Public Citizen is taking legal action to stop the Trump regime from weaponizing the United States Postal Service and preventing eligible voters from voting.
Here’s a bit of history for anyone who wasn’t getting our emails during Donald Trump’s first term:
In July of 2020, the Republican mega-donor that Trump had installed as postmaster general announced a bunch of changes that resulted in substantial mail delays.
All across the country — in small towns and big cities alike — folks went days or even weeks without mail service. They missed out on birthday cards and graduation announcements, letters from family members serving overseas, magazine subscriptions, and much, much more.
People also missed even more important mail, like benefit checks and essential medicines.
And because the changes were made during the pandemic, when more voters were relying on mail-in voting, the delays threatened to prevent timely delivery of untold numbers of ballots.
Public Citizen — representing the NAACP and co-counseling with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund — sued.
In that lawsuit, we made the case that the service disruptions instituted by Trump’s handpicked postmaster general should be suspended to restore prompt, reliable mail delivery and to ensure priority status for mail-in ballots (as had been the practice in past years).
As a result of our lawsuit — including a preliminary injunction and emergency motions we fought for — the service disruptions were put on hold and there were minimal delays with mail-in ballots throughout the elections that November.
We pressed forward with the lawsuit. In December of 2021, the Postal Service agreed to a series of critical measures to safeguard the delivery of mail-in ballots through the 2028 general election.
That brings us to this year.
On March 31, Trump — who wrongly believes that mail-in voting is rife with fraud (it is not) and inherently unfavorable for Republican candidates (also not) — issued an executive order directing the USPS to implement ludicrous rules for mail-in ballots that would disenfranchise countless eligible voters.
In essence, Trump wants the Postal Service to act as some kind of “election gatekeeper,” deciding who it will and will not deliver ballots to. This plan violates both the law and the settlement in our case.
So we have returned to that lawsuit, asking the court to enforce the settlement — which, again, the USPS agreed to and which requires it to prioritize the timely delivery of election mail to all voters without exception.
As Allison Zieve, the head of the legal team here at Public Citizen, put it, “Voting is fundamental to democracy. That the Trump administration would direct the Postal Service to adopt measures to impede voters from casting their ballots is shameful. And that the Postal Service would allow itself to be used for political purposes to advance the president’s irrational objection to mail-in voting is unlawful and contrary to the commitments it made to settle our lawsuit.”
We’ll keep you updated on how this case — and all of our lawsuits against the Trump regime — are going.
Together, real estate investment trusts (REITs) AvalonBay Communities and Equity Residential own more than 180,000 apartments nationwide, with another 20,000 under development. Were these two companies banks or broadcast networks or grocery stores, their merger would face mandatory review by federal regulators. But long-standing loopholes exempt real estate mergers from antitrust scrutiny—even as concerns mount about the consolidation of housing in the hands of large investors.
Equity Residential and AvalonBay are among dozens of investors that have already been accused of acting as a “cartel” to inflate rents during the pandemic, costing tenants billions. Just weeks before the two companies announced their planned merger in May, Equity Residential agreed to pay $56 million to resolve a class action antitrust lawsuit brought by renters. The company denied wrongdoing but also agreed to refrain from sharing private pricing data with RealPage, the tech company facilitating the alleged price-fixing conspiracy. AvalonBay still faces antitrust and consumer fraud claims involving RealPage, brought by the Washington, D.C., attorney general.
While the RealPage scandal thrust a novel antitrust issue—collusion by algorithm—into the spotlight, anti-monopoly advocates warn that ordinary mergers between rival firms remain a time-tested strategy to squeeze consumers.
“Instead of drawing on your number one competitor’s comps to set your prices, you just buy your competitor,” says Renee Tapp, an assistant professor of planning at the University of North Carolina who researches concentration in the rental market. In public comments to federal antitrust enforcement agencies submitted last month, Tapp called for stricter scrutiny of real estate mergers.
For decades, federal policy has effectively encouraged consolidation in the housing market.
Through a sweeping analysis of nationwide property data, Tapp discovered that the merger between Equity Residential and AvalonBay will create effective monopolies in at least seven communities, potentially handing the new company more power to hike rents and trample tenant rights.
That could look something like what played out in East Palo Alto, California, after Equity Residential gained ownership of more than half of the city’s multifamily rental housing market in 2011.
In subsequent months, Equity Residential sent tenants more than 1,000 “pay or quit” notices, many of them seeking rents higher than the maximum allowable under the city’s rent control regulations. The company’s representatives then began working behind the scenes to challenge enforcement of those regulations, even briefly wrangling a vice chair seat on the city’s rent stabilization board.
Monopolies in rental housing have “the same effect as any other monopoly—only in this case, it’s monopolization of something that’s a human right,” says Margaret McBride, a managing attorney at Community Legal Services of East Palo Alto, where she worked with Equity Residential tenants facing evictions and increased fees.
“People don’t have an option to pick up and go somewhere else that’s still close to their family or their kids’ schools or their jobs,” she continues. “So they’re just stuck with a landlord who’s not respecting their rights.”
FOR DECADES, FEDERAL POLICY HASeffectively encouraged consolidation in the housing market, including through mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s post-2008 fire sales of foreclosed homes to investors.
But with some two-thirds of renters now struggling to afford basic needs, cracking down on corporate landlords makes for good politics. A rare bipartisan effort under way in Congress aims to stop Wall Street landlords from continuing to gobble up single-family homes, following a January executive order that also directed federal agencies to combat speculation and anti-competitive behavior in the single-family rental market.
Foreclosed houses are not the only properties in Wall Street landlords’ portfolios, however. Some three million apartments—about 1 in 8 nationwide—are now owned by private equity firms, according to an analysis by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project.
“Corporate landlords are invested in all sorts of housing beyond just single-family homes, and we desperately need federal policy interventions that address that reality,” says Sam Garin, the group’s senior communications coordinator.
Credit: Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP Images
The standard refrain from those corporate landlords—along with neoclassical economists and liberal policy wonks—is that even the largest firms still own just a small percentage of properties, leaving them with little power to set prices.
That’s true enough, if you look nationwide. But housing markets are inherently local, and recent empirical research suggests that when ownership is concentrated at the neighborhood level, landlords also enjoy considerable power to set rents—even without the help of price-fixing.
Through a flurry of mergers since the 2008 financial crisis and the establishment of rental real estate as an asset class, Wall Street landlords have been able to “leverage their market power to extract greater surplus from renters,” according to a 2023 study published in The Review of Financial Studies.
IF EQUITY RESIDENTIAL AND AVALONBAY merge, just how much market power would the new, combined company have?
To estimate that, Tapp examined the 25 real estate submarkets where both companies are already operating and compared their pre- and post-merger market share. She found that in seven of those submarkets, the new entity’s market share would exceed 30 percent—the threshold at which a merger is presumed to have anti-competitive effects, according to a landmark 1963 Supreme Court ruling.
In subsequent decades, federal courts abandoned that standard as antitrust enforcement waned. But the 30 percent benchmark was revived in 2023, when the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued new merger guidelines as part of a more aggressive anti-monopoly agenda under President Joe Biden.
The 2023 guidelines—which are still in effect—consider both how much a merger would increase concentration and the total market share afterward. By both of those measures, according to Tapp, the seven submarkets she identified meet the threshold for antitrust scrutiny. Future acquisitions could easily put at least five other submarkets above that threshold, and Tapp says her estimates are likely conservative, given that she only examined existing properties in markets where both companies are already operating.
“In my mind this is irrefutable,” Tapp says. “This meets the definition of a monopolistic market, according to the FTC and DOJ’s own guidelines.”
AvalonBay did not respond to a request for comment.
Marty McKenna, a spokesperson for Equity Residential, said in a statement that one of the merger’s goals is “providing residents more choices and building more units.” He added that in markets where the two companies operate, their combined footprint represents less than 2 percent of available rental units.
McKenna did not respond to questions about how the company defines a “market” or the merger’s potential anti-competitive effects on the seven submarkets identified in Tapp’s property data analysis, including Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo.
IN LOS ANGELES, IT’S ALREADY DIFFICULT to find an apartment not owned by a corporate landlord, says tenant Alicia Yu.
Yu moved into a studio apartment owned by Equity Residential in 2024, immediately after living in a two-bedroom owned by AvalonBay. Yu had hoped the downgrade would cut her housing costs, but while her base rent has gone down, she says monthly fees charged by Equity Residential have soared—including a $100 parking fee that she claims wasn’t disclosed during her property tour, as well as variable building utility fees that add at least another $100 each month on top of her individual utility bills.
The news of a merger between her current and former landlords, which Yu received by e-mail last month, was alarming. Tenants in her building are already contending with maintenance issues like “constantly broken” elevators, Yu says, and she worries the problems will worsen if her landlords know that tenants effectively have nowhere else to go.
“To think of them getting even larger and managing even more properties—we’re going to be such a small speck in their brains,” Yu says. “They’re able to get away with overlooking these things that to them are very small and minute, but to us, we’re experiencing them on a daily basis.”
Equity Residential and AvalonBay share a business model built on nickel-and-diming tenants, according to Alex Ferrer, an organizer with the Debt Collective, a national organization that has fought to cancel billions in student and medical debt.
Equity Residential and AvalonBay share a business model built on nickel-and-diming tenants.
The group is now taking on the growing problem of “rent debt,” as tenants increasingly find themselves hounded by collection agencies, even after evictions, over unpaid balances inflated by myriad fees.
Last fall, Ferrer helped launch a reporting tool that tenants can use to dispute rent debts owed to corporate landlords, particularly those based on potentially abusive or deceptive practices. More than 100 AvalonBay and 60 Equity Residential tenants used the tool last year, allowing Ferrer to identify patterns, such as bathtub “reglazing fees” regularly tacked on by both companies after move-out.
Equity Residential’s billionaire co-founder, Sam Zell, was an early proselytizer for boosting revenue by charging tenants junk fees on top of rent. It quickly became a mainstay strategy of corporate landlords: In 2024, the FTC reached a $48 million settlement with the rental giant Invitation Homes over undisclosed, mandatory fees that were costing renters more than $1,700 annually, according to the agency.
Federal judges have already struck down Equity Residential’s up-front “amenity fee” in Massachusetts and its 5 percent late fee in California. But new fees have taken their place. Both Equity Residential and AvalonBay currently charge tenants monthly surcharges based on the “ratio utility billing system” (RUBS) used in Yu’s building.
RUBS subdivides building-wide utility usage according to an opaque formula that tenants aren’t privy to, raising suspicions that landlords are using the system to disguise rent increases and circumvent rent control laws in states like California. Equity Residential reported earning more than $100 million from RUBS fees in 2025.
Last year, the Debt Collective and the Los Angeles Tenants Union began organizing with Equity Residential tenants against gratuitous fees, aggressive evictions, and other practices the groups believe will intensify if the firm controls even more of the market.
“The junk fees, RUBS, all these things are part of their business strategy, which relies on their ability to impose unfavorable contract terms,” Ferrer says.
Ferrer also notes that in recent years, the two landlords have also spent millions to defeat the expansion of rent control and other pro-tenant ballot measures in California. “They’re financing that with their monopoly power,” he says.
ANTITRUST REGULATORS LARGELY IGNORE the rental market, thanks in part to the explicit exemption of rental property acquisition from premerger review, a key enforcement tool established in 1976. The real estate loophole has been in place ever since, but there’s a chance that could soon change: The FTC and DOJ are currently considering improvements to the review process, including elimination of the exemptions for rental investment properties and REITs.
There’s a catch though: The agencies are undertaking a new rulemaking process because, earlier this year, a Texas federal court struck down new premerger review requirements finalized during the Biden administration, which drew a legal challenge from the Chamber of Commerce and other business groups.
Laurel Kilgour, research manager for the anti-monopoly watchdog American Economic Liberties Project, says that while the possibility of eliminating real estate exemptions is “a silver lining,” the prospect of the agencies going back to square one is concerning. The longer rulemaking takes, she says, “the more [merger] transactions that are going through without sufficient scrutiny.”
Meanwhile, real estate lobby groups remain staunchly opposed to stronger regulatory scrutiny. In a comment submitted to the federal agencies, Nareit, a trade group that represents REITs including Equity Residential and AvalonBay, argued that real estate transactions remain “unlikely to violate the antitrust laws,” adding that the group is “unaware of any relevant geography that is highly concentrated by owner.”
Nareit did not respond to a request for comment on Tapp’s finding that a merger between Equity Residential and AvalonBay would create at least seven highly concentrated submarkets.
During a May conference call about the merger, Equity Residential President Mark Parrell told analysts that while the merger wouldn’t be subject to an antitrust review, the company was preparing for a “PR battle.”
Should the deal be approved by stockholders later this year, the companies say they expect to save $175 million in costs within the next 18 months.
While Parrell told participants that the deal was “not about getting bigger just to be bigger,” he noted that Equity Residential and AvalonBay had already successfully teamed up to acquire tens of thousands of apartments from the bankrupt Lehman brothers—a 2011 deal that, along with the purchase of 1,800 foreclosed units from Wells Fargo, put Equity Residential in control of more than half of East Palo Alto’s apartments.
Preschool teacher Javanni Brown was living in one of those apartments when, while her husband was out of work, she found herself late on rent.
Brown’s existing lease stipulated a small late fee—which she paid, along with her full rent, four days after the grace period, according to a class action lawsuit later filed against the company.
But when her balance due continued to increase in subsequent months, Brown learned that the late fee had increased—and that the company was also “stacking” new late fees on top of past unpaid ones, both allegedly without notice to tenants.
“I said, ‘Wait a minute, that doesn’t make any sense, because that kind of practice doesn’t let people actually come up for air,’” she recalls.
A federal judge ultimately struck down Equity’s late-fee policy, which charged tenants the greater of 5 percent or $50, as an unlawful business practice under California law. Equity agreed to a $43 million settlement, and some 200,000 California tenants who were charged late fees are set to receive restitution this year. But the legal process took more than a decade.
In states like California, where the merger might have outsize impact for tenants in some local markets, state attorneys general have the power to bring their own actions, even in the absence of federal enforcement, notes Kilgour.
That wouldn’t be dissimilar to the coalition of six attorneys general that joined a federal action to successfully halt the merger of Kroger and Albertsons grocery stores, Kilgour says, but “this is an even stronger overlap of geographies.”
Rather than leaving the ball in the Trump administration’s court, says Ferrer, action to stop the merger could also represent “a populist political opportunity for Democrats … to protect renters by taking on actors that are very powerful and incredibly unpopular.”
Rebecca Burns is the housing editor at In These Times and an award-winning investigative reporter whose work has appeared in Business Insider, the Chicago Reader, The Intercept, ProPublica Illinois, and other outlets. More by Rebecca Burns
State Sen. Scott Wiener and writer Ezra Klein, who popularized the ‘Abundance’ movement. The ‘Abundance’ agenda the tech lords are talking about is scary. Photo via Facebook.
Their manifesto makes clear that leaders like Zack Rosen, a founder of California Yimby, think that powerful elites should be shaping policy, not the rest of us. Their dismissal of grassroots democracy is stunning:
Small dollar internet fundraising makes politics dumber. The old gatekeepers were political professionals who could count cards; small dollar donors today are amateurs yanking the handles of ActBlue slot machines.
A few Silicon Valley titans have funded this new group to the tune of between $40 million and $260 million—a year. That money is going directly into local and state politics, including in San Francisco.
From the Prospect:
All this money, unsurprisingly, has generated some success. The documents credit abundance organizations with having “Flipped San Francisco Democratic Party, Flipped San Francisco Board of Supervisors … [and] Flipped Santa Monica City Council.” The ousting of former district attorney Chesa Boudin in 2022 is celebrated in Rosen’s pitch as “a major accomplishment.”
Oh, and state Sen. Scott Wiener and his allies are a central part:
We built our San Francisco operation with Scott Weiner’s policy and political team: Maggie Muir: Ours and Scott’s political consultant. Todd David: Ours and Scott’s S.F. political director. … Annie Fryman: Ours and Scott’s former Land-Use policy leader. Andres Powers: Ours and Scotts and Breed’s former Director of Policy. Jeff Cretan: Ours and Scotts and Breed’s former Spokesperson We helped organize the Moderate faction that has taken power in the city alongside NorCal Carpenters, Neighbors, GrowSF, and SFYIMBYs.
The story is all over the Internet and some social media. It’s missing from the pages of the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle (which really should cover a hometown story) and most of the rest of the US media.
It is the clearest evidence to date of what some of us have been saying for a long time: Big Tech, with the help of Big Real Estate, are installing their political allies in local government and using vast sums of money to defeat progressive ballot measures and candidates.
One thing is missing from the Prospect story, and it’s critical: These folks don’t just want to have their friends of the Board of Supes. They have a far-reaching political agenda, and they are willing to spend whatever it takes to make that agenda the law of the land.
Sponsored link
It goes way, way beyond changing local zoning laws.
Let’s start with Rosen’s analysis of US history.
He talks of how the industrial elites made the US much better before and after World War II:
Industrial leaders were key to this work. Practitioners who figured out how scale industry were needed to help retrofit modern management systems to government, and replace the agrarian era institutions of “courts and parties” with a modernized government that could support an industrialized civilization. Civil service finally brought professionalized management to government, the efficiency movement brought in bookkeeping and inventory management etc. Most importantly, the progressive movement scaled power only when industrialists brought their financial and social capital to bear on the institutional problems blocking progress.
More:
For the left it was a quick fall from the sudden assassinations of JFK and MLK, to the disaster of Vietnam, to the embarrassment of Watergate that took the heart out of government. From there, the left took the downslope of NIMBYism post-riots and sealed our cities in amber, and fled urban cores for the suburbs on federal subsidy; housing was made illegal, and urban public education systems were abdicated. Proceduralist kudzu overgrew the gears of government.
The idea that the left made housing “illegal” is simply untrue. Read this excellent history of San Francisco zoning by Fernando Marti, and you will learn that much of the “downzoning” that the Yimbys complain about was sponsored in the early days (1920) by racists, and in 1978, a consequential moment, by the likes of then-Sup. Dianne Feinstein, who by no means could possibly be considered a “leftist.”
Much of the political establishment, from Dianne Feinstein on down, supported the 1978 rezoning. It wasn’t just realtors and property value neighborhood associations who advocated for height and density limits. On the East Side, many community-based organizers — fighting both urban renewal and the federal “Model Cities” programs — looked to rezoning for the possibility of stemming displacement by limiting demolitions. And small business owners looked to the zoning code as a way to prevent the encroachment of banks and restaurants that were causing increasing commercial rents and pushing out the small groceries and hardware stores from the neighborhoods.
And Rosen misses perhaps the most critical point in the history of post-War America: The very rich were, indeed, interested in philanthropy, which this generation of billionaires mostly is not. But there weren’t that many very rich—because FDR realized in 1932 that if the nation didn’t address economic inequality, he could be facing a revolution.
By 1935, the top marginal tax rate went from about 20 percent to 62 percent. In 1945, it was 81 percent. In 1953, it went up to 90 percent. That paid for the New Deal, and later, things the Abundance Agenda claims to want, like the interstate highway system and the University of California, where for years tuition was free.
It also prevented massive wealth accumulation that would destroy the middle class and undermine democracy.
It lasted until the Reagan Era.
According to the RAND Corporation, if the tax rates today were the same as 1975, the bottom 90 percent would have an additional $70 trillion.
That, more than zoning, explains homelessness, housing costs, poverty, poor outcomes from public education, and so much else Rosen’s crew complains about.
But nowhere, nowhere, does the Abundance Agenda address in even a passing way the existential crisis of economic inequality. The donors to this operation have no interest in giving up even a tiny bit of their wealth for the good of society; that’s why the oppose every single tax measure that progressives try to promote.
I asked Wiener once why he wouldn’t push legislation to allow a local income tax in San Francisco. “I wouldn’t even consider it,” he said. “It would never even get out of committee.”
So what do these folks want? It’s hardly a secret.
Dean Preston, when he was running for supervisor, suggested that the Technorati are pissed that there are poor and working-class people in this city. “They have a vision,” he says in this YouTube video from his 2024 campaign.
They are trying to eliminate affordable housing, abolish rent control, fundamentally libertarian, eliminate taxes on the wealthy, that only market force drive housing in San Francisco. They deeply resent the idea of government intervention for people in need … we taxed the hell out of them during the pandemic.”
Their complaint is not the stuff that’s not working. Their rage is a billionaire backlash against things that were working during a global pandemic. We housed thousands of people who were homeless. We taxed the rich and generated tens of millions of dollars and helped 20,000 San Franciscans. We banned evictions. We provided free unconditional health care regardless of your immigration status. We had a federal government that invested in us, but we also taxed the rich to pay for it.
That’s why Big Tech spent so much money to get rid of Preston.
The Abundance Agenda is somewhere between libertarian and neo-liberal, meaning that its adherents believe that private markets and private capital should be left alone and that government should exist to make life easier for the elites. The idea that wealth will “trickle down” goes back to the days of Ronald Reagan, who followed the philosophy of Milton Friedman; we have 50 years of data showing that doesn’t work.
In 1971, the US Chamber of Commerce hired a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell, who would later go on to be a Supreme Court justice, to write a memo on the state of business in the country. The Powell Memo urged corporate America to mobilize big money to fight back against the consumer and environmental groups and create a corporate-political lobbying machine.
It led to the end of the New Deal and the election of Reagan, and the start of the collapse of the American Dream.
It’s happening again, right here in San Francisco.
We ignore the Abundance Agenda at our peril.
48 Hills welcomes comments in the form of letters to the editor, which you can submit here. We also invite you to join the conversation on our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Tim Redmond has been a political and investigative reporter in San Francisco for more than 30 years. He spent much of that time as executive editor of the Bay Guardian. He is the founder of 48hills.
US Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) speaks during a hearing on April 22, 2026 in Washington, DC,
(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
The Maine Democrat has said that “in the years since Roe was overturned, Susan Collins has done everything she can to skirt responsibility and avoid accountability—from skipping hearings to avoiding town halls at all costs.”
After Maine’s Republican Sen. Susan Collins told a reporter on Tuesday that she does not regret voting to confirm US Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, despite the resulting reversal of Roe v. Wade, her Democratic challenger Graham Platner had a two-word response: “You should.”
Noting that this is the five-term senator’s first reelection campaign since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organizationdecision overturned Roe, a journalist from News Center Maine asked Collins whether she regrets voting for Kavanaugh—who was accused of sexual misconduct during the confirmation process.
“I do not regret that vote,” Collins said of confirming the right-wing justice, while also claiming that “I do disagree with Justice Kavanaugh’s vote” in the Dobbs case.
NEWS CENTER MAINE: This is the first reelection campaign that you're run since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. I was hoping you could talk to me a little bit about your vote to confirm Kavanaugh and whether you regret that?
Collins then tried to pivot, highlighting her votes for liberal justices and saying that the Dobbs decision “has not had an impact on the state of Maine,” without mentioning that Democrats control both chambers of the state Legislature and the governor’s seat.
Also responding to the video of Collins on social media Tuesday, Lauren French of the Senate Majority PAC, a political action committee dedicated to electing a Democratic majority in the chamber, said: “Unsurprising. Collins’ abysmal abortion record goes far beyond Kavanaugh and Roe.”
“She voted to confirm at least 19 anti-abortion Cabinet nominees and 43 anti-abortion federal judges, including nominees who explicitly support fetal personhood and called birth control ‘abortifacients,’” French highlighted. “And just days after the Dobbs draft leak, Collins cast the deciding vote against the Women’s Health Protection Act—a bill that would have codified Roe into law.”
Throughout his campaign, Platner has repeatedly called out Collins for backing Kavanaugh, who has sided with the high court’s right-wing supermajority on a range of issues, from abortion to voting rights. After an April decision with massive implications for future elections, he said: “Don’t piss on our boots and tell us it’s raining: Under their bullshit legalese, the far-right Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act today. Another disastrous decision brought to you by the court Susan Collins built, one terrible confirmation vote after another.”
The following month, Platner took aim at the senator for not attending Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearings on reproductive healthcare, including abortion, post-Dobbs, declaring that “in the years since Roe was overturned, Susan Collins has done everything she can to skirt responsibility and avoid accountability—from skipping hearings to avoiding town halls at all costs.”
“In November, Susan Collins will learn she can only run and hide from her damaging votes for so long. Because whether she knows it or not—her charade is over,” added the oyster farmer and combat veteran, who has discussed his family’s fertility struggles and the high costs of treatments during the campaign.
Platner’s campaign has focused on not only how Collins has made life harder for Mainers and people across the country, but also his support for policies that would benefit the working class and challenge the oligarchs as well as the politicians they fund—including his Republican opponent, whose reelection bid has been backed by nearly 100 billionaires and their spouses.
As Common Dreams reported earlier Tuesday, amid a wave of new state-level restrictions after Dobbs, reproductive rights advocates have emphasized the economic impact of abortion bans—which, according to a new analysis by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, cost the US economy over $140 billion annually.
The Dobbs decisions and many others from the current court have fueled calls for change. Platner has argued that if his party reclaims control of Congress in the November midterms, there is a “compelling case” to impeach at least two justices—an apparent swipe at Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, right-wing ideologues who have faced ethics scandals in recent years.
Platner has further called for expanding the high court the next time Democrats control Congress and the White House—and stressed that in order to do so, “we need to elect people to the Senate who want to wield power like that, who understand that power matters, that it’s real and you can use it.”
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Call your US senators and demand they oppose the Trump regime’s warrantless mass surveillance. FISA — the War-on-Terror era legislation that authorized mass surveillance and is now under threat of being supercharged by AI — expired on June 12. Now, our Members of Congress have a choice to make: Uphold the Constitution and protect freedom of speech, or greenlight more of Trump’s authoritarian power grabs.
Tell your senators to oppose the confirmation of Trump lackey Jay Clayton for DNI. Last week, we flooded Congress with calls and emails opposing Trump’s dangerous, unqualified pick to serve as acting Director of National Intelligence. The pressure worked, and he named a less obviously terrible permanent nominee — but a terrible nominee nonetheless. So we need to keep up the pressure until he puts forward a qualified intelligence professional instead of another loyalist hack. Please email your senators today.
The case for having the government take co-ownership of AI—make that the cases for having the government take co-ownership of AI—grow louder. I had to pluralize “case” since President Trump’s perspective on the virtues of government co-ownership are distinct from Bernie Sanders’s and those of his fellow democratic socialists (like, e.g., me).
Last week, Trump returned to the topic, saying the White House would soon host a meeting with a dozen or so top AI executives to discuss the industry’s future. For Trump, this isn’t breaking new ground. He’s already made deals to take partial government ownership of a host of corporations: U.S. Steel, Intel, Westinghouse, and roughly 15 companies (where some deals are still in progress) in the fields of rare earth mining or quantum computing.
As my mentor, DSA founder Michael Harrington, used to say, “any idiot can nationalize a company. The question is, can he socialize a company?”
Trump’s distinctive brand of idiocy was not what Harrington was focused on. In Trump’s case, the narcissism that fuels his need to control everything around him, to appear the winner in dealmaking, and to have his name stamped on a product to presumably enhance his stature has driven him to champion government co-ownership. He has taken the right-wing belief in a unitary executive one huge step further, governing by the creed of L’état c’est moi as far as Congress and the courts will let him. His is neither democratic socialism nor the socialism claimed by various authoritarians; it’s self-magnifying socialism. The model is neither Karl Marx, Gene Debs, nor Lenin; it’s Louis XIV.
Then there’s Bernie Sanders’s proposal, which is to create a sovereign wealth fund that can take major shares in fundamentally important private enterprises. Such funds exist in nations that sit atop oil fields, like Norway or Saudi Arabia, as well as in one decidedly un-Marxist U.S. state, Alaska, whose residents get an annual dividend of roughly $1,000 to $3,000 from a specified share of the revenues of oil companies drilling on lands that the state has leased or otherwise permitted them to drill on.
There’s no reason, of course, why sovereign wealth funds should restrict their investments to fossil fuels; any industry that generates massive revenues and is essential to public life should logically qualify for government co-ownership. A host of enterprises that meet that second criterion (essential to public life) are often wholly owned by governments, of course: chiefly utilities and transportation, often with the additional goal of reducing costs to consumers.
For Sanders and his allies, the move for co-ownership of the emerging AI industry stems from concerns about both income distribution and oversight in the public interest. As to that latter concern, there’s a reasonable fear that mere regulation won’t be up to the task of ensuring the public good, given both the transformational potential of AI and the speed with which it innovates. Needless to say, this concern for adequate regulation is not something that Trump has raised.
The concern about income distribution, sad to say, is rooted in a current reality in which wages for most Americans either stagnate or grow only incrementally, while income from investment increases much more rapidly and substantially, as last week’s SpaceX IPO that made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire illustrates. AI’s potential to reward its investors while eliminating jobs could push that reality to a societal breaking point.
Both of Sanders’s concerns also inform the religious left. As Pope Leo XIV put it in his recent encyclical on artificial intelligence, “When it comes to decisions regarding economic flows and digital platforms, as well as the governance of data and algorithms, we cannot allow a handful of actors to dictate these processes on their own; instead, we must build forms of cooperation that respect the various levels of the global community and make them jointly responsible for the common good.” Co-ownership is a good way to ensure that.
Most of the leaders of the tech behemoths, as well as the largest investors in those companies (e.g., Andreessen Horowitz), paint a rosy future for the economy as AI advances into ever more spheres of life. The revenues and savings it will generate, they say, will flow to all. Last week, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who is forming a new AI company, insisted that AI will generate such huge productivity gains that everyone will benefit.
“There’s going to be two-earner income households where one earner drops out of the labor pool, because there’s going to be so much productivity,” Bezos said.
In that statement, he assumed that productivity gains are shared with workers, though that hasn’t been the case since the 1970s, as the Economic Policy Institute has been demonstrating for the past three decades. From the end of World War II through the ’70s, the rate of productivity gains and workers’ wage increases were virtually identical. Since then, as corporate attacks on unions all but eliminated collective bargaining in the private sector, productivity continued to rise while wages did only slightly better than flatlining. As a study by the RAND Corporation, commissioned by businessman Nick Hanauer, has demonstrated, if the share of corporate revenues going to employees had retained the levels it had in the three postwar decades, every American worker’s yearly income would be roughly $28,000 higher than it currently is.
Besides, Bezos himself has done everything in his considerable power to make sure that the immense revenues that Amazon earns are not shared with its workers. The company he founded, in which he remains both its executive chairman and largest single shareholder, will not bargain with its workers who’ve voted to unionize: Those at its Staten Island warehouse so voted four years ago, yet Amazon has consistently refused to sit down with them. It has shuttered all seven of its warehouses in the Canadian province of Quebec after the workers in one of those warehouses opted to go union. It has contested in U.S. courts the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board—a settled question for the past 90 years—for fear that the Board, during the Biden administration, might rule that the law requires the company to bargain when its workers have opted to do so (which, incidentally, happens to be exactly what the law requires).
Like most of his peers who control Big Tech, then, Bezos’s promises that AI’s immense revenues will surely trickle down to workers and the public should generate even more immense levels of skepticism. And that, I suppose, is one more reason to insist on public ownership, as American CEOs are maniacally devoted to suppressing labor income, but rely on capital income for such life’s necessities as bigger and sleeker yachts.
ENDEVR Nov 28, 2025 Edge of Existence: AI | ENDEVR Documentary Watch the First Episode here: • Nuclear War: How Close Are We To The Edge … The risk of human extinction has never been higher. A very recent past has seen a global pandemic, a renewed nuclear threat, and runaway climate change. What if COVID-19 is merely a dress rehearsal for a more serious potential disaster? New research predicts a 1 in 6 chance that life as we know it won’t make it to the end of this century. This is a story about the greatest risks to humanity, and what we can do about them. We are living in a time when human-made risks pose the biggest threat to our existence. Technological progress has brought us to a precipice. For the first time ever, we have the capacity to destroy ourselves. Edge of Existence lays out how we can pull ourselves back from this precipice in order to achieve a vast and extraordinary future.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller looks on at the US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) headquarters in Doral, Florida, on March 5, 2026.
(Photo by Eva Marie Uzcategui / AFP via Getty Images)
Reporting in The New York Times reveals Vance wanted to use the military “to crush the unrest in Minnesota.”
A Monday report in The New York Times revealed what it described as the “alarm” felt by some White House lawyers at proposals made earlier this year by Vice President JD Vance and Trump adviser Stephen Miller as the administration was forced to contend with widespread anger over its anti-immigration agenda.
Among other things, the Times reported that Vance pushed for President Donald Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow for the US military to be deployed on American streets, in an effort to shut down mass protests in Minnesota against federal immigration enforcement operations in the state.
A few days after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers fatally shot demonstrator Alex Pretti in the streets of Minneapolis, the Times reported that Vance—who had also elevated a baseless claim by Miller that Pretti had been a “would-be assassin”—said invoking the Insurrection Act was necessary “to crush the unrest in Minnesota.”
Vance also believed invoking the law would send a “message” that “paid agitators could not get away with disrupting ICE operations”—even though, as the Times noted, there is no evidence that Pretti; demonstrator Renee Good, who was also killed by federal agents; or any other organizers in Minnesota or elsewhere received any money in exchange for protesting.
However, right-wing attorney Will Scharf quickly shot down Vance’s suggestion, noting that the Insurrection Act is an instrument aimed at putting down armed rebellions rather than groups of citizens blowing whistles at ICE officers.
Former White House Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair then made the political case against invoking the Insurrection Act.
“The scenes of federal agents in Minnesota already looked chaotic, he said, and the public was recoiling,” reported the Times. “He put three questions to the room: What does the Insurrection Act give us that we don’t already have? What changes on the ground would be worth the heat? What else could they win that would justify the public relations cost?”
“The room was quiet,” the Times added. “Nobody had a good answer.”
The Times report also revealed that Trump adviser Stephen Miller, Trump’s homeland security adviser and deputy chief of staff, repeatedly pushed the president to suspend the writ of habeas corpus for undocumented immigrants, which would give the administration the power to carry out mass deportations without being subjected to judicial oversight.
As in the case of Vance’s proposal, Scharf pushed back against Miller’s suggestion, noting that courts have long held that habeas corpus cannot be suspended unilaterally by the president and must be done by an act of Congress.
“Even where Congress has explicitly suspended habeas corpus rights,” Scharf wrote in a legal memo obtained by the Times, “the Supreme Court has held that some alternative process must be provided to defendants, with procedural safeguards akin to a habeas corpus action.”
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said the Times’ reporting showed Miller “would happily shred the Constitution into little pieces if he could,” before hopefully noting that “even he wasn’t powerful enough to do it” in this instance.
University of Michigan Law School Professor Leah Litman argued that the Times report showed some in the administration were at least still somewhat conscious of public opinion when making decisions.
“In the story about the administration weighing suspending habeas corpus and invoking the Insurrection Act, what moved the needle against the Insurrection Act was concern about ‘public relations,’” Litman wrote. “Public pushback, agitation, and outcry can work. Even now. Keep it up.”
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Climate scientists are sounding the alarm after an unprecedented heatwave hit Antarctica this month and delivered temperatures 20°C higher than normal.
According to a Friday report in The Guardian, temperatures at Antarctica’s Trinity Peninsula this month hit peaks of over 15°C, even though it is the start of winter when ice typically expands on the continent. The prior record June temperature at the peninsula, 13.3°C, was set in 1998.
After weeks of above-average temperatures, scientists noticed that an area of sea ice that typically forms in the region—one roughly the size of France—was missing.
“It’s depressing,” Will Hobbs, an Antarctic sea ice expert at the University of Tasmania, told The Guardian. “It is remarkable that we are in June and there is no sea ice there.”
Hobbs also predicted that the loss of sea ice is likely permanent at this point given the trajectory of global temperature changes.
Peter Fretwell, a scientist at the British Antarctic Survey, explained to the newspaper that the loss of sea ice poses a serious threat to penguin populations.
“Sea ice is forming too late and breaking up too early,” Fretwell explained. “It leads to reduced breeding success and longer trips to moulting grounds.”
In a separate interview with The Guardian last week, Raúl Cordero, a climate professor at the University of Groningen, expressed astonishment at the record-breaking Antarctic heat.
“This is absolutely crazy,” Cordero said. “That is a huge anomaly.”
Luis Muñoz, a Chilean glaciologist, told the newspaper he was shocked to step outside at King George’s Island, located just north of Trinity Peninsula, and seeing the ground uncovered by snow.
“The temperatures here went very high so everything outside melted,” Muñoz explained. “Usually there is 20 centimeters of snow and a lot of ice on the ground at this time.”
Taking stock of the bigger picture, the newspaper reported that scientists are now fearful that some of the biggest glaciers in the region of the peninsula have now “past a tipping point” that could “push up global sea levels by four meters.”
Such a rise in global sea levels would be unprecedented. Scientists estimate that global sea levels have risen by between 21 and 24 centimeters since 1880.
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
As Sundar Pichai began his commencement address at Stanford University Sunday, more than 100 graduates staged a walkout, blowing whistles and chanting in protest of Google’s Project Nimbus contract with the Israeli government.
Over 100 graduates walked out as Pichai took the stage at Stanford University Sunday, while others in the audience waved Palestinian flags, held banners, blew whistles, and wore keffiyehs in support of Palestine, as SFGate reports. In video footage of the protest, Pichai can be heard continuing on with his speech as a steady stream of graduates head toward the exit.
Stanford grads walk out as Google CEO Sundar Pichai takes the stage as commencement speaker. No mention of AI, unlike other uni speakers getting booed down this year. Story for @sfgate shortly pic.twitter.com/qvS2rJ91Ip
Some students reportedly joined a separate “People’s Commencement” event featuring activist Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia University student who was detained by federal immigration authorities for more than 100 days over his pro-Palestinian activism.
The protest was in response to Google’s involvement in Project Nimbus, the company’s $1.2 billion cloud-computing contract with the Israeli government that it shares with Amazon.
As SFist reported in 2024, Google fired roughly 28 employees following a sit-in protest at company offices over Project Nimbus. Critics of the contract have long argued that Google has provided little transparency about how its technology is being used by the Israeli government, while the company maintains the project is not intended for weapons, intelligence, or other highly sensitive military applications.
According to a 2022 report by The Intercept examining leaked training materials, the contract gives Israeli government agencies access to Google’s cloud-based AI and machine-learning tools, including image analysis, facial detection, object tracking, and other data-processing capabilities. Some Google employees and outside researchers raised concerns that such tools could be used for surveillance or military purposes. Critics were especially concerned about Google’s claims that its software can detect emotions, intent, or deception — technology that has been debunked by experts.
Gizmodo reports that earlier this year, hundreds of Google employees signed a letter seeking greater transparency about the company’s government contracts and concerns that its technology could be used to support federal immigration enforcement.
The protest also comes just months after Google completed its $32 billion acquisition of Israeli cybersecurity company Wiz, the largest purchase in the company’s history, as TechCrunch reported in March.
Despite the disruptions, SFGate reports that Pichai’s speech was otherwise well received after the protesters left. Unlike several commencement speakers who faced backlash this graduation season over comments about artificial intelligence, Pichai largely avoided the topic altogether.
According to NBC News, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was booed during his address at the University of Arizona last month, with some audience members objecting to his comments about artificial intelligence and others reportedly shouting references to his alleged ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Image: Google CEO Sundar Pichai attends a dinner with U.S. President Donald Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi in the State Dining Room at the White House on March 19, 2026 in Washington, DC. This is Takaichi’s first official visit to Washington as Prime Minster. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Help Outreach Working Group lift the fog of corporate media. Donate to help us maintain this website and distribute literature on the street.
Seven Days in D.C. (June 28 – July 4) Seven Days in D.C. About Schedule Support Donate Volunteer Merch Auction Washington, D.C. June 28 – July 4, 2026 View the ScheduleTicketsDonateVolunteer A Week of Democracy in Action From June 28 through July 4, organizers from across the country will gather... Continue reading →
Seven Days in D.C. (June 28 – July 4) Seven Days in D.C. About Schedule Support Donate Volunteer Merch Auction Washington, D.C. June 28 – July 4, 2026 View the ScheduleTicketsDonateVolunteer A Week of Democracy in Action From June 28 through July 4, organizers from across the country will gather... Continue reading →
This Sunday’s Town Hall: Announcing This Week’s Progressive Town Hall: Every Sunday at 4pm ET/1pm PT RSVP HERE Join PDA activists online from across the country to discuss the importance of progressives reclaiming the American story from the MAGA right, an issue of heightened importance as we’re now within one... Continue reading →
“San Francisco Mime Troupe” Live Summer Musical in the Park (2026) SFMT The Tony Award-winning San Francisco Mime Troupe returns for its 2026 season with free and lively performances in park settings around the Bay Area. San Francisco Mime Troupe | 2026 Free political theater & music in parks around the Bay Area Various dates:... Continue reading →
We protest Heritage Foundation EVERY MONDAY (Join us!!!!) By admin | September 2, 2025 | Uncategorized Cliff Cash Comedy Premiered Jul 26, 2025 Every Monday at The Heritage Foundation 214 Massachusetts Ave. Washington D.C. 4pm protest 6pm pizza Every Friday at Fox News D.C. 400 N. Capitol St. Washington D.C. 4pm protest 6pm pizza We are... Continue reading →
One Million Rising: Strategic Non-Cooperation to Fight Authoritarianism Virtual Event · Hosted by No Kings Time Wednesdays 8 – 9:30pm EDT Location Virtual event Join from anywhere About this event Across the country, authoritarian forces are getting bolder and more dangerous. Trump and his allies are not hiding their agenda: mass deportations,... Continue reading →
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 →
Public Banking Coalition monthly meetings Next call: Nov 11 Excitement is building for public banking and once a month, PBI hosts an hour-long Public Banking Coalition online meeting to share the excitement and successes. Find out the latest updates on the advances being made all across the country from local advocates themselves... Continue reading →
Trump Regime Takedown: Every Saturday Saturday, March 7, 2026 12:00 PM 2:00 PM Tesla San Francisco999 Van Ness AvenueSan Francisco, CA, 94109United States (map) Google Calendar ICS Keep democracy alive every Saturday by showing up, taking a stand, and sticking together for the long haul. Standing together is better than standing alone. Let’s get together... Continue reading →
“San Francisco Mime Troupe” Live Summer Musical in the Park (2026) SFMT The Tony Award-winning San Francisco Mime Troupe returns for its 2026 season with free and lively performances in park settings around the Bay Area. San Francisco Mime Troupe | 2026 Free political theater & music in parks around the Bay Area Various dates:... Continue reading →
by 
by 
