The American Prospect put together a brilliant, and devastating deep expose of the people behind the Abundance Movement this week, reporting how a small handful of billionaires and their ideological allies are trying to take over local and state politics in the US.
Their manifesto makes clear that leaders like Zack Rosen, a founder of California Yimby, think that powerful elites should be shaping policy, not the rest of us. Their dismissal of grassroots democracy is stunning:
Small dollar internet fundraising makes politics dumber. The old gatekeepers were political professionals who could count cards; small dollar donors today are amateurs yanking the handles of ActBlue slot machines.
A few Silicon Valley titans have funded this new group to the tune of between $40 million and $260 million—a year. That money is going directly into local and state politics, including in San Francisco.
From the Prospect:
All this money, unsurprisingly, has generated some success. The documents credit abundance organizations with having “Flipped San Francisco Democratic Party, Flipped San Francisco Board of Supervisors … [and] Flipped Santa Monica City Council.” The ousting of former district attorney Chesa Boudin in 2022 is celebrated in Rosen’s pitch as “a major accomplishment.”
Oh, and state Sen. Scott Wiener and his allies are a central part:
We built our San Francisco operation with Scott Weiner’s policy and political team: Maggie Muir: Ours and Scott’s political consultant. Todd David: Ours and Scott’s S.F. political director. … Annie Fryman: Ours and Scott’s former Land-Use policy leader. Andres Powers: Ours and Scotts and Breed’s former Director of Policy. Jeff Cretan: Ours and Scotts and Breed’s former Spokesperson We helped organize the Moderate faction that has taken power in the city alongside NorCal Carpenters, Neighbors, GrowSF, and SFYIMBYs.
The story is all over the Internet and some social media. It’s missing from the pages of the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle (which really should cover a hometown story) and most of the rest of the US media.
It is the clearest evidence to date of what some of us have been saying for a long time: Big Tech, with the help of Big Real Estate, are installing their political allies in local government and using vast sums of money to defeat progressive ballot measures and candidates.
One thing is missing from the Prospect story, and it’s critical: These folks don’t just want to have their friends of the Board of Supes. They have a far-reaching political agenda, and they are willing to spend whatever it takes to make that agenda the law of the land.
It goes way, way beyond changing local zoning laws.
Let’s start with Rosen’s analysis of US history.
He talks of how the industrial elites made the US much better before and after World War II:
Industrial leaders were key to this work. Practitioners who figured out how scale industry were needed to help retrofit modern management systems to government, and replace the agrarian era institutions of “courts and parties” with a modernized government that could support an industrialized civilization. Civil service finally brought professionalized management to government, the efficiency movement brought in bookkeeping and inventory management etc. Most importantly, the progressive movement scaled power only when industrialists brought their financial and social capital to bear on the institutional problems blocking progress.
More:
For the left it was a quick fall from the sudden assassinations of JFK and MLK, to the disaster of Vietnam, to the embarrassment of Watergate that took the heart out of government. From there, the left took the downslope of NIMBYism post-riots and sealed our cities in amber, and fled urban cores for the suburbs on federal subsidy; housing was made illegal, and urban public education systems were abdicated. Proceduralist kudzu overgrew the gears of government.
The idea that the left made housing “illegal” is simply untrue. Read this excellent history of San Francisco zoning by Fernando Marti, and you will learn that much of the “downzoning” that the Yimbys complain about was sponsored in the early days (1920) by racists, and in 1978, a consequential moment, by the likes of then-Sup. Dianne Feinstein, who by no means could possibly be considered a “leftist.”
Much of the political establishment, from Dianne Feinstein on down, supported the 1978 rezoning. It wasn’t just realtors and property value neighborhood associations who advocated for height and density limits. On the East Side, many community-based organizers — fighting both urban renewal and the federal “Model Cities” programs — looked to rezoning for the possibility of stemming displacement by limiting demolitions. And small business owners looked to the zoning code as a way to prevent the encroachment of banks and restaurants that were causing increasing commercial rents and pushing out the small groceries and hardware stores from the neighborhoods.
Just for the record, the “left” hasn’t run San Francisco government in decades.
The idea that communities could hold government accountable seems to make the Abundance folks quake. The “left” fought racist redevelopment policies that destroyed Black communities. The “left” fought a freeway through Golden Gate Park. The “left’ fought the demolition of the I-Hotel. Zach: Tell me why one of those things was wrong.
And Rosen misses perhaps the most critical point in the history of post-War America: The very rich were, indeed, interested in philanthropy, which this generation of billionaires mostly is not. But there weren’t that many very rich—because FDR realized in 1932 that if the nation didn’t address economic inequality, he could be facing a revolution.
By 1935, the top marginal tax rate went from about 20 percent to 62 percent. In 1945, it was 81 percent. In 1953, it went up to 90 percent. That paid for the New Deal, and later, things the Abundance Agenda claims to want, like the interstate highway system and the University of California, where for years tuition was free.
It also prevented massive wealth accumulation that would destroy the middle class and undermine democracy.
It lasted until the Reagan Era.
According to the RAND Corporation, if the tax rates today were the same as 1975, the bottom 90 percent would have an additional $70 trillion.
That, more than zoning, explains homelessness, housing costs, poverty, poor outcomes from public education, and so much else Rosen’s crew complains about.
But nowhere, nowhere, does the Abundance Agenda address in even a passing way the existential crisis of economic inequality. The donors to this operation have no interest in giving up even a tiny bit of their wealth for the good of society; that’s why the oppose every single tax measure that progressives try to promote.
I asked Wiener once why he wouldn’t push legislation to allow a local income tax in San Francisco. “I wouldn’t even consider it,” he said. “It would never even get out of committee.”
So what do these folks want? It’s hardly a secret.
Dean Preston, when he was running for supervisor, suggested that the Technorati are pissed that there are poor and working-class people in this city. “They have a vision,” he says in this YouTube video from his 2024 campaign.
They are trying to eliminate affordable housing, abolish rent control, fundamentally libertarian, eliminate taxes on the wealthy, that only market force drive housing in San Francisco. They deeply resent the idea of government intervention for people in need … we taxed the hell out of them during the pandemic.”
Their complaint is not the stuff that’s not working. Their rage is a billionaire backlash against things that were working during a global pandemic. We housed thousands of people who were homeless. We taxed the rich and generated tens of millions of dollars and helped 20,000 San Franciscans. We banned evictions. We provided free unconditional health care regardless of your immigration status. We had a federal government that invested in us, but we also taxed the rich to pay for it.
That’s why Big Tech spent so much money to get rid of Preston.
The Abundance Agenda is somewhere between libertarian and neo-liberal, meaning that its adherents believe that private markets and private capital should be left alone and that government should exist to make life easier for the elites. The idea that wealth will “trickle down” goes back to the days of Ronald Reagan, who followed the philosophy of Milton Friedman; we have 50 years of data showing that doesn’t work.
In 1971, the US Chamber of Commerce hired a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell, who would later go on to be a Supreme Court justice, to write a memo on the state of business in the country. The Powell Memo urged corporate America to mobilize big money to fight back against the consumer and environmental groups and create a corporate-political lobbying machine.
It led to the end of the New Deal and the election of Reagan, and the start of the collapse of the American Dream.
It’s happening again, right here in San Francisco.
We ignore the Abundance Agenda at our peril.
