(From Press Release) – As California Sen. Scott Wiener’s SB 50 wends its way through legislative committees in Sacramento, housing justice and rent control advocates affiliated with Housing is a Human Right (HHR) today issued a new campaign mailer raising alarm about Wiener’s deep financial ties to the real estate industry as well as his flawed housing bill. HHR is the housing advocacy division of AIDS Healthcare Foundation.
The new mailer, headlined “Scott Wiener: The Man from Real Estate” (mailer front, mailer back) is being mailed today to residents and voters in his San Francisco district.
The California State Senate Governance and Finance Committee has voted 5 to 0 (with two absences) to advance Wiener’s troubling, trickle-down housing bill that forces ‘one size, fits all’ state control over local zoning decisions and regulations.
‘The Man from Real Estate’ mailer points out that Wiener, a one-time San Francisco supervisor who has long relied on vast amounts of campaign cash from luxury-housing developers and other real 
estate players to win elections and stay in power, that:
“In 2016, as he ran for the state senate, Scott Wiener hauled in nearly 700 donations from developers, real estate attorneys, brokers, lobbyists, architects, and other real estate insiders, totaling $574,276.”
The mailer also points out the devastating impact that SB 50 would have is enacted into law, including the facts that the bill would make California’s housing affordability crisis worse and would:
- “Generate billions of dollars in profit for the real estate players who are Senator Wiener’s political patrons.
- Fuel a luxury-housing building boom in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other municipalities.
- Worsen gentrification and displacement crises in California, particularly in working- and middle-class communities of color.”
According to the California Secretary of State’s Campaign Finance web site, for his entire 2016 senate campaign (and/or in year 2016) candidate Wiener raised a total of $1.899 million—including the $574,246 from various real estate stakeholders. The $574K raised from real estate concern represent more than one-third of his total campaign fundraising that year.
By comparison, his senate race opponent Jane Kim, also a former San Francisco Supervisor, raised $ 1.462 million. WITHOUT the $574K Wiener raised from real estate concerns, he would have raised $134,724 LESS than Kim, whom he beat by just 8,146 votes.
This basically put out Michal Weinstein, who has a long standing beef with Senator Wiener. I understand wanting to put out both sides here, but this is junk, imo.
Technical question: why should (would?) the VG print [from press release] stuff, when the issuer of the press release is not clearly identified? Particularly given the no anonymity thing…
It is a “post”… are there different rules for some?
Good point – most of the time it is fairly obvious who is putting out the press release but I should probably more clearly identify who did it in the future.
This is an interesting read and I believe has some strong insight in the approach of Wiener.
https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Fascism.html
As an economic system, fascism is socialism with a capitalist veneer. The word derives from fasces, the Roman symbol of collectivism and power: a tied bundle of rods with a protruding ax. In its day (the 1920s and 1930s), fascism was seen as the happy medium between boom-and-bust-prone liberal capitalism, with its alleged class conflict, wasteful competition, and profit-oriented egoism, and revolutionary Marxism, with its violent and socially divisive persecution of the bourgeoisie. Fascism substituted the particularity of nationalism and racialism—“blood and soil”—for the internationalism of both classical liberalism and Marxism.
Where socialism sought totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners. Where socialism nationalized property explicitly, fascism did so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the “national interest”—that is, as the autocratic authority conceived it. (Nevertheless, a few industries were operated by the state.) Where socialism abolished all market relations outright, fascism left the appearance of market relations while planning all economic activities. Where socialism abolished money and prices, fascism controlled the monetary system and set all prices and wages politically. In doing all this, fascism denatured the marketplace. Entrepreneurship was abolished. State ministries, rather than consumers, determined what was produced and under what conditions.
JH, I hear you.
Beyond that, I hear an empty wind in the desert