“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.
Twenty-five years ago, September 11, 2001 changed us forever.
Nearly 3,000 people left home that morning expecting an ordinary Tuesday. They kissed their families goodbye. They went to work. They boarded airplanes. They made coffee, answered phones, sat at their desks, and went about their lives.
So many never came home.
I know where I was that day, as do many of you. Time stopped. Our hearts broke. Today, 25 years later, we remember them.
We remember every life stolen. Every family forever changed. Every empty chair at the dinner table. Every birthday, graduation, wedding, and ordinary Tuesday that came afterward without someone who should have been there.
We honor the firefighters who climbed those stairs while everyone else was coming down.
We honor the police officers, emergency workers, service members, recovery workers, and volunteers who ran toward danger.
We honor the passengers and crew of Flight 93 who knew what was happening and chose courage.
And we honor the survivors, families, and first responders who have carried the weight of that day for twenty-five years.
But when I think about September 11, I also remember what Americans did next.
We reached for one another.
Strangers helped strangers.
People opened their homes. They gave blood. They brought food. They searched for the missing. They stood beside grieving families. They asked what they could do, and then they showed up.
In one of our darkest moments, ordinary people reminded us of something extraordinary:
Caring for one another has tremendous power.
That is the America I still believe in.
And twenty-five years later, remembering must mean more than looking backward.
It must also be a pledge about what comes next.
We pledge that fear will never make us surrender our humanity.
We pledge to reject political violence, terrorism, hatred, and authoritarianism.
We pledge to protect the freedom to speak, worship, organize, protest, vote, love, and live without fear.
We pledge to defend democracy and the rule of law.
We pledge to stand beside our neighbors when someone tries to turn us against one another because of racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, homophobia, misogyny, sexism, ageism, ableism, sizeism, elitism, transphobia, misogynoir, and bigotry.
Because the answer to fear is not more fear.
It is courage.
The answer to hate is not hate.
It is humanity.
The answer to division is community.
That is how we honor those we lost.
Not only with our memories, but with the country we choose to build in their name.
And today, we pledge to keep showing up for one another, protect our freedoms, and leave the next generation a democracy stronger than the one entrusted to us.
We remember. We honor. We pledge.
Hope over fear. Power to the people.
Together, we can champion our rights, freedoms, and democracy, hold our leaders accountable to the people’s will, and inspire voters to make a meaningful difference.
Laurie Woodward Garcia (paid with hugs and kisses, not bought by special interests) Leader, People Power United
People Power United| In this community, we will always speak out against racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, homophobia, misogyny, sexism, ageism, ableism, sizeism, elitism, transphobia, misogynoir, and bigotry!
This is our moment to rise, resist, and reclaim our rights, freedoms, rule of law, and democracy. Millions of Americans are already refusing to back down — in the streets, at the ballot box, and in their communities.
Every movement that was ever won started with people who refused to quit. We are those people.
The future is not lost. It is being built — by us, right now.
City asked developers to either sell, transfer or wait out and activate the property
by Oscar Palma September 10, 2026 (MissionLocal.org)
2205 Mission St. photographed on September 9, 2026. Photo by Zoe Malen.
For nearly 20 years, the corner building at 18th and Mission has sat empty — and derelict. Not much remains of the structure, which was modernized in the 1930s with a sleek curved front, neon clock and large windows and that once housed the largest stove store on the West Coast. It has become a canvas for graffiti, wheatpasted advertisements and the backdrop for street vendors.
Then, in 2017, it became a symbol of some small hope: 63 below-market-rate condos for teachers were to be built on the lot, part of a push to make living in San Francisco affordable.
That project is now on hiatus. More than a year ago, after nearly a decade of trying, the city quietly hit pause on the Mission Economic Development Agency’s plans to build teacher housing. The city cited a lack of both funds and a feasible financing plan, according to emails obtained by Mission Local.
The emails, from Feb. 21, 2025 to April 9, 2026 between MEDA and the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, show that the project’s future has been very much in doubt for over a year. MEDA’s efforts to secure funding — first up to $9 million in federal tax credits and then $15.6 million in federal grants — have proven unsuccessful.
This is a story of how MEDA’s attempt to create teacher housing came to a standstill, one of a changing economic environment in which MEDA tried — and is still trying — to keep it afloat.
Unlike the 135 units at Shirley Chisholm Village in the Sunset that opened in 2024 for teachers and other school district workers, the project at 2205 Mission St. was envisioned as an ownership model, open to teachers with a household income of up to 120 percent of the city’s median income, or $136,150 for a single person and $194,500 for a household of four.
MEDA bought the building in 2017 from a former Facebook executive for $6.4 million, using a $5.7 million loan from the nonprofit Low Income Investment Fund with the intention of turning it into teacher housing.
The first big blow to the project came in the summer of 2024, when its application for a federal tax credit grant failed. This was expected to bring up to $9 million into the project, but the application failed because despite being eligible, the Mission District was not considered to be in “severe distress” (defined as, among other things, an area with a poverty rate 30 percent or more), which was a requirement for the funding.
In the latest American Community Survey data, which covered a period from 2016 to 2020, the Mission in fact saw a decrease in poverty and unemployment rates, and an increase in median family income — all metrics that went into the federal government’s designation.
MEDA then scrambled to get an Environmental Protection Agency grant in November 2024. Sheila Nickolopoulos, the mayor’s housing director of policy and legislative affairs, called it a “longshot.” Indeed, a few months later the application proved unsuccessful, according to a representative from the federal agency. The representative said the project failed an “eligibility review” but declined to elaborate.
By the summer of 2025, the project’s future seemed uncertain. “As you know there is no identified path forward for the project,” wrote Lydia Ely, deputy director at the mayor’s office of housing, in an email sent to coworkers on Aug. 15, 2025.
The failure to get the federal funding in turn cost the nonprofit additional dollars it had been counting on.
MEDA had secured a promise of more than $5 million in funding from two sources, each with its own deadlines for the start of construction: $2 million from the regional affordable housing program (a May 2025 deadline) and $3.1 million from the state’s CalHOME program (a June 2026 deadline). Time has run out on both.
Emails between city staffers and MEDA over the last year illustrate the developer’s increasing concerns about funding, and confusion among the mayor’s housing officials about some of the nonprofit’s requests.
In the spring of 2025, for example, MEDA requested half a million dollars to cover the building’s demolition. MEDA had previously planned to maintain the building’s facade — an example of Streamline Moderne — but, by 2024, MEDA was ready to let it go. It applied for, and received, a demolition permit.
In its response to the request for demolition funds, however, the city could not see the reasoning. “MEDA’s overall rationale for demo’ing the site is not compelling,” wrote Ely in a June 9, 2025, email to her colleague. She recommended declining the developer’s request.
MEDA argued that demolition would save $12,000 a year in holding costs (insurance, maintenance and security) and would benefit the surrounding area because the empty property had become a nuisance.
“We are not going to move forward with this request,” Ely emailed her colleague on June 25, 2025.
Still searching for funds, MEDA emailed the mayor’s housing office in July 2025 asking to discuss several items: a $112,076.93 request for holding costs, and either increasing the income levels for potential buyers or changing the housing model from homeownership to rental.
José García, MEDA’s chief real estate officer, said the nonprofit sought to increase the sale prices in order to raise more revenue and potentially close the funding gap.
At the proposed income levels — 130 percent of area median income — potential buyers could earn $168,600 for a household of two and $210,750 for a household of four. That, Garcia said, would make a significant difference. “Let’s say, instead of selling them at $600,000, we would sell them at $700,000.”
The income change was rejected, and while officials explored the possibility of changing the project to rentals, the city attorney rejected it. The project had received its initial $12 million in funding based on an application for condominiums. Changing to rentals would require returning the money and a new application process, the city explained.
Still, officials seemingly tried. In an August 2025 email, Ely also asked a colleague, “What if we wanted to abandon the educator housing concept and just do straight rental?”
As to paying holding costs, Ely told her colleagues in an email holding costs were “ineligible” for city funding per the original loan agreement.
At the same time, MEDA was facing shortfalls elsewhere in its portfolio. In October 2025, the Board of Supervisors approved a $37.8 million rescue package for its small sites program, one that purchases small buildings with low-income residents and seeks to preserve them as affordable housing.
It’s unclear if these developments impacted the city’s view of MEDA’s new requests. But by November, city officials were making pointed suggestions that MEDA consider letting go of the teacher housing project.
“At this point, the loan agreement requires MEDA to either proceed with development and construction of the educator homeownership project, or if the project cannot move forward, then transfer the property to another project sponsor,” wrote Ely on Nov. 1, 2025.
Ely then presented three options to MEDA:
Keep the land “in anticipation of favorable changes to homeownership market conditions,” like better interest rates or other funding opportunities, and use the lot as parking, office space or arts space to cover some holding costs. (It is unclear how this would have worked since there was no office space on site.)
Sell the land and repay the city’s outstanding loan balance.
Transfers the property and assigns the loan agreement to a new nonprofit developer, with city approval.
García said that MEDA did not consider selling the property because the sale price — $6.4 million — would have been lower what it owed on the city loan. (MEDA had already used about $9.5 million of the $12 million loan in predevelopment costs.)
And García did not consider transferring the property because they didn’t want a market rate developer to take over. MEDA also didn’t know of any other nonprofits partners interested in taking over the project.
On March 31, MEDA presented two potential paths forward in a memo to the city: a $28 million city subsidy to close its funding gap and get the project off the ground, or a deal in which MEDA would transfer the land to the city in exchange for $3.4 million it had already put into the project, but which the city had not reimbursed.
The mayor’s office of housing responded that it had no authority to increase MEDA’s funding to that degree.
The very next day on April 1, housing staff emailed each other and said that MEDA wanted its money back. Nonprofit developers like MEDA typically front some of the cost of a project and are then reimbursed by the city — the $12 million was going towards those reimbursements. MEDA says it has some $3.4 million outstanding.
Both potential paths were rejected by the city. The path forward was unclear.
What is clear is that MEDA felt increasing financial pressure. By April 20, it announced it was cutting expenses by 21 percent for “long-term sustainability.” In doing so, MEDA laid off 12 employees and reduced salaries. Luis Granados, its CEO, took a voluntary 43 percent cut for one year.
What will happen to the project — now on pause — is unclear. García, for his part, said that MEDA might team up with another organization to move it forward, but said it was too early to provide details.
We won’t ignore your neighborhood
When a San Francisco neighborhood has a Mission Local reporter, it means someone is there. We’re following new housing projects proposed on your block, keeping tabs on what your district supervisor is up to at City Hall, and letting you know when longtime businesses close (and new ones open). When big news breaks, we already know the context.
Most neighborhoods don’t have that. Yours could.
That’s what Mission Local is building. Our reporters don’t parachute in — they write consistently on San Francisco, so you’re never reading about your neighborhood from someone who just looked it up.
So far we are in five of San Francisco’s neighborhoods. But we know all San Franciscans deserve our kind of coverage. Will you join us?
Reporting from the Mission District and other District 9 neighborhoods. Some of his personal interests are bicycles, film, and both Latin American literature and punk. Oscar’s work has previously appeared in KQED, The Frisc, El Tecolote, and Golden Gate Xpress.More by Oscar Palma
Jimmy Kimmel Live and James Talarico Sep 10, 2026 Jimmy’s interview with Democratic Senate candidate from Texas James Talarico was not televised because of threats from the FCC so we’re hosting their discussion here on YouTube. James talks about Republicans being scared of him winning, Jesus being co-opted by MAGA, the RNC Convention being held in Texas, not taking money from corporate PACs, Trump calling him a “freaky guy” and having second thoughts about endorsing his opponent Ken Paxton, and the GOP making it harder for people to vote.
Al Jazeera English Sep 10, 2026 A chilling new documentary about Israel’s AI-powered mass killing of civilians in Gaza received a 25-minute ovation at its premiere at the Venice Film Festival. The film was directed by two Oscar-winning Israeli filmmakers. The audience clapped continuously for Yuval Ibrahim and Rachel Szor after the screening on Thursday. The film “NAZA”, features conversations with Israeli military intelligence and whistleblowers about how they targeted Palestinians in Gaza. Al Jazeera’s Dmitry Medvedenko reports.
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.
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