“…beware of soft shoe shufflers dancing down the sidewalks as each unconscious sufferer wanders aimlessly…beware of greedy leaders, they take you where you should not go…”
George Harrison “Beware of Darkness,” 1970
We live in such a distorted media environment, almost totally bought and directed by those with money, that it is necessary to start this essay with a simple fact mostly ignored by that paid media but profoundly important in understanding the policies and politics of our mayor: Mayor Daniel Lurie is, by his family connections, in effect a billionaire.
He isn’t an ally of billionaires, he is not seeking “their” support, he is not out to convert “them” to his wing of the Democratic Party. He is running this city as a billionaire, implementing a billionaire’s agenda.
The chief contributor to his campaign for mayor, other than himself, was his billionaire mother. He was born and raised in a billionaire’s home, and he was educated at private schools with other breathtaking wealthy children—so when he made appointments to the Youth Commission, he appointed nine students from private schools, stiffing 55,000 public school students.
He has never worked a day outside of the family business, a business the family never ever entrusted him to run, instead funding a foundation for him to run as other relatives ran the real business of Levi Strauss. That raises the interesting question of what the family knew about Lurie’s abilities. Being a billionaire clearly does not mean you are either clever nor necessarily capable, especially if the billions are inherited.
Mimi Haas, the mayor’s mother, inherited the largest single share of the $8.5 billion Levi-Strauss business stock from her late husband, some 16 percent. Through special Class B shares, which carry ten times as many votes as the more numerous publicly traded Class A shares, the six-member family controls some 99 percent of the voting power of the business while owning only 30 percent of the stock.
The law that created this situation, ensuring control when most of the stock is owned by others, is an example of what turns millionaires into billionaires: state intervention. It is also why most folks do not equate billionaires with hard work and thrift, but with special government access and grift.
The mainstream media simply refuses to identify his true wealth, instead saying he is a “multi-millionaire,” or simply “wealthy.” It’s as if the media knows that being identified as a “billionaire” is viewed with far more public skepticism than being identified as a “millionaire” or simply “wealthy.”
Most folks know “wealthy” people, and many thousands of San Franciscans are paper “millionaires” simply by owning their home in this city’s grotesque housing market or, simply by being a hard-working plumber, contractor, doctor, or dentist. We may live next door to a millionaire here in the City of St. Francis.
We, most probably, do not live next door to a billionaire. And they like it that way.
As the belief in the “American Dream” gives way to the growing perception of a rigged economy that only benefits the billionaire class, as Bernie Sanders calls them, billionaires have little popular support, thus the media strategy of simply calling our billionaire mayor “wealthy” hoping that we won’t notice.
On his Form 700 economic disclosure, Lurie lists $33 million in personal assets. But his 80-year-old mother has more than $1.5 billion, she funded his campaign, and he will inherit much of that money. He has access to all he needs right now. So in effect, he is a billionaire.
It is true that Lurie was not the candidate the local billionaires preferred (other than he and his mom) in 2024 either because they knew what the family knew (he could not be trusted to run the families billions) or because they had a tried and true “public” servant in Mark Farrell with a decade long record of service to billionaires.
Lurie, who got only 26 percent of first place votes (nearly three out of four San Franciscans initially voted for someone else for mayor!) won by picking up 52 percent of Farrells second place votes. Farrell and Lurie combined got fewer first-place votes (174,835) than did Breed and Peskin (184,332) in November, but our ranked-choice formula gave the billionaire candidate the win.
If Mayor Lurie is a billionaire, is there something that can be called a “billionaire agenda?” Given the politics of San Francisco over the last six years, something very much like a billionaire agenda has emerged and, with Lurie’s narrow election, now seeks to dominate our electoral politics, especially this November’s local ballot.
The last six years of local politics has revealed four major components to the billionaire agenda:
- A direct and prolonged attack on democratic politics and safeguards, through the massive infusion of cash in local elections aimed at re-calls, measures removing public participation and meaningful regulation and slates of candidates loyal to them;
- A concerted effort to undermine the legislative branch and formal community participation in favor of a powerful executive branch centered in the mayor’s office;
- A total focus on tech—now AI—as the only economic engine allowed to drive our economy ignoring health, education and government sectors which employ more San Francians;
- The desire to build a city around deluded dystopian assumptions about who we are, where we are headed, and what must be done to protect the interests of the billionaire class—“billionaire psychosis” as writer Gil Duran labels it. .
What is remarkable about this local billionaire agenda is how closely it tracks with the national agenda of Trump and his billionaire allies, especially the dominance of AI in their politics and policies. At no time in recent San Francesco history has our politics been so closely linked to a national right-wing agenda.
How can Lurie, a man who more resembles our kindly uncle than arch villain Elon Musk, possibly be on the same side as Trump? It’s simple, it’s where the titans of AI want him to be.
Remember when Lurie had a phone call from Trump over sending the National Guard to San Francisco? Billionaire tech mavin and yawning fool Marc Benioff called on Trump to send in the National Guard to San Francisco because of out-of-control crime.
Lurie called the local titan of AI, Nvidia CEO Jenson Huang, and asked him to tell Trump that the witless Benioff did not speak for tech SF billionaires and that no troops were needed. Trump took the call and Huang urged him to call Lurie, which Trump did. Trump and Lurie had a telephone conversation on October 22 that Mayor Lurie has refused to make public even after a January 2026 unanimous vote of the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force that Lurie had improperly withheld records of the conversation from the public. Public testimony before the Task Force raised questions about what was agreed to in the conversation and argued that it should be made public.
Nine months later the Chronicle reported that “Under Trump SFO Has Become Immigration Prison,” as 25 people had been detained by ICE between January and July 2026 for more than 72 hours “…without access to dedicated medical care, attorneys or even beds.” This, the Chronicle reported, is “a violation of Customs and Border Protections guidelines.”
The story stated that “After Miami, SFO had the second-highest number of detentions that lasted longer than 72 hours…”
The Chronicle focus on Trump leaves out the important fact that San Francisco International Airport is totally and completely a City and County agency controlled by the mayor, who appoints both commissioners and directors of SFO. SFPD deployed at the airport and has primary jurisdiction. The city has the right and responsibility to keep armed and masked agents from uncoordinated “homeland security” actions aimed at SFO passengers.
Of course, Lurie can order the SFPD to assist passengers, not ICE, and end the snatches now occurring. Lurie has said nothing about these detentions at SFO or how they are consistent with San Francisco’s Sanctuary City policy—if they were discussed with Trump in his October, 2025 phone call.
Having an AI titan smooth the way for Lurie to talk with Trump is in keeping with the close embrace of AI by the mayor. It is here that the concept of incoherence should be introduced in reference to the Lurie agenda.
Technologists were not part of the Lurie circle until after he was elected mayor, as they clearly preferred. The attraction, beyond their stupendous wealth, was they were the only folks, certainly in San Francisco and perhaps the rest of the world, that had any interest in investing in downtown office buildings.
People who either owned or had a deep financial interest in downtown real estate formed an important part of the Lurie circle. Office building in San Francisco never fully recovered from Covid’s rapid transformation of the downtown workforce. The seemingly permanent reduction of the downtown office workforce had a ripple effect on the entire San Francisco central business district, causing a loss in restaurants and retail sales as their office worker customers simply vanished.
The critics of a city policy of concentrating on office development as the primary focus of the local economy, creating an economy too narrow and fragile and too vulnerable to wild swings and reverses of the market—as opposed to a more widely based, less market dependent, development policy that included the port, health care and education which employed far more San Franciscans—turned out to be right.
Downtown real estate people formed the core of the Lurie “old San Francisco” circle, and they were laser focused on their own interests, having long convinced themselves of the key role office buildings played in the city’s (and their own) future. Lurie and his longtime allies quickly realized that the AI industry, based here is San Francisco, offered a great opportunity for filling up these empty buildings.
There were two things wrong with this self-serving assumption: first, an essential misunderstanding of the nature of the AI industry, which unlike the insurance companies, law partnerships, financial service providers, or business consultants of past office booms, was not dependent upon on an ever-expanding workforce that needed ever office space. Indeed, the AI marketplace was a “value subtracted” space, replacing human workers with hot-running software and high-speed computers. AI does not need expanding office space it, instead, it needs ever expanding electrical power and water to cool its primary engine.
Second, AI did not need Lurie’s agenda. The companies needed him to adopt the one they already had. Had Lurie and his old San Francisco guard simply understood the fact that the tech sector lost some 30,000 jobs in the city between 2023 and 2025, they might have figured that new office growth was less than a sure thing in the tech sector. Tech sector layoffs announced so far this year exceed all layoffs for the sector in all of 2025. The reason is the impact of AI.
According to an “exclusive” Chronicle story last summer, Lurie set down with Open AI and Anthropic to urge them to “partner with his administration on a new effort to improve residents’ lives.” The story went on to say that ten days after the meeting, OpenAI wrote the mayor saying that while he presented “a ‘compelling’ vision for a ‘large, visible initiative that delivers tangible values to residents’ … the company didn’t plan to move ahead with the idea at this time.” Ouch!
No one outside a few Lurie insiders and the AI companies know what this “compelling” vision was (including the Chronicle since the story reported that he “failed to talk specifics” about the proposal) or, more importantly, how and with whom, it was devised. The bottom line is that the Tech Titians told the mayor to go pound sand. And the mayor has done so. Making a secret proposal concerning “residents’ lives” and persisting in the secrecy while at the same time assuming that AI will fill up downtown office building when the entire trust of the AI effort is to replace people and jobs with software and computing power is the very definition of an incoherent public policy ineffectually advanced by a seemingly bewildered mayor.
The mayor’s first eighteen months are littered with decisions that show the deep level of bewilderment in Room 200. Some are well known: his absurd personal decision, based upon a single meeting, of appointing a local businesswoman to D-4 Supervisor while she was engaged in illegal business practices known to other local business people but not the mayor; having his staff make sure that PG&E provided back up power for his child’s performance at the Opera House before back-up power was provided to the rest of San Francisco; his police bodyguard “assaulting” a person on the street ,according to a San Francisco judge who released the person, and then Lurie doubling his police escort for his daily out of the office jaunts.
Others are less well known, such as his amending the Market-Octavia plan to reduce the fee requirement that market-rate housing developers pay to cover the known impacts of their projects have on this crucial transit corridor and affordable housing in the neighboring Western Addition. The 26 market-rate projects had a total of some $78 million in fees for transit, childcare, street improvements, parks and affordable housing targeted at the greater Western Addition removed according to the Budget and Legislative Analysist. In less than a year after this reduction of Muni funding Lurie would trumpet his support for a ballot measure to fund Muni projected deficit, a deficit which his own administration helped create.
After promising during the campaign to open 1,500 new shelter beds “within the first six months” of his new administration he has, in fact, added only 403. According to Mission Local the mayor has added some 863 beds but closed another 460, for a net increase of 403, less than 30 percent of his promise. Indeed, it seems that he will continue to close beds at a rate that will reduce his initial increase by another 100 beds, bringing it to a total of 360 net new beds added to the city’s existing inventory of 7,500, which is less than a quarter of that promised before his election.
Ending market-rate developer fee payments for transit and affordable housing impacts their development cause, while dramatically reducing funding for homeless services.
While he may be out of touch with the needs of the city, Lurie is in touch with the needs of the billionaires, and has rushed to support their agenda to control San Francisco.
The campaign for Propositions D, E, and F on this November ballot are directly aimed at increasing executive branch power and reducing the power of both the Board of Supervisors and local residents. That campaign is financed by three billionaires: Michael Moritz, Chris Larsen and John Pritzker, to the tune of $5 million. The name of their campaign committee makes clear their total control of the Lurie administration: “Mayor Lurie’s Yes on D, E &F Committee.”
Larsen and Moritz have thrown an additional $250,000 in to pass Proposition A, a charter reform that is an enlarged version of Moritz’s earlier, failed attempt to re-shape the city’s commissions. The fact that not a single argument was submitted in support of the measure in the Voters Information Pamphlet shows what a personal hobby-horse the measure is.
Moritz has also chipped in another $200,000 to campaign against Proposition I, the initiative petition measure that would guarantee that an increase on the transfer tax on properties sold at $10 million and $25 million would go to the acquisition and new construction of affordable housing.
The mailers all say these measures would “clean up City Hall.”
The measures all miss an important two important facts: First, most public corruption scandals in San Francisco in recent history are in the executive branch, involving appointees, staffers, contracts and private contributions to departments. The largest recent corruption scandal of Mohamed Nuru was exclusively located in the Mayor’s Office and committed overwhelmingly by people appointed or hired by mayors Gavin Newsom (who first hired Nuru), Ed Lee (who made him head of Public Works) and London Breed who dated and borrowed money from him.
The second biggest corruption case involved the Director of Recreation and Parks and several mayoral-appointed Rec Park commissioners who stood by as a semi-official non-profit entity—The Parks Alliance— embezzled $3.8 million in grant funds awarded by the department to various neighborhood and community groups. The Parks Alliance was formed by Rec-Park Sirector Phil Ginsburg (appointed by Newsom in 2009) in 2011 and for many years had Rec-Parks commissioners as board presidents.
When Rec Park or private grants funded a neighborhood project Rec Park staffers urged the group to deposit the grant with the Parks Alliance which would handle all of the paperwork. They way the Parks Alliance handled it was to divert the funds to paying its own staff and expenses. Ginsburg claimed he knew nothing and was lied to by Parks Alliance staff which he, in fact, oversaw.
In May of 2025, newly elected mayor Lurie’s cancelled all city funds to the Parks Alliance and in September, Ginsburg left the department for an appointment to state office by Newsom. Lurie did nothing to implement the recommendations of the Controller Office made in 2020 report which highlighted the problem of private gifts to city departments through non-city organizations. It called for reforms including banning such contributions, improving reporting requirements on donors of such gifts, reducing the city’s use of such funds for staff. None of these recommendations are in any of the three measures pushed by Lurie and the billionaires.
The second fact Lurie and the billionaires want you to forget is that just two years ago we passed a measure that created the Office of the Inspector General, put on the ballot not by the mayor or the billionaires but by a unanimous vote of the supervisors. An independent office was though necessary because of the city’s failure to bring any charge against Nuru or the Parks Alliance. In fact, Lurie moved very slowly to implement the measure taking well over a year to fill the position.
The billionaire argument for D, E &F is that they “clean up city hall…by ending “special interest ballot measures “ ( while being the very definition of special interest ballot measures themselves!) by raising signatures needed to place measure on the ballot by 300 percent, provide “better services” by allowing the mayor to issue contracts up to $24 million without supervisors approval or a public hearing, and “create real accountability” by giving the mayor near total power to remove any commissioner for any reason, to appoint any department head without input from either a commission or the public—and most extraordinary giving the mayor sole power to eliminate, combine and re-assign duties and functions of every department of the city without pubic hearing or supervisors input.
Of the 16 paid ballot handbook arguments in favor of these measures, 13 were paid for the same three billionaires. SPUR paid for the other three.
Taken as a whole A, D, E and F constitute the most brazen attempt yet to take political power away from residents of the city and place it in the hands of the mayor, doing far less than the Inspector General in attacking City Hall corruption. The people who live here are labeled “special interests,” while the billionaires call themselves “independent watchdogs,” seeking “clear accountability.” The passage of these measures will greatly enhance the ability of the billionaire class to get whatever it needs from City Hall by simply concentrating all important power into a single office.
Data centers are an absolute requirement of the AI billionaires. Two proposals for new data centers in San Francisco have been discussed in the press. Both are in the Southeast portion of the city. Supervisor Shamann Walton’s District 10 is a clear potential site for these centers, which is why he sponsored a moratorium on their approval.
The law requires that the Planning Department (that is the mayor) to report back to the supervisors by late November on “measures taken to alleviate the conditions that led to the adoption of this ordinance.” It is here that the AI billionaire’s agenda meets the road, or more correctly, the streets of San Francisco.
As we all know by now, AI data centers are data centers on steroids. The huge number of extremely powerful computers needed to transform massive amounts of data into “intelligent” agents able to replace nearly every worker in the modern economy require huge amounts of electricity to run the high-capacity computers and mind-numbing tons of water to dissipate the heat generated from all the electricity.
San Francisco is uniquely dependent upon snow runoff for its electricity and water. The Hetch Hetchy Valley reservoir supplies most op our water and some 20 percent of our electricity, and is recharged with runoff from snow.
According to California’s Fifth Climate Change Assessment, released this month, “snow pack in the Sierra Nevada could be reduced by 50% by 2050-2075 and 65% by 2075-2099.” Such reductions, if they occur, would simply devastate San Francisco. Has mayor Lurie factored this inconvenient fact into his estimate of San Francisco’s economic future being the “home” of AI? Have the billionaires a plan to address this? Have they informed our mayor? Chances are the answer is No.
This is where handing the city over to billionaires willing to spend millions on lying campaigns aimed at reducing resident power and concentrating power in their hands becomes very dangerous.
Does Moritz or Larsen, the two biggest billionaire bankrollers of the current power grab, have a plan to produce housing able to afforded by working people or folks at-risk of becoming homeless? Faith and community-based non-profits have produced more than 40,000 permanently affordable homes in the world’s most expensive housing market. The mayor’s only experience in the real world is as the head of a nonprofit that he proudly boasted during his campaign built “permanently affordable housing (while failing to point out it was with the able assistance of an existing non-profit affordable housing producer, which he seems to have conveniently forgotten as he tucks himself up under his new agenda.
Lurie’s vicious and false attack on Proposition I as being a slush fund for nonprofits, when the measure calls for the mayor’s office to administer, it is doing the billionaires work.
It is clear that Lurie, like all the other billionaires, is profoundly confused about the reality of housing needs in San Francisco. His cynically named “Family Zoning Plan,” which allows more studio and one-bedroom units than actual family-friendly three-and four-bedroom homes while failing to protect current families from being displaced by new development, embraces the need of real estate investors, not San Franciscans.
Supervisor Connie Chan, called anti-housing by Wiener and Lurie’s allies, proposed an amendment of the plan that would require a developer seeking a permit to actually build the units with five years. Lurie opposed the amendment, and his supervisors voted it down, as well as Chan’s amendment to require more three-bedroom units in the plan.
Perhaps the most stinging criticism of the plan came from the dry prose of the city economist’s 41-page report.
Lurie’s plan, among other falsehoods, asserted that it would result in such a dramatic increase in production that housing prices would fall. But the report shows that over 20 years, the plan could add 425 units a year, a number hardly worth the effort.
If a “high growth scenario” was adopted that allowed 10 percent yearly increase in rents for the first five years (that’s a 50 percent increase in rents, folks) 732 units a year could be added over the next 20 years.
Significant increases in market rate housing supply only occurs, the report concludes, if rents rise steeply.
The Lurie administration claimed that “100,000” units would be added with the mayor’s plan. \The report estimated, over 20 years, allowing a 50 percent increase in rents in the first five years, 14,646 units would be built.
The mayor’s on again-off again ally, The Yimbs, were so upset with the plan that they sued the city for failing build enough market rate housing. The Lurie administration counted with the argument that this plan met both the state requirements (which called for 64,000 units being zoned for in the next five years not the 16,646 added over the next 20 years.)
Lurie’s spokesman added, “…we are going to meet state standards while protecting what’s so special about our neighborhoods…”.
Turns out that such local “protections” were pre-empted by the state two years before the mayor’s plan was passed. When Safeway sold its Marina store site to a developer who announced, in December 2025, he planned a 25 story, 250-foot-tall building with 790 units for the site (of which 72 percent were studio’s and one bedrooms) he cited a 2022 state law, AB 2011, sponsored by Wiener and signed by Governor Newsom( both allies of the mayor), which allowed such projects to be approved without local review or public hearings.
Seems neither Wiener nor Newsom told Lurie that the law overrides local control and allows density far higher than the mayor’ plan, and he pretended he didn’t know.
In his first 18 months, key elements of Lurie’s agenda on AI public benefits, housing and homelessness were either ignored, sued or abandoned. In stepped the billionaires with their agenda centered on AI, and the mayor seemed eager to adopt it as his own since his had failed.
On September 8, Jacob Coxon, a researcher who worked for both Anthropic and Open AI , posted on X that the two firms were focused on competition and making money, not public safety, and were “gambling with our lives.”
Coxon claimed that “…things are speeding up and … they are not under control.” Soon after, Open AI admitted that one of its AI “models” broke out of its containment which was not connected to the internet, figured out how to get on the internet and then, in seconds, communicated how to do that to hundreds of other AI models, including, it seems, Chinese AI models freaking out the control junkies in China.
In quick succession AI “leaders” were called to Washington and London to figure out what to do. Guess who was not invited? Daniel Lurie, the mayor of the cith that hosts the two top AI companies and the supposed center all things AI.
While Lurie is quick to pop up for a 40-second spot on Instagram for the opening of a new donut shop, it was “crickets” from him about what the city was prepared to do to make its citizens safe or what steps could be taken to ensure that our critical infrastructure was secure from a run-away technology that had “only a 10 percent chance” of killing us all.
While lecturing service providers on their supposed failures, he had not a word to say to technologists who had invented a way to, at best, take all of our jobs or, at worst, destroy humanity.
Lurie’s resounding silence on what the city was prepared to do about the perils of AI is matched by the resounding silence of the local billionaires who, like him, would rather attack resident democracy, non-profit housing developers, and homeless people than even mention possible actions to be taken to reign in a humanity-threatening technology owned by fellow billionaires.
Missing from Lurie and the billionaire’s agenda is any recognition that, besides the new potential life ending AI technology, San Francisco faces serious social and environmental challenges the solutions that require action now. Climate change will have a significant impact on the city’s ability to provide the electricity and water for its future. Wildfires and the attendant deadly contamination of the air we breathe in California, according to the Fifth Climate Change Assessment, “will experience the highest increase in annual excess death per year from wildfire smoke …than any US state”; “…coastal ecosystems [will be] re-shaped by marine heat waves, ocean acidification, and hypoxia …facing devastating threats”; expected sea level rise of 3.3 feet will expose “$78 billion worth of property and 201,000 people … to coastal flooding by 2100”; by the end of the century “the average longest heat wave …duration…[will be] six days in the Bay Area.”
San Francisco billionaires including Lurie, ignore climate change—making plans, perhaps, to join elon Musk on Mars.
The rest of us are not that arrogantly stupid and must begin now to address these very real challenges.
The billionaire answer seems to be to replace existing Saan Franciscans with an entire new population. We must now begin to address this reality with a left-progressive agenda that strengthens and rebuilds our neighborhoods and community meeting current residents’ needs.
First addressed must be the city’s income inequality, as the billionaire technologists have given us an economy that builds in inequality greater than any other big California city, even higher that Silicon Valley—a fact the Lurie administration seems to have missed or perhaps simply ignored.
The primary measure of income inequality is the GINI index, used by the UN, World Bank and the US Census Bureau. In the index, 0 is perfect equality and 1 is maximum inequality. San Francisco’s GINI index is .52, the highest in the state and second only to New York in the nation.
Norway’s GINI is 26.5, France is 31.8, UK is 32 and Germany has a 33.7 index.
We must start to set out to create an economy that provides economic opportunity for low and middle-income earners not just high-income households. That means, for example, policies which preserve, not displace, as Lurie’s rezoning plan does, neighborhood commercial retail uses .which employ thousands of San Franciscans most being low and middle income earners and which also provide critically important entry level employment to younger San Franciscans. Health care—hospitals, public health, accessible clinics and medical research and training (currently the city’s largest employer) should be the core around which San Francisco builds a sustainable urban economy.
Second, we must maximize training and placement of the city’s existing public-sector workforce, now numbering some 10,700 (not counting the school district’s 5,000 nor the 2,500 employed by community college district). We must realize that these are great jobs with decent pay, health care and retirement providing critical services the people need and not be embarrassed by promoting them as a matter of policy.
Third, by creating dynamic partnerships between city departments and high schools—which place young San Franciscans in, for example, the health department, public works, Muni and Parks and Recreation as interns.
Fourth, we needs to expand public ownership (and employment opportunism) of the electrical grid we now pay PG&E to operate. We already have public ownership of hydro-electric power generation and could easily expand public ownership to include soler power generation and installation. PG&E literally kills people, overcharges for electricity, and, though its own policy of maximizing profits disinvests in grid reliability. We have no future if we allow PG&E’s continued monopoly over our electricity. Municipalization must mean both taking over the grid and increasing public generation of new power. Millions in savings and new employment opportunities are possible.
Fifth, we must recognize the critical role nonprofit affordable housing, health and human services providers play in not only delivering services and housing but also providing employment for middle- and low-income San Franciscans. Instead of using them as a constant target of media and billionaire attacks, we need to recognize that the role they play is simply not replaceable. Paying the roughly 20,000 health and human service non-profit workers is a challenge that must be confronted and solved as they may well be a major component of a caring sustainable economy.
Sixth, we must search, find, adopt or devise ways to limit the overwhelming power of money in our politics.
Finally, left-progressives must abandon the isolation spawned by Covid and Zoom and realize that in such isolation we impower the billionaire technologists who dominate the digital world. Left-progressives must dominate the actual world of face-to-face contacts, with people talking to people. We must build people-based organizations that present locally devised solutions to local problems. We must then build connections between these organizations to mutually support the best of these ideas and transform them into public policy by winning elections for measures and candidates we put on the ballot.
Old ways of campaigning through phone calls, mail, drops and election time door knocking simply does not work in billionaire dominated elections. We need to organize ourselves for 356-days-a year presence holding regular in-person meetings, devising non-election “campaigns” that mobilize people over local issues. We must stand on street corners or sit at tables on our shopping streets regularly, not just at election time, urging our neighbors to discuss with us their good ideas.
In short we must re-learn how to walk and chew gum, meet and greet one another and really mean it when we say “we want to hear from you”.
As John Dewey said during the last great Progressive era “ the cures for the ills of democracy is more democracy.” Or, as they used to say in Chicago, “vote early and often.”
