On Wednesday February 19, hundreds of federal workers and allied protestors rallied outside of the San Francisco Tesla showroom against Elon Musk’s ongoing attacks on public services. Among the crowd were federal workers who are fighting back against cuts and layoffs from “DOGE” (Department of Government Efficiency). The rally was part of a national day of action to “Save Our Services” organized by the Federal Unionists Network (FUN), a grassroots coalition of rank-and-file union activists.

For months President Donald Trump, working hand in hand with Musk, has been bulldozing the public sector in order to pay for tax cuts for the richest Americans. This means gutting our social safety net, rolling back vital protections, and pushing out hundreds of thousands of essential federal employees. Some of the high profile targets of dismantlement include the Department of Education, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and U.S.A.I.D. Tens of thousands of probationary employees have been fired across over a dozen agencies.

The protest in San Francisco was led and emceed by FUN organizer Mark Smith, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees Local 1 and DSA member. Speakers included Kim Tavaglione, Executive Director of the San Francisco Labor Council, who said, “This is not a Democrat issue, this is not a Republican issue, this is a worker issue.” She continued, “Our entire society rests upon this fight. We need to get bigger and stronger, and show them that we’re not gonna take this shit no more.” Other speakers included the author Rebecca Solnit, who delivered brief remarks in solidarity: “We love you, we thank you, we know you take care of us and this incredibly complex system they’re trying to break.” 

Some of the signs held by protestors included: ““Fire Musk,” “Save Our National Parks,” “Workers Over Billionaires,” and “DOGE is a coup!” San Francisco DSA was well-represented in the crowd. 

To get involved with the movement to protect public services, visit the FUN website and join their rapid response network: https://www.federalunionists.net/

In September I wrote about ongoing East Bay DSA reading/discussion groups called Labor 101: Socialists and the Labor Movement.  These groups have been very useful in helping new members and members less familiar with labor to understand and be able to discuss some key ideas—why workplace organizing is essential, how we define the working class, and the role socialists can play in the labor movement, among other topics.  Some of the participants have become organizers in their own workplaces or started working with our local Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) to support other workplaces in organizing; many have become active members of the EBDSA Labor Committee. (More information about the groups is in the September California Red article.)

Since the COVID years these have been in-person groups but in April we are going to try an all-Zoom group. We’ll start on Thursday, April 10 from 6:00-8:00 pm and meet weekly. We have some EBDSA members who live too far away or take care of children or relatives, or have mobility problems; we’re hoping this gives more of an opportunity for participation. 

We are also hoping that the Zoom format can mean participation by members of other chapters. Some chapters may not have anything like this and members from around the state are encouraged to join us. We’ve tried to organize our materials so that a group leader has some guidelines, a timetable, and notes for each session. If you’d like to try leading a group for your chapter, attending this would be a great way to start.

We’d also love to have some members of other chapters that already have or are developing something like this to join us. Whether or not you can participate, please look at our materials, give us feedback and send us anything you’ve developed.

• Sign-up form for the April all-Zoom series     

• Flyer for the April all-Zoom series                

• Outline and reading list    

• Notes for group leaders     

Contact us for access to the whole folder

Greetings from Brenna and Brian, your at-large disabled comrades in residence, freshly arrived from the great lurking California Internet!

Now that a fascist coup is being executed against this country, we think it useful to fortify ourselves with the survival wisdom of our forebears, mining their strategies for overcoming horrible things in solidarity. Many in our socialist movement are already accomplished survivors, though our voices can be hard to hear. Disabled people like us have always had to hack reality in ways unthinkable to the ableds. We long ago learned to embrace "Nothing about us without us," including the universal health care we all deserve and continue to fight for. Solidarity has been at the core of our friendship for over a decade. Courage, like fear, is contagious. We have caught it from each other repeatedly. We'll use this column to keep catching it from others and sharing it with you. 

Bedrock Bodies

My (Brian's) disability began at birth, and I've had to learn the lessons of endurance and maintaining personhood in a world aligned against you and yours that are common to both the disability and antifascist communities. While you would hope that a progressive neuromuscular disease like mine might take a break from eating my muscle tissue to pursue equitable healthcare, childcare, and justice for ethnically cleansed Palestinians, in reality it's the sort of "progressive" that only makes things worse—nominally moving forward but ultimately drifting in a regressive direction. Call it “the Clinton strain of infirmity”. 

But my loss is also my gain in the armor it has bestowed upon me, an armor particularly suited to these cruel times. While the disease of my body may have no treatment and no cure, the disease plaguing my country is far from hopeless. We have solidarity, imagination, and a shared humanity on our side already, not to mention the bedrock knowledge common to disabled people that hope can become action, trial can become triumph, and strength can grow from nothing, like a fiery island birthed from the darkest ocean floor.

Some of us stumble into this bedrock knowledge later in life. In my thirties I (Brenna) was in the middle of a thriving career focused on the legal and policy needs of marginalized people in the Bay Area when my physical symptoms began eroding my sense of normalcy. I ignored them as long as I could, like the busy young fool I was, until they simply took over and ignoring them wasn't an option. Things got grim. I had to stop working and put all my energy into surviving excruciating pain. At a certain point in my advancing personal debility, I became unable to take in useful information about my medical condition, as all the words that might bring me answers started to sound like screaming regardless of the medium of delivery, and the only message I could hear was: Something inconceivably awful is happening to you, and nobody is able to stop it. Sound familiar, political friends? I also began to experience frequent vertigo, not so much a spinning sensation as that of wearing roller skates on the deck of a ship violently overcome by a stormy night sea. 

Finding your way to solid ground when everything is in massive upheaval is no small thing, but anchoring to bedrock knowledge helps. For me, I've learned to spend time daily deepening my awareness that we are all extraordinary living organisms profoundly connected to each other by biology, affect and circumstance. Staying alive to this transcending reality provides strength and perspective even amid the horrors of our current political moment. It helps me notice that the cooperation and connection that is innate to human functioning is always achieving more in everyday solidarity than the destructive cruelty of capitalism and fascism. Grounding in the fascinating fact of simply existing in your own body (have you noticed how rare humans are in the vastness of the known universe?) in the context of community (look at all us silly people bumbling around together on this watery spinning rock!) means more peace and focus, even in turbulent times, even during shock and pain.

Coming in From the Margins

With the return of the malignant magpie-in-chief to the oval office, I (Brian) quickly found myself in a place of stagnant voyeurism. Likely owing to a lifelong love of history, I became a curious bystander to an avalanche of events that didn't care if I'd read The Origins of Totalitarianism or believed that an unhealthy dose of narcissistic detachment might save me from a world where disabled people like me died first, whether by Hitler's order or Covid's rationed care. And, anyway, the Resistance of 2017 had done well enough without me. 

But now I am opting to reject the false comfort of this toxic dissociation, replacing acquiescence with action. Our national politics is at a watershed moment—a recurrence after remission, a lost function in an already failing machine, and a challenge right in my literal wheelhouse. 

The question for someone in a body like mine is, how to plug in to larger social movements? I'd been a card-carrying member of DSA since the first Trump administration, but never found my place among my likeminded comrades. From my wheelchair, I can't fix working class brake lights to fight police harassment, or shout truth to power through my ventilator. Just showing up to a meeting or protest with comrades is life-threatening for me and many others, with deadly respiratory viruses still circulating everywhere and masking so uneven. 

Yet it's not enough to stay on the sidelines when fascism also imperils our lives. So while I might not be able to physically block the levers of capitalism, I do still have my eyes and can write using eye-gaze technology. When I was a kid, the technologies that today make it possible for me to write or breathe or exist didn't themselves exist.  

Indeed, if there's one thing our disabilities have taught us, it's that we're only ever one metaphorical software fix away from a brighter and more survivable future. While for years it didn't seem possible, my (Brenna's) access to new medicine and therapies has meant less time immobilized by pain and more energy to invest in organizing for collective power. Now, with this shared column we intend to contribute to the healing political algorithm DSA crafts for a more livable future. We'd both rather be drops in this mighty socialist ocean than a couple of tears drying alone on a sidewalk that only gets hotter in silence.

So that's what we'll be exploring as the Horrible Things Subsubsubcommittee here at California Red: how to survive them (the horrible things) together. With your help, we plan to dig deep and excavate the wisdom of other marginalized people who have built and advanced community power even when it felt impossible, when the very infrastructures of survival seemed arrayed against them, and when they too felt more than a little impaired and rudderless. We believe that no matter the circumstances, everyday people, especially disabled people like us, can together drive change and answer our own hardest survival and societal questions. We'll be articulating and celebrating that timeless, stabilizing and radical spirit here in this column. 

So send us your own insights and provocations (disabled comrades, this especially includes you), dig in, and stay tuned!

The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime, and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco by Randy Shaw, Urban Reality Press, 2025

"Any city that doesn't have a Tenderloin isn't a city at all."
—Herb Caen, longtime San Francisco Chronicle columnist 

Few San Francisco neighborhoods have had more ups and downs than the 33-block area still called “The Tenderloin”—a name that derives from the late 19th century police practice of shaking down local restaurants and butcher shops by taking their best cuts of beef in lieu of cash bribes.

At various periods in its storied past, the Tenderloin has been home to famous brothels, Prohibition-era speakeasies, San Francisco’s first gay bars, well-known hotels and jazz clubs, film companies and recording studios, and professional boxing gyms. 

In 1966, trans people hanging out at the all-night Compton’s Cafeteria staged a militant protest against police harassment three years before the more famous LGBTQ uprising at the Stonewall Inn in NYC. During the last decade, the Tenderloin has become better known for its controversial side-walk camping, open-air drug markets, and fentanyl abuse.

The failure of municipal government to deal with those social problems— in a residential neighborhood for working-class families with 3,000 children—contributed to recent electoral defeats of a district attorney, city supervisor, and San Francisco’s second female and African-American mayor.

For the past 45 years, Randy Shaw has been a fixture of the place as co-founder of its Tenderloin Housing Clinic (THC). After graduating from law school nearby, Shaw became involved in fights for tenants’ rights and more affordable housing at a time when blue collar neighborhoods in San Francisco were starting to gentrify.

A Unionized Non-Profit

The THC, which now employs 200 SEIU Local 1021-represented staff members, began to acquire and develop its own network of Single Room Occupancy (SRO) buildings in the Tenderloin, as an alternative to run-down private landlord-owned ones. 

Today, THC provides subsidized housing and wrap-around services to several thousand of the city’s most needy tenants—who might otherwise be among the social outcasts living in the surrounding streets. Shaw estimates that the Tenderloin has a higher percentage of housing in nonprofit hands than any central city neighborhood in the nation, an arrangement that safeguards its distinctive character as an economically mixed neighborhood with many low-income people among its 20,000 residents.  

In this second edition to his book, The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco, Shaw recounts how this multi-racial working-class enclave managed to survive, if not always thrive, amid a city dominated by tech industry wealth and privilege. 

That history of neighborhood resistance to displacement is also on display at the Tenderloin Museum (TLM). Created ten years ago, with much help from the author, this venue for community-based, historically-inspired cultural programming now operates under the direction of Katie Conry. 

In her Forward to Shaw’s book, Conry describes the TLM’s many art shows, special exhibits, theatre productions, walking tours, and other public programs that have drawn 50,000 people to a downtown area many out-of-town visitors (and locals) are told to avoid. On April 11, for example, the THC is hosting a new production of The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot to commemorate that “collective act of resistance” and “the on-going fight for transgender rights.” (For ticket info, see: https://www.tenderloinmuseum.org/the-comptons-cafeteria-riot-play)

Community Benefits Agreements

DSA chapters fighting gentrification—or trying to make sure its benefits are more equitably shared—will find Shaw’s book to be an invaluable guide to effective activism around housing issues. It illustrates how persistent and creative grassroots organizing can challenge and change urban re-development schemes designed for the few, rather than the many. In too many California cities, it’s the latter who continue to get pushed out and left behind in the name of “neighborhood improvement.”

A central case study in The Tenderloin is the author’s account of how community residents won a pioneering “community benefits agreement” (CBA) with three powerful hotel chains. In the early 1980s, Hilton, Holiday Inn, and Ramada wanted to build three luxury tourist hotels adjacent to the Tenderloin. Given the city’s pro-development political climate at the time, these hospitality industry giants expected little organized opposition to their plans. Then Mayor Diane Feinstein lauded them for “bringing a renaissance to the area.”

However, as originally unveiled, their blueprint would have transformed nearby residential blocks by “driving up property values, leading to further development, and, ultimately the Tenderloin’s destruction as a low-income residential neighborhood.”

An Organizing Case Study

Among those faced with the prospect of big rent increases and eventual evictions were many senior citizens, recently arrived Asian immigrants, and longtime residents of SRO buildings in dire need of better ownership and management. Fortunately, this low-income, multi-racial population included some residents with “previously unrecognized activist and leadership skills” that were put to good use by campaign organizers, like Shaw, who were assisting their struggle. 

During a year-long fight, hundreds of people mobilized to pressure the city Planning Commission to modify the hoteliers’ plans. As Shaw reports, the resulting deal with City Hall created “a national precedent for cities requiring private developers to provide community benefits as a condition of approving their projects.”

Each of the hotels contributed $320,000 per hotel per year for twenty years for low-cost housing development. They also had to sponsor a $4 million federal Urban Development Action Grant (UDAG) for the acquisition and renovation of four low-cost Tenderloin SROs. In addition, each hotel had to pay $200,000 for community service projects, and give priority in employment to Tenderloin residents. 

Four decades later, community benefits agreements of this sort are not so unusual. But, in the absence of major new federal investment in public housing built with union labor, they are still much needed.  

Where tax breaks or rezoning encourages various forms of private development today, the only way to win additional low-income housing units, living wage jobs, local hiring, or preservation of open space for public use is through grassroots campaigning by community-labor coalitions, aided by sympathetic public officials. 

Otherwise mayors and city councils under the thumb of developers will simply offer financial incentives with few strings attached—whether the project involved is a new hotel, casino, shopping center, office building, or luxury apartment building.

Organizers’ optimism

Back in the Tenderloin, as Shaw reports in the conclusion to his book, residents in recent years have had to mobilize around basic public safety issues.  Pandemic driven economic distress flooded their neighborhood with tent dwellers, drug dealing, and street crime that added to small business closures, drove tourists away, and made daily life hazardous for longtime residents (except when state and local politicians cleaned things up for high-profile gatherings like the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leadership meeting in S.F. two years ago).

Nevertheless, the author ends on an optimistic note (characteristic of organizers): “New restaurants and small businesses are again opening in the Tenderloin. Street and crosswalk changes make the neighborhood among the city’s most walkable. New housing has increased the Tenderloin’s population…” 

But, Shaw reminds us, residents of this urban enclave must still fight to achieve “the quality of life common to other San Francisco neighborhoods,” while “protecting an ethnically diverse, low-income, and working-class community” with a storied past and always uncertain future.

Thorn West: Issue No. 228

State Politics

• Former Orange County congress member Katie Porter is the most recent candidate to announce their candidacy for California governor. Current governor Gavin Newsom will be unable to run in 2026 due to term limits.

• Governor Newsom interviewed Steve Bannon on his newly launched podcast. It is the third episode to feature a friendly interview with a member of the far right.

City Politics

Los Angeles chief administrative officer Matt Szabo predicted a $1 billion budget shortfall in the next fiscal year in a presentation before city council, projecting the need for “thousands” of layoffs of city employees. The current fiscal crisis was precipitated by raises for LAPD officers, and is exacerbated by police liability claims. Mayor Karen Bass, released a statement warning that her draft budget for the upcoming fiscal year, due to be released within a month, will represent a “fundamental change in the way the City operates.”

Health Care

• As Republicans discuss cutting billions of dollars in Medicaid funding over the next ten years. Capital & Main projects the devastating cascading effect this will have on health care in California.

• Medi-Cal, California’s implementation of Medicaid, is $6.2 billion over budget, a result of rising pharmacy costs, and increased participation in the program. The state has borrowed from its reserve fund to partially make up the shortfall.

• There was a diagnosed case of measles in LA County last week, in a patient who had just flown into LAX. Press release from the LA County Department of Public Health here.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• Recordings made by an LAPD officer in the department’s Recruiting Division captured a stream of racist, sexist and homophobic comments from multiple officers across dozens of conversations. A probe is underway.

• [CW: police violence] LAPD officers shot and killed an unarmed driver during a traffic stop last week.

• Amid a budgetary crisis, advocates worry about the future of a successful pilot program that diverts emergency mental health calls to an unarmed crisis response team. LA Forward is hosting a zoom call to organize a defense of the program, here.

• Sheriff Robert Luna is suing the Los Angeles County’s Civilian Oversight Commission, seeking to withhold documents related to deputy misconduct that the commission has subpoenaed.

Housing Rights

• Funding for a federal emergency rental voucher program, which provides assistance to tenants facing homelessness, is projected to run out in the upcoming fiscal year.

• An audit has revealed that LAHSA, the organization which currently provides homelessness services across LA County, has been lax in tracking its use of funds. LA Public Press provides further details on plans at the city and county level to restructure how homelessness services are provided.

The post Budget Crises at City, State + Federal Level Put Vital Services at Risk appeared first on The Thorn West.