Some hard, factual truth about the needless brutality of the Lurie budget

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It’s not about waste. It’s about bad priorities

By Tim Redmond

June 10, 2026 (48hills.org)

On Tuesday, dozens of people gathered on the steps of City Hall to call attention to the Lurie Administration’s moves to criminalize homelessness. The administration is closing shelters, cutting down on Permanent Supportive Housing, and redirecting resources to law-enforcement.

“He could take the money he’s spending on criminalization and spend it on housing,” Kema Straker, a harm-reduction specialist at the Coalition on Homelessness, said.

The Coalition on Homelessness held a rally and handed out carts for people to carry their meager possessions.

Speaker after speaker talked about the brutality of life on the streets and the lasting harm of the sweeps. “This city in not trying to solve homelessness,” said Apple Cronk, who lived on the streets for eight years. “They just want to erase visible poverty from rich neighborhoods and business corridors.”

The reality, Cronk said, is that police are expensive, and using teams of cops to roust the unhoused is both cruel and a waste of money.

This chart shows the increase in arrests for “public lodging” since Lurie took office. These are unhoused people who are taken to county jail, at great expense. SFPD date

It was just one of what will be a series of demonstrations over the next few weeks as activists from a wide range of organizations protest Lurie’s budget proposal, which diverts massive resources from social services and health care to law enforcement.

Lurie was booed when he arrived in the Castro for Pride Month kickoff, as activists noted that his budget makes deep cuts in HIV prevention services.

The People’s Budget Coalition has compiled a detailed list of all the pending cuts—and it’s alarming. Some 300 city employees have already lost their jobs, and hundreds more vacant positions won’t be filled. That’s just the start: Since nonprofits provide many city services, and those contracts are facing deep cuts, somewhere between 500 and 1,000 nonprofit workers will likely lose their jobs, Anya Worley-Ziegmann, coalition coordinator, told me.

The mayor’s budget will cost more jobs than the city economist said would be lost if the Overpaid CEO tax, which the mayor opposed, had passed.

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Here’s a detailed list, but let’s just look at a few of the most glaring examples:

The Department of Public Health will lose a total of $62 million. Overall, homelessness prevention and solutions will lose $14.7 million. HIV services will lose $4.5 million.

The little things will make a huge difference:

Glide Foundation loses its Workforce Navigator program:

GLIDE’s Workforce Navigator provides one-on-one and group support to clients engaging in workforce readiness, job placement, and career development services. Based in the Tenderloin/SOMA; 105 community members will lose services and 1 worker will lose their job.

Senior and Disability Action will lose its Homecare Advocacy Contract: Homecare Advocacy Contract: This program covers our Healthcare Action Team and our In-Home Care Stakeholder Workgroup, both of which involve leadership development and organizing for the protection and expansion of homecare programs so seniors and disabled people can live independently in the community. 2 workers will lose their jobs.

The Department of the Environment is, for all practical purposes, gone: SF Environment’s General Fund Support has been cut by 80% since FY 22-23. SFE’s GFS supports Climate Action Plan implementation, the Climate Equity Hub, EV charging installation, and biodiversity and habitat restoration. Launched in April 2024 by SFE, health professionals, contractors, and industry and community partners, the Climate Equity Hub provides technical assistance, education, and workforce development services that support citywide electrification.

This is a 40% cut to the entire department – of which only a small part is dedicated to achieving all CAP goals. That small part will be almost 100% wiped out and all progress, benefitting frontline communities in particular, will stop.

HOMEY loses $281,000 that went for Case management, life skills and job readiness development, food support, outreach, and job training to support families and Transitional Aged Youth, as well as formerly incarcerated individuals. This program has served 92 low-income, immigrant, Latinx families and youth will be impacted. 2 FTE potential layoffs.

The Southeast Geriatric Clinic will close:

Southeast Mission Geriatric Clinic w/UCSF: This clinic serves approximately 200 seniors per year with 8.75 FTE (11 staff) providing specialized geriatric and behavioral health services in the Mission. Closure will require seniors to transition to other clinics, risking disruption in care for a medically vulnerable population.

The SF AIDS Foundation loses a key harm-reduction program: Mobile Safe Supplies Access: This partnership between SF AIDS Foundation and Harm Reduction Therapy Center provides outdoor health supplies that reduce HIV transmission and support San Francisco’s Getting to Zero commitments. The cut would eliminate this service entirely, limiting access to sterile syringes and other health supplies for people who use drugs.

The list goes on and on.

So does the misinformation.

My social media feeds are filled with posts that say San Francisco’s budget is “bloated,” that the city spends more per-capita than most other city, and that there must be terrible mismanagement here.

There is, indeed, mismanagement and waste in San Francisco. There is no such thing as a $16 billion budget, in the public sector or the private sector, that doesn’t have some waste. (A friend who worked for a prominent US business for many years, including in management, told me once that he was proud he never fired anyone: “This is a big corporation, and we can always find something for someone to do to keep their job, even if they aren’t really good at anything.” His reviews always cited his exceptional management skills.)

But that’s not the point. Let’s look at some comments:

San Francisco’s government is bringing in a staggering $20,000 to $24,000 per capita, with an annual budget of roughly $16 billion spread across a population of around 750,000 to 830,000 residents. This per-capita government revenue and spending is among the highest in the country, dwarfing the figures of other major municipalities. Yet despite that we have a close to a billion deficit. How is that possible? Perhaps we have an issue of mismanagement?

I have heard this argument many times before. Joe Eskenazi, who now works for Mission Local, did a long piece in 2010 saying the SF was the worst run city in the US, citing the per-capita costs of public services.

I worked with an intern who had extensive background in economics, and we proved him largely wrong. I have reprinted my Bay Guardian story below. Then we all went on Forum and debated it.

Good times.

Some important points on the cost of local government: SF is a city and county, the only one in CA, so handles two types of government expenses. We have both a sheriff and a police department; no other city in California pays for both. You get arrested in the city of LA, the LA County sheriff holds you in jail; the LA County district attorney prosecutes you. The LA County public defender takes your case. None of that is in the LA City budget.

People who live in Berkeley and Oakland take AC Transit to get around. AC Transit is a distinct agency, with its own board and budget. That doesn’t show up in the budget of Alameda County’s cities. In SF, Muni is entirely a city and county agency, and every penny it costs is in the city budget.

We run a massive public hospital and a skilled nursing facility; both bring in much of their budget from Medicare and insurance, but the full cost—not adjusted for revenue, that’s another line—is still in the city “budget.”

We run an airport, that costs the taxpayers nothing; the full $1.5 billion budget is paid for by the airlines. But it’s still in the city “budget.”

Philadelphia is also a city and county, with an airport (run by a separate authority—not in the city budget) and a robust transit system (run by the Southeast Pennsylvania Transit Authority, so full cost is not in the Philly city budget).

New York has two airports, under the budget of the Port Authority of New York—not in the city budget.

You get the point: For a lot of technical reasons, San Francisco counts as part of its budget a lot of things that other cities provide, but that aren’t in the municipal fund.

We have to pay city workers well, or we wouldn’t have any: Three tech booms embraced by two generations of mayors have driven up the cost of living so high that teachers, cops, firefighters and other crucial workers can’t live here on “ordinary” civil service pay. Meanwhile, 60 billionaires live here and pay the city very little in taxes (thanks to Prop. 13, many pay only a tiny fraction of the worth of their homes in property taxes.)

If you actually do the math, and I have done this, when you remove SFO, the Port, SF General’s Medicare funding, etc., SF’s budget per capita is about the same as most large cities.

Meanwhile, San Francisco has, with about the same money as other large cities, taken on a lot of things that the federal government used to fund, like affordable housing, HIV services, public health for indigent people, and public education. (The SF Public Schools are not in the city budget, nor is City College, but the city’s General Fund gives money to both.)

You want to look at “waste?” The most overpaid city employees are not providing social services. They are cops and deputy sheriffs, making so much money on overtime that it’s hard to believe they could possibly work that money hours.

So the budget is not about waste and bloat; it’s about priorities. Lurie wants cops and “clean” streets to serve the technorati, not the working people who live here.

A final note: The city’s budget deficit, including Muni’s deficit, could easily be eliminated with a simple city income tax on the top 5,000 richest residents.

Here, since the web links went down when the former owners closed the Bay Guardian, is the text of our story from 2010:

The truth about San Francisco’s budget 

Guess what? SF actually spends about what other big cities do 

By Melanie Ruiz and Tim Redmond 

“San Francisco,” SF Weekly recently proclaimed, “is arguably the worst-run big city in America.” That’s a hell of a claim — the levels of corruption and mismanagement in urban America are legendary. But the Weekly‘s Benjamin Wachs and Joe Eskenazi set out to prove their case — with a series of mostly anecdotal points that looked at the usual targets: Nonprofits. Unions. And one senior Newsom administration staffer who pretty much everyone agrees was a horrible manager. 

We were tempted to just let it go. Sure, there’s plenty of incompetence and waste in the Newsom administration. There’s a need for more accountability in some of the nonprofits that get city money. The police union got too big a raise in 2007. 

That pattern also exists in a lot of other big cities. You wanna make a big headline by claiming SF is the very worst? Whatever. 

But the heart of the Weekly‘s factual analysis was a chart that purports to show that San Francisco spends vastly more per capita than other “comparable” cities. That’s a claim we hear all the time, one that the more conservative political forces constantly use to argue against higher taxes (and in favor of big spending cuts). So it’s worth exploring a little further. Because when you look at all the facts, the Weekly analysis is just wrong. 

Comparing cities is a complex task — urban areas in America are governed in very different ways. You can’t, for example, compare San Francisco to any other city in California because San Francisco is the only combined city and county. Get arrested in Berkeley, and the Alameda County sheriff locks you up, the Alameda County district attorney prosecutes you, the Alameda County public defender takes your case, and the Alameda County courts adjudicate it. And if you win, you ride home on AC Transit — a separate system that isn’t in the budget of either the city or the county. 

In San Francisco, all those things are in the same city budget. 

But Wachs and Eskenazi decided to get beyond that. “Any time someone tries to point out that San Francisco has serious systemic problems, the response (from the Mayor’s Office, from city bureaucrats, and sometimes even from city activists) is that ‘San Francisco is both a city and a county,’ as if that explained everything,” Wachs told us in an e-mail. ”So the comparison was already being made as part of the city’s defense: San Francisco is a city-county, and what appear to be systemic problems are actually just features of being a city-county. 

“We proved that isn’t the case: San Francisco’s per capita spending is significantly out of line even when compared to other large city-counties.” 

Actually, it’s more than just the city-county distinction. The large cities-counties SF Weekly chose are so dramatically different in the services they do — and don’t — provide that the comparison comes close to being meaningless. Ken Bruce, a partner in the Harvey Rose Accountancy Firm, which serves as San Francisco’s budget analyst and does similar work in other cities, is no fan of wasteful spending. But he told us he wasn’t impressed with the Weekly chart: “I have yet to see a rigorous analysis done comparing San Francisco to other cities,” he said. 

And the way the Weekly added up the numbers was, at best, misleading. 

For starters, San Francisco runs (and includes in its city budget) an airport, port, public transit system, county hospital, and skilled nursing facility (Laguna Honda), for a total of more than $2 billion. None of the comparison cities do all those things. Or rather, some do those same things — but they aren’t in the local budget. 

In Philadelphia, for example, the public transit system is a regional agency. Philly chips in $63 million from its general fund to help the Southeast Pennsylvania Transit Authority (SEPTA). SF pays almost three times that much to run its own Muni, because the overhead costs are included in the local budget. Philly taxpayers spend much more than $63 million on SEPTA — it just comes out of a different budget and funding stream, so it isn’t in the figures the Weekly used. Denver’s transit system is regional too, and thus not in the city-county budget. 

In Indianapolis, the city transit system, Indygo, is far less complicated than ours. Jenny Brown, a spokesperson for Indygo, told us she was amazed her city was being compared to San Francisco: “Our transit system is not in the same league as yours,” she said. 

Philadelphia also does not pay for a county hospital or include its port or airport in its budget. Neither does Denver. 

There’s also a difference in most municipalities between the general fund (locally allocated spending) and the total budget, which includes federal and state money, self-sustaining departments,etc. In Philadelphia that’s a big distinction — more than $3 billion a year — but the Weekly compared Philly’s general fund to SF’s total budget (something Wachs admitted to us was his mistake). 

So we took this a step further. First, in Chart A, we compare apples to apples — general funds to general funds. It turns out SF and Philly are relatively close in per capita spending. Then we adjusted the budgets to account for the fact that SF includes in its budget a lot of services other cities and counties budget somewhere else. That makes all the comparison cities a lot closer. 

But can you really compare San Francisco — with its diverse and complex population and urban problems — to Indianapolis or Nashville? Even Denver? If even the folks in Indianapolis think that’s kind of bogus, we figured we could do better. So we set out to find some cities that make a more fair comparison. We included Philadelphia, but added Los Angeles and Chicago (New York, by the way, is so big, so complex, and has so many counties, boroughs, and budget items, that it’s not fair to compare that city to any other — even though is would help our case). To account for the city-county issue, we added to the L.A. and Chicago city budgets a percentage of the L.A. County and Cook County, Ill. spending equal to each city’s percentage of the county population. (Not a perfect yardstick, but pretty close). 

As Chart C shows, all four big cities are within about 30 percent of each other in terms of per capita spending. 

But there’s another big factor — cost of living. The vast majority of the budgets of these cities goes to employee pay and benefits — and it stands to reason that a city with a higher cost of living would have to pay its employees more. And San Francisco has by far the highest cost of living (according to the latest figures from the Council for Community and Economic Research’s ACCRA Cost of Living Index) of all the cities in this chart. 

So we adjusted per capita spending by the cost of living index (SF = 169, L.A. 145.4; Philadelphia, 124.1; and Chicago, 110.8) and discovered that in fact all four big cities spend roughly the same per capita — although San Francisco spends the least. 

So is San Francisco a service-rich city (like L.A., Philadelphia, and Chicago)? Absolutely. Is SF’s spending far out of whack with what other similar municipalities spend? No, not at all. All things considered, it’s a little low. 

PS:The Weekly spent much of its article attacking the lack of accountability in the city’s $500 million’ worth of nonprofit spending. That’s a huge issue, but oddly, the Weekly didn’t quote a single person who supports the system San Francisco uses to distribute services through nonprofits. 

We’ve been critical of many individual nonprofits, and some are over-funded, wasteful, and of dubious value. But overall, as labor activist Robert Haaland told us: “The fact that an individual nonprofit isn’t performing up to standard doesn’t mean that the services aren’t needed.” 

And there are many who say the San Francisco model is, in fact, a national standard. Margaret Brodkin, former director of the Mayor’s Office for Children, Youth, and Families, helped develop the current system of nonprofit accountability in that office. She has been invited to speak all over the country about the standards and data system they developed. “Others have replicated the data system we had in place. It’s held up as a national model, the data system as well as the standards,” she explained. 

So it’s not so simple — and to use a few anecdotes and some inaccurate and misleading figures to call San Francisco the worst managed city in the nation is, well, a bit of a stretch. To say the least.

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

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.

88 Corporations That Paid No US Federal Income Tax in 2025 Spent $852 Million on Recent Lobbying, Elections

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President Trump Signs His "Big, Beautiful Bill" Into Law And Celebrates Independence Day At The White House

US President Donald Trump, joined by Republican lawmakers, signs the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law at the White House in Washington, DC on July 4, 2025.

 (Photo by Eric Lee/Getty Images)

“The result,” said the author of a new Public Citizen analysis, “is a self-reinforcing loop where corporate cash buys policy, and policy pays cash back.”

Brett Wilkins

Jun 11, 2026 (CommonDreams.org)

Eighty-eight corporations that paid no federal income tax last year spent roughly $852 million on US campaign contributions and lobbying during recent election cycles, a report published Thursday revealed.

The report, “The Current Price of Zero,” was authored by Eileen O’Grady, a researcher at Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division. The publication draws upon an analysis published in April by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) showing that at least 88 of the nation’s largest companies paid no federal corporate income tax in fiscal year 2025, despite reporting combined US pretax income of around $105 billion.

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“Using data from OpenSecrets, which compiles and publishes campaign finance and lobbying data, we found that from the 2020 election cycle through the 2024 cycle, these 88 companies have spent nearly $852 million on lobbying and campaign contributions,” O’Grady wrote. “We highlight the companies that spent the most money on lobbying, hired the most lobbyists, lobbied specifically on tax issues, and contributed the most cash to political campaigns.”

The federal corporate income tax rate is 21%, indicating that the 88 companies in the report dodged a combined $22.1 billion in taxes last year. Additionally, they received $4.7 billion in tax rebates, bringing their total tax breaks to approximately $26.7 billion.

“The largest and richest corporations in the country are paying zero in federal income tax, and that is a slap in the face to the American taxpayers who are struggling to afford necessities like groceries and healthcare,” O’Grady said in a statement.

“Meanwhile, these companies are spending money that could have gone to the public good on lobbying for even more special advantages and tax breaks,” she added. “In this backwards, cash-fueled system, the deck is being stacked ever higher in favor of corporations, and against working people.”

The report’s key findings include:

  • The 88 corporations that paid no federal corporate income tax in 2025 spent $712 million on lobbying and $140 million on campaign contributions over the last three election cycles;
  • Comparing the taxes the corporations saved against the cost of their political spending, they collectively made a 3,000% return on investment;
  • Coinbase Global spent the most of any company—$89 million—followed by CVS Health ($66 million), Honeywell International ($56 million), American Electric Power ($47 million), and Duke Energy ($35 million);
  • On average each year, these companies together have sent 1,119 lobbyists to influence the federal government, including on tax issues and legislation that changed the tax code in favor of corporate giveaways; and
  • Since the beginning of 2025, these companies have collectively laid off at least 21,200 workers and announced plans to lay off thousands more.

“Our findings suggest that while Republicans lawmakers rewrote the tax code to enshrine massive giveaways to wealthy corporations, those same corporate tax dodgers poured millions into lobbying and political campaigns that yielded further tax breaks, which in turn has bankrolled even more political influence,” O’Grady wrote. “The result is a self-reinforcing loop where corporate cash buys policy, and policy pays cash back.”

The report singles out two related pieces of legislation—President Donald Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), signed into law by Trump last July 4—which enabled “several common strategies the companies used to get tax breaks and rebates.”

“The most commonly used corporate tax giveaway, accelerated depreciation, enabled more than half of the companies to collectively avoid $11.4 billion in taxes by allowing them to write off capital investments immediately,” O’Grady noted.

“In addition, a tax break supercharged under the Big Ugly Law allowed more than 30 companies to immediately write off research and development expenses, which alone netted them at least $4.4 billion in savings,” she added, using a common liberal epithet for the OBBBA.

Since the US Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling—which affirmed that political spending by corporations, nonprofit organizations, labor unions, and other groups is a form of free speech protected by the First Amendment—nearly $20 billion has been spent on US presidential elections and more than $53 billion on congressional races, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets. Spending on 2024 congressional races was double 2010 levels, while presidential campaign contributions were more than 50% higher in 2024 than in 2008, the last election before Citizens United.

Ultrawealthy and corporate megadonors played a critical role in Trump’s 2024 victory. Fossil fuel interests spent more than $445 million during the 2024 election cycle on campaign donations, lobbying, and other efforts to elect Trump and his Republican allies, plus pass policies that benefit their climate-wrecking businesses. Artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency are fast emerging as some of the most prolific lobbyists. Trump and Republicans in Congress have promoted policies and legislation boosting these sectors and shielding them from government regulation.

X post: https://x.com/Graham_dePenros/status/2064121479042916591?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2064121479042916591%7Ctwgr%5E0aaa35c0be9d495866533978fc4170bc40e2fdba%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Ftax-dodging-corporations-spend-big-on-lobbying

Elon Musk—the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and majority owner of X who could soon become the world’s first trillionaire—is the most prominent of the numerous Trump donors who have been rewarded with Cabinet nominations and other key appointments in “an administration dominated by billionaires and corporate interests,” as Americans for Tax Fairness executive director David Kass described it.

O’Grady wrote that “corporate tax dodgers spend lavishly on lobbying and campaign contributions that feed into more tax breaks, which in turn fund even more political spending on policies that serve to pad corporate profits—and the cycle continues.”

To remedy this, the report asserts: “It is imperative that Congress undo the Republican tax giveaways to corporations like bonus depreciation and research and development write-offs. In addition, the corporate rate must be increased to at least the 35% rate that stood before the 2017 law.”

“Corporations should not be able to deduct multimillion-dollar bonuses. And Congress must prevent multinational corporations from avoiding taxes by booking profits in offshore subsidiaries by equalizing the domestic and international tax rates,” the publication concludes. “With these and other reforms to our tax code, our nation could have more than enough revenue to breinvest in American communities and make life more affordable for everyone. It’s time to finally put people over corporate profits.”

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Brett Wilkins

Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

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‘We Will Continue Until Palestine is Free’: Freed Gaza Flotilla Activists Speak

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The Real News Network Jun 9, 2026 Israeli military forces captured the latest convoy of humanitarian aid ships sailing to Gaza with the Global Sumud Flotilla (GSM) between late April and mid-May. Activists who were imprisoned by Israel for days and eventually deported have reported harrowing treatment by their captors, including targeted torture, abuse, broken bones, unauthorized injections of undisclosed substances, and sexual violence by Israeli soldiers. We speak with a panel of freed GSM participants—Thiago Ávila, Catríona Graham, and Ariadne Telles—about what they saw and endured, and about the successes, defeats, and future of the movement to break Israel’s siege on Gaza. Hosted by: Maximillian Alvarez Studio Production / Post Production: David Hebden

With Straight Face, Trump Says Platner ‘Worse Than Any Human Being That’s Ever Run for Office, Probably’

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Maine Democratic Candidate For Senate Graham Platner Campaigns Across The State

US Senate candidate from Maine Graham Platner speaks to attendees during a campaign event at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 6859 on May 17, 2026 in Portland, Maine.

 (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

The president has been convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying documents as well as being found guilty of fraud, sexual abuse, and defamation. While in office he’s given massive tax giveaways to billionaires, opened the gates for corporate polluters, and made enriching himself and his family a top priority.

Julia Conley

Jun 10, 2026 (CommonDreams.org)

Four months after President Donald Trump’s name reportedly appeared over a million times in long-hidden files related to his former friend, convicted sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, and weeks after one analysis warned that his foreign aid cuts will likely kill 9 million people by the end of the decade, the president announced Wednesday that he’d identified the politician who is “probably” the worst person to ever run for public office.

In the Oval Office, Trump declared Democratic US Senate candidate Graham Platner, whom Maine primary voters chose to run in the general election by more than a 52% margin, a “thug” and a “cheap, no-good person,” adding that he is “worse than any human being that’s ever run for office, probably.”

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“Nobody’s ever had a record like that… This guy’s got a rap sheet, I’ve never seen anything like it,” said the president as he lied about Platner, who has no criminal record.

Trump, meanwhile, was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in 2024. A New York judge also ordered Trump to pay a $450 million civil penalty over financial fraud that year, and in 2023, a jury found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming columnist E. Jean Carroll. More than two dozen women have accused the president of sexual misconduct.

Trump, who has openly bragged about sexually assaulting women and reportedly committed adultery numerous times during his three marriages, was likely referring to controversies that made headlines after Platner, a combat veteran and oyster farmer, launched his campaign last year with a focus on taxing billionaires, expanding Medicare to the entire population, and ending US wars.

During his two terms in office, Trump has been rebuked for his allegiance to corporate interests, giving massive tax breaks to billionaires and powerful industries, undermining labor protections, launching wars of choice overseas, attacking public education, and gutting public health and environmental protection efforts.

Recently, a former campaign staffer told news outlets that Platner’s wife had confided in her about messages Platner sent to other women early in their marriage. The candidate’s former girlfriend, a right-wing operative, also accused him of being physically aggressive during their relationship. Earlier controversies centered on a tattoo that critics said resembled a Nazi symbol and posts he wrote on Reddit in the years after his military service.

Despite the months of criticism and news stories regarding Platner’s past, with 91% of votes reported as of Wednesday afternoon, he won the support of more than 71% of Democratic primary voters, with many saying they connected with his strong focus on issues affecting working people and that he had taken accountability for his previous actions.

While attacking Platner on Wednesday, Trump brought up the Epstein scandal, saying Democratic lawmakers “go crazy” over his association with the financier, who died in prison while awaiting a trial on sex-trafficking minors and who was convicted in 2008 of soliciting prostitution with a minor.

As Trump hurled insults at Platner, also calling him “an outright pig,” the Democratic candidate released an ad taking aim at “the Epstein class,” saying that “the only thing the DC establishment can agree on is a love of Jeffrey Epstein—and a hatred of me.”

Earlier, the Democratic candidate and so-called “thug” posted a video on social media of a volunteer activity he was taking part in on the morning after the election in Bar Harbor.

“This morning, I’m doing very important things, which is riding on the bike bus,” said Platner, evidently taking time off from being what Trump has also referred to as a “major sleaze bag.”

“The community gets together and helps ride with all of the kids who want to ride their bikes to school, and so it’s safe and fun,” he explained.

“Honestly, it’s exactly the thing that we need a lot more of in this country,” said Platner, “which is people coming together and realizing that their neighbors are good people, and everybody just wants to help each other out. It’s the message we need to take into our politics, which is why we won last night.”

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Julia Conley

Julia Conley is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.

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Trump Official Lies That ‘No One Was Kicked Off’ SNAP as Millions Lose Food Aid—Including Kids

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US Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins testifies during a Senate hearing on Capitol Hill on June 10, 2026 in Washington, DC.

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“Did 700,000 children simply not apply?” asked one advocate in response to USDA chief Brooke Rollins’ Senate testimony.

Jake Johnson

Jun 10, 2026 (CommonDreams.org)

The head of the US Department of Agriculture on Wednesday falsely told senators that “no one was kicked off” the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, claiming that the millions of people—including many children—who have lost federal nutrition assistance in recent months were no longer eligible for aid or decided not to apply for it.

USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins declared that “no one in Washington or in America wants to see a family go hungry,” but insisted that anyone who is no longer receiving SNAP benefits has “chosen not to reapply or they’re an able-bodied adult that can either work for 20 hours a week or volunteer.”

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Rollins’ testimony conflicts with a growing number of anecdotal reports and expert analyses showing that families across the United States are losing SNAP benefits at the fastest rate in decades. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) estimates that at least 700,000 children have lost SNAP since President Donald Trump signed into law a Republican budget package last summer, enacting the largest-ever cuts to the federal nutrition program.

“Did 700,000 children simply not apply?” Rachel Sabella, director of the No Kid Hungry New York campaign, asked in response to Rollins’ remarks.

Katie Bergh, a CBPP policy analyst, pointed to recent reporting by NBC News, which spoke to a mother of two in Arizona who said her “benefits stopped without warning three months ago” after the state began implementing new eligibility requirements included in the Republican budget law.

“It’s been really hard,” the mother said. “We’ve been going to food banks every week… We’re eating less, we’re eating more frozen stuff.”

Rollins, a multimillionaire, has openly celebrated the massive and rapid decline in SNAP participation during Trump’s second White House term, claiming that the roughly 4 million people who have been “moved” off the program are closer to realizing “the American dream”—even as hunger grows to levels not seen since the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“This is a celebration of work and the dignity of work,” Rollins told senators on Wednesday.

But CBPP concluded in an analysis released in late April that the “dramatic” loss of SNAP benefits across the country “cannot be explained by a rapid improvement in people’s economic well-being or reduced need for help affording food.”

“Labor force data show that the unemployment rate was flat between July 2025 and March 2026, the most recent data available,” the think tank observed. “A more likely explanation for why people are losing access to food assistance is that states are now facing new challenges as they respond to the cuts in [the Republican budget law]—the largest in the program’s history.”

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Jake Johnson

Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.

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‘Voters Are Seeing Through the Bullshit’: Progressives Take Down Corporate Dems Nationwide

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Jane Kim

California insurance commissioner candidate Jane Kim delivers remarks during the California Democratic Party convention in San Francisco on February 21, 2026.

 (Photo by Yalonda M. James/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

“If the Democratic Party wants to beat Republicans and win back a majority in November, they need to listen to their voters and usher in a new generation of fighters.”

Jake Johnson

Jun 10, 2026 (CommonDreams.org)

Progressive candidates have swept to victory against establishment opponents in Democratic primary races across the US, including on Tuesday, as voters turn out in support of working-class champions who have spurned corporate money and vowed to pursue transformative change at the national, state, and local levels.

The Working Families Party (WFP) celebrated a five-for-five sweep for the US House candidates it backed in California primaries, as Mai Vang, Connie Chan, Aisha Wahab, Randy Villegas, and Angela Gonzales-Torres each advanced to the November general election. As Common Dreams reported, Villegas—who is running to unseat incumbent Rep. David Valadao (R-Calif.)—advanced despite the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s intervention in support of his opponent Jasmeet Bains, a corporate Democrat.

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WFP noted that the wins in California followed upset victories by Chris Rabb in Pennsylvania’s 3rd Congressional District and Analilia Mejia in New Jersey’s 11th District.

“Voters are seeing through the bullshit and voting for candidates who aren’t in the pocket of billionaires and corporate interests,” Ravi Mangla, WFP’s national press secretary, said in a statement. “In New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and now California, WFP candidates have defied the odds and won shock victories over do-nothing corporate Democrats. We’re electing a new generation of leaders who won’t put up with being pushed around by billionaire elites.”

WFP, along with US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and other progressives, also backed Graham Platner in Maine, where he won a landslide victory over Democratic Gov. Janet Mills on Tuesday.

Politico reported that other Sanders-backed candidates in US congressional races “include Adam Hamawy and Analilia Mejia in New Jersey, Sam Forstag in Montana, Brian Poindexter in Ohio, and Bob Brooks in a key Pennsylvania swing district.”

“The senator’s support has been instrumental in powering unknown candidates to major wins this cycle, a demonstration of just how much political influence the 84-year-old progressive leader still commands,” Politico noted.

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Justice Democrats, the grassroots group working to replace corporate Democrats with progressives across the country, is celebrating primary wins by Jane Kim, who is running to serve as California’s insurance commissioner, and Mai Vang, who is vying to represent California’s 7th Congressional District in the US House.

As of this writing, Vang has received more votes in the jungle primary than incumbent Rep. Doris Matsui (D-Calif.).

“Sacramento is ready to move on from the corporate dynasty that has represented it for 50 years and elect a true working class champion to fight for their families in Washington,” said Alexandra Rojas, the executive director of Justice Democrats. “Mai represents the Sacramento being left behind by Doris Matsui and the promise of representation that fights the corporations raising our prices and ICE contractors enabling our communities to be terrorized—instead of cashing their checks.”

“If the Democratic Party wants to beat Republicans and win back a majority in November,” Rojas added, “they need to listen to their voters and usher in a new generation of fighters like Mai, to excite our base and lead this party forward.”

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How an Oakland organization became a national force for better prison meals

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Impact Justice, a leading expert in prison food, is championing innovative improvements. Its work is captured in the 2026 James Beard Award-nominated book “Eating Behind Bars.”

by Tony Hicks June 10, 2026 (Berkeleyside.org)

An incarcerated man at California State Prison Solano holds a fresh pear distributed through the Harvest of the Month program led by Impact Justice in partnership with the UC Nutrition Policy Institute. Credit: Evett Kilmartin courtesy of Impact Justice

It was a throwaway comment, sparking unusual recognition of a throwaway topic for most Americans when discussing nutrition.

Impact Justice founder Alex Busansky was at a two-day Bay Area event in December 2017 put on by a funder of his Oakland-based nonprofit. Someone from Food Corp., a national nonprofit working for better food in middle schools, said during her presentation that some school lunches were worse than a meal in prison,” Busanky said.

An idea started percolating in his head. Busansky approached her afterward and asked what she knew about prison food. She didn’t know anything. Neither did he, though he’d been to prisons through his regular social justice work.

“I talked to her and went back to my hotel room and got on Google,” Busansky said. “I saw no one was doing much research on prison food.”

He called his national campaign people and connected them with the woman from Food Corp., to find out more about their work.

That call was like splitting the first intellectual atoms of a nine-year chain reaction at Impact Justice, exploding into a 2026 James Beard Foundation award nominee for books covering food issues and advocacy. The award winner will be announced June 13 in a ceremony in Chicago.

The book by Leslie Soble, Alex Busansky and Dr. Aishatu R. Yusuf, “Eating Behind Bars: Ending the Hidden Punishment of Food in Prison,” lifts the curtain on how, and what, the penal system feeds the humans inside its walls.

It’s not a pretty picture.

“Prisoners are purposely out of sight and out of mind,” said Yusuf, Impact Justice’s vice president of innovation programs. “If people saw prisons more often, it would be a bigger part of the discussion.”

The group’s interest began with a search for previous research on prison nutrition.

It didn’t exist, so they did their own.

Two years of research produced what they called the first national study of prison food. Their 2020 report, “Eating Behind Bars” made Impact Justice the leading national expert on prison food.

Eating Behind Bars, published in 2025, is nominated for a 2026 James Beard Award for best book on food issues and advocacy. Credit: Impact Justice

Released in 2025, the book was a natural extension of the report, with additional research and solutions.

Most of the focus was on state facilities, where the highest number of the nation’s incarcerated people live. From interviews with former prisoners, their families and friends, and current and former corrections officers, the authors discovered mealtimes are one of the most traumatic and humiliating aspects of incarceration.

Prisoners are no different than any human looking to food for comfort and sustenance, the authors say. What inmates are served is often unrecognizable slop, bereft of nutrition, in favor of ultra-processed meals high in sugar and sodium that favor shelf life over nutritional content.

Prison food is heavy on carbohydrates meant to merely meet caloric standards, which vary, depending on the jurisdiction. The authors said prisoners rarely get fresh fruits or vegetables, even in industrial-scale prison farms.

Much of the unpalatable food ends up in the trash, as prisoners would rather go hungry than try eating prison food. The results are malnutrition and an estimated 300,000 tons of food waste annually.

In the report, former prisoners described finding maggots, body parts of rats, or cockroaches in their food.

The authors said correctional facilities control mealtimes and food access — as well as the food itself — as a form of punishment. They single out something called “the loaf,” a disgusting mash of incompatible foods presented as a meal. 

“The book isn’t laying out radical ideas,” said Busansky, the president and founder of Impact Justice. “Prisoners are people with the same hopes, wants and desires as the rest of us.”

Inside the vertical farm at Camille Griffin Graham Correctional Institution, part of Impact Justice’s Growing Justice partnership with AmplifiedAg and the South Carolina Department of Corrections. Credit: South Carolina Department of Corrections courtesy of Impact Justice

Of formerly incarcerated people Impact Justice surveyed, 75% said they were served rotten or spoiled food in prison. More than 90% said they didn’t receive enough food to feel full.

Most of the country’s roughly 2 million prisoners came from low-income areas often described as “food deserts,” where access to fresh produce is limited. The food available in food deserts is often heavily processed and bought just to fill stomachs.

Yusuf said prisons are an opportunity for the government to educate the incarcerated — most of whom will be released and need to make food choices for themselves an their families — about nutrition and establish healthy habits.

“When individuals are in prisons, they are under state care; the state is responsible for them,” Yusuf said. “The decisions (prisoners) make are controlled by the state. We’re just talking about simple, healthy, everyday food.”

Busansky said prison food quality is a government choice. In 2024, California spent $4.20 a day on three meals for adult prisoners. By comparison, San Diego public schools spent $3.91 per child for usually one meal.

“We know how to feed people at scale – the military, schools, hospitals – and we do it well,” Busansky said. “We don’t have a constituency that fights for prisoners … We have people in prison who haven’t experienced the taste of a strawberry in 17 years.”

Busansky said there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that “what you eat affects your behavior.”

“We don’t think about the consequences of what happens in prisons,” Busansky said. “I know how I feel after a bad meal. Now multiply that by meal after meal, day after day.”

Bad nutrition also leads to more health problems like heart disease and diabetes, resulting in higher medical expenses for the state.

“Each year in prison shaves two years off someone’s life,” Yusuf said. “It’s an important factor.”

The book’s first part lays out the problem. The second discusses remedies.

“The book is different than the report,” Yusuf said. “It really focuses on solutions. Most of the solutions are new.”

The group immediately began forming alliances with other organizations to help.

“Once you take the veil off something to people, they can’t unsee it,” Yusuf said. “They engage with the project, and they want to know how they can help.”

Impact Justice’s Growing Justice initiative in California and South Carolina builds vertical farms inside women’s prisons to produce nutritious leafy greens and train women in indoor farming.

The organization has also created programs like Harvest of the Month, a partnership with regional food hubs, UC Berkeley’s Nutrition Policy Institute, and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

The program has delivered more than 600,000 pounds of fresh produce to about 90,000 incarcerated people since 2023.

Busansky said some prison systems, like California’s, are open to new ideas.

“There’s an openness to the conversation,” Busansky said. “It’s usually about the funding, doing something they’ve never done before.”

Impact Justice trains former prisoners to be food justice advocates in their communities and started a Chefs in Prisons program in Maine, which trains prisoners in culinary arts while creating better food for inmates. The model is catching on in other states.

“The majority of people incarcerated are parents,” Busansky said. “If you teach them about the benefits of nutritional food, that has an effect on generations.”

“We ask people to do something, now that you have the information,” Yusuf said. “We can’t forget about the people we don’t always see.”

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How Dark Money Captured America — And How Hawaii Just Declared War on It

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From Citizens United to Trump-era oligarchy, the billionaire takeover of American politics seemed unstoppable. Then Hawaii found a way to strike at the heart of the system…

Thom Hartmann

Jun 10, 2026 (HartmannReport.com)

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Against all odds and massive dark money, Graham Platner won. And won big.

The oyster farmer and Marine Corps veteran who turned a long-shot run into a movement just took the Democratic nomination to challenge Susan Collins for her Senate seat in Maine, and he did it the hard way, the clean way, the way that’s supposed to be impossible in this age of unlimited corporate and billionaire money.

He out-raised a sitting governor backed by the entire party establishment and their corporate funders, he packed arenas with Fighting Oligarchy rallies alongside Bernie Sanders, and he built the whole thing out of small-dollar donations from working Mainers rather than checks from corporate political action committees.

He’s been a sharp critic of AIPAC and the river of industry cash that flows through our politics, and he’s pledged to keep that money out of his campaign.

Now look at the woman he’s running against. Susan Collins is the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which means she sits atop the federal spending faucet for defense contractors, pharmaceutical companies, banks, and agribusiness, and wouldn’t you know it, those are exactly the industries pouring money into her reelection.

The single largest organized source of cash in her campaign is AIPAC, the pro-Netanyahu lobby that bundled more than half a million dollars for her in a single filing period and accounted for nearly a fifth of everything she raised last year.

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It’s a nonprofit corporation working on behalf of a foreign government’s leader’s agenda, doing in American elections exactly what Citizens United made legal when Stevens’ dissent pointed out the decision “would have given Tokyo Rose” a voice in US elections during WWII.

Roughly ninety-five percent of Collins’ money comes from outside Maine. And when Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman dropped two million dollars into a pro-Collins super PAC in the summer of 2025, she voted the very next day to advance Trump’s tax bill, stuffed with giveaways to the private equity industry that had just paid to keep her in office. That’s the whole transaction, in miniature, right there in the open.

If you want to see the same machine running at full industrial scale, just watch what Donald Trump and his sons have been doing for the past year and a half.

— A Reynolds tobacco subsidiary gave five million dollars to a Trump super PAC, and five days later the FDA cleared fruit and candy flavored vapes for the American market, with Trump’s own FDA commissioner resigning rather than sign off on addicting kids.

— Bayer and Monsanto wanted protection from the tens of thousands of cancer victims suing them over Roundup, so Trump handed them a February executive order granting glyphosate producers immunity from lawsuits, then sent his own lawyers to the Supreme Court to argue Bayer’s case. And the saddest part of that one is Bob Kennedy, the lawyer who once won nearly $300 million suing Monsanto over Roundup and built his whole brand calling glyphosate a cancer-causing poison, as Health Secretary rolled over and praised the bought-and-paid-for order as “putting America first,” betraying the very people who trusted him.

— Crypto financier Justin Sun poured something like ninety million dollars into Trump family crypto ventures, and the SEC promptly paused and dropped its fraud case against him, part of a pattern in which the agency walked away from roughly sixty percent of its crypto enforcement after those firms donated to the inauguration.

— Big Oil executives gathered at Mar-a-Lago in 2024, where Trump asked them for a billion dollars and promised to gut Biden’s climate rules in return, a promise he’s since kept by killing wind, solar, and EV incentives, opening federal lands to drilling, and even paying a French company nearly a billion of your tax dollars to cancel offshore wind farms.

— And Tim Cook handed Trump a personal million-dollar inauguration check and a slab of gold, and walked away with tariff exemptions worth billions to Apple while the rest of the country pays the price at the cash register.

Every one of those deals is sleazy, and every one of them is also perfectly legal, and the reason they’re legal is a Supreme Court decision that I’d argue is the single most corrupt ruling in the history of the Court.

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In 2010, in Citizens United, five Republican-appointed justices declared that corporations have a constitutional right to spend unlimited money influencing our elections, building on a 1978 case written by Lewis Powell himself (of Powell Memo infamy) called Bellotti that had first cracked the door open.

This, despite the fact that the word “corporation” does not even appear in the Constitution.

In that five-to-four ruling every vote in the majority was a deciding vote, and one of those five was Clarence Thomas, who for decades had been quietly pocketing gifts, luxury trips, private jet and yacht rides, and tuition payments from Harlan Crow, the Texas billionaire whose Dallas mansion famously houses a collection of Nazi memorabilia including two Hitler paintings and a signed copy of Mein Kampf.

Just weeks before the Citizens United ruling, Crow even helped fund a dark money group co-founded by Thomas’s own wife. The man who cast a deciding vote to legalize secret corporate money in our elections was himself bought-and-paid-for, and he never considered recusing himself for a second.

For fifteen years now, we’ve been told there’s nothing to be done about this short of a constitutional amendment, and every attempt at one has died at Republican hands in Congress. But a handful of states have now found a crack in the wall, and it’s so elegant it’s almost funny.

Hawaii just became the first state in the nation to redefine what a corporation even is. States are the entities that charter corporations and grant them their powers in the first place, so Hawaii simply rewrote the definition to say that a corporation operating in the state does not have the power to spend money influencing elections or ballot measures.

It’s not regulation, it’s redefinition, which is the brainchild of Tom Moore at the Center for American Progress, and the beauty of it is that the Supreme Court has held for two hundred years that defining the abilities and powers of corporations is a matter of state law the federal courts have no business touching.

Hawaii didn’t overturn Citizens United: it just made the ruling meaningless inside its borders, where every dollar spent on an election will now have to come from a human being. Montana is gathering signatures to put the same idea on their November ballot, with a measure that would take effect even sooner than Hawaii’s, and at least fourteen states, including New York and California, are today considering versions of their own.

There are limitations to this approach: redefining corporate power at the state level won’t stop the billionaires. It won’t stop Harlan Crow or Elon Musk or the oil and crypto and pharma tycoons who spend as individuals, because they’re flesh-and-blood people, not corporate charters, and reaching them still requires either overturning Citizens United through a constitutional amendment or changing the composition of the Court that handed it down.

But it’s a real start, and just as importantly it drags the whole rotten arrangement back into the daylight, forcing Americans to look at what Thomas and Roberts and the rest of the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court did to us and our democracy, and ask why we ever let corporations buy our government in the first place.

I’ve spent a good chunk of my life writing and broadcasting about how we got here, and in my new book, Who Killed the American Dream, I trace this entire catastrophe back past Citizens United, back past Bellotti, all the way to an 1886 Supreme Court headnote, written not by a justice but by a court reporter, that falsely declared corporations to be persons under the Fourteenth Amendment and threw us to the mercy of the oligarchs. The book lays out the other solutions, too, the ones that reach the billionaires and not just the corporations.

The biggest, most critical crisis for America that Citizens United caused is that the oligarchy it produced isn’t a stable form of government: it’s a transitional one, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.

When a tiny class of the very rich — billionaires, corporations, or both — captures the machinery of the state, as they’ve now done in the Trump White House and across the entire Republican Party, the people eventually figure it out and rebel as we’re seeing today with the No Kings and other protests.

At that point, the oligarchs are left with only two choices. They can back down and let the country become less corrupt, the way America did during the Progressive Era and the New Deal, or they can come down with what Democratic President Grover Cleveland, warning Congress about corporate power back in 1888, called an “iron heel,” crushing the opposition rather than loosening their grip.

That second path is the one that Trump’s mentor, Vladimir Putin, chose. Russia had become an oligarchy in the neoliberal chaos of the 1990s, and when Putin took over he gave the Russian oligarchs a simple bargain: keep your billions, pay me off, and don’t challenge anything I do. When billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky crossed that line, Putin destroyed him, seizing his oil company and locking him away for a decade.

That’s the fork in the road we’re approaching, and it’s why what Hawaii just did is so much bigger than just Hawaii.

The Hawaii-style fix doesn’t require Congress, it requires your statehouse, which means your own state representative and state senator are the people who can make this happen where you live.

Look them up and contact them at openstates.org, and tell them in plain words that you want them to do what Hawaii did and what Montana is about to do, and to redefine corporate power so that only human beings can spend money in your state’s elections.

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Make sure you and everyone you know is registered and ready to vote at vote.org, because the same ballot box that elects a Platner can pass these measures. If you’re in Montana, go find the signature drive and sign it.

And on the federal side, the road to actually overturning all of Citizens United, call your senators and representative through the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them to back a constitutional amendment and meaningful Supreme Court reform.

None of this current state of corruption fixes itself: it requires citizen action, or the special interests and billionaires will prevail. So, share this piece with the people in your life who’ve given up believing anything can be done about the money, because something finally can, and forward it to the friend who thinks corruption is just like the weather, something about which nothing can be done.

Support independent journalism at the Hartmann Report so we can keep dragging this into the light. The oligarchs are counting on you to believe the game is rigged forever. Hawaii just proved it isn’t.

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