Normal view

There are new articles available, click to refresh the page.
Before yesterdayMain stream

How Trump’s Firings “Paralyze” the NLRB

14 February 2025 at 17:09

President Donald Trump has plunged the National Labor Relations Board—an independent federal government agency that enforces laws on collective bargaining and unfair labor practices—into chaos, risking the enforcement of workers’ rights across the country.

On January 28, Trump fired General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo. Soon after, he pushed out Democratic Board member Gwynne Wilcox. While Abruzzo’s firing was not a surprise—she was a Biden appointee who expanded labor rights—the dismissal of Wilcox was far outside the norm. A president had never removed a Board member prior to the end of their term. (Wilcox has since filed a lawsuit against Trump, arguing that her termination violated the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which states that Board members can only be removed “upon notice and hearing, for neglect of duty or malfeasance in office, but for no other cause.”)

In early February, the purge continued. Trump fired Acting General Counsel Jessica Rutter, who had just replaced Abruzzo, and appointed William Cowen, a conservative who briefly served as a Board member under George W. Bush. He then dismissed Susan Tsui Grundmann, the Chair of the Federal Labor Relations Authority, an independent federal agency that oversees labor relations between the federal government and its employees. During her term, Grundmann fought against budget cuts that she asserted would force furloughs amid a rise in federal employee unionization. 

The shake-up is particularly alarming because—by leaving only two members on the five-member Board—the Trump administration has eliminated a quorum, effectively preventing the NLRB from ruling on cases at the federal level. 

Margaret Poydock, a senior policy analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank, told me that the NLRB firings not only “essentially paralyze” the agency from making decisions but also “destroy its independence.” 

The NLRB maintains independence in part because its Board members’ terms are five years. This is intentional, Poydock says, and allows members to serve between administrations, thus shielding them from presidential interference. But because Trump can now fill three seats, this may no longer be the case.

Poydock points to the letter firing Abruzzo and Wilcox as a glimpse at what is to come. Trent Morse, the deputy director at the Office of Presidential Personnel who wrote on Trump’s behalf, stated that he did not think the pair could “fairly evaluate matters before them without unduly disfavoring the interests of employers.” 

Such language furthers concerns that Trump wants the NLRB to take a pro-business stance. In his first term, the Board and the Trump-appointed General Counsel Peter Robb systemically reversed workers’ rights to form unions and collective bargain with their employers.

In September 2019, the NLRB lowered the standard for employers to demonstrate that they followed collective bargaining agreements when making unilateral changes to employment policies like safety and disciplinary action, thus decreasing the grounds for employees to file unfair labor practice charges. 

Firing a Board member before their term is up and leaving three Board seats vacant to freeze it out of a quorum “is a different animal” that “stops the enforcement of the law, period,” said a labor official.

Just this week, the Department of Justice said that it would no longer defend members of the NLRB—as well as the Federal Trade Commission and Consumer Product Safety Commission—from being fired by the president without good reason. The DOJ is requesting that the Supreme Court overturn its 1935 decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, in which the high court declared that Congress could block President Franklin D. Roosevelt from dismissing an FTC commissioner due to a disagreement in political views. Overturning the decision may allow Trump to increase his executive power and bypass checks and balances. 

This has left labor leaders who communicate with the Board alarmed.

“While regions can go through the ministerial function of scheduling an election, certifying an election, and identifying an unfair labor practice, without a functioning NLRB, there are no repercussions [for employers], there’s no enforcement, and it all just stops,” said Andrea Hoeschen, the general counsel and an assistant executive director at Actors’ Equity Association, a labor union that represents over 51,000 professional actors and stage managers.

During our phone conversation, Hoeschen brought up Whole Foods, which is owned by Amazon, requesting in early February that the NLRB disregard the union election results at a Philadelphia store (in part due to Abruzzo and Wilcox’s departures). Although a regional NLRB official could reject Whole Foods’ complaint and certify the union win, that decision would hold little significance until at least one Board member is nominated and confirmed. 

This recent push is part of a broader assault on the NLRB.

After the federal agency accused Amazon, Starbucks, and Trader Joe’s of illegally impeding its workers’ unionization efforts and asserted that SpaceX unjustly fired eight employees for criticizing their CEO, Elon Musk, the four companies attacked the federal agency in separate lawsuits, claiming that its structure violates the separation of powers by allowing the NLRB to wield legislative, judicial, and executive authority—including penalizing companies without a jury trial. The lawsuit could result in a decision to undo the NLRB as we know it—even ruling the board unconstitutional.

These legal battles run counter to the GOP’s efforts to portray itself as the class-conscious party. “Five, ten years from now,” Donald Trump told Bloomberg Businessweek about the future of the GOP prior to his 2016 election victory. “You’re going to have a worker’s party.” At the Republican National Convention last year, Sean O’Brien, the general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, talked to the crowd about large corporations firing employees who tried to organize: “This is economic terrorism at its best.” 

But as my colleague Tim Murphy pointed out, billionaire union-buster Elon Musk donated at least $288 million to help elect Trump and other Republican candidates this past election. “It was not the rise of the workers,” he wrote. “It was the restoration of the bosses.”

This contradiction promises detrimental consequences for the most vulnerable workers as the GOP’s working-class policy hinges on issues like anti-immigration—developments we are already seeing today. Instead of conservatives pointing the finger at corporations and arguing for helping workers through actions like facilitating union formation, the rhetoric seems to mostly align with blaming immigrants. As my colleague Isabela Dias wrote, JD Vance claimed numerous times on the 2024 campaign trail that immigration leads to lower wages for American workers.

Hoeschen also highlighted how she has a union election petition, unfair labor practice charges, and a 10(j) injunction pending for male revue workers who organized last year at the Chippendales location in Las Vegas. While staff at NLRB’s Region 28 in Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Albuquerque have been “very responsive,” Hoeschen said they require authorization from either the NLRB or the General Counsel in order to request 10(j) injunctive relief, which aims to temporarily stop certain unfair labor practices while administrative judges and the Board litigate the dispute. 

According to Hoeschen, Rutter had sent out guidance on how labor cases would move forward without a Board quorum, but the Trump administration removed her hours after she distributed the memo. Cowen, the Trump-appointed replacement, has yet to put forward any guidelines.

“I’ve dealt with two different regions and the compliance office in DC,” Hoeschen told me last week. “The people working there are not promising me they’ll be able to be responsive the next day…We don’t know how long they’re going to be there.” This week, Hoeschen updated me, saying she is no longer able to reach the DC compliance attorney.  

Hoeschen says that Trump’s actions at the NLRB go well beyond the norm of a Republican administration or even his first term.

Unions are typically able to prepare for a new Republican majority in the Board, but firing a Board member before their term is up and leaving three Board seats vacant to freeze it out of a quorum “is a different animal” that “stops the enforcement of the law, period.” 

Hoeschen emphasized that what’s happening is antidemocratic and goes against precedent; no one has ever tried to repeal the National Labor Relations Act in court.

“All those people who voted last year—we heard so much about Republicans making inroads into the working class—those people haven’t gone away with inauguration,” Hoeschen said. “All those people who filed for election petitions and organizing drives last year are still here…That’s not representative of where Americans are right now.”

The Danger of Trump’s Plan for a Private USPS

11 February 2025 at 11:00


Trump promised retribution in his second term. For our March+April issue, we spoke with those targeted about lessons from the first term, fears of a second, and plans to fight back. Read the whole package here.

At a December 2024 press conference in Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump said his administration would be looking into privatizing the United States Postal Service, renewing efforts from his first presidential term to limit government programs and services. The Washington Post reported that same month that Trump stated the government should not subsidize the agency due to its annual financial losses

“The days of bailouts and handouts are over,” House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) said during a December 2024 hearing with Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. “The American people spoke loud and clear…there’s going to be significant reform over the next four years.” 

To understand more about what’s happening with USPS and get a better sense of where calls for government cuts are coming from, I talked with Mark Dimondstein, the president of the American Postal Workers Union. The union represents over 200,000 USPS employees and retirees.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Trump administration and groups like DOGE are pushing for more cuts to the federal government. For USPS, the argument seems to be that the mail system loses money and is no longer relevant, and therefore, should be curtailed. What do you think about this perspective?

To me, DOGE is a question of billionaire oligarchs trying to figure out how to get more money into their private profits. So all of this stuff about efficiency is really a cover for that, and that also carries over to those who want to privatize the Post Office. The Post Office takes in about $80 billion a year in revenue. Those on the private side of the industry want their hands on that money because when it’s in the public domain, they can’t use it to generate private profits. 

What’s the value of the Post Office? I think the way that people communicate has changed fundamentally. I’m sure it changed when Morse code came in, when the telephone came in, and it certainly has changed with the advent of the internet. But change doesn’t mean that the Post Office no longer has tremendous value. 

With the advent of the internet, you had this tremendous growth of e-commerce. The Postal Service is vital if e-commerce is going to work for everybody, particularly on the small business side. On the customer side, the Post Office is there by law for every single person, no matter who we are and where we live. If it were to be privatized, then the decisions on who gets to engage in e-commerce or who gets medicine through the mail would depend on whether a company can make a profit. The Post Office is based on non-profit, and it’s based on service. So it’s changing, but it’s invaluable. 

Then there’s less tangible things like helping in natural disasters. The Post Office could really do a lot more than they do now—if they were allowed to—in terms of getting water and supplies in the stricken areas and the rebuilding that follows.

You also have the whole question of democratic rights, the question of voting by mail, the question of access to the ballot box. The Post Office provided millions of people in this last election access to the ballot box

What could be accomplished if—instead of privatizing USPS—we expanded it?

The Post Office can do and should do a lot more than it does. There are all sorts of opportunities for expanded services. There’s new opportunity for financial services—tens of millions of low-income people are either unbanked or underbanked. In many parts of the world, people do basic banking and financial services through a public postal service.

People like Elon Musk are virulently anti-union. The Post Office is one of the largest unionized workforces in the country. And what the unions have brought to the postal workers is equal pay for equal work—opportunities for women workers, for Black workers, and workers of color who are usually marginalized and don’t have the same opportunities. We’re the largest employer of veterans outside of the Defense Department. So all of those things are mixed in.

There has been a lot of work against previous attempts to privatize USPS. Do you think these pushes for privatization will be any different with the new Trump administration?

There’s been constant efforts to piecemeal privatization of the Postal Service, and some of that has taken hold. There was Staples [starting in 2013], and a couple decades before, there was a similar effort for Sears’ department stores to do the retail. If the postal service gets turned over to the private sector, then prices are going to go up and service is going to go down. And what happens if that private company no longer can or wants to do it and people lose their services? 

The White House in 2018 advocated for the breaking up and the selling off of the public postal service. So that’s a whole different level [of privatization]. 

What should people take away from these ongoing discussions about cutting USPS?

The Post Office is the low-cost anchor of the package industry. What’s keeping the rates and the package rates lower than they would be otherwise is because the Post Office is in the public domain. That’s one of the reasons why some of these big package companies would like to make it harder on the Post Office through more privatization. That low-cost anchor helps serve everybody. 

Why Trump’s Potential Cuts to Veteran Affairs Would Be a “Disaster”

11 February 2025 at 11:00


Trump promised retribution in his second term. For our March+April issue, we spoke with those targeted about lessons from the first term, fears of a second, and plans to fight back. Read the whole package here.

In one of his many day-one executive orders, President Donald Trump called for a 90-day hiring freeze of federal employees to “reduce the size of the Federal Government’s workforce through efficiency improvements and attrition.”

Michael Embrich, a US Navy veteran of the Iraq War and War in Afghanistan who also does advocacy work for veterans—including as a policy advisor for the Secretary of Veterans Affairs—has regularly raised his concerns in Rolling Stone and other outlets about how such a freeze would affect those who have served in the military.

“Medical professionals, crisis hotline responders, and claims processors are desperately needed to keep the VA running,” Embrich wrote in Rolling Stone. “Now, with hiring frozen…veterans will wait longer for care, disability claims will pile up, and crisis lines—lifelines for veterans on the brink—will be understaffed.” 

Although Trump’s Inauguration Day order states that it “does not apply to military personnel of the armed forces” and submitted an exemptions list via the VA, a subsequent memo from the department says that additional exemptions to the hiring freeze for veterans must pass through the Office of Personnel Management and the Secretary of Veterans Affairs.

I talked with Embrich in January about what is happening and the importance of the VA for not only veterans but also citizens.

How did you get involved in advocating for veterans?

I joined the Navy right out of high school. I have a long line of Navy service in my family. My great-grandfather served during WWI, and my grandfather was torpedoed twice during WWII, so it’s kind of a family tradition. I’m from a town called Bayonne, New Jersey—a very blue-collar town—and was looking for economic opportunities. I didn’t have a lot of college scholarships that excited me, and plus, I probably couldn’t afford to go live on campus somewhere anyway. So I decided to join the Navy for the educational benefits and to be around training and adventure. I joined right before 9/11, so I was immediately deployed for Operation Enduring Freedom and then went back out to sea for Operation Iraqi Freedom. 

My goal was to go back to college after getting out of active duty. In 2004, when I started to apply to colleges, I figured out really quickly that the GI Bill was not living up to its promise: free college for military service. When I started to use it as one of the first post-9/11 veterans, it barely covered the cost of tuition. 

I figured: “Wow, there’s something we need to do about this.” I worked with my senator, my member of Congress here in Hudson County, and ended up meeting with Senator [Jim] Webb in Virginia, who was the former Secretary of the Navy, and we later came up with the Post-9/11 Montgomery GI Bill. It was my crash course into government and politics.

A lot of the discussion in media coverage of the Trump administration seems to be about how the VA is not efficient and how that justifies cuts. What are some things that people aren’t aware of about this issue?

I think the reason that the VA gets a bad rap—especially from the right—is because it proves that a national healthcare plan can work in the US. I have very good private insurance, but I end up waiting months to see a provider, whereas at the VA, my appointments are scheduled relatively quickly. 

The VA also provides specialized care to veterans. There’s a lot of talk in DOGE that the VA should be privatized. That would be a disaster for veterans. You can’t put a veteran with a traumatic brain injury into their local ER or their local general practitioner doctor’s office and say, “Treat this veteran with specialized care for their PTSD.” The VA knows how to do that and to throw it out now would be incredibly detrimental to not only the nation but to our veterans. The VA does have a large budget compared to the rest of the federal government but not compared to the Department of Defense. So why can’t we spend a small percentage of that taking care of veterans?

From Our Readers

Elon Musk’s and Vivek Ramaswamy’s developing Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has floated slashing entitlement programs. Our readers told us what that would mean for them.

My family’s worries revolve around my veteran husband and his VA health care and disability benefits. He has been diagnosed with ALS. The Project 2025 promises of cutting those benefits or erasing them are terrifying. My husband served for 22 years. We cannot imagine a government who spits on these veterans and their families after the fact. It is shameful. —Belinda, 67

In the eyes of the incoming congressional GOP, DOGE, and the Trump cabal, I must be the worst of the worst. I am a retired federal employee, a disabled veteran, and a Social Security recipient. My income and medical care are provided by the federal government. Given their stated objectives to cut both Social Security and the VA, I could be left broke, homeless, and sick, despite working 50 years until I was unable to work longer. I feel like Bond strapped under the laser when Goldfinger says, “No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die.” —Kenneth, 64

In one of your recent Rolling Stone stories, you talked about the VA and its capacity for emergency response in situations like the height of the Covid pandemic. What could an expanded VA do to help those both within and outside of the veteran community?

A lot of people also don’t think about the VA’s Fourth Mission to bolster the nation’s preparedness for emergencies: the war on terror, natural disasters, a public health crisis. The VA can outperform the private sector, especially when it comes to national health emergencies. For instance, the VA provided vaccines for non-veterans during the Covid crisis, supplied over one million pieces of PPE early on when people couldn’t get masks, and provided negative pressure rooms [to isolate infected patients]. The VA helped ease that burden on the national healthcare system. 

During Hurricane Sandy, the VA was there to provide medical assistance and respond on the spot with mobile VA vans to assist people who may have been injured or displaced. 

That’s why this whole nonsense of privatizing the VA misses the mark. When people think of the VA, they think healthcare. Well, the VA provides educational benefits, mortgages, and home loans. The VA provides burial spots and headstones for veterans to be buried. How do you privatize that? 

What could the VA or the government do to better support veterans? 

The long-term solution is a public healthcare system that serves all Americans. The VA is overburdened with the failures of the private healthcare system—they’re overburdened with people who lack medical care. When a veteran shows up at the VA emergency room and they haven’t seen a doctor in 20 years because they didn’t have outside healthcare, the VA picks up 20 years of lack of medical care to get that person up to speed.

Every time there’s a spending battle in Washington, the VA is caught up in that spending battle. Veterans don’t know if they’re going to get care. Veterans don’t know if they’re going to get their health benefits or their compensation for disability, because if the government’s not funded, then that money is not there.

DOGE’s grand plan is to lay off federal government jobs. Well, 30 percent of those jobs are veterans. If you want to help veterans, don’t fire them from their jobs and put them on unemployment. 

Are there certain advocacy groups who are fighting for veterans that we should be paying attention to? 

There’s a labor union called the American Federation of Government Employees that represents a lot of veterans.

The last Congress had the same story about the VA—it was inefficient, it didn’t work, and they were going to clean house. They’re picking a fight, but it’s more of a smoke and mirrors operation over there. 

The VA doesn’t need a vast overhaul. What it needs is more funding, more attention, and more support from the private sector healthcare system to be better. It doesn’t need to have roadblocks thrown in front of it to perform its mission, but I think that’s what the plan is at this point. 

DOGE Is a New Way to Talk About an Old GOP Aim: Attacking the Poor

23 January 2025 at 16:02

For all the talk of a new class-conscious GOP, the Republican Party sounded much like its old self when, in December, Vivek Ramaswamy laid out the mission of the nascent Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). “Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security,” Ramaswamy complained. “The dirty little secret is that many of those entitlement dollars aren’t even going to people who they were supposed to.”

There it is again: “entitlement” reform. Drawing from his own presidential campaign pitch, Ramaswamy urged Donald Trump to deploy DOGE as a beachhead in a war on spending, arguing for using executive powers to slash “wasteful” federal expenditures without congressional approval. (Although Ramaswamy has since departed—reportedly rather messily—as co-lead to run for Ohio governor, President Trump officially established the temporary entity within the White House on Monday through one of his many day-one executive orders.)

DOGE apes the language of a Silicon Valley slide deck, but it has so far presented little more than a memeified version of well-trodden right-wing austerity politics.

Ramaswamy and Elon Musk—now DOGE’s sole leader—have pushed cuts in the corporate speak of “efficiency.” But what they offer makes little sense. Musk has talked of slashing $2 trillion. How would such a change not destroy programs Trump has promised not to kill? The billionaire does not have an answer, later backtracking his goal to consider $1 trillion to be “an epic outcome.”

“Entitelements” originally had a much different meaning.

Musk has offered the same logic that undergirded past calls for cuts: Tough love is good for the poor. He agreed in an October town hall on X that Trump’s policies would deliver “temporary hardship” but “ensure long-term prosperity.” Here, he sounds much like former House Speaker Paul Ryan, whose Path to Prosperity budgets proposed scaling back Medicare and Medicaid and repealing the Affordable Care Act to offset tax cuts for the wealthy, and like former Rep. Matt Gaetz, who said in 2023 that he did not “think hard-working Americans should be paying for all the social services” of “couch potatoes.”

Entitlements originally had a different meaning. When Franklin D. Roosevelt adopted Social Security in 1935, the program was pitched as “social insurance,” one that Americans “earned” and were “entitled” to. But Republicans have flipped that meaning by associating these programs with notions of dependence: lazy people asking for handouts—an “entitled” culture.

This argument traces back centuries, but the core of the discourse came during the New Deal and its aftermath. In the 2019 book Free Enterprise: An American History, professor Lawrence B. Glickman recounted how Roosevelt’s critics divided the country into “productive makers” and “unproductive takers.” As opposed to the early labor movements of the 1800s, wherein “makers” were workers and “takers” were business owners, free-market proponents “turned an image of class warfare on its head.” In this view, anti–New Dealers claimed taxation as theft. “The affluent declared themselves the victims” who were forced to support welfare, Glickman wrote.

The 1960s solidified anti-entitlement ideas amid a backlash to the civil rights movement, notes Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. “By 1967, most of the stories about welfare and the poor were illustrated with pictures of Black people,” she told me. This laid the groundwork for Ronald Reagan to huff in 1987 that “millions of Americans became virtual wards of the state” through government assistance.

The party has continually found rhetoric to suggest poor people are to blame for each new crisis. When the Tea Party took over the GOP, a key frustration was that “taxpayers” were supporting a population of the unworthy. Mitt Romney almost rode a similar “47 percent” sentiment to the White House.

This “free enterprise” mindset has assumed strange textures as venture capitalists take the vanguard of the GOP. Tech billionaire Marc Andreessen pointed to the New Deal as Roosevelt’s “personal monarchy.” We need a Caesar-like CEO in Trump, he said, to undo FDR’s grasp.

Given the upper crust’s latest New Deal backlash, the left’s challenge goes far beyond lawsuits against DOGE—it is how to revert “entitlements” back to its original meaning. In Williamson’s view, mainstream liberals have failed to show how government is good. Progressives, she says, need to start promoting a different version of government “efficiency.” Namely, the adoption of policies that better the lot of regular people and protect them from the excessively rich and self-entitled DOGE boosters.

Trump Shuts Down Diversity Programs Across Government

22 January 2025 at 21:45

Federal diversity, equity, and inclusion employees are set to be placed on paid administrative leave by the end this afternoon as part of President Donald Trump’s executive order to put a stop to DEI programs in government agencies. 

According to a Tuesday memorandum from the US Office of Personnel Management, agencies are required to send a plan for “executing a reduction-in-force action”—in other words, layoffs—for their DEI employees. 

A separate but related executive order—titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity”—argues that DEI programs violate civil rights laws by illegally enforcing “dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences” that “deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement.” The White House also claimed that these policies are discriminatory because they select based on “how people were born instead of what they were capable of doing.”  

The Trump administration memo also seeks to coerce federal employees into informing on their agencies and colleagues. It instructs agency heads to tell employees via email: “We are aware of efforts by some in government to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language. If you are aware of a change in any contract description or personnel position description since November 5, 2024 to obscure the connection between the contract and DEIA or similar ideologies, please report all facts and circumstances…within 10 days.” The email template warns that any “failure to report this information within 10 days may result in adverse consequences.”

But Trump isn’t content with just targeting federal employees. In a section of his executive order labeled “Encouraging the Private Sector to End Illegal DEI Discrimination and Preferences,” the president calls on the attorney general to submit “specific steps or measures to deter DEI programs or principles…that constitute illegal discrimination or preferences” within 120 days. 

This comes as companies like Meta, Walmart, and McDonald’s have scaled back DEI initiatives in the wake of Trump’s reelection and several conservative-backed lawsuits, which cite the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling curtailing affirmative action in college admissions. 

The right’s attacks on DEI programs is nothing new—anti-DEI activists like Christopher Rufo have been pushing against such initiatives since Trump’s first term. The backlash has also appeared in places like Project 2025, which argued that a 60-year-old anti-discrimination executive order should be rescinded because it improperly enables the government to force private employers to comply with “novel anti-discrimination theories (such as sexual orientation and gender identity theories) that Congress had never imposed by statute.” Trump revoked that landmark executive order—enacted by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965—on Tuesday. 

“This attack on DEI is part of a larger backlash against racial justice efforts that ignited after the 2020 killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor,” Leah Watson, a senior staff attorney for the ACLU, wrote in February 2024 in response to dozens of bills from the right targeting DEI in higher education. According to Watson, DEI programs are necessary to “repair decades of discriminatory policies and practices” harming underrepresented individuals and communities.

Trump is clearly unmoved by such arguments. “This week, I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life,” he said in his Monday inauguration address. “We will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based.” But the important question remains: merit-based for whom?

As Los Angeles Fires Burn, Community Organizers Race to Prevent a Wave of Evictions

16 January 2025 at 19:25

In the week since wildfires began spreading through Los Angeles County, rent prices have skyrocketed as the thousands who have lost their homes try to find new places to live.

“We’ve seen businesses and landlords that use increased demand during emergencies to jack up the price,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said at a January 11 press conference. “It’s called price gouging…It is illegal.”

Under state law, during a declared emergency, rent increases are capped at 10 percent above the advertised price immediately before the disaster. California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency on January 7, but some rental asking prices have reportedly spiked well above this limit—sometimes by more than 50 percent.

“We are demanding that the city and the county enact an emergency eviction moratorium and a rent freeze.”

In response, advocates like the Los Angeles Tenants Union—an organization that says it’s “fighting for the human right to housing for all” by demanding “safe, affordable housing and universal rent control”—have begun to track allegations of rental price gouging and have renewed calls for an emergency eviction moratorium and a rent freeze. 

Earlier this week, I talked to Lupita Limón Corrales, an organizer with the LA Tenants Union. She first got involved with the union as an interpreter and translator at the height of the Covid pandemic in 2020. Limón Corrales was born in Mexico and grew up in Southern California’s San Gabriel Valley; she’s lived in the city of Los Angeles for the past decade. Last year, she helped found the union’s Echo Park local.

“We are demanding that the city and the county enact an emergency eviction moratorium and a rent freeze, they enforce price gouging protections that are currently being abused by landlords and realtors, they fill all vacant units instead of displacing and evicting folks from their homes—whether that means instituting aggressive vacancy taxes or seizing the vacant units outright,” she told me on Monday, January 13. “It’s unnecessary to displace anybody and immoral and unjust for anyone to lose their home, when we’ve just seen thousands of our community members going through that.”

The following day, the Los Angeles City Council delayed a vote on proposed restrictions on rent-hikes and evictions for some residents. According to LAist, that proposal aims to prevent landlords from raising rents for one year and to stop evictions for tenants who can’t pay rent due to lost income, illness, or the need to take in additional roommates due to the fires.

“It’s unsurprising,” Limón Corrales told me via email in reaction to the city council’s delay. “But to be clear, today’s motion was insufficient to begin with” because it stopped short of a full eviction moratorium that would protect all residents of the city.

You can read a condensed version of our January 13 conversation—edited for clarity—below. 

How are you doing? Are you safe?

I’m located in Echo Park in Central LA, so we haven’t been as impacted by the fires as folks on the Westside and at the foothills in Palisades and in Altadena. So far, we’re safe and sound, but we’re expecting that tonight the winds are going to pick up. They died down on Friday and the weekend cleared up a little bit, which allowed the firefighters to move forward with containment. But they’re anticipating that tonight, tomorrow, and through Wednesday there will be increased winds. So folks are just hunkering down a little bit and preparing for additional fire risk these next couple of days. 

What were tenant protections like in LA when you got involved with LATU during the Covid pandemic? 

When the pandemic first started—similar to now—it was mostly neighbors that were coming together to give each other information, to make sure that folks knew what was happening, had the supplies that they needed, and had basic necessities. In this past week in LA, a lot of the folks that we were organizing with were not getting reliable news.

There’s some people who didn’t know that the fires were happening until they reached their yard. There’s folks we know in Altadena who evacuated not because they received an order on their phone, but because they saw the flames from their window. And so I would say there are parallels between both the pandemic and these first few days in the sense that it’s a total failure of our local government to act with the urgency needed to save people’s lives, to make sure that they have the information and the resources they need to stay safe, and to not exacerbate ongoing housing and homelessness in LA—which is really a crisis of greed and an unwillingness to protect working people and tenants.

“This isn’t going to be the last crisis.”

When the Covid pandemic began, there weren’t any protections that the city was automatically extending to folks. Rent was still due on April 1, 2020—a couple weeks into the shelter-in-place order—despite the fact that folks were losing their jobs. There was no infrastructure in place to keep them safe. So the response in 2020 from the LA Tenants Union and many other grassroots organizations was to insist that people take care of each other. 

The Food Not Rent campaign was launched to encourage people to hold on to their rent money, because we didn’t know how long the crisis was going to last. We didn’t know what type of support or aid—if any—the state was going to extend. So a lot of the city stopped paying rent either out of necessity because they just didn’t have the money, or in solidarity with neighbors.

Eventually the city did put protections into place like a moratorium on eviction. But even when the moratorium was in place, it didn’t stop landlords from illegally changing the locks or from suing tenants. It still fell on us as neighbors and as a community to be the ones to protect and enforce it to keep people in their homes. 

Similar to 2020, we’re calling for an eviction moratorium and a rent freeze. We were told that the safe thing to do was to shelter in place. There was an acknowledgement that home was the safest place to be, and yet, home wasn’t guaranteed for people. It’s the same thing now where homes are being burned down, the air quality outside is terrible, and people who are elderly, who are disabled, and who live outside are the ones that are bearing the brunt of it. We’re expecting that there’s going to be—as history has shown us—a big scramble and that landlords will take advantage of this opening to try to force folks out.

A lot of media coverage seems to be focused on landlords engaging in price gouging. What should people understand about what’s happening in LA?

Rent gouging is just the basis of how landlords operate in this city, and this crisis will exacerbate it. A lot of the people who have lost their homes in these fires were homeowners and are now without a home, so we’ll see how that plays out in the coming weeks and months. If emergency measures aren’t passed immediately, vulnerable tenants in the city are also going to be impacted. We’re seeing some houses listed at over $20,000 a month, where so many people in LA live off of $20,000 a year

The immediate rent gouging isn’t the only thing that we need to be afraid of. A lot of people in our locals and in our neighborhoods have already lost work because they’re caretakers, they’re gardeners, they worked in the neighborhoods that are impacted by the fire, or because schools are closed and they don’t have child care, so they need to stay home. A lot of people are going to lose income for months or years. People are going to have to choose between food and rent and other necessities. Folks are already being harassed and receiving eviction notices just in the last few days because there’s an opening for landlords to harass, to displace, to empty units, and to increase the rent. So rent-gouging on vacant units isn’t even the most disastrous way that tenants will be impacted.

There’s also a lot of coverage on cracking down on looting, Newsom speeding up construction by suspending environmental regulations, and a Marshall Plan to build “LA 2.0.” What does all of this mean to you?

I’ve been seeing glimpses of some of this online, but I feel like cognitive levels are clouded. There’s smoke in the air and adrenaline is rushing. Each day has been a little bit different: driving around to drop off masks, to source air purifiers, to distribute meals, to pack our go bags. It’s just been an insane pace for people—some folks are going to work every day like it’s normal. A lot of my family are gardeners and landscapers and work in Pasadena, so they’re still going to work every day. 

So those responses at that level are not tuned-in. Folks haven’t received masks, and folks haven’t received protections for their housing. Despite the fact that emergencies are becoming more common, there’s nothing in place. There’s a lot of conversation about where our funding goes and the fact that we don’t invest in the public good but rather in policing, in development, and what will come next—it just feels so far removed. 

Seventy-five thousand people in the county are living outside and are being abandoned en masse, while people are thinking about building new homes that none of us are going to be able to live in. 

What is the LA Tenants Union doing in response? How do we best help people who have lost their homes or are vulnerable to losing their homes?

The LA Tenants Union—just like folks all across the city—is responding with immediate mutual aid and letting people know in their languages about accurate, life-saving information because it’s not coming from anywhere else. We’ve even received emergency notices to our phones telling the entire city to evacuate that…minutes later, were corrected as errors

Another is distributing supplies. In my local, we dropped off air purifiers to folks that we know have respiratory issues, have children with asthma in the house, or have windows that don’t close. 

In the coming weeks and months, as the emergency mutual aid gives way to the longer, less acute crisis, what we’ll need to do is mobilize around what we have been building over the last few years toward demands for a total eviction moratorium and a rent freeze—to direct ourselves toward our city council and be organized enough to be willing to hold on to rent and to stop evictions ourselves if it’s something the city doesn’t grant as protection. 

What can people do to help if we don’t have an effective government response to emergencies?

It has been super-inspiring to see folks create webs of mutual aid and care overnight. It’s easy to buy supplies and it’s easy to drop them off. It’s harder to know who needs them and how to get them to those folks. For a lot of us, it’s been merging our established networks with emerging mutual aid groups—it’s about reaching out to all of the folks in our local and calling the elders, the folks with asthma, and the people we know are going to go work outdoors all day. It’s cool to be able to ask what someone needs and see that the whole community has come together to put those supplies there.

But it requires establishing connectivity ahead of the crisis, so in these coming weeks and months, it’s about connecting with the people who live in your building if you live in an apartment building. It’s about talking to the folks that live on your street, and if there’s an encampment near you, it’s about the people that you know that live outside. And it’s about pacing yourself, too, because there’s this immediate need but we’re going to need to sustain this energy for probably years—or probably for the rest of our lives—because this isn’t going to be the last crisis. 

This is a moment where we need to make stronger demands. But it’s also a moment where we’re seeing a historically Black neighborhood completely wiped out, where so many of our childhood friends have lost their homes, and where places we had beautiful memories we’ll never see again. So there’s a lot that we’re losing. But I would say it’s about the work in between the crises, in addition to this inspiring outpouring of energy.

Elon Musk Applauds the German Neo-Nazi Party

20 December 2024 at 21:25

Elon Musk appears to be leaning even further into a full neo-Nazi embrace. Following his social media assault to block a congressional spending bill meant to avoid a government shutdown, the tech billionaire took to X and described the racist, far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party as Germany’s last, best hope. 

“Only the AfD can save Germany,” he posted on X early Friday. He was responding to Naomi Seibt, a young German right-wing influencer—the Washington Post dubbed her the anti-Greta Thunberg for her climate change denialism—whose caption in part read, “The presumptive next chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) is horrified by the idea that Germany should follow Elon Musk’s and Javier Milei’s example.” Similar to Argentina President Javier Milei’s “chainsaw” policies, Musk has promised $2 trillion in cuts to federal spending as co-lead of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). 

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1869986946031988780

Olaf Scholz, the current chancellor of Germany, dismissed Musk’s remarks in an unrelated press conference on Friday. “We have freedom of speech, and that also applies to multibillionaires,” Scholz said. “But freedom of speech also means that you can say things that are not right and do not contain good political advice.”

The AfD is controversial even among other European far-right parties because many of its leaders are not shy about expressing Nazi sympathies. In May, France’s far-right party led by Marine Le Pen split from the AfD in its European Parliament coalition after the German party’s top candidate, Maximilian Krah, said that a person was “not automatically a criminal” just because they had been a member of the SS, Adolph Hitlter’s paramilitary organization. 

As my colleague Isabela Dias wrote, many Germans consider the AfD party as ethnonationalists who want to mass deport all “unassimilated citizens” with non-German ethnic backgrounds. The country’s domestic intelligence agency designated the AfD as a “suspected extremist group” back in 2021 and is currently holding the party under observation

Reports that AfD members held a covert meeting regarding the mass deportation plan led to protests earlier this year, but despite this, the party is polling in second place at 19 percent —behind Merz’s CDU/CSU political alliance at 31 percent—in the lead-up to Germany’s snap election in February 2025. 

Musk has been amplifying right-wing, anti-immigration voices on X for years and has already questioned criticism aimed at the AfD back in June. In September 2023, he denounced Germany for giving money to charities and rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean Sea. 

In the US, many Republicans support Musk’s growing political influence. “The Speaker of the House need not be a member of Congress,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said on X early Thursday. “Nothing would disrupt the swamp more than electing Elon Musk.”

“I’d be open to supporting @elonmusk for Speaker of the House,” wrote Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene, who reposted Paul. “The establishment needs to be shattered.” 

In a world of oligarchies, the richest man in the world is pushing the most destructive policies possible, and it’s marginalized communities like immigrants who inevitably will suffer the consequences. With a looming Donald Trump administration, a Republican majority in both chambers of Congress, and a conservative Supreme Court, this spells trouble for US immigrants—GOP government officials say they intend to end birthright citizenship, limit legal immigration, and enact mass deportation. 

Musk is also increasingly going global with his attempts to influence elections. He previously has shown interest in funding other anti-immigration parties, such as Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, in which reports suggest he has contributed as much as $100 million. Musk met with Farage earlier this week at Mar-a-Lago to discuss the donation. 

Elon Musk Applauds the German Far-Right Party

20 December 2024 at 21:25

Elon Musk appears to be leaning even further into an embrace of far-right extremism. Following his social media assault to block a congressional spending bill meant to avoid a government shutdown, the tech billionaire took to X and described the racist, far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party as Germany’s last, best hope. 

“Only the AfD can save Germany,” he posted on X early Friday. He was responding to Naomi Seibt, a young German right-wing influencer—the Washington Post dubbed her the anti-Greta Thunberg for her climate change denialism—whose caption in part read, “The presumptive next chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) is horrified by the idea that Germany should follow Elon Musk’s and Javier Milei’s example.” Similar to Argentina President Javier Milei’s “chainsaw” policies, Musk has promised $2 trillion in cuts to federal spending as co-lead of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). 

Only the AfD can save Germany https://t.co/Afu0ea1Fvt

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 20, 2024

Olaf Scholz, the current chancellor of Germany, dismissed Musk’s remarks in an unrelated press conference on Friday. “We have freedom of speech, and that also applies to multibillionaires,” Scholz said. “But freedom of speech also means that you can say things that are not right and do not contain good political advice.”

The AfD is controversial even among other European far-right parties because many of its leaders are not shy about expressing Nazi sympathies. In May, France’s far-right party led by Marine Le Pen split from the AfD in its European Parliament coalition after the German party’s top candidate, Maximilian Krah, said that a person was “not automatically a criminal” just because they had been a member of the SS, Adolph Hitlter’s paramilitary organization. 

As my colleague Isabela Dias wrote, many Germans consider the AfD party as ethnonationalists who want to mass deport all “unassimilated citizens” with non-German ethnic backgrounds. The country’s domestic intelligence agency designated the AfD as a “suspected extremist group” back in 2021 and is currently holding the party under observation

Reports that AfD members held a covert meeting regarding the mass deportation plan led to protests earlier this year, but despite this, the party is polling in second place at 19 percent —behind Merz’s CDU/CSU political alliance at 31 percent—in the lead-up to Germany’s snap election in February 2025. 

Musk has been amplifying right-wing, anti-immigration voices on X for years and has already questioned criticism aimed at the AfD back in June. In September 2023, he denounced Germany for giving money to charities and rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean Sea. 

In the US, many Republicans support Musk’s growing political influence. “The Speaker of the House need not be a member of Congress,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said on X early Thursday. “Nothing would disrupt the swamp more than electing Elon Musk.”

“I’d be open to supporting @elonmusk for Speaker of the House,” wrote Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene, who reposted Paul. “The establishment needs to be shattered.” 

In a world of oligarchies, the richest man in the world is pushing the most destructive policies possible, and it’s marginalized communities like immigrants who inevitably will suffer the consequences. With a looming Donald Trump administration, a Republican majority in both chambers of Congress, and a conservative Supreme Court, this spells trouble for US immigrants—GOP government officials say they intend to end birthright citizenship, limit legal immigration, and enact mass deportation. 

Musk is also increasingly going global with his attempts to influence elections. He previously has shown interest in funding other anti-immigration parties, such as Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, in which reports suggest he has contributed as much as $100 million. Musk met with Farage earlier this week at Mar-a-Lago to discuss the donation. 

How Democrats (Just Barely) Flipped America’s Most Expensive House Seat

9 December 2024 at 11:00

In late November, more than three weeks after Election Day, GOP Rep. Michelle Steel conceded to Democrat Derek Tran in one of the most hotly contested US House races in the country. In the end, Tran won by roughly 650 votes in Southern California’s 45th congressional district, making it one of the country’s closest contests and helping ensure that the Republican House majority will be among the narrowest in history. 

In an election cycle in which Republicans made big gains in California and among Asian-American voters nationwide, the CA-45 race stood out. As I reported in October, this majority-minority district—encompassing more than a dozen cities in Orange and Los Angeles counties—is home to a population that is 39 percent Asian American and Pacific Islander. About half of this group is Vietnamese, including many immigrants who came to the United States fleeing communist rule after the Vietnam War. In recent years, the district has become known for clashes over Asian identity and red-baiting, a strategy routinely employed by Steel’s backers, in particular. Vietnamese-language signs populate street corners and mailers are sent to households insinuating that candidates hold communist sympathies. 

Amid the countless post-election analyses examining demographic shifts among voters, what has stuck with me the most is something that Jeanie Le, a board member with Orange County Young Democrats, told me months prior to the CA-45 vote: “We all fit in these diverse categories…but we are not a monolith. There’s so much happening in our community, and I just really want to make sure that when people write about this community, they reflect that.”

A mailer from Michelle Steel for Congress sent to a household in Westminster, California. Left: The front of the mailer reads, “Why does a member of the Communist Party support Derek Tran?” Right: The back mentions Richard Green, a co-chair of the Southern California Communist Party, and suggests that Tran is “a tool for socialism.” Courtesy of Jay Chen

Still, the battles over identity were unavoidable. Democrats bet that Tran’s personal biography—a US Army veteran and the son of Vietnamese refugees—could help him withstand Steel’s anti-communist attacks and give him a better chance at connecting with Vietnamese voters. And indeed, Tran outperformed Jay Chen, a Taiwanese American who was the Democratic nominee in 2022, in the Republican-leaning cities of Westminster and Garden Grove in Little Saigon.

Bich-Tram Le, a host and commentator for Nguoi Viet Daily News in Little Saigon, said that although Steel had many local Vietnamese leaders on her side, “the elders—they have a sense of patriotism—wanted to put a son of Vietnamese refugees into Congress.” Le said that these sentiments fueled a door-to-door campaign in support of Tran. “They really want to do whatever they can to help the next generation build up the community and a voice and Vietnamese vote because they feel that is part of their duty.”

Volunteer canvassers in Westminster, California, preparing to head out with yard signs and campaign literature in support of Derek Tran.Courtesy of Bich-Tram Le

In the lead-up to November, LAist found through a public records review that—while on the Orange County Board of Supervisors during the height of the pandemic—Steel had awarded a $1.2 million contract for meals for seniors to a marketing and printing company involved in her congressional election campaign.

Le helped organize multiple protests against Steel in which hundreds of people in Little Saigon showed up to oppose the Republican’s red-baiting tactics and Covid scandal. There were also counter-protesters supporting Steel at many of these events. Le, along with others, made talk show appearances on Vietnamese-language broadcasts to lay out what they saw as Steel’s transgressions.

According to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that tracks campaign finance and lobbying data, CA-45 was the most expensive US House race this cycle, with the candidates and their supporters spending a combined total of $46 million. Elon Musk’s America PAC spent nearly $800,000 supporting Steel’s campaign and more than $500,000 opposing Tran, while the pro-cryptocurrency super PAC Fairshake spent roughly $2.8 million helping Steel. 

Many in the district believed all along that the race would be one of the closest in the country. “I drive through my parts of CA-45, and I see both candidates’ signs everywhere,” said Nathan Bui, the communications director for the Orange County Young Democrats. “And our opinion [at OCYD] was it was going to come down to a field margin and turnout.”

That’s exactly what happened. On election night, Tran led by 4,000 votes but was trailing Steel by 10,000 a day later. “It looked pretty bad for us at one point, but then we knew it wasn’t over because there were still 100,000 votes left to be counted,” said Le. Slowly, as more votes were tabulated, Tran clawed his way back until finally taking a lead on November 16

This brought baseless allegations of election fraud from the likes of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.). But Steel conceded the race on November 27. In a statement on X, she wrote that she’d “embarked on a mission to assist First Generation Americans, stand up to our adversaries, and defend human rights.” She also said she was grateful to “work on behalf of legal immigrants and struggling families.” For his part, Tran tweeted that “only in America can you go from refugees fleeing with nothing but the clothes on your back to becoming a member of Congress in just one generation.”

Bui views the election results in CA-45 as a call for change. “That’s why we saw a Trump-Tran split,” he said, pointing out that many Vietnamese voters in Little Saigon chose the Republican presidential candidate but also voted for Tran. “It was just a shift away from incumbents, especially because Michelle was not particularly a popular incumbent to fight for, considering all the scandals.” 

Bui thinks the results indicate a notable shift in the district. “We’re seeing a change of the politics in Little Saigon. The old guard of people—conservative candidates for all these positions in Orange County—have mainly been a lot of the same people,” he said. “I think when we see these scandals against these people who you know are connected to one another, it kind of disillusions voters.” 

When I asked him what he wants from Tran and his fellow Democrats, Bui recognized that it would be difficult to enact laws in Republican-dominated Washington. “I think there’s still a lot of things that he can do that can push the district in a better place,” Bui told me. “He can really support the organizations and the people in this district that will be able to invest in more progressive policies that young people care about.”

The Republican Trifecta Looks Complete. What Happens Now?

13 November 2024 at 20:07

Democrats needed to snap up just four seats in 2024 to gain control of the House of Representatives. But today it became clear Republicans would retain control of the House. The results complete a dismal year for Democrats: The House results nail in a Republican trifecta and ensure President-elect Donald Trump will be able to implement his agenda with limited resistance. 

Republicans saw opportunities in two blue states: New York and California—home to 10 of this year’s toss-ups. Republicans made significant inroads in each state in 2020 and 2022, leading Democrats to prioritize flipping some of those seats back this cycle. Money flowed to the battles. This year, according to OpenSecrets, the two states had five of the top 10 most expensive House races in the country.

In New York, Democrats gained back four seats. But their chances fell in California. Across the country—and perhaps to the surprise of Democrats—many communities of color broadly shifted to the right, often saying the economy was not working for them. As my colleague Noah Lanard reported, two California seats, both largely Latino in the southern part of Central Valley, were drags on the opportunity for Dems to take the House. A district with a significant Asian American population in Orange and Los Angeles counties, as I reported, saw a similar dynamic.

“We’re going to raise an America First banner above this place,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said at a press conference on Capitol Hill, declaring victory on November 12 before more than a dozen seats were decided. 

Johnson mentioned policies of a “common sense” America First agenda, including secure borders, lower costs, and the end to wokeness and gender ideology. 

We’ve published a ton of stories on what might happen—an attack on immigration, a crackdown on transgender rights, a reversal of many Democratic environmental policies, and a rethink on education and college affordability

Another element to look out for: tax breaks. Through reconciliation, which allows budget-based bills to pass the Senate and avoid the filibuster with a simple 51-vote majority, Republicans will have the ability to propose and pass policies like tax cuts: Many tax cuts.

Breaks enacted during Trump’s first term will expire at the end of 2025. While the 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act slashed the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 percent permanently, most tax cuts for households and individuals were short-term. 

According to the Center for American Progress, an independent nonpartisan policy research and advocacy institute, extending Trump’s tax breaks would contribute $400 billion per year to the national debt. Trump has also made other promises such as ending taxation on overtime income, social security benefits, and tips, as well as lowering the corporate tax rate even more, to 15 percent. (The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated some of the additional costs here.)

Despite outgoing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) saying the filibuster will stand the day after Election Day, Trump had repeatedly called for its end in his first term. Republicans could weaken or kill the process and be able to pass any legislation with a simple majority rather than requiring a two-thirds majority to nullify a Democratic filibuster. This would theoretically grant Republican lawmakers the capacity to do whatever they want, creating a sweeping partisan playbook for at least the next two years. It looks less likely after the selection of Sen. John Thune as majority leader.

A Republican majority in both chambers of Congress also prevents Democrats from having any real authority to hold investigations. For the House, committee chairs hold unilateral subpoena power. This would strip Democrats of the ability to conduct inquiries on figures like Trump and those involved in coordinating the storming of the US Capitol. 

With Republicans in control of both chambers of Congress, among the first set of decisions will be how to overhaul much of the Biden administration’s policies in place of Trump’s agenda. 

While Republican lawmakers elect their House and Senate leaders, House Democrats will have to take time to rethink the next steps of their party. 

“The American people have spoken,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told CBS Mornings on November 12. “We’ve got to, as Democrats, work with the incoming administration whenever and wherever possible, and strongly disagree when necessary, and that’s going to be the approach that we take.”

A Ballot Measure About Rent Control Is Dividing California Democrats

5 November 2024 at 23:26

As Americans cast their votes in an election dominated by debates over inflation and the cost of living, a ballot measure in Vice President Kamala Harris’ home state is dividing the Democratic Party on the issue of how to address skyrocketing rents.

Proposition 33—dubbed the Justice for Renters Act—would repeal the state’s controversial Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, which for decades has restricted local governments’ ability to cap rent increases. Currently, Costa-Hawkins blocks counties and cities from imposing rent controls on apartments, condos, and single-family homes built after a certain date—1995 in much of the state, but years earlier in some cities, such as San Francisco. It also prohibits vacancy control, meaning that even landlords who are subject to rent controls can raise rents up to the market rate when a new tenant moves in.

Some cities have already enacted new rent control plans in anticipation of Prop. 33 passing. In October, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to approve legislation that would expand rent control to approximately 16,000 additional units if the initiative passes. 

In some ways, Prop. 33 is similar to President Joe Biden’s proposal this past summer to cap annual rent increases at 5 percent over the next two years for large landlords who want to obtain federal tax breaks. Two weeks after it was rolled out, speaking to a crowd in Atlanta, Harris appeared to voice support for the president’s plan, vowing to “take on corporate landlords and cap unfair rent increases.” But since then, according to the Nation, she has largely left promises for direct tenant protections out of her public statements. The outlet observed that instead of renters, Harris seemed to be focusing on homeowners, pushing policies like tax incentives for developers to build for first-time homebuyers. 

Harris’ reluctance to embrace rent control may mark a small victory for YIMBYs, the “yes-in-my-backyard” pro-housing movement that first emerged in San Francisco in the 2010s as a more market-based approach to the housing affordability crisis. YIMBYs, many of whom are Democrats, have largely opposed Prop. 33, arguing it would cause new rental construction to grind to a halt. An analysis by California YIMBY, an advocacy group focused on ameliorating the state’s housing shortage, argued that passing the measure “will likely worsen housing affordability by empowering NIMBY jurisdictions to block new housing.” 

NIMBY, a largely pejorative label meaning “not in my backyard,” describes locals who oppose construction and redevelopment in their neighborhoods—ranging variously from affordable housing, to homeless shelters, to luxury condos, to public transportation infrastructure. According to Matthew Lewis, the communications director at California YIMBY, NIMBYs include residents from across the political spectrum. While conservative NIMBYs might oppose new buildings to maintain the status quo or inflate property values in their neighborhoods, many left-aligned NIMBYs strongly oppose market-based development out of fears over gentrification or ideological commitments. Between those poles lies a significant group of mainstream liberal NIMBYs, who, as New York Magazine’s Curbed puts it, “believe in affordable housing until it’s in their neighborhood.” In 2022, Barack Obama called them out, specifically arguing that resistance to “affordable, energy-sustainable, mixed-use and mixed-income communities” contributes to the housing crisis. 

“When you have very right-wing NIMBYs agreeing with left NIMBYs that we should do all the things necessary to prevent more homebuilding, it kind of makes you go, huh?” Lewis said.

For Lewis, the story of a rent-controlled city like San Francisco characterizes the debate. According to the city’s housing plan, about 70 percent of San Francisco renters live in rent-stabilized units, built before June 1979. But this hasn’t helped the affordability crisis, as the percentage of the city’s households who were rent-burdened—that is, who spent more than 30 percent of their income on rent—increased by roughly 15 percent from 1990 to 2015 for residents making 50 to 80 percent of the median San Francisco income. And according to the Public Policy Institute of California and the California Housing Partnership, in 2024, over half of all renters in the state—roughly 3 million residents—are rent-burdened. 

“I think our opponents on the left misconstrue that rent control is this mechanism of broad affordability,” Lewis said. “But what it’s supposed to do is provide stability and security of tenure for lower income tenants. In a city like San Francisco, what you end up with is millionaires living in rent-controlled housing.” 

To get it right, Lewis suggests that the city first has to “unleash a building boom” by constructing housing and renting it out at market rate so developers can recoup investment costs and continue to build. “Then when those buildings become eligible for rent control—after 15 or 20 years—you have this abundant supply of rent-stabilized units because you’ve never stopped building,” he argues. 

Many housing justice advocates reject that argument. In a 2021 article for Housing is a Human Right, a prominent group now backing Prop. 33, Patrick Range McDonald wrote that such market-based strategies resemble the real estate industry’s failed “trickle-down housing policy” that has led to the ongoing crisis. Comparing it to giving tax cuts to the rich, McDonald wrote that “corporate landlords and major developers will generate billions in revenue by charging sky-high rents for market-rate apartments, making massive profits off the backs of the middle and working class.” 

In a May 2024 analysis charging that California YIMBY has sided with corporate landlords to defeat Prop. 33, McDonald wrote that this YIMBY proposal of “filtering” actually “fuels gentrification and displacement in working-class neighborhoods, including communities of color,” since, he says, developers will only build luxury housing to maximize profits. 

For his part, Lewis contends that many of Prop. 33’s leftist supporters are acting in direct opposition to affordability by arguing that only government-funded social housing projects can solve the problem. “I think that this is where YIMBYs really part ways with the left,” he said. “The market can just move substantially faster than the government can, if you let it.” While Lewis concedes that the government should play a substantial role in providing subsidized housing for low-income residents, he says that “you can’t have a functioning system where the government is basically shutting down housing production for most of the market.” 

Rent control, Lewis says, contributes to the housing shortage. He points to New York City, which has an estimated 26,000 older, rent-stabilized units that are empty, according to findings from the 2023 survey, because limits on rent increases make it difficult for landlords to keep up with maintenance costs and building codes. 

The debate is raging among economists, too. A University of Chicago poll found that an overwhelming 81 percent of economists surveyed opposed rent control. But in 2023, 32 prominent economists signed a letter supporting nationwide rent control. The document referred to a 2007 study following rent control policies for 30 years across 76 cities in New Jersey. It found “little to no statistically significant effect of moderate rent controls on new construction.” There is also research connecting housing supply reductions to systemic loopholes, such as exceptions that allow landlords to evict all tenants in a building to convert their rental units into market-rate condos. 

Shanti Singh, the legislative and communications director at Tenants Together, a coalition of local tenant organizations in California, argues that rent control and new development can work in concert. “We fight for housing that folks can afford. Millions and millions of people’s wages simply are not anywhere close to meeting market rates,” Singh says. “We’re fighting for people living in crowded conditions, people who are homeless, and people one step away from being homeless.” 

It’s not tenant advocates but current laws restricting rent control that are the real problem, Singh claims: “Because of Costa-Hawkins, we are actually bleeding the supply of rent-controlled housing that’s affordable at below market rates. That’s a unit that you’ve lost. That’s the supply loss.”

According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, there is a shortage of nearly one million affordable rental units in California for “extremely low income renters,” or residents who earn less than 30 percent of the state median income. “There’s a huge issue with folks with disabilities on fixed incomes, including seniors, who need accessible housing,” Singh says. They can’t access rent-controlled housing in places like San Francisco because the units are too old to have the necessary accommodations—they’re all constructed before 1979. 

Instead of working on legislation that will solve the affordability crisis, Singh says that many YIMBYs are “leaving a status quo in place that’s untenable” by bringing up “insane hypothetical scenarios.” 

Susie Shannon, the policy director at Housing Is A Human Right—which has put over $46 million into its support for Prop. 33—says Tony Strickland is one of these hypotheticals. Strickland, a conservative city council member in wealthy Huntington Beach, is an example of a NIMBY to many pro-development advocates. YIMBYs argue that he would use rent control laws like Prop. 33, if passed, to circumvent California’s affordable housing mandates by setting unreasonably low rent caps designed to stifle new housing development, according to the Orange County Register

Shannon pointed to an op-ed by Strickland, in which the councilman said his words had been taken out of context and affirmed that he has been “a lifelong opponent of rent control.” He clarified that he does support some language in the ballot measure that stops the state from using the court system to block local rent control decisions. Strickland did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones

Dean Preston, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the number one enemy of several California pro-development groups, says the amount of money backing the campaign against Prop. 33—over $120 million according to the Los Angeles Times—is telling. The two largest opposition donors are the California Apartment Association at nearly $89 million and the California Association of Realtors at $22 million.

“What has sucked up a lot of the debate from [Prop 33] opponents is discussing…what impacts rent control has on construction financing,” Preston says. “But what’s really driving the opposition is vacancy control”—the possibility that with the repeal of Costa-Hawkins, local governments would limit the amount a landlord could increase rents between tenants.

Preston believes that without vacancy control, cities are essentially powerless to regulate rents. “That’s why it is worth it for the California Association of Realtors, the California Apartment Association, and the landlord lobby to invest,” he says. 

While more than 650,000 people in the United States experience homelessness on any given night and living without shelter has increasingly become a crime, everyone I talked to maintains that there is a way to solve the housing crisis. 

For Lewis, it’s expanding funding for programs like the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, which offers developers incentives for making a portion of their construction affordable for low-income residents. He also favors upzoning to increase housing density by allowing more multifamily units in areas previously reserved for single-family homes. 

For tenant advocates like Singh and Preston, it’s about the increased dialogue around housing on the national stage, as well as the repeated attempts to create a federal social housing authority.

“I think there’s a sense within the tenant movement in California that it is inevitable at some point that Costa-Hawkins will be repealed because most people support rent control,” Preston says. “I hope Prop. 33 passes, but if it doesn’t, I expect it’ll be back on a future ballot and in future legislative efforts.”

The Future of the House Runs Through Two Blue States: California and New York

5 November 2024 at 20:46

This year, the road to take back the House of Representatives runs through California and New York, two states often skipped over when discussing the balance of power in an election year.

In 2022, the GOP showed surprising strength in the two blue stalwarts. They won upsets in each, earning Republicans the majority in the House. This time, Republicans are defending nine competitive races; as of November 1, the Cook Political Report labels these contests either “lean” or a “toss up.” According to the nonpartisan US election analyzer, two New York Republican incumbents are at particular risk: Anthony D’Esposito in NY-04 and Brandon Williams in NY-22.

Both major parties know the states are key. According to a Politico review of Federal Election Commission data, about one-third of independent expenditures in House races have been spent in California and New York—a significant jump from one-fifth in 2022. 

Mother Jones has picked five races, two in New York and three in California, that you should follow on Election Day.

NY-04: A scandalous rematch

Anthony D’Esposito (R) vs. Laura Gillen (D)

Anthony D'Esposito talks behind a podium at a outdoors press conference.
Rep. Anthony D’Esposito speaks during a press briefing on April 24, 2024, calling on Columbia University President Minouche Shafik to resign.Lev Radin/Sipa USA/AP

In wealthy sections of Nassau County on Long Island, Rep. Anthony D’Esposito faces off once again with Laura Gillen. The district is a historic Republican stronghold that has increasingly turned blue over the last 30 years. Alongside CA-22, it is the most Democratic-leaning congressional district represented by a Republican, with a 2022 Cook Partisan Voting Index of D+5 (meaning it voted five points more Democratic in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections than the national average). 

Turnout is a major issue. At a campaign event for Gillen in October, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries attributed the 2022 loss to voter turnout. According to data from the New York State Board of Elections and the New York Times, only 52 percent of registered Democrats voted for Gillen while roughly 83 percent of registered Republicans backed D’Esposito.

But there may be hope for Democrats this cycle as D’Esposito is embroiled in scandal. In September, the New York Times reported that he gave taxpayer-funded jobs to his lover and his fiancée’s daughter, possibly violating House ethics rules against corruption and nepotism. 

The race’s thin margins have pushed both D’Esposito and Gillen to the center. Gillen has advocated for the Biden administration to strengthen the border given New York City’s struggle to shelter thousands of migrants, even appearing in a campaign ad to promise to “work with anyone from any party to secure our southern border, lock up criminals pushing fentanyl, and stop the migrant crisis.” Meanwhile, D’Esposito has toned down Republican language on reproductive rights, promising in a campaign video that he would never vote for a national abortion ban.

NY-19: The New York race that is about the southern border

Marc Molinaro (R) vs. Josh Riley (D)

Rep. Marc Molinaro speaks into a microphone during a press conference at the U.S. Capitol.
US Rep. Marc Molinaro speaks at a press conference at the U.S. Capitol ahead of the State of the Union address.Michael Brochstein/Zuma

Upstate New York sees another rematch—one where Riley lost by only about 4,500 votes in 2022. Like NY-04, the two prominent issues seem to be abortion and immigration. According to CBS News, Riley vows to sponsor the Women’s Health Protection Act, which forms a new legal protection for the right to provide and access abortion care post-Dobbs. Molinaro says that he will support IVF and birth control and will never back an abortion ban. 

Still, according to the New York Times, Rep. Molinaro, once a moderate Republican, has drifted further right—especially on immigration. One of Molinaro’s campaign ads pays special mention to the August arrest of Gianfranco Torres-Navarro, a Peruvian gang leader, in upstate New York, and claims Riley helped write Joe Biden’s border policies that let Torres-Navarro into the country. The Republican congressman wants to close the southern border and deport “illegals with criminal records immediately.” He has also spread conspiracy theories, including that Haitian immigrants had “carved up” Springfield, Ohio, residents’ pets to eat them. 

Like Gillen, Riley has also shifted to the right on immigration, criticizing President Biden’s administration for being soft on law enforcement. He also blamed Molinaro for opposing a bipartisan Senate border security bill proposed earlier in 2024 to limit border crossings. 

CA-13: The test of Democrats’ sway with Latino voters

John Duarte (R) vs. Adam Gray (D)

Rep. John Duarte shakes hands on stage with Adam Gray before a debate.
Rep. John Duarte and Adam Gray greet each other before a debate in Modesto in October.Adam Alfaro/TNS/Zuma

California’s 13th is a Latino-majority congressional district where both candidates argue that they’re the most moderate. Duarte squeaked by Gray in the 2022 race by 564 votes. But, it could be tougher this year. If the district had existed in 2020 in its current configuration, it would have supported President Biden by 11 percentage points.

My colleague Noah Lanard has a big article on the race, which looks at the potentially massive drop in Latino support for Democrats across California.

In an October debate, Duarte distanced himself from Project 2025 conservatives and pointed out that he’s the lowest-ranking Republican according to Heritage Action, a conservative advocacy group that is a sister organization to The Heritage Foundation. While remaining vague on specific policies, he said, “I stand against the extremes of both parties. I want everyone to be who they are and love who they love. I want women to have choice.”

Gray portrayed himself as a team player with Republicans, boasting his bipartisan voting record, while connecting Duarte to Donald Trump and the most conservative House Republicans.  

The two candidates take similar positions on local policies. According to the Sacramento Bee, they both reject increasing the minimum wage from $16 per hour to $18 per hour via Proposition 32, despite California having the third-highest cost of living, according to World Population Review. The state also has the most number of people experiencing homelessness in the nation and the highest rate of unsheltered people. Both candidates oppose cities deciding their own rent control rules via Proposition 33

CA-27: The contest involving space stuff

Mike Garcia (R) vs George Whitesides (D)

Rep. Mike Garcia walks out of a meeting into a hallway.
Rep. Mike Garcia leaves a meeting of the House Republican Conference on May 7, 2024.Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Zuma

Based in northern Los Angeles County, California’s 27th is another prominently Latino district, making up almost half of the district.

According to Roll Call, the area is home to a host of aerospace companies, defense contractors, and manufacturing firms. Whitesides—who is new to politics—was the CEO of Virgin Galactic, a Richard Branson-founded space tourism company. He was also the chief of staff for NASA under Barack Obama. Whitesides is pushing a moderate platform of preserving Social Security and Medicare, as well as reproductive rights. He has targeted Garcia for backing Donald Trump and supporting abortion restrictions.

Democrats previously attacked Garcia following a December 2023 report from the Daily Beast, which found that the Republican incumbent sold up to $50,000 of Boeing stock before a congressional committee he served on released an investigation on 737 aircraft crashes. The news outlet said that Garcia did not disclose the sale until after he won reelection. 

Garcia calls Whitesides an “extreme liberal,” and says he is focused on lowering spending and improving safety and security, including the border. He has led raids on illegal, cartel-operated marijuana growers in the district. 

CA-45: The red-baiting brawl

Michelle Steel (R) vs Derek Tran (D)

Rep. Michelle Steel walks outside down the House steps.
Rep. Michelle Steel walks down the steps of the Capitol after the last vote before the Easter recess. Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Zuma

California’s 45th congressional district stretches across more than a dozen cities in Orange and Los Angeles counties. According to Politico, the race was not expected to be a toss-up, given the incumbent, Michelle Steel, has been serving in the US House since 2021 and has years of previous experience in local California politics. But, as one of the country’s few majority-minority districts represented by a Republican, Democrats are hopeful that their challenger, Derek Tran, can win. 

Tran, who is Vietnamese American and the son of refugees, may attract voters in Little Saigon, a neighborhood in Orange County home to the largest Vietnamese community outside of Vietnam itself. As I reported in October, this race has become about Asian American and Pacific Islander identity, as they make up about 39 percent of the district’s voting-age residents. This includes a history of colonization, war, and oppression that many Vietnamese immigrants attribute to communist governments in China and Vietnam. 

Red-baiting is thus a significant component of both candidates’ campaigns. 

Vietnamese-language ads accuse Tran of being a communist, bringing up that he has support from “socialists like Bernie Sanders” and has “thousands of dollars of cryptocurrency linked to China.” The Tran campaign ran a Vietnamese Facebook ad in September and October that says Steel’s husband “brought Chinese spies into American politics in exchange for money,” referring to a report from the Wall Street Journal.


❌
❌