that segregation is not something that just happened but was planned and executed by a federal government whose societal debt will take centuries, if ever, to repay.
Ask anyone who is even remotely serious about California history what you need to read to get started, and the answer is always Kevin Starr. And it’s always the correct response: He is the master. This is where I note that, as much as I wish everyone was as fascinated with California as I am, Starr is not for casual readers. As the former state librarian and foremost chronicler of the Golden State, his books sag under the weight of their comprehension. Take Golden Dreams, which covers a relative burp of history—California from 1950 to 1963—yet is almost 600 pages and roughly 250,000 words. To get through Starr’s entire Americans and the California Dream series, which covers about 150 years, you’ll need to put aside time for seven more volumes and well in excess of a million more words.
I have them all, but if you’re going to read one book from the canon, Golden Dreams is it, because that was the period when California really took over the nation’s politics and economy. The book goes deep into the West Coast psyche, pulling together a vast trove of cultural, economic and political history mixed with long chunks of literary criticism. By the end you’ve covered subjects ranging from the architectural marvel of stacked multi-level interchanges to the horticultural tinkering that gave us freeway landscaping to the instructional images of Sunset magazine, the styles of Williams-Sonoma, the religiousness of Big Sur, and the highbrow strategy of the San Francisco 49ers’ offense. The book has an entire chapter analyzing the “Baghdad by the Bay” metaphor that Herb Caen deployed in his columns for the San Francisco Chronicle. It’s a lot.
Speaking of metaphors, after all this excess, Starr ends with stunningly elegant conclusion, which is that the result of California’s wealth and abundance was a rebellion to the simple designs and style choices that have come to define Apple products and gave rise to the concept we call “coolness.” “There was, to put the matter simply, a lot of money flowing through the society, hence a lot of jobs and careers open to talent, hence the filling in of domestic space with iconic manifestations of the new consumer lifestyle— stereophonic sound systems, electric appliances, modernist furniture, abstract art and sculpture, Space Age silver and flatware, fabrics in unprecedented colors, designer jewelry and eyewear,” he writes. “Hence the effort to keep this consumption under control by banishing clutter from interiors, appliance design, and related items… Coolness, from this perspective, constituted a kind of asceticism, an insistence upon choice and restraint, in a world filling up with consumer goods.”
Honorable Mention: Sandow Birk,In Smog and Thunder: The Great War of the Californias
Technically this isn’t a book (though you can buy one). It’s an art exhibit that I saw at the Laguna Art Museum in 2000, shortly after I moved to LA from San Francisco. The premise of the show, more than 120 artworks, is that NorCal and SoCal fought an actual war and these are the paintings that documented it. The result is a bunch of epic, oil on canvas scenes with names like “The Bombing of the Getty Center” and “SF MOMA and the Battle of San Francisco.” The concept is hilarious, the paintings are gorgeous, and the story is sly. If you’ve spent any amount of time in either SF or LA, this will resonate.
Conor Dougherty is an economics reporter at The New York Times. He previously spent a decade in New York covering housing and the economy for The Wall Street Journal. He grew up in the Bay Area and lives with his family in Oakland.
By Katie Dowd, Managing editor April 26, 2026 (SFGate.com)
A file photo of the view of Lope National Park located in Central Gabon, April 13, 2013. Desirey Minkoh/AfrikImages Agency/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
A California man was killed by a herd of elephants during a hunting trip in Africa, his family confirmed. Ernie Dosio, 75, was the owner of a Central Valley farm management company.
Dosio, who was a well-known big game hunter affiliated with the Sacramento Safari Club, was on a trip with Collect Africa, the New York Times reported. The travel company bills itself on its site as an “African Species Collecting Concierge.” According to family friends, Dosio was hoping to kill a yellow-backed duiker, an antelope known for its timid personality, in the Lope-Okanda rainforest area of Gabon.
While hunting on April 17, Dosio and two other hunters unexpectedly came upon a small herd of female elephants and their calves. The adult elephants charged repeatedly, and Dosio was killed when he was gored by one of the elephant’s tusks, the Times reported. His remains are awaiting repatriation to California; he lived in Lodi at the time of his death.
The news came as a shock to loved ones in the Central Valley, where Dosio was the millionaire owner of Pacific AgriLands, a farm management company that works with wineries. The Central District Elks posted on Facebook that he was a “pillar of our Community,” and Dosio’s son told the Daily Mail that the family was thrown into chaos by the news.
“The day it happened we heard it was buffalos — and different crazy things,” Jeff Dosio told the outlet. “The lawyers got called before the family. There’s just some things that just don’t make sense.”
A close family friend who spoke with the Times said Dosio had been on many hunts in Africa and “knew the risks.” Photos of Dosio’s home attest to his controversial hobby: trophies of a rhino, lion and numerous deer and antelope species can be seen.
Katie Dowd is the SFGATE managing editor. She started her career at SFGATE in 2011 shortly after graduating from UC Berkeley. She was born and raised in the Bay Area.
Saikat Chakrabarti is seen in June 2018 with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after her victory in New York’s Democratic congressional primary. Mark Lennihan/Associated Press file
Saikat Chakrabarti, a progressive centimillionaire running to succeed U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, is not shy about flaming the Democratic Party and its congressional leaders, who he says have “failed” to clean up corruption, offer a positive roadmap for the nation and stand up to President Donald Trump.
“I don’t believe the Democrats have been doing a good job in Congress,” said Chakrabarti, who made a fortune as a tech-startup engineer before launching a career as a progressive agitator on issues such as green energy, universal health and child care, and government-subsidized housing.
“I think they’re falling flat on the job of actually stopping this authoritarian coup I believe we’re in the middle of,” said Chakrabarti, who as of March 31 had spent nearly $5 million on his campaign based mostly on loans from himself — more than all of his rivals combined in the race.
Chakrabarti’s outspoken approach to other Democrats has been evident in his campaign for the District 11 seat — particularly concerning his chief opponent, state Sen. Scott Wiener.
It also featured prominently in a notable controversy in 2019 when he was chief of staff to liberal firebrand Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez of New York, whom he helped to elect.
That incident has gained currency this month because Ocasio-Cortez has not endorsed Chakrabarti, though Chakrabarti says he would “love” to have it and “of course, I’m going through the process.” An email from The Examiner sent to Ocasio-Cortez’s office did not receive a response.
Her reticence has prompted speculation about her relationship with Chakrabarti, who frequently invokes his past work with her in support of his campaign and uses photographs of himself with her in campaign materials.
In particular, Chakrabarti in an interview with The Examiner drew a clear line from his work supporting Ocasio-Cortez on the Green New Deal to President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which produced the largest climate and energy investments in U.S. history.
Chakrabarti was Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign manager and then campaign chair during a 13-month period. When she took office, he became her chief of staff in Washington, D.C.
That arrangement came to an end after eight months following a controversy over a message Chakrabarti posted on social media comparing some Democrats to “new Southern Democrats” based on their votes on a border-control bill.
“Instead of ‘fiscally conservative but socially liberal,’ let’s call the New Democrats and Blue Dog Caucus the ‘New Southern Democrats,’” Chakrabarti wrote in the message, according to The Washington Post. “They certainly seem hell bent to do to black and brown people today what the old Southern Democrats did in the 40s.”
The subsequently deleted message drew an online rebuke from the House Democrats Twitter account run by the office of Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, according to The Intercept. Jeffries, another House member representing New York, is the legislative body’s current minority leader.
Pelosi — who was speaker of the House at the time — encouraged members not to air grievances with other Democrats in public, The Post reported.
Asked about the controversial message this week, Chakrabarti reiterated his disappointment over the vote in Congress.
“Trump was putting children into cages,” Chakrabarti said. “I believe the thing I said is the system of immigration that Trump is implementing is a racist system. That made a lot of people mad. But it’s true, it was.”
Despite the dustup, The Intercept reported in 2019 that Ocasio-Cortez’s office said Chakrabarti’s departure had been planned. It quoted Ocasio-Cortez as saying she was “extremely grateful for his service to advance a bold agenda and improve the lives of the people” in her New York district.
Chakrabarti also said this week his exit was planned, that he trained his replacement, and that he was expecting a baby.
Wiener spokesperson Joe Arellano, however, recently said Chakrabarti was “trying to cover up the skeletons in his closet” from his time in the nation’s capital.
“San Franciscans want a representative who fights for our values and also delivers for our city and country,” Arellano said this week. “That requires building coalitions and passing real laws.”
Asked about Wiener’s voluminous legislative record, Chakrabarti questioned how much effect his laws have had.
“If voters believe the thing that we’re really lacking in D.C. right now is more experienced state and local legislators, then, yeah, I’m not your guy,” he said. “But if you think what we need to do is actually change the party, take the political risk to do that, then that is what I’m offering.”
Julie Edwards, a spokesperson for San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan, another candidate in the race, said, “Saikat attacks people who could be allies.”
Though she said Chan would call out “corporate Democrats” who “cave to billionaires,” Edwards said Chan “looks forward to joining all the Democrats, using all leverage from their different roles and perspectives, to get the best deal for the working Americans nationwide.”
Chakrabarti, meanwhile, said he thinks Democrats need a “fundamental reset.” He said the nation is in a moment similar to the 1930s, when many people were attracted to fascism but President Franklin Roosevelt showed how the government could work for the good of common citizens.
“You have to be willing to blow up your future political career if you want to make real change happen today — and that’s what I’m willing to do,” he said.
Raised in Fort Worth, Texas, by parents who from India, Chakrabarti said he grew up “middle class,” attending public schools. He graduated from Harvard University in 2007 with an undergraduate degree in computer science.
Chakrabarti had two three-month internships and spent a year as a technology associate in Connecticut at a large investment firm before co-founding Mockingbird, a web-design firm that he was part of for the next eight years amid other pursuits.
In February 2011, Chakrabarti became a founding engineer at the payments-technology company Stripe, based at the time in San Francisco. The role quickly catapulted him into the ranks of the ultrawealthy. Chakrabarti left the company after two years and four months, and his fortune today is worth more than $160 million, according to federal disclosure forms.
A tech boom was blossoming in San Francisco while Chakrabarti was at Stripe, and he said he quit because he became disillusioned watching people get “pushed out” of The City.
“When I went through that experience of hitting the startup lottery, that to me, felt like I need to give back,” Chakrabarti said. “Because, yeah, like I worked hard, but I didn’t work harder than a teacher or a nurse or the janitors cleaning our offices.”
“They would never be able to afford a home, would never be able to afford a secure retirement,” he said. “And that’s frankly why I quit, and I started looking around for how to solve the actual problems people were facing.”
Chakrabarti said he was not political at the time, but he was attracted to the messaging of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders — “and that’s how I ended up spending the next 10 years of my life trying to unrig this broken economic system by passing taxes on the rich, including myself, by trying to actually create an economy that will work for working people and not just the wealthiest few.”
“It’s not just a question of fairness,” he said.
“I believe it’s a question of whether our country is doomed, because I do believe when you see levels of inequality like we’re seeing today, that is how nations fail,” he said. “It’s an existential crisis for this nation.”
In 2015, Chakrabarti worked as director of organizing technology in Sanders’ first presidential campaign. Then in April 2016, he co-founded Brand New Congress, which he ran as executive director for nearly a year and a half to support progressive candidates.
Chakrabarti also co-founded Justice Democrats in 2017, and he led that organization — which played a prominent role in the election of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and other progressive politicians — as executive director for 18 months.
After leaving Ocasio-Cortez’s office, Chakrabarti became congressional policy director for New Consensus, a think tank he co-founded that develops and promotes progressive public-policy ideas for a clean economy.
Its “Mission for America” is something of a progressive version of the conservative Heritage Foundation’s highly influential Project 2025, a “plan of how exactly do you build up an economy that will create prosperity for everybody and reverse the decline we’re seeing today,” Chakrabarti said.
Chakrabarti said he has “a lot of respect for Nancy Pelosi” — particularly for her advocacy for HIV/AIDS research, care and prevention — and said she was a better leader and opponent of Trump than Jeffries. But he criticized Pelosi for voting in favor of an $890 billion defense budget last December.
“I’m not going to vote for another dollar for any defense spending,” he said. “In fact, I believe we need to slash our military budget.”
“We’re getting dragged into World War III, looking at AI potentially replacing half of all of our jobs,” he said. “At the same time, wealth and power is being concentrated into the hands of a few at a scale that we haven’t seen since the Gilded Age. And in the face of these monumental challenges, I think a lot of what most Democrats are offering are kind of the same old, same old.”
A spokesperson for Pelosi responded by providing a memo from Democrat Rep. Adam Smith, the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, stating that, among other things, the package included measures to strengthen congressional oversight.
Wiener has said Chakrabarti had a negligible presence in San Francisco before his candidacy, and his campaign has attacked Chakrabarti’s residency and voting history, highlighting the fact that Chakrabarti voted in San Francisco in 2010 and then not again until 2020.
Chakrabarti said he has owned different homes in San Francisco since 2013 and currently lives with his wife and daughter near Duboce Park.
He said he has given “millions” of dollars to local nonprofits, particularly those providing housing and food assistance. He served on the Friends of Duboce Park board of directors for about a year until leaving to pursue his campaign, according to the organization’s president.
Wiener’s camp has hit Chakrabarti on the residency issue following a news report that said he claimed a house in Maryland was his principal residence for seven years in conjunction with property-tax payments. Chakrabarti has said it was a mistake not repeated on other documents and that he bought the home for his parents.
He countered that campaign mailers highlighting the Maryland story were funded by Abundant Future, a committee that has received hefty donations from tech bigwigs and other wealthy figures, including cryptocurrency billionaire Chris Larsen and Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan. He noted that Larsen’s company, Ripple Labs, made a large donation to Trump’s inauguration, though Larsen has personally made large donations to Democrats as well.
Chakrabarti said he wants to get all corporate money out of elections and to move toward public financing of elections.
He said he sees Congress as corrupted and wants to restrict lobbying by former members. In addition, he vowed to file something called a “discharge petition” in order “to force a vote on banning congressional stock trading” by representatives, which he believes the public overwhelmingly supports.
“Leadership doesn’t like it because you’re going around their power,” he said. “I don’t care about that.”
Meanwhile, he attacked Wiener for not immediately joining him and Chan during a January debate in labeling Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza a “genocide.”
Wiener refused to answer a lightning-round question on the charged subject and was booed by the audience. Later, in a video he posted online, he did use the term to describe Israel’s actions in the conflict and explained his hesitance given the word’s origins in the wake of the Holocaust — but not before Chakrabarti posted his own video featuring Wiener and asserting, “When you can’t call out a genocide when the whole world sees one, how can we trust you in D.C.?”
Politically, Chakrabarti said he has mostly been active at the federal level. He gave $7,000 in November to New York City Councilmember Chi Osse shortly before Osse backed off a run against Jeffries.
Chakrabarti has also made some contributions to San Francisco candidates, including most recently $500 to Natalie Gee, who is running for District 4 supervisor.
But Wiener and Chan both have far more extensive lists of endorsements from politicians, political groups and unions.
Chakrabarti said he has had about 3,000 people who signed up to volunteer. Some of those he hired, and his campaign currently employs more than 200 people in various capacities, including as canvassers, some making $45 an hour.
“I’m going to force Democrats to fight this moment,” he said. “And I believe that’s what people want, too.”
The detention camps are moral abominations — but they’re not inevitable. Local organizers have already prevented thirteen of these warehouses from being converted into detention camps and with your help we can prevent even more.
We all have a role to play in the fight to end the warehousing of human beings and the criminalization of immigration. You can get started by joining the Communities Not Cages National Day of Action.
There are hundreds of events today, and no matter where you live, there’s an action you can take to fight back against ICE detention camps:
1️⃣ Join a Communities Not Cages event near you. Stand in solidarity with immigrant communities, connect with local groups and activists leading this fight, and call on your local officials to use every tool to oppose the camps.
2️⃣ Demand action from Congress. Email your Members of Congress and tell them to publicly oppose any new warehouses or detention centers and block any federal funding that would be used to build, renovate, or operate these facilities.
3️⃣ Check out our resource page for more ways to get involved. From Know Your Rights guides and recorded trainings to toolkits and an ICE warehouse tracker created by our partners, this page has everything you need to join the fight against Trump’s ICE detention camps.
We hope you’ll join us today and stand in solidarity with immigrant communities across the country, and after the national day of action we’ll be in touch with more ways to continue organizing against the regime’s detention camps.
If Tom Steyer gave away about $1.5 billion dollars in the next month, he would demonstrate that he doesn’t want to be part of a government run by and for billionaires. He doesn’t have to pay me anything for this advice, but divestment of his wealth might improve Steyer’s chances of becoming California’s next governor.
I’m not endorsing him here, or saying you should vote for him, just contemplating the difficulty of a billionaire seeking office at a time when many voters oppose the increasing influence that wealth exerts on local, state and national government.
With his personal wealth estimated to be around $2 billion, Steyer is likely to encounter some opposition to his gubernatorial campaign because he’s a billionaire. The disastrous government run by billionaires in Washington, D.C. Is not giving a good name to plutocracy.
If he gave all his money away, he wouldn’t be the rich guy running for governor. Wikimedia images photo
Steyer was just endorsed by Our Revolution, Bernie Sanders’ group known until recently for its outspoken criticism of government by and for wealthy men. A statement in support of Steyer by O.R. notes:
“Tom Steyer isn’t afraid to use his platform to challenge the very system that made him wealthy. His platform includes a set of core priorities that resonate deeply with working people across the state, including:
Single-payer healthcare and universal coverage; taxing the wealthy and closing corporate loopholes; lowering costs for working families, including housing and energy; bold climate action and a just transition to clean energy; holding corporate power accountable and strengthening democracy”
These goals are commendable, whoever proposes to implement them. But can a very wealthy man persuade voters he favors a progressive agenda?
Critics of Steyer question his integrity, as he invests over $100 million of his own money to support his campaign for office. While he’s not buying the governorship outright, he’s spending a lot more of his own money on it than other candidates can afford to give themselves.
Sponsored link
Steyer’s critics also question the sources of his income. He made some of his fortune by investing in private prisons and coal mining, businesses that might lead one to question his current commitment to clean energy and prison reform, although a man is certainly entitled to change his mind on these issues, particularly if he becomes more progressive.
Steyer also has said that billionaires like him need to pay more in taxes, and he has endorsed the wealth tax bill, which our current Governor, Gavin Newsom, is trying to kill. He’s not fleeing the state to avoid taxes, as some other wealthy men have; he’s ready to pay more.
Which brings me back to my original proposal.
Besides paying a wealth tax in the future, there’s one more highly dramatic expenditure Steyer could make right now to show the public that he’s not going to be another self-serving billionaire once elected. If Steyer gave away enough of his money—I estimate it would be $1.5 billion—in the next few weeks, he would no longer be a billionaire. The candidate for governor could honestly say that he opposes government by and for billionaires.
He might still live comfortably, particularly if he begins to receive a California governor’s salary (about $234,00 per year). But if I were his campaign manager (and you can see here why I’m not), I would urge Steyer to divest himself of excess wealth before a wealth tax bill is implemented. He could literally put his money where his agenda is.
In the coming weeks he could give $1.5 to $2 billion to non-profit environmental groups, advocates of prison reform and abolitionism, defense funds for immigrants, and grants to foster affordable housing and to sustain independent journalism.
The divestment of wealth wouldn’t guarantee Tom Steyer’s election, but it would permit him to air some interesting commercials. I can see him facing the camera and announcing: “I’m Tom Steyer, former billionaire. California needs a governor who knows how to spend money on your needs instead of his own. Brother, I can spare a dime; I can spare $1.5 billion to help you out, in fact, I just did.
“Let’s tax the wealthy, and make the state affordable to everyone else.”
Joel Schechter has written several books on satire.
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San Francisco Young Democrats meet with SFDems Chair Nancy Tung Wednesday, April 29th | 2pm Location: SC T-160 (third floor of Student Center) Register The San Francisco Young Democrats at SF State are teaming up with SFDems to make sure their voices are heard. Want to get more plugged into San Francisco... Continue reading →
One Million Rising: Strategic Non-Cooperation to Fight Authoritarianism Virtual Event · Hosted by No Kings Time Wednesdays 8 – 9:30pm EDT Location Virtual event Join from anywhere About this event Across the country, authoritarian forces are getting bolder and more dangerous. Trump and his allies are not hiding their agenda: mass deportations,... Continue reading →
THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 2023 AT 2 AM – 4 AM PDT How to create trust in a group? Details Event by Extinction Rebellion Empathy Circles online EMPATHY CAFE Duration: 2 hr Public · Anyone on or off Facebook How to create trust in a group? This is the question that arose in our... Continue reading →
This May 1st, history is calling us into the streets. Our Revolution members are mobilizing for May Day action, joining workers, organizers, union members, students, immigrants, and community allies in a powerful show of solidarity against authoritarianism, corporate greed, and attacks on working people. Across the country, people are rising together... Continue reading →
They’re coming soon and we can’t wait for you to see ’em. The Pissed Off Voter Guide drops this Friday, and we’re having a party to launch them across the City. WHEN: Friday, May 1st, 6-8pm WHERE: Thee Parkside 1600 17th Street @ Wisconsin (map) Muni lines 22, 19, 55 Come... Continue reading →
When you volunteer for Saikat, it’s on us to give you a great experience and a genuine chance to make a difference. We don’t want to waste a second of your time. That’s why we’re always optimizing. And I’m excited to report that this Saturday we talked with 300% more... Continue reading →
