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oligarchy
The L.A. Awakening: Repression, Resistance, and the Possibility of Radical Democratic Renewal
It is increasingly clear that the real threat lies not with the person crossing a border, working a warehouse shift, or marching in the street—but with the structure that enriches itself by sowing division and suppressing dissent.
Jun 10, 2025
The crackle of tear gas canisters and the rumble of tactical boots on asphalt echoed through Los Angeles this week as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), backed by federal agents and U.S. Marines, descended upon protestors decrying a sweeping series of immigration raids. What began as a protest against ICE quickly exploded into a broader protest. Progressive community members of all types flooded intersections, blocked freeways, and surrounded detention centers in a show of mass resistance. Federal forces responded with mass arrests, tear gas, and brute force—but the crowds didn’t disperse. They stayed. They returned. They grew.
The targets of the raids revealed the intent. ICE didn’t go after exploitative bosses or the companies violating labor laws. Instead, they rounded up garment workers, day laborers, and food delivery drivers—those whose labor keeps the city alive but whose status makes them vulnerable. Meanwhile, as Congress quietly pushed forward legislation providing major tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy, the manufactured “immigration emergency” shifted public attention away from growing inequality and back toward fear and division. The raids were less about enforcement than they were about distraction—shaping a narrative, channeling anger, and justifying control.
But this time, the usual script isn’t working. Instead of dividing people, the spectacle has clarified the real lines of conflict. Communities once siloed by race, language, or status are joining together—seeing the true threat not in each other but in those who profit from their separation. Warehouse unions, immigrant rights groups, tenant associations, and progressive local officials are increasingly aligned. A shared understanding is taking hold: the enemy is not the worker next to you—it is the elite profiting from your instability.
The movement taking shape in LA is not just a response to injustice. It is the beginning of something more ambitious: a challenge to the foundational myths of American political life.
This is also a stark illustration of the imperial boomerang in motion: the tools of empire—surveillance, militarized policing, psychological control—returning home. What was once deployed to suppress resistance abroad is now turned inward. But rather than subdue, this backlash is catalyzing a broader awakening. The brutality in Los Angeles has illuminated the deeper architecture of repression, drawing new political lines that unite across race, status, and geography. From LA to Gaza, the common thread is clear: state violence serves elite power, and the response from below is no longer fragmented. It is building into a global resistance that sees through the old divisions and names its adversary plainly—oligarchy.
Oligarchic Backlash and the Authoritarian-Financial Complex
President Trump’s activation of the National Guard under Title 10 and his readiness to deploy Marines from Camp Pendleton was never about public safety. It was a choreographed assertion of power meant to produce fear and reaffirm control. Helicopters circled. Tactical units patrolled neighborhoods. Cable news cycled images of property damage while ignoring the scenes of solidarity unfolding at the ground level.
This is how the authoritarian-financial complex operates—a system in which political repression and economic extraction are not separate but interdependent. Moments of unrest become business opportunities: more riot gear, more surveillance contracts, more privatized detention. Each crackdown funds the next. Each protest becomes another justification to expand the reach of state and corporate power.
Nowhere, perhaps, is the fusion of political repression and economic opportunism more blatant than in the machinery of immigration enforcement. The so-called “immigration crisis” has become a lucrative engine for private interests, with for profit prison companies expanding detention capacity well beyond ICE’s funded limits. The recent spike to over 48,000 detainees—far exceeding official capacity—is not a logistical error; it’s a business model. These companies are not just building prisons, they are lobbying for policies that fill them. Trump’s push to detain 100,000 people, coupled with doubled arrest quotas for ICE agents, has created an insatiable demand for space, surveillance, and services. Private contractors now profit not only from detention but from the entire apparatus of deportation—transportation, medical care, legal processing, and data collection—embedding their profit margins deep into the logic of state violence.
This financialization of immigration control explains why enforcement is not designed to succeed, but to persist. The spectacle of militarized raids and mass detentions serves a dual function: it energizes a political base while funneling billions in public money to politically connected firms. It’s no coincidence that watchdog agencies overseeing detention conditions were recently gutted, just as complaints of medical neglect and overcrowding mount. Nor is it accidental that local police forces, through programs like 287(g), are being deputized into ICE’s mission—blurring the line between civil enforcement and criminal policing, eroding community trust, and diverting resources from genuine public safety. This is not about border security; it’s about embedding a permanent state of exception, where fear and control are monetized, and immigrant lives are raw material for profit.
In Los Angeles, this convergence was unmistakable. While federal agents arrested undocumented workers, not one exploitative employer faced charges. The very actors enabling and profiting from illegal labor practices were shielded. The crackdown revealed the true purpose of enforcement: to preserve a system of racialized labor and elite impunity. But instead of breaking public resolve, the repression fueled it. Community leaders who might once have stood apart are now strategizing together. City council members are now publicly calling Trump’s actions “purposefully inflammatory”. The backlash is becoming organized—and political.
Anti-Oligarchic Backlash
The tactics on display in LA were not improvised. They were imported—from battlefields, occupied zones, and foreign policy handbooks. For decades, the U.S. honed its techniques of control overseas. Now, the same playbook—complete with unmarked vehicles, psychological warfare, and militarized response teams—is being applied domestically. This is the imperial boomerang: tactics of colonial dominance turned inward.
But as with foreign occupations, brute force rarely produces lasting submission. Instead, it deepens opposition. In LA, it is catalyzing an unprecedented alignment. Labor unions are holding joint press conferences with immigration organizers. Neighborhood coalitions are coordinating transportation and legal aid for arrestees. Local politicians are being forced to publicly clarify their loyalties: will they support their constituents, or will they remain silent in the face of elite-led repression?
Street actions are converging with union demands, tenant struggles, and local policy fights. Coalitions are being built not around identity alone, but around material interest and shared opposition to oligarchic control.
Mayor Karen Bass’s denunciation of the federal intervention sharpened the political meaning of the crackdown. Framing Los Angeles as a "test case" for the erosion of local authority, Bass exposed the authoritarian logic at work: not the restoration of order, but the imposition of federal dominance through manufactured crisis. Bass’s warning cuts through the noise: Los Angeles wasn’t descending into chaos—it was pushed. The ICE raids didn’t restore order; they shattered it, unleashing fear across communities, including among legal residents. This wasn’t enforcement—it was the imperial boomerang in action. Tactics honed abroad to control foreign populations are now being used at home to fracture civic life and neutralize dissent. Under the guise of national security, federal power bypassed local authority, transforming the city into a living laboratory for domination.
Governor Gavin Newsom’s decision to sue the Trump administration marks an even sharp escalation in the standoff, transforming the crisis into a battle over who holds real authority in a democratic society. By calling the federal deployment of the National Guard “illegal” and “unconstitutional,” Newsom exposed the move as a naked power grab—an attempt to override state control and impose federal force without consent. His defiance was visceral: “Arrest me,” he dared Trump’s border czar. This isn’t just legal pushback—it’s political resistance at the highest level, signaling that California won’t quietly submit to Washington’s manufactured chaos.
The backlash in Los Angeles is not isolated. Across the country, cities like San Francisco have become flashpoints for parallel demonstrations, where thousands marched peacefully in solidarity with immigrant communities and in defiance of federal raids. The widespread mobilizations—from San Francisco’s Mission District to streets in New York, Atlanta, and Seattle—underscore that this is not merely a local crisis but a national awakening. What is unfolding is a geographically diffuse yet politically unified resistance to the authoritarian-financial complex—one that links neighborhoods, cities, and struggles under a shared call for justice and accountability.
More profoundly, this moment is giving rise to a new sense of political identity. An identity not based on citizenship or party, but on a shared understanding of how power operates. It is increasingly clear that the real threat lies not with the person crossing a border, working a warehouse shift, or marching in the street—but with the structure that enriches itself by sowing division and suppressing dissent. The very tools of imperial control that were meant to fragment and subdue are now forging a unified opposition—turning the boomerang's trajectory from division into solidarity, from repression into resistance against the oligarchy itself.
Reclaiming Democratic Power
The movement taking shape in LA is not just a response to injustice. It is the beginning of something more ambitious: a challenge to the foundational myths of American political life. People are beginning to realize that democracy, as it has been practiced, too often serves as a tool of preservation—not transformation. But this moment is shifting that understanding.
The bipartisan oligarchy is cracking, and a new political line is emerging—between those who serve concentrated power and those who challenge it.
As political theorist Camila Vergara argues, real democracy must be plebeian—built from below, driven by those excluded from traditional power. In LA, that principle is being tested. Street actions are converging with union demands, tenant struggles, and local policy fights. Coalitions are being built not around identity alone, but around material interest and shared opposition to oligarchic control.
This uprising is also forcing a reckoning within the Democratic Party. For too long, party leaders have paid lip service to justice while quietly enabling enforcement budgets and border expansion. Now, protestors are demanding clarity: who are you with? Those who remain silent risk political irrelevance. The bipartisan oligarchy is cracking, and a new political line is emerging—between those who serve concentrated power and those who challenge it.
A new democratic force is awakening. And it is not going back to sleep.
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It's the Bad Ideas—Not the Old Age, Stupid!
Don't count birthdays. Follow the money.
Jun 06, 2025
Sometimes a little procrastination can be a good thing. A recent case in point was this year’s California Democratic Party’s convention decision to postpone consideration of a resolution calling for a mandatory retirement age for state and local officials. By not acting on the measure the party has, at least for the moment, spared itself a diversion from the real question of just what message it wants to convey – regardless of the age of the messenger.
The resolution was offered by Eric Kingsbury, a member of a heavily tech-funded slate that succeeded in moving the San Francisco Democratic Central Committee dramatically to the right in the last election. Kingsbury was quick to state that this was “decidedly not about Nancy Pelosi. If every elected leader in this country were like Nancy Pelosi [the 85-year old San Francisco Representative who is a fellow Committee member] we wouldn’t have to have this conversation.” And yet SF Democratic Committee Chair Nancy Tung suggested a specific age cap of 70: “That’s the general thought. Though we are thinking that an exploration by the state party is the way to go. But 70 is an age that other jurisdictions have adopted for judges and the like.”
This all, of course, is a predictable reaction to Joe Biden’s inept debate performance widely believed to have cost the Democrats the White House. It is also something of what we might call a “best seller-list solution,” in this case a follow-up to the success of “Original Sin,” the account of the Biden decline in his White House years that immediately hit the top of the New York Times non-fiction list. This book comes close on the heels of “Abundance,” the best-seller pro-growth manifesto also touted by centrist members as the cure for what ails the Democrats. .
Perhaps the quickest refutation of the age-limit solution is Senator Bernie Sanders, currently traveling about the country conducting (often in the company of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) the largest anti-Trump Administration rallies to be found anywhere, while also sponsoring the (unfortunately unsuccessful) U.S. Senate resolutions to block weapons shipments for Israel’s use in further devastating Gaza. Sanders is 83, a year older than Joe Biden. Would we really want to silence the principal challenger to the Trump agenda in the currently trendy cause of fighting gerontocracy? Well, actually the people behind the convention resolution just might.
What is the new leadership of the San Francisco Democratic Party all about? As they say, just follow the money. In winning control of the Central Committee, the SF Democrats for Change slate raised over $2.2 million, more than tripling the amount raised in support of the Labor and Working Families slate of incumbent members and allies.
The source of that overwhelming financial edge was predominantly high tech capital. Backers included billionaire Chris Larsen of Ripple cryptocurrency, once estimated to be the fifth richest person in the world, now down to #407; Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman; and Zack Rosen, CEO of the venture-backed software company Pantheon. But the group’s most prominent and infamous supporter is self described “centimillionaire” Garry Tan, CEO of startup incubator Y Combinator (I’ll leave you to do your own research on the exact meaning of that), and also an early employee of Palantir Technologies, the data analysis and technology firm that has received over $113 million in federal funding from the Trump administration for the implementation of the executive order for federal government cross-agency data sharing.
Tan, who is estimated to have spent something like $400,000 on SF politics in the past few years, achieved his moment of maximum fame with a wee hours X post directed at a majority of the then members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors: “Fuck Chan Peskin Preston Walton Melgar Ronen Safai Chan as a label and motherfucking crew … And if you are down with Peskin Preston Walton Melgar Ronen Safai Chan as a crew fuck you too … Die slow motherfuckers.” When someone responded suggesting that he was drunk when he posted what was apparently a reference to a Tupac Shakur song, Tan responded, “You are right and motherfuck our enemies.” (The posts were subsequently deleted.) Tan describes himself as a “moderate.”
While all of the big bucks backers of SF Democrats for Change may not be as crude as Tan, one trait we can be certain that they do share is disinterest in any campaign to radically shift the status quo in America. Do they share their proteges’ interest in a political age cap? Who knows, but it’s nothing that’s going to make them start asking for their money back. Whereas, if they were to hear that the recipients of their campaign funding were calling for an end to the corporate domination of politics, we can be pretty sure they’d let us know what they thought about that.
That the party needs to find a way to recapture the hearts and minds of the working class has become a truism in Democratic circles. And that doing so will require advocating clawing back some of the wealth and power that the nation’s corporate elite have amassed in recent years is obvious to anyone who takes the time to think it through. But you ain’t going to keep the support of the people whose cash put SF Democrats for Change in power by talking that kind of talk.
This is a scenario we can expect to see repeated in every state over the next couple of years. Age limits! Deregulation! Strong defense! Cut bureaucracy! Patriotism! Less political correctness! It’ll all be rolled out as party “moderates” try to achieve the impossible status of being both the party of the working class and the party of billionaire and centimillionaire financiers. Beware!Keep ReadingShow Less
WelcomeFest’s Billionaire Backers Reveal Its True Mission
Like Third Way and the Democratic Leadership Council before it, Welcome is yet another donor- and elite-driven operation seeking to drag the Democratic Party rightward on economic policy.
Jun 04, 2025
If the Abundance universe is to be believed, the hottest ticket this summer is WelcomeFest.
Wednesday’s confab is the second such annual gathering organized by the centrist group Welcome Party and its political action committee WelcomePAC, with this year’s event touting a distinct abundance flair. The conference boasts a rogues’ gallery of corporate-friendly cosponsors, including Third Way, the New Democratic Coalition, Inclusive Abundance, and the Blue Dog Caucus. A sizzle reel from last year’s event paints WelcomeFest as an Internet Hippo tweet come to life, complete with cameos from A-listers like ex-CNN anchor John Avlon and Democratic influencer Olivia Julianna.
Taken together, WelcomePAC’s leadership and funding are at odds with their claimed opposition to the “buttoned-up [politics] of Washington elites.”
This year’s “Responsibility to Win” session (misspelled on the event’s official poster) has drawn viral attention online—both for its bizarre AI Ghibli promos and stacked lineup of neoliberal pundits, conservative Democratic lawmakers, and wunderkind pollsters serving up Dick Morris’ reheated leftovers.
Speakers include:
- Derek Thompson, co-author of Abundance.
- Matt Yglesias, confidently-wrong pundit and, per Thompson, the “OG grandfather of Abundance.”
- Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), who doesn’t think Democrats should use the term “oligarchy.”
- Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), Abundance champion and darling of AIPAC and crypto lobbyists.
- Reps. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.), Adam Gray (D-Calif.), and Kristen McDonald Rivet (D-Mich.),founding members of the Abundance-themed Build America Caucus.
- Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash). and Jared Golden (D-Maine), current and former co-chairs of the conservative Blue Dog Caucus.
- Adam Jentleson, anti-”Groups” crusader currently distancing himself from his 14-month stint as Sen. John Fetterman’s (D-Pa.) chief of staff.
- David Shor, pollster and prolific party animal.
WelcomePAC’s Donors
Campaign finance records reveal that WelcomePAC, the primary organizers of WelcomeFest, has raked in sizable contributions from billionaires and corporate oligarchs:
- Reid Hoffman: LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman has given over $1.8 million to WelcomePAC since 2021. A major donor to former Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign and the pro-Harris SuperPAC Future Forward, Hoffman strongly opposed the Biden administration’s anti-monopoly policies and publicly demanded that Harris fire Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan if she won the election. Hoffman has also bankrolled the Mainstream Democrats super PAC, which spent heavily in Democratic primaries in 2022 and 2024 to defend conservative Democrats like Kurt Schrader and Henry Cuellar and defeat progressives like Cori Bush and Nina Turner.
- Walton family: WelcomePAC has received over $1.1 million from relatives and heirs of Walmart founder Sam Walton—the richest family in America.
- S. Robson (Rob) Walton: Rob Walton, the eldest son of Walmart founder Sam Walton, has given $100,000 to WelcomePAC since 2024.
- Samuel R. Walton: Samuel R. Walton, grandson of Sam Walton and owner of a natural resources holding company, has given $625,000 to WelcomePAC since 2024.
- Christy Walton: Christy Walton, widow of one of Sam Walton’s sons, has given $125,000 to WelcomePAC since 2022.
- Alice Walton: Alice Walton, daughter of Sam Walton, has given $25,000 to WelcomePAC since 2022.
- Carrie Walton Penner: Walton Penner, daughter of Rob Walton, has given $150,000 to WelcomePAC since 2022. She is also a prolific donor to the anti-public education charter school movement.
- Greg Penner: Penner, the husband of Carrie Walton and son-in-law of Rob, has given $150,000 to WelcomePAC since 2022. Penner is also Chairman of Walmart’s Board of Directors and a managing partner for the Walton family’s private equity firm.
- Bekenstein family: Bain Capital co-chairman Joshua Bekenstein and his wife Anita have given a combined $375,000 to WelcomePAC since October 2024.
- Michael Bloomberg: Billionaire and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has given $100,000 to WelcomePAC since August 2024. Bloomberg is best known for his controversial mayoralty (which saw the expansion of racist “stop-and-frisk” policing tactics and anti-Muslim surveillance) and his expensive, widely-mocked 2020 presidential campaign.
- James & Kathryn Murdoch: James Murdoch—the estranged younger son of News Corp founder Rupert Murdoch—and his wife Kathryn have given a combined $2.5 million to WelcomePAC since April 2024.
- Rob Granieri: Granieri, the co-founder of Wall Street quantitative trading firm Jane Street, has given $100,000 to WelcomePAC since June 2024.
- Edward Fishman: Fishman, a managing director at hedge fund D.E. Shaw, has given $200,000 to WelcomePAC since February 2022.
- Mark Heising: Heising, the founder of private equity firm Medley Partners, has given $250,000 to WelcomePAC since June 2024.
- David Nierenberg: Nierenberg, an investment manager and former national finance co-chair for Mitt Romney’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, and his wife Patricia have given a combined $726,600 to WelcomePAC since March 2024.
- Americans Together Inc: Americans Together Inc, a centrist group founded by former Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-W.Va.) daughter Heather Manchin Bresch, has given over $1 million to WelcomePAC since February 2024. A core plank of Americans Together’s policy platform is opposing any repeal or reform of the Senate filibuster (the goal, ironically, of a 2021 book by WelcomeFest speaker Adam Jentleson).
- Bresch, the former CEO of pharma company Mylan, attracted national attention in 2016 for defending Mylan’s EpiPen price-gouging.
Who’s Actually Welcome to the Party?
While WelcomePAC’s donor roster makes clear who the group wants to welcome into the Democratic tent, its website is quite explicit about who they wish to exclude. WelcomePAC blames the Democratic Party’s woes on an “extreme right and socialist left […] conspiring with conflict-driven media to trash the Democratic brand.” In a poorly-aged 2021 Substack post calling for a “Jim Clyburn Day,” Welcome co-founder Lauren Harper celebrated Clyburn’s 2020 endorsement of Biden for “steering the party away from further polarization that would have led to a second Trump term.”
WelcomeFest organizers have explicitly juxtaposed their event with the purportedly left-wing Democratic National Committee, offering a refuge to those put off by the Democratic Party’s current leadership. They firmly reject unspecified “progressive purity tests” (read: having values), but lack a compelling explanation for why swing and red state voters are flocking to the progressive-populist fight against oligarchy.
Bafflingly, for a group that promises to offer “a vision for a depolarized United States,” WelcomeFest only features Democrats speaking about the need to moderate. The group, which proudly touts the label of “centrist insurgency,” has seemingly little to offer a polarized Republican Party—which is perhaps why their previous campaign to convince five House Republicans to caucus with Democrats failed so spectacularly. This has hardly hampered their push for moderation at all costs. In pursuit of this end, the group has even invented a metric that claims safe blue congressional seats are undemocratic, encouraging Republican challengers to pursue previously uncontested blue seats.
Some of WelcomePAC’s top staff have also spent their careers working to move the Democratic Party to the right. Co-founder Liam Kerr previously spent 10 years working for Democrats for Education Reform, a charter school advocacy organization founded and funded by hedge fund managers. Welcome Party board member Catharine Bellinger has also spent her career working for the same pro-charter school groups as Kerr. WelcomePAC’s political director, Daniel Conway, spent nearly six years working for No Labels, the centrist dark money group co-founded by the late Joe Lieberman that repeatedly attempted to recruit a third party candidate to run for president in 2024.
Taken together, WelcomePAC’s leadership and funding are at odds with their claimed opposition to the “buttoned-up [politics] of Washington elites.” Like Third Way and the Democratic Leadership Council before it, Welcome is yet another donor- and elite-driven operation seeking to drag the Democratic Party rightward on economic policy. That “rebranded neoliberalism” approach risks further alienating the very constituencies that Democrats lost in 2016 and 2024, and ceding further ground to right-wing faux-populists like Vice President JD Vance.
Given the WelcomeFest lineup, it’s clear that the donor class views Abundance as key to carrying out this self-serving crusade against populism.
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