California elections: I was both wrong and right

California's June primary election taught me some lessons about the numerous vehement opinions I bring to our election system.

For many years, I argued that widespread adoption of "abseentee" or "vote by mail" would detract from voter engagement rather than increase it. I was wrong.

I used to argue that campaigning to enhance Election Day -- marches, parties, the common accompaniments of 19th century elections -- would be the best way to increase turnout. This sort of thing does work in some contexts: homeless advocates have been known to march groups of street-living foks to City Hall to vote with some effect. But there is overwhelming evidence that automatically sending every eligible voter a ballot that can be mailed, dropped in a drop box, or delivered to a polling place is more effective.

Joe Garofoli of the San Francisco Chronicle describes the extraordinary success of mail ballots in our state:

... California had the second-highest voter turnout (40%) of any state that has held a primary so far this year.  The state with the highest turnout: Oregon (41%), which, like California, mails a ballot to every voter. 

Trump doesn't like this, but if you want more civic participation, make convenience voting easy! 

• • • 

However, seeing the "top two" primary voting system in action in picking the candidates who will be on ballot in November was the absurd farce I've always thought it. In loathing the "top two," I was right. 

Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton skewers the strange consequences of this systemic gimmick. 

... [Former state Sen. Abel] Maldonado says he crafted the current system 16 years ago believing it would produce “pragmatic and commonsense” officeholders. But that has failed, he acknowledges.

... Voters, regardless of party affiliation, can vote for any candidate. And the top two vote-getters, regardless of their party, advance to the general election. ... The idea was that candidates would be forced to appeal to centrist voters — not just party ideologues — and more moderates would be elected.

... Actually, the electorate has become so polarized in recent years — particularly during the Trump era — that very few centrist voters seem to be left.

... Democrat Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, favors dumping the top-two.

For one thing, she says, there was too much focus this spring on whether any Democratic gubernatorial candidate would qualify for the November ballot. Fear spread that so many Democrats were running that they’d splinter the party vote and two Republicans would finish first and second.

She wanted to hear less talk about the horse race and more debate over substantive issues.

“People were obsessing about a Democratic shutout,” Gonzalez said. “And people were waiting until the last minute to fill out their ballot because they wanted to vote for the candidate who was ahead to make sure someone made the top two. We didn’t have a policy discussion.” ...

Maybe we can get rid of this abomination? We implanted it by ballot initiative and we would have to vote it away in order to revert to a system in which each party gets a nominee. My instinct is that this would not be an easy campaign to win: voters tend to be protective of any arrangement which they think gives them more choices and presumably that's what defenders of the "top-two" would argue.

• • •

Meanwhile, it would be totally hypocritical of me not to point out that my candidate for US Congress from San Francisco is only still in the running because of the "top-two" system. If we'd had party primaries, Scott Wiener would be a Democratic shoo-in for November. In the current system, Connie Chan, still gives us a chance to elect a progressive, union supportive, Chinese immigrant from this city.  That seems like a good idea ...

No to ICE in Gilroy!

Californians will recognize this image: a string of marchers trudging under the sun carrying banners alongside rich fields in a wide agricultural valley. City people may forget at times, but this too is our state.

The location on Sunday was just outside Gilroy, in southern Santa Clara county. Why the march? The Trump/Miller deportation machine is threatening to build an ICE detention facility among these fields.

Neighbors are not having of it.

Gilroy is proud to call itself the Garlic Capitol of the World. 

A go-to source for information about the Gilroy detention plan seems to be the independent non-profit newsroom, the San Jose Spotlight. They've got the goods: 

Blueprints confirm ICE involvement in South County facility

Detailed blueprints show an ICE office with detention and processing space is planned in South Santa Clara County.

The 111-page document obtained by this news outlet, dated Sept. 17, 2025, illustrates a future U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility with detention areas, detainee processing areas, interview and holding rooms, spaces for mothers with infants, visitation rooms, weapons and ammunition rooms, tactical equipment storage, offices and a fitness center planned at 7240 Holsclaw Road. Certain pages of the document bear the logos for ICE and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The planned facility is located in an unincorporated area right outside Gilroy.

San José Spotlight obtained the blueprints after first reporting on public records that gave an incomplete picture of what was being built. ...

County and Gilroy elected officials want no part of this project; California Attorney General Rob Bonta has sued to block what he claims is an "Illegal Development" of an ICE facility.

 

Country people understand that sometimes elders need a seat in the heat.

How Democrats win California: there are a lot of us and we vote

Republicans don't win statewide and urban elections in California. There simply are too few GOP voters to get their candidates over the top. So -- naturally -- for a party that has a hard time with reality, they say our elections must be rigged. Bulls__t!

I am no longer a subscriber to the Los Angeles Times. The editorial policies of the paper's nutcase, Trump-loving owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, made sure of that; I quit. But I still seem to get the paper's California Politics e-newsletter and that means I can read occasional dispatches from one of the most plain spoken columnists writing anywhere, Anita Chabria. 

Chabria recently responded to Republican whining about our elections with a useful explainer of how the state conducts our voting.

... Voter rolls are a huge refrain in conspiracy theories and the subject of numerous (mostly unsucessful) lawsuits by Trump’s Department of Justice. Trump is demanding that the federal government “audit” the voter rolls to ensure ballots go only to legal voters, which is one of those scary and ill-conceived ideas that sounds reasonable on the surface.

... So what’s the deal with voter rolls? Are they really the dark heart of a Democratic scam to rig elections? Or is the scam that Trump and MAGA are attempting to use the boring and bureaucratic nature of voting rolls to do the very thing they claim to be fighting — undermine of free and fair elections?

... Voter rolls are the lists of eligible voters kept by each state. States run elections, because, well, the Constitution. But that structure is also a good idea because states keep closer track of who is a legal resident and where they are than the federal government. 

Republicans charge the Dems cook the books, putting fraudulent people on the rolls. Not so.

... voter rolls are “loose,” according to Chris Fowler, a professor of geography and demographics at Penn State who specializes in voting rights. Most states have laws that strive to be inclusive and are slow to remove people from the lists, precisely because we want as many people to vote as we can get.

Some people in California are added when they get a driver’s license. Some people move and ask the postal service to update their voter registration. Some people register once, move dozens of times and never think to tell their secretary of state.

Some people die. Some people get married and change their name. Some people don’t vote for 10 years, then do. You get the idea. Life happens, and updating voter registration is rarely our first thought.

But doesn't that mean that people who shouldn't be on the rolls can vote? Well no.

... here’s what the conspiracy folks leave out: Being on the voter roll doesn’t automatically mean a vote will be counted or even that a ballot will be sent. It’s just the starting point of everyone who might be invited to the party.

There are numerous safeguards, such as signature verification, that cast ballots go through before the vote is considered legitimate. When there is doubt, the vote is “cured,” which is an unnecessarily convoluted way of saying local election officials may go as far as tracking down the actual voter and making sure they are legit. Yes, if there is a question, actual people contact an actual voter. If they can’t get in contact, the vote is usually set aside.

The MAGA demand to audit voter rolls ignores all this reality and is instead based on the false idea that voter rolls translate directly into counted votes.

The game MAGA is running with voter roll audits is that it was never about election integrity. It’s about suppressing the vote of Black people, brown people, young people and others who tend to vote Democratic and also tend to have more unsettled lives that would lead them to have inaccurate information, such as conflicting addresses, on the voter rolls. 

I should add that Chabria is also a fair minded commentator. She points out that the baseless whining is not from all Republicans. 

[Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve] Hilton on Tuesday addressed the president’s unfounded but vociferous claims that Democrats have massively cheated in our recent election.

“We’ve got teams standing by, we’ve got lawyers standing by, very focused on that,” Hilton told reporters, including my colleague Seema Mehta, outside the L.A. elections headquarters. “We don’t want to let anyone down, we don’t want to let anything slip away, and we’ve seen nothing.”

Hilton made the November runoff; he's not served by denouncing the vote. He's going to lose; there aren't enough Republicans in California to make a contest. If you want to know who Hilton is, I recommend this delicious piece on his toxic past as a British conservative ad-man by Finton O'Toole in the New York Review of Books. [Free link.]

All together now against MAGA

Immigrants, trans people, and friends gathered outside the San Francisco branch of the California Department of Motor Vehicles Thursday morning to protest plans to turn all of our state data over to a national contractor. The move creates reasonable fear that the Trump regime will use the data to harm people, especially those it is trying to expel or erase from our community.

 Per CalMatters: 

California is preparing to share with an outside organization detailed information about drivers license holders, including immigrants who do not have legal authorization to live in the U.S.

That breaks a promise the state made a decade ago when it began issuing licenses to unauthorized immigrants, advocates say, and it means more than 1 million people may face higher risk of deportation.

California issues an ID card that allows undocumented migrants to drive after they pass a driving test. 

California also protects the rights and privacy of people who have undergone a gender transition, issuing updated ID documents which match the chosen gender presentation. 

Representatives from ... advocacy groups ... told CalMatters the shared information will show whether a person has a Social Security number, meaning it could be used to identify people in the country without authorization. ...  advocates fear that federal immigration officials will try to gain bulk access to the data and use the fact that a person doesn’t have a Social Security number as a signal that they’re deportable.

The state received assurances from the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators that safeguards will be added to prevent bulk searches for unauthorized immigrant license holders in the database and to prevent access by the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to people who joined [a] briefing with the DMV and governor’s office. ... 

“Once this data is uploaded to AAMVA, it’s out of California’s control, no matter what California wants, no matter what protests we may make,” said Ed Hasbrouck with San Francisco civil liberties group The Identity Project ...

 

Meanwhile trans people are all too aware of the threat from the administration to their very existence. So far, California has been a relatively safe place for trans adults -- but anyone who is paying attention understands that MAGA wants to end that.

This is about protecting the integrity of the diverse and welcoming California we have chosen to become ...

California picks a governor. The return of the gray?

I had thought I might wake up this morning and find myself miserable over the election results in California. But to my surprise, I look at what happened and it seems pretty good. Nothing to get excited about, but no reason to despair of the Golden State either.

The Governor's race: As I've written before, Californians have been spoiled for the last 16 years to have had energetic, intelligent and highly plausible Democratic governors. Yes, there have been multiple occasions on which I disagreed with and even protested Brown and especially Newsom, but they knew a lot about how the state works and tried to accomplish policy wins for their constituents. 

The title of this post refers to their Democratic predecessor Gray Davis who was recalled and replaced in the interesting Arnold Schwarzenegger interlude. Gray was indeed gray; I actually sat at a table with him once at some political dinner and the man had the charisma of a paper napkin. Brown and Newsom came along and set a new standard for high-octane Democratic leaders.

Then, this year, we looked to lurch from these two very qualified pros to a choice from a small bevy of Dems, all except one of whom had little experience in state government. This was jarring; this state is huge and rich and influential and also sometimes needy and fractious. Whoever got to be Governor was going to face a major learning curve.

From a doing-the-job perspective, Katie Porter seemed the best prepared; she understands government as policy and was my choice. But the California electorate quickly decided it wasn't up for an abrasive fat women; that's a reach too far apparently. Congressman Eric Swalwell imploded; lesson to ambitious guys, learn to curb your hormones. 

So for many Democrats, the election came down to which gray candidate could win enough votes to be sure to make the November ballot because, theoretically, if two Republican candidates got the most votes, the splintered Dems would not have a candidate at all. This seemed unlikely, but the horror of the prospect raised the sense of stakes as Primary Day approached. 

We were left with progressive billionaire Tom Steyer and Democratic political fixture Xavier Becerra, a former state legislator, state attorney general and head of Biden's Health and Human Services. And they battled it out. Because neither personally excited much excitement, online the campaign sometimes seemed to exemplify "the narcissism of small differences," the tendency in the heat of conflict to exacerbate minor conflicts in order to draw distinctions which we give excessive weight. I had friends in both camps and I hope they can come together in the aftermath. For a minute there, they were at each other's throats.

It worked out that Steyer's money couldn't overcome Becerra's comforting grayness. Democratic political consultant Gary South identified Steyer's fatal flaw: 

“It may sound facetious to say that you can have too much money in a campaign, but in fact the way these rich self-financing candidates spend their money becomes a liability. …They wear out their welcome.”

L.A. Times political pundit George Skelton catches our former Attorney General's appeal to many:

“Voters are exhausted by Trump. He makes it hard to sleep at night. ‘Cool and calm’ win,” says Chapman University political science professor Fred Smoller. “People want a candidate like a no-drama Becerra.

“The fact he has a charisma deficit may in fact be his political asset.”

But Becerra also has other assets, notes UC San Diego political science professor Thad Kousser — ”legislative and executive experience…. He was safe and predictable.

“And he’s second only to Gavin Newsom in opposing Donald Trump.” 

Besides -- isn't it about time we elected a Latino governor? Seems right. 

We count on Becerra to defeat the surviving Republican in the fall. Party identification plus disgust with Trump ought to do the trick in this blue state. And then we'll come to terms with our latest gray governor.

 • • •

Meanwhile in San Francisco: As well, I have reason to be happy this morning because in my home Congressional district where Nancy Pelosi is finally retiring, a billionaire tech-bro carpetbagger, Saikat Chakrabarti, got handed his walking papers -- driven off the ballot by a hard working Taiwanese immigrant, local Supervisor, Connie Chan. Chan now runs, from behind, against another local fixture, centrist gay policy wonk Scott Wiener. This one is a real San Francisco barn burner replete with scrambled coalitions; at least we haven't sunk so low that our representation in Congress was available to the highest bidder. On to November.

Primary day in CA

Not much here. Voting has been slow at polling sites. After all, eligible Californians received ballots by mail and have multiple options to turn them in. 

Spent the day piloting an election protection scheme, on standby for disruption that wasn't going to happen today. But come November, might it?

Two very quiet polling sites. 

Was he a delayed casualty of his war?

Over the years, I've written a quite often on Memorial Day (and also on Veterans Day) about various relatives who served in the US military. But seldom about this one, who I actually knew.

My first cousin (my father's sister's son) Kirby Atterbury has been gone over twenty years now. When he was still with us, I was cautious about introducing or explaining him to my friends. The result of any encounter could be unpredictably explosive.

He was born in 1921; yes, the generations are long and screwy in my family. At age 20, he left college to serve as a navigator in the US Merchant Marine on the arctic Murmansk Run delivering essential war supplies to our Russian allies in World War II.

An historical description: "This was no glamorous sea campaign, with full-sail, tall-masted men-of-war firing broadside after broadside into their enemy’s rigging. It was a cold, dirty, dangerous business in which seamen might be blown into a flaming sea of burning oil and left to die of wounds, burns, or hypothermia."

By the way, because the US used private shipping for this hazardous duty, Kirby was not technically a veteran. That seems an injustice. He served.

Kirby came through, married, settled in Marin County, fathered five daughters (several younger than me) and became known as a bon-vivant restaurateur opening a place in Tiburon he named "Caprice." This was also the name of one of the daughters; I don't know which came first.

He was a local fixture according to this nice obituary by longtime Chronicle journalist Peter Fimrite. 

Reading between the lines even of this public obit, it's possible to discern what happened with Kirby. He became well known for consuming the fine alcoholic beverages he specialized in; by the time that, as an adult, I knew him he was a high-functioning drunk. A rage would come out; he needed to offend. When drunk enough, this man would insist "Hitler had some good ideas." 

I'm just glad this angry man didn't live to become an enthusiast for Donald Trump; I'm sure he'd have enjoyed promoting MAGA. Even when justified, war is terrible for living things, for living people.

Waiting game

Our ballots for the California June primary have arrived -- and I'm not going to do a damn thing with mine for the next few weeks. 

It's not my usual practice to delay voting. Usually I deposit the ballot in our nearby drop box right away and sigh with relief, or at least resignation.

But given the chance that our stupid "top two" primary voting system means we could get stuck with two Republicans as the only choices for governor if they come out ahead of the gaggle of Dems running, I have to wait and probably go with the Dem who seems most likely to make the November ballot. Even if that individual is not my top choice of governor. 

The combination of the state's electorate having done away with party primaries for this dumb system and the indiscipline of the Democratic Party in throwing up so many candidates leaves me in this absurd position. Let me offer applause to Betty Yee who had the decency to pull out when her campaign didn't catch fire. Let me denounce Mat Mahan who jumped in at the last minute with a ton of billionaire money, making this mess worse. Forget that guy!

If this were a time when I could vote my true choice, I'd vote for Katie Porter. That woman is enough a policy wonk to be able to be a good governor, after a learning curve. I don't care if she is sometimes abrasive; that's often the rap on very sharp women.

But responsible citizenship may force me to vote for whichever Dem looks able to be one of the top two when we get to June. This silly election system robs me and many Californians of their chance to support their first choice of candidate for governor. That's an improvement?

Defeated by arithmetic

Los Angeles basketball great Kareem Abdul Jabbar is disgusted by the current California primary election kerfuffle: five quasi-plausible aspirants whose self-serving continuation of egotistical campaigns might give this blue state a MAGA governor. He calls bullshit.

The California Democrats have pulled off a rare feat: they’ve turned a massive home-court advantage into a self-made crisis. In sports, we call this “hero ball.” It’s what happens when a team has all the talent in the world, but five guys are trying to drive to the hoop at the exact same time. The result is usually a turnover, and right now, the Democratic party is handing the ball directly to the opposition.

Seven Democratic candidates are currently splitting the vote. None will drop out, no one will pivot, and two Republicans are watching the whole thing fall apart from a very comfortable lead.

The problem is the “jungle primary.” It’s a rule that sends the top two finishers to the general election, regardless of their jersey color. It works fine when you’re organized, but it becomes a trap the moment you splinter. Strategist Paul Mitchell calculated the odds of an all-Republican November at 27% back in March. In the NBA, if you have a 27% chance of turning the ball over on every possession, you aren’t going to win many championships.

Every Democrat left in this race has convinced themselves they are the “chosen one.” Matt Mahan actually said, “I plan to be the one,” while polling in the low single digits. That’s either extraordinary confidence or a complete break from basic arithmetic. Nobody wants to be the first to head to the bench, so they stay on the floor, and the combined result is that they all lose together.

Then there is Tom Steyer. He’s spent over $130 million on ads and he’s still tied at 14% with a county sheriff. I’ve seen this before, owners who think they can buy a championship by just throwing money at the roster without checking if the players actually fit the system. Steyer spent $345 million on his 2020 presidential run and walked away with zero delegates. He’s currently on track for a repeat performance. The most jarring part? He told a reporter he hasn’t followed Governor Newsom’s record “closely enough to give him a grade.” Imagine walking into a locker room and telling your teammates you haven’t bothered to watch the game film. You’d lose the respect of the room before you even laced up your sneakers.  ...

Let's applaud former state Controller Betty Yee (a controller oversees the state accounting) who can read numbers and did have the decency to get out! How about some more of them taking one for the team -- that is, the people of California.

Kareem looks to Gov. Gavin to lead Dems out of this dead end alley. Gavin has never been much of a team player, but Kareem is probably right that Newsom is the only one in the party who might be able to knock some sense into this field of ambitious infants. We've already got an Orange Toddler in DC;  California should be able to do better.

It's Katie Porter time

Until Eric Swalwell's implosion (good riddance to another abuser of women), I hadn't paid much attention to the California governor's race. Any of the candidates might do...

Now I'm forced to dig in a bit -- and a very little reflection makes me realize what an odd contest this is.

• California has enjoyed extraordinary stability in the governor's office for the last 16 years. That's amazing to recognize. First we elected a used governor who had matured  and already knew the ropes (Jerry Brown 2011-2019), then his ambitious understudy who had cooled his jets watching Brown for eight years as Lieutenant Governor (Gavin Newsom 2019-2026). Love 'em or hate 'em, that experience mattered.

• Disposing of Swalwell helps, but there are still too damn many non-viable Dem also-rans on the June primary ballot. (Any who drop out will still appear at this point.) Sacramento denizens Tony Thurmond and Betty Yee never took flight. Xavier Becerra had a Sacramento background, but had been out of state for four years. Antonio Villaraigosa has been out of sight for longer. The tech bros got a late candidate in San Jose's Matt Mahan, but who is he? Can money elevate any of these non-starters?

• None of the three original contenders (now two) came out of experience with California government. California has a huge government, not easily mastered by any pol; ask Arnold Schwarzenegger. Sacramento is its own world, far removed from the daily lives of people, especially in the southern part of this huge state. But here we are left with Tom Steyer and Katie Porter who've never worked in state government. (Neither had Swalwell.)

• I think we can hope the combination of Trump endorsing one of the GOP cranks and getting rid of one of the genuine Dem contenders will ensure we will have some Democrat to vote for in November. But the Democratic Party circus sure doesn't inspire confidence.

So, out of Steyer and Porter, who am I for? 

To be blunt, Steyer has excellent issue positions, but this is no year to elect a billionaire to anything. It's a year to reject billionaires across the board; we need to stoke the populist backlash to the criminals in the national GOP, not default to a money guy in a Democratic stronghold. Steyer is a very good donor wanting to be a real player -- but that doesn't qualify him for me. 

That means I'm continuing to throw down for Katie Porter. I think she is getting the dismissive treatment from a lot of the punditocracy because she's a sharp woman. Her detractors brush her off with what amounts to "nice fat lady; should stay in her place." She made it abundantly clear in her service in Congress that she understands how money works in the lives of working Americans. That should matter in a governor. Yes, she's apparently abrasive; women who succeed in a power job tend to be tough cookies. Can we, finally, get to where women of ambition no longer have to present a charming public face that soothes egos? 

I'll vote in November for any Democrat who survives this shit show. But it is hard to be impressed with the politics of my state.

Calling all California Democrats

We've got a race for a new governor on the ballot this year and, for the moment, it's a mess.

As you probably know, California chooses most of the candidates who appear on our November ballots by a crackpot "top two jungle primary" system. (I've always hated this foolishness, but the voters chose it by referendum, so here we are.) Everyone seeking a state office runs on the same ballot in the June primary; that includes all Democrats, Republicans, and whatever other nuts may be out there. 

Only the two with the highest number of votes in June get to move on to contest the fall election when most normal voters get around to tuning in. That's what the primary is for, to pick the genuine candidates. Or at least what it should be for: weeding out those with no chance. 

But this year, a ridiculous number of politicians think Californians just might decide to want them as governor. In addition to two right wing Republicans who have fractional support, eight Democrats are competing for our votes. 

Five of the Dems are living also-rans who have proved unable to break into more than 8 percent (and usually much less) in polling. 

Three of the Dems are running neck and neck in the mid-teens in polling. And of those, any of the three might have a chance to win the job. The other low-polling five are vanity candidates, just taking up space. 

The two Republicans also poll in the teens. No Republican is going to win the governor race against any Democrat. Dems are some 45 percent of the state's electorate, while Reps are about 25 percent while the rest are independents who mostly vote for a Dem.

But while the Dems divide their votes among eight candidates, five of whom haven't got a chance, it's numerically possible that the top two highest voter winners in June could be the two Republicans! Dems would not have a November candidate.

The five also-ran Democrats need to do the state a favor and DROP OUT NOW!

The ones who should drop out now for the good of the state are:

Xavier Becerra: info@xavierbecerra2026.com

Antonio Villaraigosa: contact@antonio2026.com

Matt Mayhan: mayor@sanjoseca.gov

Betty Yee: info@bettyyee.com

Tony Thurmond: info@tonythurmond.com

Some big names there. But these folks have not caught fire and merely endanger their state by staying in a race they can't win. Their personal ambition should give way to the good of the community they claim to want to serve. I've provided email addresses: we can thank them for their service and ask them politely to step aside for the common good. 

Then, take your pick among the genuine Dem prospects; links are to their websites:

Katie Porter 

Eric Swalwell 

Tom Steyer 

If we can get the also-rans out of the running, we can forget about the two Republican knuckle-draggers. But serious California Dems need to step up and let the voters choose their candidate without letting personal ambition risk the well-being of us all. 

• • •

For a more temperate description of this absurd California kerfuffle, see this link. 

Cesar Chavez revisited

In Dolores Huerta's interview about the rapes she endured by her United Farm Workers co-founder Cesar Chavez, she explains:

"I just didn’t want to hurt the movement.”

She goes on:

“Cesar believed in promoting women as leadership, not at the policy level, but at the work level,” she said. It was, she suggested, a reflection of something deeper. “Women are not seen as human beings. We’re just seen as sex objects. I think it’s an illness.” 

And there it is. The New York Times expose [gift link] of Chavez's pedophilia, as well of his many infidelities to his long suffering wife Helen is a period piece. Read it; it captures a great deal about what one of the significant progressive heroes and movements of the 1960s and '70s was really like. 

But Chavez makes such an arresting villain that the Times piece obscures a truth of those times: pretty much all the men who saw themselves as heroes of history-defining movements -- for poor people, for peace, for justice -- blithely saw women as subordinate workers and sex objects, just as Dolores Huerta describes. 

There's a reason that Second Wave feminism was born among women inside the movements of the 1960s. Long days working in struggles for justice alongside men who could not be trusted to see and value our brains and humanity was bound to spark resistance.

And, moreover, it should be no surprise that a vibrant lesbian feminism also sprung up and came to include many movement women who might not have organized their sex lives around women if they hadn't gotten tired of being seen as conquests for movement men. Some, like me, found a natural home as lesbians; for others, bi-sexuality was a protest and an experiment, a liberating option.

Chavez was not unique in his time in his root-and-branch sexism and in being a sexual predator when opportunity came his way. 

• • •

Chavez was however unique in being a larger-than-life movement visionary who both moved mountains, metaphorically, and, very materially, stumbled over stones along the wayside. 

I worked for the United Farm Workers twice, briefly, first on the grape boycott in Boston in 1970-1971 and again in New York City in 1972. Later, when located in California, I reported on the UFW for the national Catholic Worker newspaper  and various alternative media through much of the 1970s and volunteered on the San Mateo County boycott. I was never anywhere near the center of the union/movement, just a peripheral staffer, supporter and observer.  

But that background gave me credibility on reporting trips to California's fields, talking with dozens of staffers and workers about their experiences with the union. When I visited strike sites or attended a mass rally, I could usually find a slightly disappointed staffer who was about to leave the union and could share the joys and contradictions that were life in "La Causa." Very little of those conversations found its way directly into my reporting, but I hope they informed a fairly honest picture of the struggle of the workers.

Years later, on this blog, when the LA Times was publishing one of its periodic exposés about the UFW, I wrote this:  

... in the 1960s and 70s, Cesar Chavez' United Farm Workers Union was a stirring, seething locus of social creativity, bound together by its founder's charisma. It was a multi-headed beast, providing structure and meaning to very different tendencies and constituencies.

• Most obviously, it was a labor union, organizing to win better wages and working conditions for agricultural workers.

• True to Chavez's roots in community organizing, it engaged whole communities with the struggle of the farmworkers for justice, especially settled Latinos who had escaped the migrant labor stream and put down roots in rural California.

• It ran a network of social services, clinics, a credit union, a gas station and more.

• It pioneered a creative tactic, the grape boycott, that carried what could have been a local California struggle to cities across the country and world, engaging literally millions with the well-being of farmworkers.

• The farmworkers' movement served as a catalyst and rallying point for the struggle for Brown people's civil rights in whole Southwest.

• It was also a beacon for Latino and Chicano cultural nationalism as a formerly muzzled segment of the population articulated its identity.

• The UFW attracted a stream of earnest, mostly white, mostly middle class, progressive people who learned class consciousness and organizing skills from the farmworkers and went on to work in labor, politics and communities all over the country.

• The movement incorporated the workers' Roman Catholic spirituality, marching to victory behind the Virgin of Guadalupe.

• Chavez also urged a philosophy of self-sacrificial non-violence, drawing on many traditions including those of Gandhi and Jesus.

• And I'm sure that other veterans of the movement could and would suggest more things the UFW was to its many adherents.

Nobody straddled all these tendencies but Cesar Chavez himself. Not surprisingly, as the movement grew, tensions between devoted workers who emphasized different parts of this complex package within the movement only increased. 

I still think that was a pretty accurate catalogue of characteristics of the classic period of the UFW, though looking back now, I'm very aware that once agricultural organizing stalled in the 1970s, Cesar led the union's leaders into his idiosyncratic explorations, in particular the "attack therapy" which was the Synanon Game. 

• • •

Contra what the Times article implies, in its peak years, the UFW was not in support of broad immigration reform or migrant laborers. The backbone of Chavez's union and movement was the class of settled Spanish-speaking Californians in the Central Valley who had long moved beyond their migrant roots. Their children were upwardly mobile and now constitute much of the political leadership of the state.

• • •

I chose the photo of Cesar here because it places him beside his admired role model, the Indian visionary and anti-colonial campaigner Mohandas Gandhi. Late in life, the Indian who had famously taken a vow of celibacy slept alongside young girls "to test, or further test, his conquest of sexual desire". As Dolores says, "I think it is an illness."

Confirmation they should be scared of their own workers

Last October, it looked as if the San Francisco Bay Area was to be next target of Donald Trump's Rambo/ICE thugs.

And then we weren't. And the thugs were redirected to such unfortunate locations as Memphis and eventually Minnesota's Twin Cities.

Why did Trump/Miller/Noem back off then? San Francisco's mayor, Daniel Lurie, whose promise is to eradicate any vestiges of the historically weird and anti-corporate character of the City by the Bay, claimed to have talked Trump out of it. It may have helped that the federal forces had located on an isolated Coast Guard island where they might have been expected to shoot their way out when protesters inevitably blocked their way.

But I've always suspected that the tech barons who support both Lurie and Trump were the deciders. They don't mind beating up on poor Central American and East Asian migrants, but they didn't want their work force seeing the carnage. And some of their companies depend on immigrants. Lots of tech jobs have moved on from the Bay, partially because the pandemic encouraged remote work, but there are still legions of ambitious, not-yet billionaire techies who locate here for the promise of natural beauty, each other, and hope for start-up riches. 

And if the Bay were a fascist target, these might be confronted by the ugly violence of the state for themselves. They are part of labor; their work still matters to their bosses -- hence our (momentary?) reprieve. 

WIRED has confirmed stirrings among the lower and mid-level tech workers and the response of their oligarch employers. Notably, the rustlings of dissent are within the company what seems to be the fascist Dark Star -- Peter Thiel's Palantir.

After federal agents shot and killed Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti on Saturday, Palantir workers pressed for answers from leadership on the company’s work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—and many questioned whether Palantir should be involved with the agency at all. Leadership defended its work as in part improving “ICE’s operational effectiveness.” 

Internal Slack messages reviewed by WIRED reveal growing frustration within Palantir over its relationship with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and in particular, ICE’s enforcement and investigations teams. In response, Palantir’s privacy and civil liberties team published an update to the company’s internal wiki detailing its work on federal immigration enforcement, arguing that the “technology is making a difference in mitigating risks while enabling targeted outcomes.” 

In a Saturday thread on Slack discussing Pretti’s killing, Palantir workers questioned both the ethics and the business logic of continuing the company’s work with ICE. 

“Our involvement with ice has been internally swept under the rug under Trump2 too much. We need an understanding of our involvement here,” one person wrote. 

“Can Palantir put any pressure on ICE at all?” wrote another. “I’ve read stories of folks rounded up who were seeking asylum with no order to leave the country, no criminal record, and consistently check in with authorities. Literally no reason to be rounded up. Surely we aren’t helping do that?” 

The discussion was held in a company-wide Slack channel dedicated to general world news coverage. ... 

... [A corporate] wiki acknowledges “increasing reporting around U.S. Citizens being swept up in enforcement action and held, as well as reports of racial profiling allegedly applied as pretense for the detention of some U.S. Citizens,” but argues that Palantir’s customers at ICE “remain committed to avoiding the unlawful/unnecessary targeting, apprehension, and detention of U.S. Citizens wherever and however possible.”

Yeah -- and where's the evidence for that? Dead civilians?

Here too, among tech workers, is where resistance will rise and must be welcomed by those of us with a more skeptical response to their world. Working techies are people too and they don't like ugly.

We're in this together, trying to save the aspirations of the country from the monsters currently in power.

Let those migrants go!

So many bits of good news for both small "d" democracy and also Democrats in the recent election! I want to highlight one that most of us in much of the country didn't know about.

Voters Ousted This Pennsylvania Sheriff After He Signed Up to Collaborate With ICE

A populous, swing Pennsylvania county replaced its GOP sheriff on Tuesday after months of controversy over his joining ICE’s 287(g) program. The Democratic winner promises he’ll end the contract. 

... Since Donald Trump’s return to office, local and state agencies across the country have rushed in huge numbers to aid his deportation campaign by joining 287(g), which authorizes local law enforcement officers to act as federal immigration agents. The agreement in Bucks County granted [Sheriff Fred] Harran’s deputies the power to question the immigration status of people they encounter and to serve and execute arrest warrants on ICE’s behalf.  ...

... [Harran's] Democratic challenger, Danny Ceisler, a 33-year-old attorney and Army veteran, spoke up against the ICE partnership, putting the issue at the center of his campaign.

Ceisler defeated Harran by 11 percentage points last week, a margin of roughly 25,000 votes. He confirmed to Bolts after his victory that he intends to terminate the 287(g) agreement once he enters office. 

• • •

County sheriffs are part of "law enforcement" but they usually not the cops on the streets. They mostly run the jails (an important job) and guard public buildings. 

That's the case in my home county of San Francisco. I figured I should find out what our elected sheriff, Paul Miyamoto, is doing in ersponse to over-reaching federal immigration invaders. After all, San Francisco is a "sanctuary city" for migrants; we sure don't want our sheriff working with them.

On the one hand, in July, Miyamoto insisted 

he will not act as an "arm of immigration enforcement," refusing to hand over inmate information. 

We certainly hope that is the case.

But also, Miyamoto seems attracted to strange political buddies for a San Francisco sheriff.  In July he endorsed a MAGA Trump supporter for governor.

His reasoning seems shallow.

“I support Sheriff Chad Bianco, alongside other sheriffs in California, as a peer leader in law enforcement and in the work we do to keep our communities safe,” Miyamoto wrote in a statement to Mission Local. “Law enforcement is not defined by political parties, but grounded in a commitment to public safety and the integrity of the profession.” 

Maybe we ought to pay attention when Miyamoto comes up for re-election. This choice of friends seems madness.

San Francisco has had some quite benign sheriffs in my time here, especially the excellent Mike Hennessey. The job is not a stepping stone to anything so candidates are few.

Am I Next?

When masked men wearing no badges start grabbing people off the streets, it's natural to ask "Am I Next?" Los Angeles artists are responding to ICE raids and an attempted federal militarized occupation with images that project the question on downtown buildings, according to a press release from the California Community Foundation. 

The project, "Am I Next?" will feature images, measuring about 20 by 30 feet, to confront attacks on civil liberties and the undermining of democratic norms that weaken civic life. The portraits feature a cross-section of Angelenos united in protest over recent U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service raids that have swept up hundreds of residents—many with no criminal record—and placed them in detention.

"We ask the question, 'Am I Next?' because when basic rights are taken away, anyone can be taken away, for any reason," said CCF President and Chief Executive Officer Miguel A. Santana. "If anyone's right to speak, protest or create can be stripped, if anyone can be targeted for their race, religion, identity or who they love, we are all in danger. Until justice is restored, no one is safe. Not one of us. Any one of us could be next."

 

This is not the first time Californians have asked a similar question. During a political campaign in 1994 when a Republican governor sought to reduce immigrant rights by initiative, opponents also asked "Who's Next?"

In those days, the majority of Californians went along with a fear-based attack on their neighbors. Today the vast majority of Californians have shown, by passing Prop. 50 by a 25 point margin to stiffen opposition in Congress against the Trump regime, that we understand that immigrants are our neighbors and ourselves.

A reprieve perhaps -- and a Bay Resistance show of force

For the moment, Donald Trump's invasion of San Francisco (and perhaps the rest of the Bay?) is on hold. Our billionaires apparently weighed in. 

Joe Eskenazi at Mission Local describes what might better be described as a pause than a Trump stand down. 

And, just like that, a daylong crisis and flood-the-zone news cycle across the Bay Area regarding the imminent deployment of border protection agents to the region was quelled. Or not: Oakland mayor Barbara Lee said the president didn’t call her. Lurie and other local leaders are taking the president’s words to mean that the rest of the Bay Area will be spared — but there was no overt pledge regarding that.  

It’s great for the people of San Francisco that the president has capriciously decided to unsend the troops he capriciously decided to send. But the real story here is, per the president’s summation of his discussion with Lurie on social media, that the Commander-in-Chief is overtly stating that he is basing a domestic military deployment upon what local “friends of mine” (billionaire CEOs Jensen Huang of NVIDIA and local boy Marc Benioff of Salesforce) lobbied him to do. Trump also noted that Lurie asked him “very nicely” not to establish a military beachhead in San Francisco. 

All for the good. But what if Huang and Benioff had been in the mood for a military parade and called for sending in the troops? What if Lurie had been less polite? 

If things had gone even slightly differently, it stands to reason that federal immigration agents and/or armed troops could be rolling through the city by now. ...

Though our billionaires and millionaires think they are kings of the city and the world, they do in the end want their enterprises to run with as little friction as possible. To most of us in San Francisco, the tech workers who the sector brings here look like gentrifiers. But they would not warm to a martial law state where neighbors are snatched off the street by anonymous thugs. I think we can trust that. And our billionaires don't want the hassle of their employees being upset. So they have an interest in trying to distract Trump.

What a world! 

• • •

Meanwhile, organized by the Bay Resistance coalition, we are readying ourselves for whatever the fascists bring on our area, no less today than yesterday. Several thousand of us gathered at Embarcadero Plaza last evening.

This was an activist bunch -- union members, campaigners for Prop. 50, immigrant welfare non-profits -- all riled up to act.

Yet despite the looming threat, the same joy in finding each other that we saw during the NO KINGS demos was here too.

 

Let's hope the pause granted to our billionaires (with an assist from our firm resistance) also applies to the city with a Black woman mayor and beyond.

 

The crowd looked often like friends standing together -- because that is what it was.

To be continued, for sure ...

So the occupation of Northern California begins ...

This morning some large number of protesters who object to the Trump/ICE-etc. goon squad occupying the Coast Guard facility in Alameda made their presence known on the road outside.

A friend in the area sent along this commentary:

Click to enlarge.

 Apparently in the next few days, the Bay's determination and resilience will be put to the test. We love our neighbors!

Seems appropriate

This picture is from New York City, said to be in response the arrival of a convoy of ICE occupiers. 

Trump is threatening to send his goons to San Francisco. We won't make their mission of civic destruction easy. If the Supreme Court continues to fail, liberty is up to us.

I have voted YES on Prop. 50

The whole thing is distasteful. Not so long ago, I voted for a proposition that was supposed to make California Congressional districts less gerrymandered. After living through the decade of 2000-2010 when pols had engineered incumbent protection districts of which only one changed parties over that span, voters were ready for a non-partisan redistricting commission. So we passed such an arrangement by initiative. And Congress districts were subsequently a little more fairly drawn according to proximity and affinity characteristics. Dems still won most of them, because California is a very Democratic state. But the voters got what we aspired to.

Now, in response to Trump's power madness, we have to suspend our redistricting commission and reorganize districts to give the Dems as much power in Congress as is possible.

I'll outsource the explanation to that old curmudgeon columnist for the Los Angeles Times George Skelton. He doesn't much like Prop. 50 either, but he knows necessity when he trips over it.

[Prop 50 is] about exerting some control over unhinged President Trump. That would happen if voters across America next year flip the House of Representatives from Republican to Democrat, ending one-party rule of the federal government. Proposition 50 could help do that.

Does an obedient Republican Congress continue to allow Trump to walk all over it? Or does a new Democrat-led House exercise its constitutional duty to provide checks and balances over the executive branch?

This is what’s potentially at stake in California’s special election on Nov. 4.

... Trump pressured Texas Gov. Greg Abbott into orchestrating a mid-decade legislative gerrymandering of his state’s House districts, with the aim of gaining five more Republican seats. The president has also been browbeating other red states to rig their congressional lines.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom quickly retaliated. He asked an eager Democrat-controlled Legislature to draw up new House maps designed to gain five new Democratic seats, neutralizing Texas’ action.

... Unlike in Texas, Newsom needs the voters’ permission to resume gerrymandering. That’s what Proposition 50 does, along with granting voter approval of proposed new weird-looking congressional maps drawn by Democratic lawmakers.

... Proposition 50’s opponents contend Democrats can’t be trusted to keep the gerrymandering temporary.

And they’re hypocritically screaming about a “Newsom power grab” — without also pointing the finger at Trump and Abbott, who started this fight.

At its core, this is a brawl over raw political power. Forget any idealism.

... “Gerrymanders are a cancer and mid-decade gerrymanders are metastasis,” [opposition funder Charles] Munger wrote in a New York Times op-ed last month.

If Democratic politicians gerrymander California, he asserted, “then they lose the moral high ground.”

Well, if this is the moral high ground we’re living in under the Trump regime, I’d like to move to another level.

My definition of a moral high ground doesn’t include a Congress that won’t push back against a bully president who cuts back millions in research aid to universities because he doesn’t like what they teach, who sics his own masked police force of unidentified agents on California residents, who sabotages our anti-pollution programs.

... We should all play by the same rules — even if it unfortunately requires temporary gerrymandering. After Trump leaves, we can return to the high road.

Okay, I admit it. I am thrilled that the new scheme might endanger GOP Rep. Darrell Issa, millionaire car alarm crook and entrepreneur, whose tenure in Congress has been far too long. 

But largely, I just think Californians have to do it to attempt to preserve some check on Trump's autocratic rule.

YES on Prop. 50 

Update from a National Park Service gift shop

Last July, I explored the NPS gift store near Civil War-era Fort Point under the Golden Gate Bridge. I wanted to see whether the Trump regime's attempt to whiten and sanitize American history had yet determined what was offered to the public.

The Warming Hut then boasted a full wall bookcase with an attractive display of hardcover historical books, including plenty that highlighted slavery in the early American life of the Golden State and the fate of local indigenous residents. 

The good news: the Trump regime has not completely displaced serious historical materials with snow globes and commemorative mugs for tourists. The bad news: the effort to offer meaty historical books is much diminished.

A lone shelf in a corner still held books unlikely to please a MAGA culture warrior. There's still history as we know it today here, but it has been pushed to the edges. Some of the previous shelf space has been filled with natural histories and state guide books.

The true delight to me on my previous visit had been the broad collection of children's books at the site. (My inheritance from my childrens' librarian mother is showing.) What survives is still impressive:

 But again, much of the display now centered natural history and marine life curiosities. So much safer:

Click on any of these pictures to see the titles in larger size.

The National Park staff here seem to be trying to retain their integrity as educators of the public -- and hanging on, carefully. I fear for what the coming government shut down will do to this historical park.