People get ready ...

In the auditorium of San Francisco's Mission High School, a leftish segment of the Bay Area activist population was in the house this morning -- immigrant workers, organized teachers and nurses, the gray haired stalwarts of a hundred campaigns. Led by Bay Resistance, plans were laid out for the fall season. 

Here staffer Jane Martin lays out what we already know we have to do; I'll interpret her points in my own words.

• Work to win the election of anti-fascist Democrats in contested districts wherever located

• Make sure you are connected to whichever organization is available to do the work in your neighborhood and on your issues

• Join a pod; get into regular supportive contact with like-minded people

• More specific to the Bay: remind our tech oligarchs that the people won't give them a free ride on the road to ruinous rule!

Such meetings are how winning campaigns build!

• • •

And above all, resistance succeeds when there is room for everyone and we all find our own lanes. I'll give the last word here to one of my favorites in the broad national resistance movement, elder operative Simon Rosenberg. He's the last believing FDR Democrat and we could only wish there were more of him, even if some of us find a home elsewhere: 

There is nothing Trump and MAGA wants more than for us to be fighting with each other and not with him. We have one job now - elect as many of these [Democratic] candidates running for the House and Senate as we can. It’s where our focus must be. It’s a year of opportunity for us across the country. We must seize it, together. 

It's crunch time! 

ICE is evil

Here's another San Francisco action from Saturday. I had thought to attend this one also, but accepted that getting to two had to be good enough. Do turn the sound on and listen when you open.

The Human Banner crew has done it again! 

Found out and about

The Mission District is full of houses which have been made canvasses for murals. On a recent walk, I encountered these:

 

The visual conceit works, I think.

Heck of an amendment to a bank of very ordinary garage doors.

ICE out of the Bay

Enil has friends. And so, when he had to report in to immigration court on Sansome Street in downtown San Francisco today, his posse showed up.

According to Bay Resistance: 

Enil is a loving father of three and longtime community member who was brought to the U.S. as a baby and has lived most of his life here.

He is an advocate for immigrants’ rights and has strengthened our community through his leadership and care. ICE is trying to detain him again and rip him away from his family.

A long line of other migrants waited outside the doors. Every day dozens of anxious people show up for their various ICE check-ins, never quite knowing if this will be the day the regime arbitrarily decides to take them into custody. The occasional larger protest against ICE, like this one, they sometimes find confusing and a little scary, according to one of the Faith in Action regulars.

So far San Francisco has been spared one of the Trump regime's murderous immigration enforcement surges, but we never know -- and try to be ready.

The local legal community has done a valiant job of decoding and stymieing the multiple illegalities in the process. Immigration law is a snarled nightmare even in benign circumstances. The San Francisco Chronicle has produced a detailed, easy to understand account of how the San Francisco bar is working to protect migrants. Read it! [gift link]

Socially useful residue of great wealth ...

Around the corner from where I live, there's a public library building which has been under renovation since 2020. (I looked up how long construction had been going on ... there was the pandemic and some kind of beef with PG&E. ...) The City powers-that-be claim this is nearly complete; I sure hope so. I use libraries.

Carnegie libraries were built with the ill-gotten gains of late 19th century industrialist/self-made robber baron Andrew Carnegie. He spent the last 20 years of his life on good works, funding 1,679 public libraries in the US, and more in Britain, Canada, and New Zealand. San Francisco has several, including a fine specimen in Chinatown.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson included Carnegie's story in her 250 to 250 project for the recent anniversary. It is read by Corey O’Connor, mayor of Carnegie's town, Pittsburgh, PA.

None of the current crop of billionaires seem to do anything so socially useful. Maybe if Elon succeeds with his rockets, we can shoot him off to Mars.

Misery in the Mission

When I see my neighbors who live on the street, I feel moved to repurpose these words of the great moral orator, Frederick Douglass: 

… At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced. 

Nobody should be "living" like this.

These folks are gathered to score from the dealer, I assume. If you don't yet know, the bent-over posture is common among fentanyl users.

Hell of a place to sleep, but still breathing ... all these folks survive (mostly) within a half-block radius of our home.

As the city tries (and largely fails) to "clean up" other neighborhoods, people migrate. I'm not saying it's easy to intervene when we've allowed the creation of a whole class of under- or un-housed outcasts, but a decent society and polity would find a way.

Trump is a crook, any way you think about it

It's hard to avoid thinking about "corruption" these days. Every pundit who isn't a MAGA stooge agrees that Donald Trump is the most corrupt leader/office holder the nation has ever empowered. Some might wonder whether Andrew Jackson, or Ulysses Grant, or even Warren G. Harding might give Trump a run for the title. But even a little digging says no. The barons of the Jim Crow system like Huey Long might give Trump competition, but their state level corruption is a different league. In the corruption games, Trump is a legitimate winner.

And yet discussions of Trump -- and his sons' and MAGA acolytes' -- corruption often bemuse me. Let me try to pick this apart ...

For about ten years back in the '70s and '80's I was a small scale construction contractor. That meant that jobs that I worked on were sometimes subject to inspection by the San Francisco Building Department. In that era, the inspectors were mostly old Irish guys who had worked the trades when younger; I think it is possible that my boss passed along a bottle of Irish whiskey to the inspector when we passed the final, but this was closer to solidarity than bribery. I don't think anyone thought you paid the inspector to get a sign off. These inspectors liked good work when they saw it: one of my happy memories of that era was having a white haired, retired, inspector, a Glen Park neighbor of the job, come over to where I was building an entry staircase and announce that I'd engineered the thing as well as any boy he'd trained. He cared that no one would stumble because of my errors. That was the ethos, at least most of the time. 

In subsequent years, the San Francisco Building Department became a sinkhole of corruption facilitated by payoffs to "expediters" and sometimes allowing complete neglect of inspections, all for a price. It took a federal investigation to clean up some of this.  I was glad I was out of the business.

That's what first comes to mind when I hear "corruption" -- bribes and payoffs to authorities for favors. And there certainly is plenty of that in Trump's various pay-to-play schemes.

But a great deal of commentary on Trump and the Supreme Court describes what we're seeing as "corrupt" -- and these writers don't just mean that Thomas and Alioto seem to float happily along on gifts from their rich benefactors, some of whom have cases on the docket.

What we are up against isn't just run-of-the-mill bribery, quid pro quos.  It's rot that lives and grows embedded in the system: the "moth and rust [that] doth corrupt," to be exploited by the thieves.

David Kurtz, via Henry Farrell, makes the point that we are up against this systemic meaning of "corruption."

"To understand corruption properly, we shouldn’t think of it as an individual level phenomenon. Classical thinkers, like Machiavelli, understood corruption as a condition that could afflict governments and indeed societies. But if we value democracy as the best way to order our affairs, we should understand corruption as not a moral phenomenon but a political one, which involves the corruption of democratic processes."

… and applies it to the Roberts Court:

"Across an apparently unrelated range of issues – campaign finance, executive immunity, political corruption and gerrymandering – the Roberts Court’s decisions have persistently corrupted the workings of democracy, so as to undermine equality in decision making and voice in favor of processes that are both duplicitous and exclusive." 

Our Constitutional state has rotted from within at the encouragement and for the benefit of the rich and powerful. Such rot overrides citizen democracy. Yet citizen resistance remains and in our history has again and again overcome robber barons, against both sorts of corruption. 

Note that this broader meaning of "corruption" was well understood in Shakespeare's English: Hamlet's friend, contemplating the drunken revels of the usurpers, summarizes: "there's something rotten" here. 

We are forced to reclaim this usage. 

Flowers for a quiet Sunday

San Francisco is surprisingly verdant. It's the dry season, yet the season of thick fog. Observed on neighborhood walks:

 Proving once again, sun and sweat are not the only way to do summer.

Still on a brain break ...

I stumbled foggily out to a store yesterday still full of rhinoviruses and found myself among crowds of lovely young women making their way to Dolores Park for the Dyke March. The scene reminded me of this classic lesbian poster by my friend Michele Lloyd.

And that's only a tiny slice of us. Happy Pride to all.

Regular posts will resume tomorrow, I hope. 

Go ahead, make up a story

I usually don't pause to take pictures while getting in my laps around Blue Heron Lake in Golden Gate Park. But this was too good to leave uncaptured ...

You have to wonder, what was the husband in question doing? ... Or not doing? ...

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 ...

Thought for a Wednesday.

Busy today. I find myself living in a construction site; thirty years of deferred maintenance has its - expensive - consequences. I am sometimes distracted.

The early 20th century four-story school building across the street is an even larger construction site --and  has been now for a couple years and looks to take a few more to get finished.  

As soon as the workers across the street put up plywood to cover their fencing, the graffiti gremlins come out. They promote the neighborhood sentiment,

'Nuff said, for a busy day.

Once more, to the Beach ...

Several thousand of us took to Ocean Beach once again yesterday to denounce the Trump regime as Brad Newsham and his contemporary incarnation of a band of merry pranksters have taught us to do. We've made this human art over 30 times since the first which sought to impeach George W. for his wars.

Drone photo of the human art piece we created

There's plenty of local outrage about the Epstein files.

 

The vibe at these events is at once determined, angry, and celebratory. We like seeing each other.

Here we both enjoy getting in costume .. and mean it.

Friday night festivities

The weekly resistance Dance Party on the 18th Street overpass over Highway 101 in San Francisco greets the evening traffic.

Recorded music competes with the loud traffic and many affirming honks from passing cars.

Sometimes a frog joins the party.

 

From the bridge and the surrounding surface streets, there's no vantage point from which to see the signage.

But yesterday's message that dozing Don is asleep at the wheel seemed popular with the drivers passing underneath.

Organized by RiseUpToAction and friends, the party will be on the bridge every Friday at 4:30pm through the November elections according to the group's newsletter.

Resistance can be a party!

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. 

A morning walk around Bernal Hill

Actually just the lower flanks of the neighborhood, but it's quite clear what people care about here.

A new crop of signs spring up for the season. 

These San Franciscans are not only vocal, but also verbal.

Friday cat blogging under a Congressional endorsement

 

Janeway peaks out hopefully under the sign of the choice of this household.

 

Here in San Francisco, this feels a dreary electoral season. The California governor contest risks becoming a fiasco. 

 

Then there's the Congressional race to succeed Nancy Pelosi. We're not used to having to make a real choice. Pelosi has been our Congresscritter, through too many wars and too much tumult, since 1987 -- sometimes annoying, usually honest, and sometimes brave.

Now we're choosing a new U.S. Representative. Several choices are repulsive. Scott Weiner is the candidate of the real estate developer establishment. Saikat Chakrabarti is a carpetbagger, a tech bro millionaire who parachuted into town and thinks he can repeat lefty slogans and buy a Congress seat. Connie Chan is the work horse of the bunch. A first generation immigrant, she has toiled in the minutia of city government on the Board of Supervisors since 2021. She's tried to keep this town livable for ordinary people, for those of us for whom San Francisco is home, neither a stage set for a party nor a gold field to be mined. She's a stalwart friend of the unions -- and unions still matter in this town. She shows up -- for picket lines, for marches against ICE and the Trump regime. Yet she also runs a mean Budget committee meeting with fellow legislators. Chan is not perfect, but what candidate is? I differ with her on some issues, including keeping the former Great Highway as a park, not a commuter freeway. But she is by far the best option.

 

In elections, you do your best to elect whoever seems a better choice. In this one, Connie Chan is my choice and a solid one. Janeway seems to agree. so long as she can look out ...

May Day 2026 -- International Workers Day

May Day here in San Francisco was marked around the Bay by what seemed a lot of protest events.

In the morning, my candidate to fill the Congressional seat that the ageless Nancy Pelosi is finally leaving joined airport workers from the Service Employees International Union in blocking an airport  road way and was arrested. Connie Chan stands up for workers. The San Francisco Chronicle was there and reported:

“San Francisco airport is the people’s airport,” Chan told supporters before her arrest. “We know our workers deserve fair pay, a fair contract, health care and benefits. We’re demanding that the workers get that benefits and fair pay right now.”

Later in the day, protesters from among unionized workers and activist groups gathered in Civic Center plaza.

 

He wanted to let folks know what it is all about ...

Workers know what we are up against.

The tech sector is not unionized and their bosses sure don't want them getting ides. But brave workers turned out anyway.

Friends from UniteHERE, the hotel and restaurant workers union, were in the house.

There are an awful lot of ways to say to the bosses ENOUGH!

 

Eventually the Civic Center crowd marched off to join the next rally to be held in Embarcadero Plaza at the end of the day. 

 

I admit it -- I'd had enough for one day and skipped this one. Would May Day have felt more powerful if the various participants had not spread themselves all around the Bay? I don't know. We're learning ... the movement is learning ...