A small group of well-heeled property owners surrounding the Keller — the Halpern Group — have spent considerable treasure to advocate for the first option, while advocates for PSU’s proposed 3,000-seat complex range from Governor Tina Kotek to the Oregon Legislature to organized labor. PSU has already raised more than $137 million toward its vision of teaching spaces, a conference center and hotel, and the new large theater in what it is calling the Portland Arts and Culture Center, or PACC.

One thing both sides agree on is that the Keller Auditorium, built in 1917, cannot withstand a major earthquake. No one questions whether the Keller will close for seismic work; it will. The issue is what happens to the people whose livelihoods depend on it during the two years it is shut down.

That is the question Crossroads Consulting Services set out to answer in an economic impact analysis delivered to the City of Portland in May 2024. Commissioned through the City’s Office of Management and Finance, the report modeled a 24-month closure during fiscal years 2027 and 2028. In a debate that often drifts toward abstractions, this report is the clearest factual anchor. It deserves a larger place in the public discussion than it has gotten.

What it shows is sobering. In FY 2027, the closure would eliminate approximately 320 jobs supported by Keller operations and $20.5 million in regional labor income. In FY 2028, those figures rise to 336 jobs and $21.8 million in labor income. Over the two-year closure period, $42.3 million in labor income would disappear, along with $96.3 million in total economic output and approximately $5.1 million in local and state tax revenue. These are not aspirational projections about what some future arts investment might one day produce. They are conservative estimates, drawn from standard regional economic modeling, of what stops happening when a venue with $46.8 million in annual operating activity goes dark.

And those losses are not just lines on a spreadsheet. In FY 2028, the direct employment loss is 229 jobs: facility staff, stagehands organized through IATSE Local 28, musicians performing with touring orchestras, wardrobe workers, box office staff, and food and beverage workers serving audiences at intermission. Another 107 jobs would be lost indirectly or through induced effects: restaurant servers near the Keller whose Saturday-night tips depend on a show being in town, rideshare drivers, parking attendants, and suppliers tied to the facility’s operations. Crossroads explicitly names IATSE. Broadway Across America, the main vendor of this venue, warned of “the potential loss of jobs for members of IATSE and other staff associated with the Keller Auditorium” in its formal communication with the City.

Much of this turns on Broadway, the traveling company, which is the single largest source of the affected work. During fiscal years 2018 through 2023, Broadway accounted for 46 percent of Keller performances and 55 percent of total attendance, averaging approximately 177,000 annual Broadway attendees. According to Broadway Across America, more than half of those attendees come from the suburbs and beyond, and more than 70 percent are season subscribers. In a typical Portland season, six to eight touring shows run for as many as twelve weeks, with eight performances a week. Every one of those performances employs the IATSE crew, the touring musicians, and the facility staff who make the show possible.

If no successor venue is operating when the Keller closes, Portland will not simply put Broadway on hold for two years; it will lose it. Broadway Across America will move its Portland season to Seattle and San Francisco. Season subscribers, who make up most Broadway attendance, will spend their money elsewhere, as the Crossroads report predicts. Other users will move to other venues. Some may hesitate to come back even after construction ends if they see Portland as unreliable or uncertain. In other words, the damage would outlast the closure itself. Re-staffing the facility with skilled personnel becomes, in the report’s words, “a challenge.” The IATSE crews who have spent decades building technical expertise specific to Keller productions will either find other work in the region or relocate. Once that experience disperses, it does not snap back into place the day the doors reopen.

This is where the PACC matters most. If the Performing Arts and Culture Center is built and operating by the time the Keller closes for renovation, Broadway can move across the South Park Blocks to the PACC instead of across state lines to Seattle. The crews move with the touring schedule. Season subscribers keep their subscriptions. Musicians keep their gigs. Wardrobe staff keep their wages. Downtown restaurants keep their pre-show traffic. The labor income Crossroads projects as lost does not disappear because the work behind it continues.

Economic activity will propel the city’s resurgence, building on its robust and globally renowned arts and culture scene. PSU, which has lost 23 percent of its enrollment in recent years, would be able to capitalize on its new performing arts resource to attract students interested in both performance and back-of-the-house training.

A second labor benefit of the PACC option concerns construction. Because PSU is a public landowner, Oregon law requires that capital projects meet high-road construction standards, including prevailing wage requirements, the use of registered apprentices, and workforce equity protections. Over the life of the project, the construction phase is estimated to support roughly 2,000 construction jobs across the trades: laborers, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, ironworkers, and operating engineers. Portland needs more work of that kind, not less, at a moment when the region’s broader construction pipeline has slowed. In fact, the PSU project is expected to stimulate a 10-year building renaissance, returning cranes to the skies over Portland.

That helps explain why organized labor is lining up behind the project. This is not generic civic boosterism or a reflexive institutional endorsement. It is a practical response to a specific decision with visible consequences for its members. They understand the Crossroads numbers because those numbers describe the workers they represent. The labor case for the PACC is the one these organizations have been making to the legislature and the city all along. Portland’s reputed pro-labor city councilors should prioritize these objectives as they weigh the decision before them.

Sooner or later, the Keller will close. Once renovated, it could be reopened as an intermediate-sized performance space, adding to a thriving cultural mecca. Meanwhile, however, the question is whether the workers who keep it running go dark with it, or move a short distance to a successor venue ready to take them in. The Crossroads analysis puts a price on those two outcomes. The PACC is what makes the better one possible.

I want to stay with this scene because it shows how an old antisemitic script can run through an academic institution without ever using a slur.

Two small marks of punctuation around a working verb.

In her February 2026 testimony before the United States Commission on Civil Rights, Amy Spitalnick of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs described what makes antisemitism distinct from other forms of prejudice. It functions, she said, as a conspiracy theory rooted in tropes and lies about Jewish control and power. Jews are alleged to manipulate finance, manipulate numbers, and manipulate the institutions that other people inhabit in good faith. The remedy proposed by anyone who reproduces the trope is always the same: a public accounting, a demand that the suspected party submit to communal scrutiny of methods the community has already decided are suspect.

The trope does not need to identify you.

Antisemitism is harder to address than many other forms of bias for precisely this reason. A slur announces itself. A swastika announces itself. The conspiratorial mode operates differently. It works through syntax, framing, and the public theater of demand. It can be spoken by a colleague who has never used a slur in his life, who would object strenuously if asked whether he holds antisemitic views, and who may not consciously hold the suspicion that his sentences enact.

Consider how the conspiratorial accusation appears in professional settings. The accused is a member of a protected class who holds administrative responsibility involving numbers, budgets, or data. The accuser raises a question about transparency. The question is asked publicly rather than privately. The numbers the accused has presented are placed in quotation marks, indicating they may not be real numbers, may not be the right numbers, or were derived through methods the community does not understand and therefore must distrust. The accused is asked to demonstrate his methods to an assembled group. The demand is framed not as discipline but as healing. The community has been suffering. The accused is either the source of or the obstacle to relieving the suffering. His public confession of method is the path to collective repair.

Individually, these elements are innocuous: transparency as a virtue, methodological demonstration as normal academic practice, communal healing as a worthy aim. The trope does not need to identify you; it organizes the combination. The combination produces an old sequence of suspicion: the figure who hides the numbers, the demand for public exposure, the framing of his accounting as restorative for everyone else.

The trope of Jewish manipulation of finance and numbers is among the oldest in the antisemitic repertoire. It spans centuries: from the medieval moneylender to the Weimar caricature of the Jewish financier engineering economic ruin to the contemporary financial conspirator. The version that took root in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s did not begin in the camps. It began with newspaper articles, radio broadcasts, and public demands that Jewish methods be subjected to communal scrutiny. When a professional setting reproduces the demand to expose hidden Jewish manipulation of numbers, it is not inventing a new accusation. It is reactivating an old one.

A colleague who enacts this sequence need not be antisemitic in any conventional sense. He may be repeating a pattern he has never examined. He may believe, sincerely, that the suspicion he holds is a response to objective evidence rather than a script. He may even see himself as an ally, serving on diversity committees and imagining that he is merely advocating for fairness. The script does not care what he believes. The script runs through him.

Spitalnick was careful to describe antisemitism as a feedback loop rather than a fixed inventory of slurs. The conspiratorial mode adapts to different cover stories. One year it appears as “fiscal responsibility,” another as “program oversight,” another as “community healing” or “transparency reform.” The language changes, but the suspicion stays the same. It appears among people on the right and people on the left. It appears among people who consider themselves allies of Jewish colleagues, who would be wounded to learn that their words have been recognized for what they were.

The recognition is an account of pattern, not an accusation of intent. Pattern is what trope is.

I have collected examples of this pattern in my working life. I have not collected them to file as evidence in any single proceeding. I have collected them to confirm that I am not imagining what addresses me, that the unease I feel in these moments is not a private paranoia but a recognizable script. The trope does not need me to be visibly Jewish to function. It needs only that I occupy the position the trope assigns: the administrative role involving numbers, the methodological complexity that others in the institution have not learned, and the accounting that the community can demand.

Once a person has been placed in that role, the trope arrives, whether his name announces him or not. The quotation marks are added. The demand is made. The community is summoned. The figure is asked to account for himself.

The first protection is recognition. Not of the colleague, not of the grievance, not of the apology. Recognition of what addresses you, so that the next time the quotation marks appear around someone else’s verb, in someone else’s email, on someone else’s list, the people who read the message know what they are reading.

If there is a second protection, it is refusal: refusal to treat these demands as neutral, refusal to see quotation marks around someone’s work as a harmless stylistic choice.

Two small marks of punctuation. The trope rides on smaller things than that.

Whether the Moda Center renovation fits the same pattern as the Washington Commanders deal, the King Dome saga, and the Tampa Bay Rays subsidy is not easily answered. The answer is more complicated than the public conversation allows: the framing drives the politics, and the conditions determine the contract. Whichever positions hold political weight over the next four months will shape the 20-year lease.

I. The proposal on the table

Nearly two years after the City of Portland purchased the Moda Center from the estate of Paul Allen for $7.13 million in August 2024, Senate President Rob Wagner introduced Senate Bill 1501. The legislation, which Governor Tina Kotek signed on April 27 after a bipartisan 24-6 Senate vote, established a framework for shared ownership of the arena between the State of Oregon and the City of Portland. The state is authorized to issue up to $365 million in general obligation bonds toward a renovation estimated at $600 million. The state’s contribution is contingent on the Trail Blazers signing a binding 20-year lease after the sale of the franchise to Texas billionaire Tom Dundon, who purchased the team for $4.25 billion in August 2025.

The City of Portland, under Mayor Keith Wilson, has proposed $120 million in upfront capital and an additional $14 million per year in operating and maintenance costs over the life of the lease, for a total city contribution exceeding $400 million over 20 years. Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson has proposed $88 million in renovation funding and an additional $13 million in maintenance from county sources, including motor vehicle rental tax and business income tax revenues. The Blazers, under Dundon, have committed zero dollars to construction, though the team would be responsible for cost overruns.

The combined public commitment, in present-value terms, is about $665 million against a privately held franchise that just sold for $4.25 billion, to an owner whose fortune was built running the nation’s largest subprime auto lender.

II. What opponents get right

Opponents are not wrong about how stadium financing works. A 2023 review in the Journal of Economic Surveys, conducted by economists John Charles Bradbury, Dennis Coates, and Brad R. Humphreys, examined more than 130 studies of stadium and arena subsidies spanning four decades and concluded that large public subsidies for professional sports venues are not justified by their returns.

The Trail Blazers organization, Mayor Wilson’s office, and the bill’s legislative sponsors cite economic-impact figures. They list $670 million in annual regional impact, 4,500 jobs, 1.6 million annual visitors, and 7,000 hotel rooms booked for a single sporting event. But the figures rely heavily on flawed methodologies that treat money spent at the arena as new economic activity rather than as spending diverted from other regional venues, count private profit as public benefit, and label construction wages as economic stimulus without subtracting the opportunity cost of the public dollars.

Portland economist Joe Cortright has called the proposal a giveaway. State Senator Kim Thatcher, one of six votes against SB 1501, cited the same body of research on the Senate floor; her vote was correct on the empirical merits even if her broader politics are not.

Opponents are right about the pattern: the public bears the cost. At the same time, the private owner keeps the revenue, a recurring mechanism by which billionaires capture public subsidies for the construction of vanity assets that remain in private hands.

III. The distinction that changes the analysis

One feature sets the Moda Center deal apart from the standard pattern.

Because the City of Portland owns the building, the renovation, if it proceeds, would be a public investment in a publicly held facility, not a transfer of public money to a private owner for the construction of a private building. The closest analogies are the Portland International Airport, which Mayor Wilson invoked in his State of the City address; the Oregon Convention Center; the Veterans Memorial Coliseum next door; and the public museums, libraries, and concert halls that constitute the cultural infrastructure of every American city.

Public investment in shared civic infrastructure is a defensible tradition on the left, different in kind from the Washington Commanders subsidy, the Atlanta Falcons subsidy, or the dozen other deals Robert Reich has documented. The Commanders and their stadium are privately owned; the public was paying off a billionaire’s mortgage. The Moda Center is publicly owned, and the public would be paying for upgrades to a public asset. The distinction is necessary, though not sufficient.

Public ownership of the building does not, by itself, change the pattern: the public bears the cost while the private owner keeps the revenue. Under a 20-year lease to a privately held franchise, the renovation revenue, naming rights, concessions, ticket revenue, and franchise appreciation all remain in private hands. Public ownership relocates the cost-revenue split rather than ending it.

Public ownership creates a contractual position in which enforceable conditions can be written into the lease before public money is committed. Without such conditions, public ownership is a formality that changes the accounting but not the political or financial stakes. Under the conditions outlined in Section VII, public ownership becomes the precondition for a public investment that differs in kind from the standard stadium subsidy. The distinction depends on the conditions being written into the lease as enforceable terms. Failing that, the objection is valid.

What the council writes into the lease will determine whether the public investment returns enough value to the public to justify the expenditure, and whether the labor, environmental, and community requirements attached to the renovation are set out in enforceable contract language rather than left to the goodwill of a Texas billionaire.

IV. Lower Albina and the question of restorative development

For much of the twentieth century, the neighborhood now called Lower Albina was the heart of Portland’s Black community. The neighborhood was decimated in the 1950s and 1960s when scores of homes and businesses were demolished to make way for Interstate 5 and for the Memorial Coliseum. The displacement and redlining that preceded it have been documented by the Albina Vision Trust, the Portland City Archives, and the I-5 Rose Quarter Improvement Project’s own history page. The Moda Center sits on land taken from a Black neighborhood under an urban renewal policy well-documented by historians.

The Albina Vision Trust, led by Executive Director Winta Yohannes, has spent several years building a restorative development plan for the neighborhood. Albina One, the 94-unit affordable housing development that opened in September 2025, was the first major project. It was designed and constructed by Colas Construction, only the second Black-owned construction company to put a crane in the sky in Oregon’s history. In 2024, the Trust entered into the Albina Rose Alliance, a formal partnership with the Blazers organization built on a joint development strategy, joint legislative advocacy, and a shared commitment to the generational prosperity of displaced residents.

Yohannes told state lawmakers in February that the success or failure of SB 1501 would depend on how the deal affected the entire neighborhood, not just the arena. Yohannes’s testimony places public investment within a frame that the populist objection does not address: whether the renovation of a community asset can be tied to the rebuilding of a community destroyed by prior policies. The frame is restorative, not philanthropic. It treats the Moda Center renovation as one piece of a larger accounting the city owes to Lower Albina, including the Albina Vision Trust’s freeway caps over I-5, the 1803 Fund, the affordable housing pipeline, and a community benefits agreement that has not yet been written into the lease.

V. Two tales of organized labor

The labor argument for the renovation breaks into two parts, and the two parts are not the same case.

The case for the construction workforce is the stronger of the two. Councilor Eric Zimmerman and the Mayor's office have committed to a project labor agreement, with prevailing wage requirements, local apprenticeship hiring through the Oregon State Building and Construction Trades Council, measurable diversity targets, and Pacific Northwest-sourced timber.

Multnomah County Chair Vega Pederson has demanded union labor for both construction and ongoing operations and maintenance work at both Moda Center and the Veterans Memorial Coliseum as a prerequisite for the county’s contribution.

The Oregon State Building and Construction Trades Council represents 31 member unions. Laborers Local 737, Ironworkers Local 29, Glass Workers Local 740, Elevator Constructors Local 23, and Linoleum/Carpet Local 1236 are among its locals with jurisdiction over the work. A union-built renovation of a publicly owned building is precisely the project the labor movement has fought for across the postwar period, from the Hoover Dam to the federal courthouses to the PDX modernization that Mayor Wilson invoked as an analogy.

The case for the operations workforce is more troubling. The food service, concessions, parking, ticketing, and logistics workforce at the current Moda Center is not unionized, except for a small group of engineers. Mark Davison, president of Teamsters Joint Council 37, told the Portland Mercury in April that the lack of union representation in those categories is atypical for Oregon, a state without right-to-work laws, and that the Teamsters had been in conversation with Moda workers for roughly a year about the terms of their employment before the public funding negotiations began. The Teamsters represent workers at Lumen Field and Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle, Oracle Park in San Francisco, and Ball Arena in Denver; the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union represents workers at other comparable venues across the country.

Organized labor in Portland is pushing for a labor peace agreement, a neutrality contract committing the Blazers’ incoming ownership group, under Tom Dundon, to remain neutral during union organizing campaigns and to refrain from suggesting opposition to representation. Councilor Mitch Green has stated publicly that a labor peace agreement should be a bare-minimum precondition for any public financing of arena renovations. The condition is not currently in the deal.

The operations question is where the populist argument has the most political traction and where the conditional argument must be most precise. A renovation that creates union construction jobs while leaving the operations workforce in the hands of a billionaire who has no track record of labor neutrality is not a complete labor victory. The labor case for the renovation requires both union construction and a binding labor peace agreement covering the existing workforce, written into the lease as a condition of public funding.

VI. The Clean Energy Fund problem

The Portland Clean Energy Fund was passed by Portland voters in 2018 as a 1% surcharge on the sales of large retailers with more than $1 billion in national revenue. The fund was originally projected to generate $60 million annually; it has averaged $200 million per year since collections began. The mandate is climate investment with community benefit, with a particular focus on creating jobs for people of color, building infrastructure to respond to climate change. The mandate has not been amended by voters since.

Mayor Wilson’s proposed funding package includes up to $75 million in PCEF revenue, contingent on a Climate Investment Plan amendment and approval by the PCEF citizen-led advisory committee. This allocation is the most contested element of the package. Two left-leaning councilors, Mitch Green and Tiffany Koyama Lane, have refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement that would have given them access to the ongoing negotiations between the city and the Blazers; the stated reason is that the public case for the use of PCEF money should be made in public, not behind closed doors. Several other councilors, including Jamie Dunphy, Elana Pirtle-Guiney, and Sameer Kanal, have indicated they could support the use of PCEF revenue conditioned on the advisory committee’s recommendation. No advisory committee recommendation has been issued because no design plan or project scope has yet been finalized. The Blazers have not yet selected a general contractor, and the project timeline indicates that final design plans will not be available until December.

The PCEF allocation is the weakest point in the conditional case. The fund was created to support specific climate and equity work with accountability mechanisms in a city with a documented history of climate work being defunded when a higher-priority political demand arises. The Albina Rose Alliance includes climate-friendly building commitments, and some portion of the renovation could meet PCEF eligibility standards, particularly if the building is upgraded to a fully electric standard with solar generation, energy storage, and resilience infrastructure that serves the surrounding neighborhood during heat domes and ice storms.

PCEF eligibility has not been established. Until the design scope is public, until the climate components are itemized and budgeted, until the PCEF advisory committee has issued a recommendation against the existing Climate Investment Plan criteria, the PCEF allocation is a giveaway with climate language attached. It cannot be defended.

VII. The conditions of a defensible deal

The conditional case requires that the lease language include the following provisions as conditions of public funding:

• A binding labor peace agreement: Covering the food service, concessions, parking, ticketing, logistics, and operations workforce at the Moda Center, modeled on the Lumen Field and Climate Pledge Arena agreements.

• A project labor agreement: Covering all construction phases of the renovation, with prevailing wage, local hire through Oregon State Building and Construction Trades Council apprenticeships, and diversity targets enforced through hiring data rather than aspirational language.

• A community benefits agreement: Coordinated with the Albina Vision Trust, the 1803 Fund, and the Portland Opportunities Industrialization Center. It must be enforceable in court and include measurable commitments to affordable housing pipelines, displaced-resident return programs, and local procurement.

• A public equity stake: Capturing the franchise’s appreciation during the term of the 20-year lease, structured as a share of any eventual sale price above a defined threshold. (Edan Krolewicz, the Trail Blazers fan who launched the Rip City Not Rip Off campaign, has proposed a model that would generate $6.7 to $10.2 million annually for the city, and is one approach among several.)

• Restricted PCEF allocations: Tied strictly to verified climate components of the renovation, evaluated by the PCEF advisory committee against the existing Climate Investment Plan criteria, with the burden of proof on the city to demonstrate eligibility rather than on the advisory committee to identify exclusion.

The conditional case also requires that the negotiations be conducted in public, not under a non-disclosure agreement. Council Vice President Olivia Clark and Council President Jamie Dunphy have justified the NDA by arguing that complex commercial negotiations require confidentiality. Because the Blazers are negotiating with a public body to use public money to renovate a publicly owned building, however, the public has a right to see the terms before they are written into a 20-year lease that will outlast the current council. Councilors Green and Koyama Lane were correct to refuse the NDA. Their refusal sets a model for the rest of the council's negotiating posture.

VIII. The choice before the council

It is true that Portland is heavily taxed and that city services are deteriorating. It is also true that the maneuver by which billionaires take public money while teachers are furloughed is a recurring pattern of American urban politics, and that this pattern deserves our wrath.

Treating the Moda Center renovation as a replication of the welfare-for-billionaires scheme is misleading, however.

The current deal does not meet any of the conditions outlined in Section VII. It is being negotiated under a non-disclosure agreement. The funding package includes a PCEF diversion. The package contains no labor peace agreement covering the existing workforce. The package contains no public equity stake in the franchise. The team is contributing zero dollars to construction.

An optimal deal is possible. Councilors Green and Koyama Lane are exercising political muscle from outside the negotiating room, and they should be supported by every Portlander.

Two verdicts are possible. If the council writes the conditions of Section VII into the lease as enforceable terms, the renovation becomes a defensible public investment, and the case for support stands. If the council writes the deal currently being negotiated under non-disclosure, in which the team contributes zero dollars to construction, the operations workforce remains non-union, the PCEF is diverted, and the public retains no equity stake in franchise appreciation, the case for opposition stands.

Portland has the negotiating advantage in this political moment: the city owns the building, the state has conditioned its bonds, and the Blazers cannot move without a new arena, and no other city has one ready. The advantage stands, and the negotiations are not over. The council’s choice over the next four months determines which of these two verdicts prevails.

In April 2000, the High Court of Justice in London ruled in Irving v. Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt. David Irving had sued Lipstadt for libel after she identified him in print as a Holocaust denier. The court considered whether the documentary record of the Final Solution was open to interpretation, as Irving had insisted. Justice Charles Gray ruled that it was not. Irving had falsified the evidence. The records said what they said, and Irving had bent them past the point of any defensible reading.

The ruling established a principle that institutions across the democratic world rely on but rarely defend. Documents have integrity. Records cohere. The category of fact, when constituted by a chain of dated, signed, archived materials, is not infinitely plastic. There is a point beyond which the phrase “open to interpretation” no longer describes legitimate disagreement and begins describing evasion.

A public record is a particular kind of artifact. It is generated in the ordinary course of administrative work, retained under statutory authority, subject to release under public records law, and indexed against the time of its creation. Each email bears metadata. Each calendar entry bears a timestamp. Each meeting note bears the names of those present. The record is not a representation of an event. The record is the event, occurring in the same institutional time as the actions it documents.

Documents require reading. Contracts are construed by their terms; statutes are read with reference to their preambles and legislative history; intent is weighed against the circumstances of the act. Proper interpretation reads a document with reference to its accompanying correspondence, prior policy, statutory framework, and office practice, and renders a reading the reader is bound to honor. The interpretive pretext does the opposite. It withholds related evidence, isolates the document from its context, and declares the isolated text ambiguous beyond adjudication. Where interpretation narrows uncertainty, the pretext manufactures it. Where interpretation binds the reader to its result, the pretext requires a reader determined to remain unbound.

Hannah Arendt described this maneuver in 1971, in an essay written immediately after the publication of the Pentagon Papers. “Lying in Politics” is her account of how a bureaucracy constructs a documentary record at variance with its actions, and then, when the record is exposed, treats it as material to be re-narrated. The bureaucratic image of the event — what Arendt called “image-making” — substitutes for the event itself. The facts do not disappear. They are converted, through bureaucratic rephrasing, into a form the institution can defend. The memo becomes a draft. The decision becomes a discussion about the decision. The record is preserved, and the meaning of the record is suspended in the same act.

This maneuver, the interpretive pretext, permits an institution to acknowledge the existence of records while disowning what the records establish. It preserves the appearance of transparency while suspending the consequences of transparency. The records are released. The records are dismissed. The two acts occur in the same sentence.

The American tobacco industry sustained the pretext for nearly four decades and lost. Internal research memoranda from Brown and Williamson, R.J. Reynolds, and Philip Morris documented, in plain language, what the executives publicly denied: nicotine’s addictive properties, the carcinogenic profile of cigarette smoke, and the deliberate engineering of products to sustain dependence. Publicly, the industry maintained that the science was inconclusive. Privately, the engineering proceeded based on documented findings. When the records surfaced through whistleblower disclosure and discovery in state attorney general litigation, the defense was not that the documents had been forged. The defense was that the documents were exploratory, contextual, internal scientific dialogue, open to interpretation. The 1998 Master Settlement Agreement was, among other things, a legal verdict on that defense. The documents were read as documents.

The pretext did not end with the Master Settlement. In January 2017, on Meet the Press, Kellyanne Conway defended the Trump administration’s false claims about inauguration crowd size by telling Chuck Todd the administration was offering “alternative facts.” The phrase entered the language overnight. It named, in three words, the same defense the tobacco industry had run for forty years, and the same maneuver Arendt had diagnosed in 1971. Photographs, transit data, and attendance figures: none were contested. The administration acknowledged them and offered, in their place, an alternative reading. What had taken decades to articulate became, in three words, common knowledge.

Public institutions are bound by public records law because legislatures, over the course of the twentieth century, decided that institutions funded by the public should be answerable for what they did, not what they intended or what they later wished they had done. The basis of that accountability is the record they themselves created, retained, and now must release. The statutory scheme rests on a premise: the records will speak, not be interpreted into silence by the same office that issued them.

What the tobacco industry could not sustain in court, respondents in a public-sector grievance now attempt in personnel adjudication. The respondents are the named parties against whom the grievance has been filed. They receive a documentary record of dated, signed, archived emails that establish the chronology of decisions and name the actors. They do not claim the documents have been forged; they claim the documents are open to interpretation. They do not engage the metadata, address the timestamps, or furnish the correspondence thread that would resolve any genuine ambiguity. They isolate each document, declare its meaning unsettled, and rest. They thereby assert that the institution is not bound by its own records. They suspend the documentary regime under which public institutions operate the moment it becomes inconvenient.

The principle to defend is simple and old. Some words mean what they mean. Some sequences of events occurred in the order they occurred. Some emails were sent on the dates they were sent. Interpretation has its proper work, and its proper work is not the refusal of fact. To call the refusal of fact interpretation is to keep the form of reading and abandon its purpose. Respondents who refuse to read a record as a record forfeit the credibility to defend the institution’s actions on evidentiary grounds. An institution that permits its respondents to deny the meaning of its own records forfeits any claim to public accountability.

House Bill 4124 directs the Higher Education Coordinating Commission to study Oregon’s seven public universities, evaluate their distinct missions, and recommend changes, including collaboration, restructuring, or institutional integration. The bill targets unnecessary program duplication for elimination. It authorizes HECC to use third-party contractors to carry out all or part of the study, and sets a preliminary report due October 1, 2026, and a final report due April 1, 2027.

The Higher Education Coordinating Commission posted draft principles for the new law on its website without issuing a press release or holding a public hearing. Instead, it offered bullet points under the heading “We are committed to,” written in the careful prose of an agency that has already decided what it intends to do and now needs a process to confirm it.

One principle holds that recommendations should not rely “on major increases to public funding.” Another commits the process to “being realistic and working within the parameters that the Legislature established in HB 4124, even when it is uncomfortable.”

The Same Argument at Two Scales

Representative Pam Marsh (D-Ashland) told Oregon Public Broadcasting that the legislature did not have time to “sit around and twiddle our thumbs” and that the system had to be turned around quickly. The bill she sponsored passed the House 36 to 6 on February 27, 2026, and the Senate the following week.

Marsh cast the bill as a response to public mistrust, saying the system had lost the public’s confidence and that of legislators trying to understand why higher education costs seem so unconstrained. By recasting the political question as an efficiency issue, the legislature put the funding question off the table. The political question becomes not whether the state will fund higher education, but whether universities spend efficiently enough.

On that point, Democrats and Republicans agree: Oregon’s public universities will not receive substantially more state money in the foreseeable future. Earlier this year, the legislature gave Southern Oregon University a $15 million emergency bailout when SOU projected it could not cover payroll. It could have stopped there. Instead, Salem expanded the response into a system-wide restructuring study. Without new funding, restructuring becomes the answer.

Portland State University has been advancing the same argument as Salem for two years. The PIVOT process rests on the same premise: structural reorganization, not new revenue or reserve allocation. President Ann Cudd’s March 2026 Article 22 retrenchment declaration, naming 19 academic units for elimination, follows the same logic. At both the state and institutional levels, underfunding is being addressed not with funding but with reorganization.

The rhetoric is identical: “right-sizing,” “mission alignment,” “strategic prioritization,” “institutional sustainability.” These phrases recur in HECC documents, PIVOT materials, Cudd’s communications, and the bill’s text. HECC, the legislature, and PSU’s administration all use the same language to justify their choices.

The Portland State chapter of the American Association of University Professors and the Interinstitutional Faculty Senate, which represents elected faculty from all seven public universities and OHSU, both warned in February that any restructuring study “must be explicitly linked to a commitment to adequate and sustainable public funding for higher education” and that restructuring without new investment risks masking a funding crisis as a governance problem. The Interinstitutional Faculty Senate registered a parallel objection, insisting that faculty at each institution must retain a predominant role in decisions about academic programming and curricular change.

Two Accounts, One University

PSU’s own statements about its financial conditions contradict each other. In feedback on HECC’s January 2026 Spending and Efficiency in Oregon Public Universities report, PSU stressed that its operating expenses grew just 2.8 percent annually between fiscal year 2015 and fiscal year 2024, below inflation and the system average, and that total staff FTE fell by 106 positions over the decade, even as staffing rose systemwide.

To HECC, PSU claimed to be efficient. To its faculty, it claimed to be in crisis, with no more efficiencies to be found. Those claims cannot both be true. The administration is tailoring its story to its audience.

HECC’s own report shows PSU ending fiscal year 2026 with the largest Educational and General (E&G) reserve cushion in the state system: about $82 million, or 2.9 months of operating revenue. The university with the most reserve capacity in Oregon is also the one declaring a fiscal emergency and invoking retrenchment. Its primary reserve ratio, a standard measure of whether reserves can cover operating obligations, is 0.44, above the Board of Trustees’ aspirational threshold of 0.40, even after subtracting pension accounting effects that have no operational meaning.

Administrators may object that all-funds metrics include restricted dollars unavailable for operations. But that does not explain away the $82 million in E&G reserves, the fund that pays faculty salaries. Those figures come from PSU’s audited financial statements.

Reserves cannot cover a structural deficit indefinitely. Article 22 raises a sharper question: whether PSU has reached the point where retrenchment is the only remaining option. Employee unions say it has not. Voluntary separation incentives, attrition, reallocations across reserve categories, and time-limited reserve use are alternatives the administration has declined to adopt.

The retrenchment declaration is not a response to exhausted resources. It is a discretionary act by Oregon’s best-resourced public university, taken before the state study is complete. Cudd has chosen to treat an E&G-only problem as institutionally insoluble. Salem did not force this outcome. PSU adopted a state rhetoric that makes discretionary choices appear necessary.

The Sequence and the Stake

The bill’s compressed timeline obligates HECC to issue a preliminary report on October 1, 2026, and a final report on April 1, 2027. PSU issued its Article 22 retrenchment declaration in March 2026 and is moving toward implementation on a timeline that will conclude well before HECC delivers its findings.

Consultants arriving in autumn 2026 to assess Oregon’s public universities will find PSU in the middle of an active retrenchment, with program eliminations underway and an administrative narrative insisting that restructuring is the only available response to fiscal pressure.

That matters because PSU’s actions will set a precedent. They will shape the recommendations for Western Oregon University, Eastern Oregon University, Oregon Institute of Technology, and Southern Oregon University.

Defenders of PSU’s actions may argue that the university is an outlier: an urban university with stronger reserves whose circumstances do not apply to other institutions. But that cuts the other way. If the university best positioned to resist borrowed scarcity instead embraces it most fully, the message to less-resourced institutions is clear: retrenchment is now standard.

Eastern Oregon University Board Chair Charles Hofmann warned the legislature in February that for rural-serving universities, mandates of the kind HECC was considering could weaken access, destabilize operations, and undermine the very efficiencies the recommendations sought to achieve. Hofmann observed in the same testimony that much of the program growth at EOU and other rural-serving universities consists of low-cost concentrations, certificates, and workforce-aligned pathways built onto existing courses, often with net-neutral or positive fiscal impacts. Cutting them to satisfy the bill’s duplication target would harm the communities they serve.

Eastern Oregon University has already implemented an 8.4 percent operating budget cut and has among the lowest growth in total cost of attendance in the Oregon system. It has already undergone the kind of structural contraction HECC is now considering recommending.

When the system’s best-resourced university treats $82 million in reserves as insufficient reason for moderation, institutions with less capacity will read retrenchment as no longer optional.

PSU, whose decisions HECC’s consultants will treat as evidence, should itself be subject to the standards Oregon’s faculty bodies have demanded under the bill: explicit linkage to a commitment to public funding, a predominant faculty role in academic and curricular decisions, and meaningful consultation that is not late, formal, or pro forma. PSU meets none of them.

The Choice

HECC will conduct its study on the question the legislature chose to ask. The real question is funding. The offered answer is governance. PSU has accepted that substitution.

The next twelve months will determine which position becomes state policy. Every university that enacts retrenchment before HECC finishes its work ratifies the premise and supplies evidence for it after the fact. Every university that delays, contests, or reverses retrenchment forces the inquiry to confront the premise it was designed to confirm.

In March, an Israeli Air Force officer was interrogated about bets he had placed on Polymarket. The contracts in question covered the timing of Israeli and American strikes on Iran. Investigators alleged that one squadron member fed nonpublic operational information to a colleague, and the two had earned roughly $244,000 by trading on the war they were preparing to fight. A separate crewman, interrogated about a smaller set of trades on the same conflict, offered an explanation that no senior officer wanted to enter into the record. The entire squadron is on Polymarket, he told his interrogators. The entire air force is betting.

An air force pilot, instructed to keep operational timing secret as a condition of his oath, has discovered that the timing is a tradable asset. He can monetize his knowledge of when the planes take off, making the timing financially worth more than his role in the strike. What the airman described is not a personal failure. The prediction-market design rewards anyone with insider information the same way.

Israeli airmen are not the only ones betting on their own missions. On April 23, federal prosecutors in Manhattan unsealed an indictment against Master Sergeant Gannon Ken Van Dyke, a United States Army Special Forces soldier stationed at Fort Bragg. Van Dyke participated in the planning of Operation Absolute Resolve, the January 3 raid that captured Nicolás Maduro in Caracas. Between December 27 and January 2, he opened a Polymarket account and placed roughly $33,000 in bets across thirteen contracts: that United States forces would be in Venezuela by January 31, that Maduro would be out of office by that date, and that the President would invoke the War Powers Act. The contracts paid out on the morning of the raid. Van Dyke netted $409,881. He moved most of the money to a foreign cryptocurrency vault, asked Polymarket to delete his account, and posted a photograph of himself at sunrise on a ship deck in fatigues, holding a rifle. Twenty days later, he closed on a $340,000 house.

The Commodification of Knowledge

The industry calls this “information finance,” and its operators expect it to be the next major asset class. Kalshi, valued at $22 billion in March, processes more than $100 billion in annualized trading volume. Polymarket, valued at roughly $15 billion in April, processed $29 billion through its books in the first four months of the year. Annual prediction-market volume across the sector climbed from $15 billion in 2024 to $63 billion in 2025, and is on pace to roughly double again in 2026. In March alone, the sector logged 192 million transactions. Coinbase, Robinhood, Kraken, DraftKings, and FanDuel have all added prediction markets in the past year. Both Kalshi and Polymarket launched perpetual futures contracts in April, allowing traders to take leveraged positions on unresolved political and military events indefinitely.

Polymarket and Kalshi, the two largest prediction-market platforms, refer to themselves as knowledge brokers. They offer a public-interest justification: prediction markets forecast public events more accurately than polls, pundits, or experts. Nate Silver, the most recognizable name in election forecasting, has signed on as an advisor to Polymarket. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission ruled in March that prediction markets are derivatives, placing them inside the federal regulatory framework that Wall Street investors require before they can invest in an asset class. CNBC sponsors Kalshi and holds a minority stake. Yet, despite their lofty claims of forecasting utility, sports betting accounts for 90% of Kalshi’s revenue, according to industry analysis. The product is, in Susan Strange’s words, casino capitalism.

In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi described how capitalism advances by treating land, labor, and money as commodities even though none of the three was produced for the market. The market treats them as ordinary goods regardless. The result is the long story of the past two centuries: the dispossession of peasants from common land, the factory acts, the recurrent monetary crises, and the fights over the length of the working day. One feature of capitalism is the steady production of new fictitious commodities, driven by capital’s need to find new outlets for accumulation when existing ones become unprofitable. The first major addition after Polanyi’s three was knowledge, commodified across the centuries from the patent office to the data broker. The next was social-media data, which Tiziana Terranova calls “free labor” and Shoshana Zuboff “surveillance capitalism.” Polymarket and Kalshi are now adding public events to the list.

Shaping the World They Price

Prediction markets convert events into prices. A missile strike, a troop deployment, a head of state’s removal, a journalist’s wire story, a strait closing: each becomes a contract, each gets a price, each attracts trading volume, each produces a payout. The contract not only predicts the event, but also turns it into an asset for the investor who profits from it. The contracts pay out on the decisions of generals, presidents, and reporters. They then reshape the behavior of those same actors, by giving each a financial stake in the outcome of his own decisions.

The defense of the platforms draws on Friedrich Hayek’s theory of the price system. In The Use of Knowledge in Society, Hayek argued that markets coordinate dispersed knowledge in ways no planner can match. The argument assumes that the trader is a passive observer with private knowledge of an outcome the market is only trying to predict. The model breaks the moment a trader can affect the outcome on which his contract pays. The platforms produce the conditions under which Hayek’s theory no longer applies.

Between Sunday, April 5, and Wednesday, April 8, 413 million bets were placed on Polymarket contracts tied to the war with Iran. More than $100 million was at risk. The largest single trading day was April 8, the day after the President warned on Truth Social that a civilization would die that night. 100,000 bets were placed that day on whether American troops would enter Iran. The President’s post triggered a wave of trading, which in turn created an audience for the next post. The President’s son, Donald Trump Jr., holds an investor stake in Polymarket through 1789 Capital and serves as an advisor to Kalshi. He is positioned to profit from the price movement generated by his father’s announcements. A spokesman called the question of conflict of interest “fact-free Democratic propaganda.” But the conflict is built into the platform’s design.

The contracts also pay out on what reporters write. On March 11, Emanuel Fabian, a military correspondent for the Times of Israel, reported that an Iranian missile had struck Israeli territory. Bettors aggressively traded on the nuances of his report, with roughly $14 million wagered on the final outcome. Those who had taken the other side messaged Fabian, demanding that he reframe the missile as intercepted debris. Some offered him a cut of their winnings. When he refused, they threatened to kill him. The threats were specific, repeated, and credible enough that he reported them to police and wrote about the experience publicly. Fabian was not pressured by the Iranian government, the Israeli government, or any state actor. He was pressured by bettors on a Polymarket contract whose payoff depended on the wording of his story.

The Public Sphere as Asset Class

What makes the present platforms historically distinctive is that the contracts shape the events they price. Earlier forms of political wagering existed at the margins of the public sphere and did not reach the actors whose decisions the markets priced. The Iowa Electronic Markets, founded by University of Iowa economists in 1988 to study aggregation properties under controlled conditions, operated at a $500-per-account limit and remained a small research project. Intrade, the Dublin-based platform that ran from 2003 to 2013, attracted a small popular following during the Bush and Obama elections, but went bankrupt after the Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed an enforcement action against it. Neither platform was integrated with the established financial system, neither attracted Wall Street money, and neither was politically connected to a serving presidential administration. The accuracy claims that emerged from the Iowa research, demonstrating that small-stakes prediction markets outperformed polling in several presidential elections, do not survive the transition to large-stakes platforms in which participants can affect the outcomes on which they bet.

The new platforms are different on every count. They are large enough to reshape the incentives of the actors whose decisions they price, integrated enough with the financial system to attract Wall Street investors, and politically connected enough to operate in the open. The platforms have positioned themselves at the meeting point of venture capital, cryptocurrency exchanges, the brokerage industry, and the political family that controls the executive branch.

Polymarket and Kalshi enmesh the actors whose decisions determine the events being priced — pilots who fly the missions, master sergeants who plan the operations, reporters who file the stories, Presidents who post the threats. Once those actors have a financial position in the outcome of their own decisions, the decisions are no longer made the same way. The platforms are not just profiting from public life; they are reshaping it from inside. Marx called this kind of operation real subsumption, though he was describing the factory floor rather than the public sphere.

Elections, wars, policy decisions, and the speech acts of public officials become assets that pay out. The pilot whose squadron is on Polymarket flies a different mission. The master sergeant whose operation moves a contract plans a different operation. The reporter whose wire story is worth $14 million writes a different story. The President whose every threat creates a hundred thousand bets governs for a different audience, regardless of his intentions.

Shayne Coplan and Tarek Mansour describe their platforms as knowledge producers. The business is more straightforward: a fee-based exchange where bettors trade contracts on events they increasingly seek to influence, and the house takes a cut of every transaction. Coplan told Axios in November that he was glad his platform paid people to leak confidential information. He called the arrangement “super cool.” Some might consider certain data leaks treasonous.

Polanyi called the social response to commodification the double movement. Society pushes back against the market’s attempt to absorb what was never made for sale. The fights over the wage, the length of the working day, the protection of land, and the regulation of money have defined political life for two centuries. A political response to prediction markets has not yet taken shape. Six states have moved against Kalshi and Polymarket: Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Treating this strictly as a gambling issue misses the broader pathology. The platforms convert public decisions into an asset class held by a small set of politically connected state investors. The decision-maker now answers to the contract-holders rather than to the people he is supposed to govern.

Presidential announcements have become revenue events for the President's family. Classified information has become a tradable commodity. Journalists have become the targets of bettors who demand they rewrite their reporting under threat of death. Together, they are a wave of crimes in search of a prosecutor and a structural crisis in search of a regulator.

I. The Biographical Sentence

Since 2016, the opening of the American leftist candidate’s biography has settled into a recognizable form. It appears in the second paragraph of campaign websites’ “About” pages written by Democratic Socialists of America-affiliated candidates, Working Families Party endorsees, and post-Sanders insurgents in Democratic primaries at every level from school boards to the United States Senate.

Candidates phrase the claim variously — I grew up in a working-class family, my parents were working-class people, I come from a working-class background, I was raised in a working-class household — but the work the claim does is the same each time. The candidate uses the opening to assert a class identity, and the assertion is then repeated, unexamined, through the campaign material, through endorsement letters issued by aligned organizations, through press coverage in sympathetic outlets such as Jacobin, In These Times, and The Nation, and eventually in the legislative biography that follows the candidate into office. Whatever the candidate now does for a living, however much the candidate now earns, whatever class position the candidate now occupies as a matter of present economic fact, the campaign continues to assert the founding sentence. Once made in the second paragraph of the biography, the working-class membership claim does not expire. The founding sentence of the biography establishes class identity before any other fact about the candidate is introduced. It’s as if Abe Lincoln lived his whole life in the log cabin of his birth.

The persistent claim describes very little: a parent who taught middle school in a Midwestern suburb; a parent who worked a manufacturing line that has since been offshored; a parent who served 20 years in the military and retired into a mortgage paid through the GI Bill; or a parent who cleaned houses, drove a truck, ran a small auto-body shop, or carried mail. The political content is far larger. By claiming a working-class background, the candidate establishes a political identity that the American left treats as both the principal agent of left-leaning politics and the moral subject in whose name policy is conducted. Working-class identity carries political standing, and political standing carries the authority to speak for the class. The biographical claim is the credential by which the candidate establishes both the identity and the authority.

The claim also has coalitional uses. It tells organized labor, progressive nonprofits, and high-dollar left-wing donors that the candidate is one of theirs by origin, even if not by present circumstance. It tells the press that the candidate’s policy commitments proceed from authentic class experience rather than from ideological choice. And it tells voters that the candidate’s wealth, profession, education, and donor coalition need not be examined too closely, because the founding claim has discharged the question in advance.

II. Marx’s Two Senses of Class

The working-class identity these candidates invoke is incoherent, and the incoherence can be specified.

Marx distinguished two senses of class. The first, Klasse an sich, names a class in itself: a structural position in the relations of production occupied by people who share a relation to capital, whether they recognize it as such. The wage workers of nineteenth-century Manchester, Lyon, and Lowell were a single class by virtue of their shared position in the production process, regardless of how they understood themselves or which church they attended or the political party with which they identified.

The second sense, Klasse für sich, names a class for itself: a class that has come to recognize its position, organize around its interests, and act collectively on its own behalf, typically through trade unions, working-class political parties, and mutual aid societies. The transition from the first to the second was, for Marx and the entire socialist tradition that followed him, the central political problem of the modern era. A class in itself was a sociological fact. A class for itself was a political achievement, one that could not be assumed and had to be made. The German Social Democratic Party, before 1914, came closest: a million members, parallel institutions for press and education, and an explicit programmatic commitment to working-class political organization.

From a Marxist perspective, the American working class today exists as a class in itself. It does not exist as a class for itself. Its members do not share a political consciousness; they vote in different directions; they identify with different cultural formations, hold sharply different views on immigration, social issues, and foreign policy, and divide along sector, region, citizenship, language, and skill. The structural divide between the unionized minority, currently at or below ten percent of the American workforce and concentrated in public-sector employment, and the non-unionized majority cuts across all these divisions.

What constitutes the working class today is itself contested. The industrial proletariat Marx wrote about is a much smaller fraction of the American workforce than it was in 1900 or even 1970, and the literature on contemporary class composition has specified the problem: precarious service labor, debt-burdened salaried employees, gig and warehouse workers organized through channels Marx did not anticipate. The argument here does not require treating the industrial proletariat as the working class proper. “Working class” is being used in the broad sense the post-Sanders left itself uses. The point is that whatever today’s working class is, the post-Sanders left has not organized it. The class in itself exists. The class for itself does not. When the American left invokes “the working class” as a coherent political subject with shared interests and a discernible voice, it refers to a class for itself that does not exist as such.

III. The Rhetoric of the Universal Subject

The post-Sanders American left continues to use the term nonetheless, because the rhetorical work the term does is too valuable to abandon. Since 2016, the left has simplified the term through a particular rhetorical move: the working class is defined by negation against the billionaire class.

Sanders introduced the construction in its current form during his 2016 presidential campaign, and the post-Sanders left inherited, refined, and amplified it across the subsequent wave of DSA-aligned electoral efforts. For the better part of a decade, Sanders deployed a single phrase, ‘millionaires and billionaires,’ alongside more substantive references to corporate monopolies, private equity, and the broader owner class. The shorthand proved more portable. As book royalties boosted his household net worth into the millionaire bracket and public reporting increased, Sanders dropped “millionaires“ from the phrase and used “billionaires” alone. The contracted form is now the standard formulation across the post-Sanders left: the working class is defined as everyone who is not a billionaire.

Defining a class by what it is not, however, and specifically by negation against a small number of extremely wealthy individuals, collapses every other class distinction into the same undifferentiated category. The petite bourgeoisie; the professional-managerial class; salaried knowledge workers in technology and finance; public-sector professionals; university faculty; small business owners; mid-career physicians; and actual wage laborers in manufacturing, agriculture, food service, retail, and warehouse work all become “working class” by virtue of not being Bezos, Musk, or Zuckerberg. The professional-managerial coalition that dominates the American left can claim working-class identity through opposition to billionaires while remaining structurally distinct from the wage laborers in whose name their political aims are pursued.

Defining a class through what it opposes has a long pedigree in political rhetoric. Every ruling class presents its particular interests as the universal interests of society. Marx made the point in The German Ideology. The American left has carried out a smaller version of the same substitution. The category ‘professional-managerial class,’ introduced by Barbara and John Ehrenreich in 1977 and contested in the literature since, remains useful for naming the credentialed strata that dominate leftist electoral coalitions. This group presents its particular interests as the universal interests of ‘the working class’: credentialing, public-sector employment, redistributive transfers funded by taxation rather than by socialization of production, cultural recognition of identity-based grievances, and regulation of the largest concentrations of private capital. The substitution is rarely deliberate; it is structural. The people doing the substituting are mostly sincere; the sincerity does not change the substitution.

IV. Two Forms of Progressive Claim

The construction works at every scale; a local case shows what it looks like in practice. The current Oregon political cycle has two forms, both recognizable without naming any individual.

An organization can claim a constituency without ever speaking to it. The Portland chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America presents itself, in its own published materials, as an organization devoted to “build[ing] working class power” and to constructing “an organized working-class movement big enough to take on” the ruling class. The chapter’s electoral working group describes its mission as electing “DSA champions for the working class.” The chapter repeats the phrase across its About page, its issue pages, its voter guides, and its social-media biographies. With each repetition, it names a constituency it claims to represent. The chapter does not specify on what basis it speaks for that constituency, because no one has raised the question.

A candidate can claim a class position she no longer occupies. A typical campaign biography for a DSA-affiliated or DSA-aligned candidate in the post-Sanders Oregon wave opens with the founding sentence in one of its standard variations. The candidate’s current profession is named in the third or fourth sentence, after the working-class biography has been established. The professions are recognizable as a class: physicians and nurse-administrators, software developers and product managers, university professors, hospital administrators and nonprofit executives, sitting elected officials, and a smaller number of small-business owners. The structural distance between the founding sentence and the current class position is then unexamined through the campaign material into the endorsement letters, the press coverage, and the legislative record that follows the candidate into office.

V. Lenin, Inverted

Politics, a sympathetic reader might object, is conducted by organized minorities on behalf of disorganized majorities. No political coalition has ever waited for its constituency to spontaneously self-organize before acting. Lenin himself understood that the proletariat could not attain revolutionary consciousness on its own and required a vanguard party to bring it from outside. The DSA’s electoral practice, from this view, is a modest current version of the same Leninist insight, conducted within bourgeois parliamentary forms because those are the forms currently available.

Lenin’s most relevant text on this question is “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, written in spring 1920 for the Second Congress of the Communist International, addressed against the Western European ultra-leftists who refused on principle to participate in bourgeois parliaments, to work within reactionary trade unions, or to enter tactical alliances with non-communist workers’ parties, including the British Labour Party. Lenin called the stance infantile because it confused strategic patience with ideological compromise. His argument was that revolutionary parties must work within the existing mass organizations of the working class to win over workers still within those organizations rather than purifying themselves into irrelevance outside them. The argument was about engagement with the working class as it had organized itself. Lenin’s pragmatism presupposed a working class already organized as a force and a vanguard party with a revolutionary theory adequate to lead it. The American left possesses neither: the mass organizations have collapsed, and the DSA, whatever its merits, is an electoral coalition with a labor working group, not a vanguard formation in the Leninist sense.

The DSA has, in fact, formally adopted a version of this Leninist mandate. The Rank-and-File Strategy, adopted at the 2019 national convention, explicitly calls on socialists to enter existing trade unions as workers, build relationships with non-socialist co-workers, and organize from within. The strategy has contributed to the Teamsters reform efforts that elected Sean O’Brien, in the UAW reform that produced Shawn Fain, and in elements of the Amazon and Starbucks organizing campaigns. The DSA is not refusing the work Lenin prescribed.

The problem is that the work Lenin prescribed and the work the DSA is best known for are not the same, and the relationship between them has inverted the original Leninist priority. Lenin placed engagement with authentic workers at the center of socialist practice, with electoral and parliamentary work subordinated to that engagement and accountable to it. The DSA has reversed the relationship. Rank-and-file work continues, conducted by a small fraction of the membership in the sectors where organizing is currently active. The organization’s public-facing identity (candidate biographies, endorsement decisions, electoral coalitions, the framing of leftist policy in the language of working-class representation) runs on the imagined working class rather than the organized one. The second practice dominates the first in budget, in staff time, in press attention, and in the criteria by which the organization presents itself to voters and imposes itself on unsuspecting workers with different political views.

The infantile disorder Lenin diagnosed was the refusal to engage with actual workers. The current version is more subtle. A real engagement sits alongside a much larger rhetorical practice that constructs the working class through biography and negation rather than encountering it through organization. The imagined class is more comfortable than the work of building an organized one, and the imagined class is what the broader public hears.

The empirical conditions that gave Lenin’s argument its power in 1920 no longer exist in the United States. Trade union density stands at or below ten percent and is concentrated overwhelmingly in public-sector employment. The fraternal associations, mutual aid societies, and neighborhood institutions that constituted the social infrastructure of pre-1970 working-class life have been dispersed by deindustrialization, by suburbanization, by the collapse of the parish networks that hosted them, and by the broader atomization of American civic life.

The mass institutions Lenin presupposed do not exist: trade union federations with millions of members, working-class parties with their own newspapers and schools, cooperative societies, and dense neighborhood networks. The rhetorical practice may partly be a response to that absence, a way of invoking a class one cannot reach through the channels Lenin assumed were available. The substitution is constrained more than chosen. Constraint does not make the substitution legitimate, however. A practice that constructs an imagined class through biography and negation does not become more accurate because an authentic class is harder to organize. It becomes even more misleading because the rhetoric continues to imply an organized constituency that the speaker cannot deliver on. Without doubt, the DSA’s rank-and-file work has contributed to organizing wins, but on its own, it cannot make a class for itself out of a fragmented and demobilized class whose actual interests may not align with the DSA’s. The rhetorical practice does not assist the rank-and-file work; it substitutes for it.

VI. Moving Beyond the Imagined Constituency

The post-Sanders left has substituted a class it has not organized for a politics it does not defend. A coalition of professionals, public-sector workers, organized labor staff, and leftist donors is conducting electoral politics on behalf of a redistributive and regulatory program the coalition believes would benefit a working class it has not organized and cannot, on its current scale of engagement, claim to speak for. The agenda may be good. The coalition may be effective. The candidates may serve well in the offices to which they are elected. None of those possibilities requires the working-class claim. The claim is included because the coalition believes it legitimizes the project, and because the conventions of the American left have made it a condition of admission to serious left-leaning politics.

A defender of the post-Sanders electoral approach will respond that the electoral coalitions the rhetorical practice has built have produced material gains for working people: the Teamsters reform that elected Sean O’Brien, the UAW reform that produced the 2023 Big Three strike, the Amazon and Starbucks organizing campaigns that emerged in part from networks the post-Sanders left helped sustain. The response is not wrong about the gains. It is wrong about their source. The Teamsters reform was won by Teamsters; the UAW reform by UAW members; the Starbucks campaigns by baristas. The rhetorical practice did not produce the organizing. It accompanied it, sometimes funded it, and often drew on its legitimacy. Removing the rhetorical claim would not remove the organizing. It would remove the substitution that obscures whose work actually won the gains.

A different reader will accept the diagnosis but reject the prescription. All political representation, the argument runs, involves the construction of the represented. Pitkin made the point in 1967; Mansbridge has refined it across four decades. The imagined class, on this view, is not a special pathology of the post-Sanders left but a feature of how representation works at all. In certain applications, this may be true at a generalized level, while still wrong about the specific charge. For instance, many, if not most, building trades workers tend to move to more central political views and see their worker interest hew to more traditional, even capitalist, values. A constructed constituency can still be falsely constructed, can still be invoked in ways its members would not recognize, can still be substituted for the work of building one. That all representation is partly imagined does not answer the charge that this particular imagining lacks any organizational counterpart. It only universalizes the problem.

This is the price of becoming, eventually, the kind of political force that could organize the real working class rather than represent the imagined one.

The class in whose name the program is pursued exists as a class in itself. It does not yet exist as a class for itself.

The author is a faculty member at Portland State University and writes about Oregon politics and public higher education at Academic Gadfly.

The visual symbols of May Day serve as a record of class struggle. The carnation came from the European socialist parties and the Haymarket commemorations, a flower discreet enough to wear on a lapel and unmistakable to anyone who knew what it meant. The black eagle on red came out of the Delano grape strike of 1965, designed by Richard Chavez to be simple enough to reproduce on a picket sign. The wheat predates the labor movement by millennia. It is the harvest symbol of Demeter and Ceres, of the Eleusinian rites, of every agricultural civilization that marked spring planting against autumn yield. The red rose was forged in the bread-and-roses strikes of 1912 — bread for survival, roses for the dignity that survival alone cannot provide.

None of these symbols represents the workforce that will march on the first of May. The nurse finishing a twelve-hour shift. The adjunct teaching four sections at three campuses for a fraction of a tenured professor’s salary. The warehouse picker whose bathroom breaks are timed by an algorithm. The home health aide working at poverty wages to bathe someone else’s mother. The farmworker bent over berry rows, paid by the flat, toiling under a climate change-created heat dome. The rideshare driver forced into the legal fiction of independent contractor. The graduate worker organizing her department against the institution that signs her stipend. The barista, the call-center agent, and the delivery driver, all trading physical exhaustion for an unpredictable wage. And the data labeler, paid by the task to annotate the images that train artificial intelligence, feeding the system that will eventually replace her.

The labor movement has not yet produced an iconography, a set of symbols a movement uses to recognize itself, that captures the material reality of this workforce. Where the working class once forged its own symbols, capital has supplied only the headset of the call-center agent, the apron of the service worker, and the padded delivery bag of the gig economy courier: corporate shorthand rather than working-class iconography. Until the working class gains class consciousness, capital will regard it as disposable.

The symbols of workers are being written by the workers themselves, on picket lines, in union drives, and in walkouts that the official story refuses to acknowledge. The roots of May Day run deeper than industrial capitalism. They will outlast the app-based platform economy as well. 🌹

The 2026 State of the Economy report, released by the Portland Metro Chamber and presented to the Portland City Council on April 14, frames the regional comparison as a story of two policy environments: employment in Multnomah County remains below its 2020 level, while employment in Clark County stands at 114 percent of its 2020 level. The overall divergence is documented; the income composition of the shift is not.

New arrivals to Multnomah County average $73,540 in income, while those moving to Clark County average $106,715. That $33,175 difference per new resident, across a state line just 20 minutes away by car, is not the result of different policy choices producing different outcomes. It is the signature of a region sorting itself by income, with higher earners choosing Washington and lower earners left to bear more than their share of taxes for the public hospitals, schools, and transit system concentrated on the Oregon side.

The employment data show the same pattern. In 2025, the Portland metro area lost 8,800 jobs, ranking fourth-worst among U.S. metro areas even as national employment grew. These regional losses mirror the income data. Job losses were concentrated in professional services, manufacturing, construction, and information—the higher-wage traded-sector industries where employees produce goods for external markets and work from either side of the Columbia. Conversely, the sectors that gained jobs were health care, education, and government. These are lower-wage, local-demand sectors whose jobs require physical presence in Oregon. The region is not losing jobs at random; it is shedding the specific roles that grant geographic mobility while retaining the personnel who must remain.

The housing data support the same conclusion. Multifamily permitting in Portland fell from 2,092 units in 2023 to 868 in 2024 and 656 in 2025, the lowest level since 2011, while Clark County now accounts for 57 percent of multifamily permits across the seven adjacent counties that include Portland.

The proximate causes are regulatory: permitting speed, land-use rules, inclusionary housing requirements, system development charges, and design review have raised the cost of Portland multifamily construction relative to Clark County’s. The underlying cause is the migration of higher-earning households to Clark County.

The Chamber’s framework misses the dynamic captured by the income data. It treats two jurisdictions within a single metropolitan economy as if they were two separate economies in competition, casting one as successful and the other as failing. From that framing comes a familiar agenda: restoring confidence, repairing public-private partnerships, and competing to retain and attract talent. The agenda answers a different question than the one the data raises.

The question the data raises is what such a division produces over time. The answer is consolidation. Multnomah County is becoming the residential location for the workers who staff the region’s hospitals, schools, retail establishments, and public agencies, while Clark County is becoming the residential location for the professionals whose incomes have continued to rise during the contraction. The county losing the higher earners is also the county that contains the service sector and the tax base that funds them.

Washington’s lack of a state income tax, paired with Oregon’s high one, allows higher earners to take their income from the metro economy without contributing to it. The professional class whose work is remote or Washington-based pays none of Oregon’s state income tax, nor Multnomah County’s Preschool for All tax, Metro’s Supportive Housing Services tax, or the local high-earner surcharges that fall on incomes above $125,000. Oregon loses revenue in two ways: through income sourced across the line, and through the consumption that follows the household to Vancouver.

The arrangement is available only to workers whose jobs can be sourced to the Washington side. Oregon taxes income where it is earned, not where the earner lives. Remote work from a home in Vancouver qualifies. A commute to a Portland office does not. The work-from-home rates show who is in that class.

In 2023, 21 percent of workers in the Portland metro area worked from home. The rate rises with income: 34 percent among Multnomah County residents earning more than $75,000, compared with 14 percent among those earning under $35,000. The pattern is the product of recent policy choices and a long-standing tax differential that a mobile professional class is now exercising at scale.

The Chamber recommends restoring confidence, repairing public-private partnerships, and competing to retain and attract talent. The data describes a region not competing with Vancouver but retaining the bottom tier of a two-class system across the state line.

Thanks to its history of changemakers, Portland, Oregon has long been a hotbed of progressive political activism. As one of Portland’s most controversial native sons, John Reed, would agree, however, this is a city with a split personality – supporting justice movements on one hand and struggling with entrenched racism, economic conservatism, and right-wing encroachment on the other. With apologies to Reed, the author of Ten Days that Shook the World, this essay offers an analysis of Portland’s Summer of 2020: Ninety Days that Shook the World.

The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police ignited the latest chapter in Oregon’s social justice story. Outraged citizens of all ages and races gathered in the city’s center, across from the federal justice building, to protest this latest in a string of murders by police officers of unarmed people of color. For many, his pleas for help and the haunting last words “I can’t breathe!” became a passion-inducing call for this mostly white community to demand an end to racial injustice. A broad range of self-organized groups, including a mostly white “Wall of Moms”, dads armed with leaf blowers to fend off tear gas, Black Lives Matter activists, “Don’t Shoot Portland” organizers, and the well-publicized “Antifa” youth, coalesced to demand police reform and accountability, and to call for racial justice more broadly.

Daily protests evolved into a semi-permanent encampment in front of the Justice Center, where peaceful protesters encountered daily interactions with federal officers who tear-gassed them, fired rubber bullets, and beat individuals. Additionally, they experienced violent confrontations launched by right-wing groups. Then-President Donald Trump politicized the daily uprisings and sent in Homeland Security, the FBI, and private contractors to aggressively respond. Media headlines catapulted Portland into the national and international spotlight. Escalation of violence by such right-wing groups as Patriot Prayer, Oath Keepers, and Proud Boys ultimately resulted in the deaths of two people, Aaron Danielson and Michael Reinoehl.

These Ninety Days, though contentious and politicized, brought needed change to Portland’s policing practices, including a $15 million Police Bureau budget cut that was spent instead on intervention services; the creation of an independent police oversight committee charged with investigating misconduct; and a suite of state laws designed to rein in certain policing practices (Ellis, 2020). It also stimulated, however, an exodus of officers from Portland, less responsiveness to the upsurge in criminal acts, and the proliferation of private security guards hired by Portland businesses that hadn’t moved out. In the two years after protests, more than 12,000 Portlanders had left the city altogether (Mesh, 2022).

This essay explores the social, historical, and political roots of Portland’s social justice history from which this latest movement arose. It also examines the ongoing layers of struggle Portland has faced in this period, including worsening income inequality. It will show how neoliberalism, and each side’s conscious or unconscious reaction to its excesses, undergirds ongoing strife across Oregon.

Post-Neoliberalism, Portland Style

The clashes between the antifascists and Patriot Prayer, the most violent feature of the Ninety Days, have their roots in – and are a microcosm of – a broader anti-neoliberal backlash seen across the country. Neoliberalism’s excesses, such as the free movement of unregulated capital, growing income inequality, and the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs, have ignited this movement. Portland’s strife, underlying the 2020 uprising, can be traced to what Paolo Gerbaudo (2021) describes as the limits of neoliberalism, evidenced by political polarization and manifested in culture wars prosecuted by the Right and Left. On one hand, the populist Right targets “cultural neoliberalism” (immigration policies, LGBTQA+ rights, and the supposed teaching of critical race theory in public schools). Their antipathy is laced with conspiracy theories spread through disinformation campaigns. On the other hand, the populist Left’s objections are to economic neoliberalism (focusing on housing, health care access, and fair wages).

The real upsurge in this latest chapter of struggle came after Trump was sworn in as President in 2017. Portland experienced a corresponding rise in violent and deadly clashes between anti-racist activists and Trump supporters, including Patriot Prayer and Proud Boys, two groups intimately involved in the attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. The pattern was already visible by May of that first Trump year, when Jeremy Christian, a self-proclaimed white nationalist, stabbed two men to death on the Portland light rail train after they intervened on behalf of two women of color, the targets of his racist rage. Two years later, in October 2019, 23-year-old anti-fascist activist Sean Kealiher was killed when a right-wing group ran him over after a dispute at a local brewery. The violence carried into the new decade: in February 2022, Benjamin Smith confronted and shot at a group of racial justice advocates walking past his house, killing one and wounding four others.

The rise of Portland’s Far Right became most acute on August 30, 2020, in reaction to the nightly racial justice protests downtown. A caravan of 600 Trump supporters from the Portland suburbs swarmed the city center, hoping to ignite a civil war. Armed with paintball guns, bats, clubs, and bear spray, they confronted the peaceful protesters and ignited skirmishes. One of their own, Aaron Danielson, was shot and killed in the resulting melee. President Trump exploited the incident by calling for the activation of the Insurrection Act of 1807 – a call for posse comitatus action that would allow him to step over state and local authorities and deploy military units to suppress the nightly protests. Ultimately, the shooter, a self-proclaimed “Antifa” activist by the name of Michael Reinoehl, was gunned down by law enforcement officers.

Meanwhile, the echoes of so-called “non-lethal ammunition” (which caused permanent brain damage in one protester) and of tear gas canisters fired into the peaceful crowds by police reverberated throughout the city and could even be heard in the northwest Portland hills three miles away. The authors were among the many Portlanders who had purchased a bike helmet, gas mask, and goggles, hoping to join the protests in solidarity. Instead, we donated the gear to a friend who had no such protection. We drove to the encampment a few times, overwhelmed by the strong, bitter smell of tear gas residue hanging in the air. We provided food and cash to the Riot Ribs outdoor kitchen concession that emerged to provide free food and bottled water to protesters, journalists, and medics. We observed a sea of tents, graffiti such as “ACAB” (which stood for “All Cops Are Bastards”) and “Fuck the Police”, and anarchist and antifa symbols scribbled on sidewalks. Doors and windows of such businesses as Starbucks – seen as symbols of corporate capitalism – were smashed and boarded up. Fliers for free self-defense training were stapled to telephone poles. A huge and colorful mural depicting George Floyd, with the phrase ‘I can’t breathe’, was painted on the gigantic boarded-up wall of the downtown Apple Store.

All of this was happening in the midst of a still-raging pandemic, epic wildfires that clogged Oregon air, and a growing homelessness crisis borne of neighborhood gentrification and a gaping income/wealth gap between rich and poor Oregonians (Bates, 2013).

When the total 200 days of action were over, police had arrested more than 1,000 protesters – 200 of whom were charged with crimes. The New York Times reported that undercover FBI surveillance teams infiltrated the demonstrations and recorded protesters, who were later identified and arrested (Baker, M., Olmos, S., Goldman, A., 2021). Critics say that these tactics amounted to domestic spying and possible First Amendment infringements. According to a 2022 Portland city auditor’s report, police officers collected information about protesters with documentation of criminal activity. This included photos and videos of protest activity, as well as recorded vehicle license plates. The auditor recommended that police intelligence cease its evident infringement on protesters’ First Amendment rights when no criminal activity was at issue.

Other disturbing activity, conducted by a Trump-deployed militarized unit, also made headlines during this time. BORTAC, the Border Patrol Tactical Unit of the federal government, created in 1984 to respond to rioting at immigrant detention facilities, showed up in military-style camouflage, driving unmarked minivans, and abducted peaceful protesters right off the streets of downtown Portland. Terrified victims were blindfolded and taken to secret locations for interrogation and imprisonment. As Harvard law professor Andrew Crespo documented, at least one high-profile example from Portland of an arrest (captured on video) clearly violated the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which forbids law enforcement officers from arresting individuals without probable cause (Vladeck, 2020).

In addition to the federal government's provocative engagement, the racial justice movement’s steam was finally diminished when political and corporate entities co-opted it to express their solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, contributing more than $10 billion to its causes (Robinson, 2022). Those effects were to reduce it to symbolic achievements, such as the removal of monuments honoring past (racist) leaders and renaming schools and military bases. Antonio Gramsci describes this tactic as “passive revolution”, involving the dominant class’s overtaking of the intellectual, political, and cultural leadership of anti-capitalist and anticolonial struggles.

The Long Local History

Portland’s Ninety Days was not an anomaly for this urban western burg. Like Minneapolis, whose police violence inspired the Summer of 2020, Portland’s history of anti-racist activism goes back decades. When, in the 1980s, a group of Minneapolis youth formed “The Baldies”, a self-proclaimed anti-racist skinhead group who clashed with a gang of neo-Nazis called the White Knights, they subsequently evolved into the Anti-Racist Action Organization, which established chapters in several cities, including Portland. Also emerging in this period were anti-racist youth groups in Portland, such as the East Side Skinheads (Flores C., Yanke, E., Crenshaw, M., 2019)

Racism remained problematic throughout this time. Portland was home to various neo-Nazi groups in the 1980s and 1990s. White supremacists and neo-Nazis saw the Northwest as the last frontier for establishing a white utopia.

On April 20, 1985, 31-year-old Lloyd “Tony” Stevenson – an African American and former Marine – was killed by Portland police who applied a choke hold, mistaking him for a suspect in a convenience store robbery (Buggy, 2016). This security guard and father of five had gone to the store to buy ice cream for his kids when he intervened in a scuffle between two store clerks and a black man accused of stealing. When the police arrived, they attempted to arrest Stevenson, who made a futile effort to explain that they had the wrong guy. In subduing him, they pressed on his carotid artery in the neck to diminish blood flow to the brain. It killed him. On the day of his funeral, Portland police officers began selling t-shirts with the message: ‘Don’t Choke ‘em; Smoke ‘em.” Co-chair of the Black United Front Ron Herndon said at the time, “This is what you would expect from police hit squads in El Salvador” (Turner, 1985). It was just one of countless documented cases of police violence against Portland’s Black community.

Among the most notorious of the activist groups was the White Aryan Resistance, whose members in 1988 murdered Ethiopian immigrant and Portland State University student Mulugeta Seraw – a crime that was provoked by WAR leader and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon Tom Metzger. The Southern Poverty Law Center used an innovative legal strategy to hold Metzger and WAR liable for the wrongful death of Seraw, winning a $12.5 million verdict that effectively put the racist hate group out of business (Bennett, 2020). Out of the same period of resistance, Rose City Antifa formed in 2007, becoming the first official antifascist organization in the country. This movement joined a long and rich Portland protest culture that included anti-war protests and advocacy for a broad range of progressive social policies. When President George Bush visited Portland in 1991, for instance, he was confronted by such protesters, prompting him to dub the city “Little Beirut” (McCall, 2003).

Intimately tied to the racial justice movements of the past four decades is the concurrent and intersectional fight for income equality and economic justice. Especially in the post-protest climate, with some 5,000 homeless people sleeping on Portland’s sidewalks while rich developers erect multimillion-dollar hotels and penthouse condominiums on the same streets, the case for economic justice had never been more stark (Hasenstab, 2022). Portland’s wealth gap tracks the nation’s, with the top 1 percent owning one-third of the country’s wealth by the end of 2021. And like the rest of the U.S., Portlanders were active in the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, begun in 2011 on the heels of the financial crisis, to advance social and economic justice. Then, as in the Summer of 2020, protesters set up an encampment near City Hall that lasted only a little more than a month before the city shut it down. Over time, the group expanded to plan acts of civil disobedience and led a picket that successfully shut down the busy Port of Portland for a day. Its activists later turned attention to protesting war, supporting student debt relief, and calling out the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

This is the movement that most concerned the corporate titans, and it is in part to divert attention from questions of economic inequality that elites have long embraced a non-economic racial justice message in Portland and across the country. When necessary, partisans have no problem with more heavy-handed tactics, of course – such as the use of the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service (FPS), which has contracts with more than 50 private security firms, including “Blackwater” (Conroy, 2020). FPS, with its $1 billion budget, hires 13,000 security guards to support federal law enforcement with crowd control. In “protecting” federal buildings, armed FPS-hired security guards confronted protesters in Lafayette Park in Washington, DC, in June 2020, lobbing flashbang grenades and tear gas to disperse them. These units were deployed despite a 2019 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office that called out the guards’ insufficient training and noted that several guards were felons. Today’s army of ICE officers is similarly unqualified.

Moreover, through the state apparatus, the ruling classes began deploying new surveillance technologies, arming local police with advanced military-grade weapons, and pouring millions of dollars into private security to institute social control and sustain capital accumulation amid the enduring financial crisis facing capitalism. William Robinson (2022) calls this the “accumulation by repression,” and it is an instructive lens through which to view the widespread protests of 2020 and the disproportionate federal law enforcement and government response. In dealing with the visible face of economic inequality, the government’s response, even in liberal Portland, has at times veered toward control rather than problem-solving. Portland’s mayor at the time, Ted Wheeler, leaned on his advisor and former mayor Sam Adams, who proposed warehousing thousands of homeless tent dwellers in temporary shelters supervised by unarmed Oregon National Guardsmen (Kavanaugh, 2022). A business-funded group, People for Portland, attempted a parallel ballot measure in November 2022. Critics of both plans identified criminalizing homelessness and disregard for people’s unmet needs as reasons to block the proposals, which they did, successfully.

Portland in 2022

Though the nightly protests waned to nearly nothing in the year-plus since they were officially ended, young “Black Bloc” anarchists roamed Portland’s streets for a time, sometimes vandalizing businesses and vehicles and generally stirring up trouble. They seemed to have no political agenda, having sprung from a white youth brigade that essentially hijacked Portland’s black-led racial justice cause. Though most of the plywood had come off by 2022, and businesses were returning to profitability, evidence of the Ninety Days remained. For months, a huge, imposing fence wrapped around the front of the federal building, the county courthouse across the street has subsequently moved, and the nearby police headquarters remained boarded up. Graffiti marred many buildings. Pandemic-related protocols lifted, tourism began to revive, and nightlife returned. Mayor Wheeler fought off a small Leftist recall effort, a few officers were held accountable for assaulting protesters, and, as noted before, both the city council and the state legislature enacted police oversight and legal restraints (Zielinski, 2021).

According to the “Oregon Values and Beliefs” survey, a majority of Oregonians polled supported the Black Lives Matter movement at the time, but they were split on whether society had improved because of it (OVBC, 2022). Surveyors noted a lingering political divide among Oregonians regarding perceptions of the social justice movement, with 87 percent of Democrats in support and 69 percent of Republicans opposed. Antifascist protesters drew “strong criticism for demonstrations that ended in repeated damage to downtown businesses.” Some noted that this vandalism “drowned out the overall message and overshadowed the need for police reform” (Vaughn, 2022). In short, we remained a divided state and city whose government, nonprofit, and academic institutions adopted full-throated equity and diversity language and plans, but few solutions to enduring economic and political chasms. But as the City Most Known for Its Protests, Portland will surely rise up again.

Postscript: 2026

Three and a half years on, the original paper’s hint that Portland would rise up again has been borne out, though not in the form anyone would have wanted. In the spring of 2025, Donald Trump’s second administration deployed federal forces to the South Portland Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, where months of nightly protests drew a federal response familiar from the Summer of 2020. Portland police officers eventually testified in federal court against the actions of federal officers at the site, in what Mayor Keith Wilson described as a principled stand against federal overreach. The “No Kings” rallies of 2025 and 2026 have once more put thousands of Portlanders into the streets.

The political map shifted as well. Ted Wheeler did not seek re-election. In November 2024, Portland voters used a new ranked-choice system to elect Keith Wilson, a freight company executive and political outsider, as the 54th mayor under a restructured Council-Mayor form of government. The change abolished the commission system that had governed the city for more than a century, expanding the council to twelve members elected from four geographic districts.

Other elements of the 2022 portrait have shifted. The fence around the Hatfield Courthouse came down. Some of the criminal cases against protesters resulted in convictions, others in acquittals. The independent police oversight committee remains tangled in disputes over implementation. Portland’s homeless population has more than tripled in four years: Multnomah County now estimates nearly 18,000 people are experiencing homelessness in the region, with roughly 9,000 unsheltered, up from about 6,000 unsheltered when Wilson took office in January 2025. Mayor Wilson, who campaigned on ending unsheltered homelessness within a year, has publicly disputed the county’s methodology while reassuring Portlanders that the city is in a “resurgence.” In late 2025, his administration resumed enforcement of the public camping ban, a criminalization-of-homelessness measure that the 2022 critics had successfully blocked in earlier forms.

The city now faces a budget deficit of more than $160 million in the 2026-27 fiscal year. The named forces of cooptation, surveillance, and accumulation by repression have not weakened; if anything, they have grown more entrenched. Division among Portland’s city councilors threatens to reduce the body’s productivity and has already engendered internecine policy struggles. Whether the political shift to a new mayor-and-council form of government will produce solutions to the underlying economic and political chasms, or only manage them more efficiently, remains an open question.

References

Baker, M., Olmos, S., Goldman, A. (2021, December 22). The FBI deployed surveillance teams inside Portland protests. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/22/us/portland-protests-fbi-surveillance.html

Bates, L. K. (2013). Gentrification and displacement study: implementing an equitable inclusive development strategy in the context of gentrification. City of Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. https://www.portland.gov/sites/default/files/2020-01/2-gentrification-and-displacement-study-05.18.13.pdf

Bennett, B. (2020, October 25). Remembering Mulugeta: 30 years after SLPC lawsuit, life and legacy of man killed by hate group memorialized. The Southern Poverty Law Center. https://www.splcenter.org/news/2020/10/25/remember-mulugeta-30-years-after-splc-lawsuit-life-and-legacy-man-killed-hate-group

Buggy, K. (2016, April 19). It’s been 31 years since Lloyd “Tony” Stevenson was killed by Portland Police at age 31. The Willamette Week. https://www.wweek.com/news/2016/04/20/its-been-31-years-since-lloyd-tony-stevenson-was-killed-by-portland-police-at-age-31/

Conroy, B. (2020, July 22). The lead federal agency responding to protesters in Portland employs thousands of private contractors. Medium. https://wkc6428.medium.com/the-lead-federal-agency-responding-to-protesters-in-portland-employs-thousands-of-private-db137349f8b0

Ellis, R. (2020, June 11). Portland poised to cut $15 million from police budget, Eudaly says it’s not enough. Oregon Public Broadcasting. https://www.opb.org/news/article/defund-portland-police-budget-eudaly/

Flores, C., Yanke, E., Crenshaw, M. (2019). It did happen here. https://itdidhappenherepodcast.com/transcripts/episode1_transcript.html

Gerbaudo, P. (2021). The great recoil: Politics after populism and pandemic. Verso Books.

Hasenstab, A. (2022, May 5). Multnomah County releases first homeless ‘point-in-time’ count in two years. Oregon Public Broadcasting. https://www.opb.org/article/2022/05/05/multnomah-county-oregon-releases-first-homeless-count-point-in-time-two-years/

Kavanaugh, S. D. (2022, February 11). Portland mayor’s top advisor proposed massive, militarized group shelters as step in ending homeless camping, records show. The Oregonian. https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2022/02/portland-mayor-wants-to-create-1000-person-group-shelters-then-outlaw-camping-by-homeless-people-records-show.html

Mesh, A. (2022, March 24). Portland metro population declines amid American flight from major cities. The Willamette Week. https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2022/03/24/portland-metro-population-declines-amid-american-flight-from-major-cities/

McCall, W. (2003, August 19). Portland police, activists get ready for Bush’s visit. The Seattle Times. https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=20030819&slug=protests19e

Oregon Values and Beliefs Center (2022, March 16). Equality and the Black Lives Matter movement in Oregon. https://oregonvbc.org/equality-and-black-lives-matter-movement-in-oregon/

Portland City Auditor (2022). Police intelligence-gathering and surveillance: better management needed to protect civil rights. https://www.portland.gov/sites/default/files/2022/police-intelligence-gathering.pdf

Robinson, W. I. (2022). Global civil war: Capitalism post-pandemic. Kairos.

Turner, W. (1985, May 5). Blacks protest choke-hold death in Oregon. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/05/us/blacks-protest-choke-hold-death-in-oregon.html

Vaughn, C. (2022, March 23). Oregonians support Black Lives Matter, few think it has helped. The Portland Tribune. https://pamplinmedia.com/pt/9-news/539921-432446-oregonians-support-black-lives-matter-few-think-it-has-helped

Vladeck, S. (2020, July 25). Are the Trump Administration’s actions in Portland legal? Are they constitutional? The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/07/25/are-trump-administrations-actions-portland-legal-are-they-constitutional/

Zielinski, A. (2021, November 8). The campaign to recall Mayor Ted Wheeler is officially over. The Portland Mercury. https://www.portlandmercury.com/news/2021/11/08/36852057/the-campaign-to-recall-mayor-ted-wheeler-is-officially-over

Note: Illustration by Ramin Farahmandpur, after Reuters coverage of federal officers in Portland, summer 2020.

The incident occurred at approximately 8:15 during the subject’s routine pre-work coffee acquisition. Staff members, who had prepared his usual order upon seeing him approach the counter, were forced to halt production and recalibrate their workflow.

“We didn’t know what to do with ourselves,” said barista Emma Chen, who has served the customer for three years without deviation from his standard order. “I actually asked him to repeat himself twice.”

The customer, a regular since 2021 who visits the establishment four times a week, offered no explanation for the departure from protocol. When asked by staff if “everything was all right,” he reportedly nodded and confirmed the cappuccino order.

Security footage reviewed by management shows the customer appearing calm during the transaction, displaying no signs of distress or coercion. The cappuccino was prepared without incident and consumed at his usual corner table.

Records reviewed by this publication indicate that the customer has ordered the medium oat milk latte with an extra shot 1,057 times in a row since November 2022. Tuesday’s cappuccino represents the first documented deviation in his 41-month ordering history.

Sources close to the customer describe the decision as “unprecedented” but declined to speculate about underlying motivations. The subject, reached for comment, acknowledged the incident but refused to elaborate on his decision-making process.

“No comment,” he said, before entering his office.

Petrichor Coffeehouse’s management is reviewing protocols for handling unexpected order modifications. The establishment reported no other irregularities during Tuesday’s service period.

The investigation into customer ordering anomalies continues.

A city councilor posts a photo of her kickball team, hoping for a double-digit win. Two posts later, she is reading the mayor’s budget overnight because it arrived late, and the hearing is at nine-thirty. Two posts after that, she declares that the council has just passed a historic housing bill.

The feed shows the life, the labor, and the legislative claim. What the feed does not build is the machinery that would turn the historic claim into something more than an adjective.

This is Portland, but it could be anywhere. American socialist political speech in 2026 lives largely on such feeds. A Bluesky thread from a progressive council member, a repost of a mayor’s inaugural address, a tearful-face emoji attached to every proclamation that a city deserves a “Mamdani Mayor.”

The medium through which these wins are announced is not a neutral channel but a circuit of accumulation. The feed converts political speech into circulation. It rewards affective intensity over sustained organization. It substitutes a rhetorical totality for the party-form.

Jodi Dean names this condition communicative capitalism in her earlier Blog Theory (2010); in Crowds and Party (2016) and Comrade (2019), she develops the argument for the party-form as the answer to it. Our basic communicative activities, according to Dean, are enclosed in circuits as raw materials for capital accumulation.

The message seeks no decision.
It enters a stream.
The stream produces value for the platform, not a political force.

Against this logic, Dean sets the communist horizon that underwrites the possibility of social transformation, and the party-form that concentrates a crowd’s affective release into the persistence required for struggle at the scale of the mode of production, not the scale of the city budget. The feed is what the Left has instead of the party.

If we read the genres of contemporary socialist speech on their own terms, a distinct taxonomy emerges:

• The Maximal Adjective: A zoning resolution is “historic.” A revolving loan fund is “historic.” A municipal social housing allocation is a “turning point.” The adjective compensates for an institutional position that cannot deliver what the rhetoric invokes.

• The Testimonial: The speaker offers the cat and the kickball team as a councilor-as-knowable-person. This stands in for the collective body that would walk with the speaker when her identity is under attack.

• The Aspirational Repost: The local official retweets a national figure she has never met, filling the space left by the charismatic leader her local coalition cannot produce.

None of these gestures is mere vanity. Each does the work a party would otherwise do. A minority bloc of four socialists on a twelve-member council, operating under a freight-company executive mayor, inside a state that preempts municipal revenue tools: under these conditions, the rhetorical elevation is not a choice. It is a form.

But without the party-form, political disagreement on the feed inevitably reads as betrayal. A colleague’s alternative amendment is immediately cast as pork-barrel politics. A pragmatic critique becomes grandstanding noise. The billionaires-versus-working-people framing, descriptively accurate about material relations, mutates in the feed’s compressed reality. It becomes a reflex that assigns “billionaire-function” to any local interlocutor who votes the wrong way. In the feed, the opponent is not an opponent. The opponent is a traitor.

Dean argues in Comrade (2019) that the party’s symbolic function is to metabolize this Manichaean structure into disciplined factional argument internal to a shared horizon. Without the party, the imaginary runs unchecked. Every legislative setback becomes evidence of the opponent’s bad faith, rather than the unfinished work of persuasion.

What the party-form was, when it existed, can be read in two scenes from American Communist Party life in the 1930s and 1940s. In Birmingham, Alabama, during the depths of the Great Depression, the Party organized illegally among Black industrial workers in one of the most violently segregated cities in the country. Hosea Hudson, a Black iron molder, joined in 1931 and built cells that operated under the constant threat of Klan violence and police raids.1 In one such cell, a unit organizer knocks on a company-house door in broad daylight, handing out pamphlets. A checkup meeting reveals that a member dumped his leaflets in a sewer. Comrades press him. He confesses. The unit continues.

Or take a scene from the Lower East Side of Manhattan a decade or so later, recounted in Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism (1977). The neighborhood was then a center of Jewish, immigrant, and working-class radicalism, and the Party had deep roots in its tenements and union halls. Eric Lanzetti, a Party organizer, tells a young communist named Lilly that when she confronts her father about her engagement to a Chinese man, “we’ll take the whole damned Communist Party.” Lilly later says she felt them in the room, not just the organizer, but the whole Party.

The historical Party was demanding, often cruel, and catastrophically wrong about the Soviet Union and the commitments it extracted from members. But what it delivered, inside and despite that record, was concentration and endurance. Contrast the grueling, life-or-death discipline of a 1930s cell meeting with a contemporary Zoom coalition call where half the participants have their cameras off. One body assembled under threat. The other, half-present by design.

The Party had its own communicative machinery: pamphlets, the Daily Worker, the internal bulletin, and the section meeting. The crucial difference is that the Party owned its media and directed its circulation toward decision and accountability inside the organization. The checkup meeting was a circulation with a terminus; the leaflet’s journey ended at the comrades who would answer for it.

The contemporary feed, whether billionaire-owned like X and Meta or venture-funded like Bluesky, directs circulation toward extraction. The platform’s governance matters less than the form. The circulation has no checkup meeting. It accumulates as engagement and disperses as feed-fatigue. The crowd generates the affective intensity that Dean’s party-form was built to metabolize, but the feed does not. It merely circulates it. The next post displaces the last, and the affective residue dissolves into the revenue the platform was built to extract.

The common objection is that the feed is the only assembly ground a de-industrialized city still has. The company-house door is gone, the foundry shift change is gone, and the union local is captured or hollowed out. Dean’s framework does not deny this. The feed can be a site of crowd formation, as it was during Occupy Wall Street, and the DSA’s national growth since 2016 has relied heavily on digital circulation.

But what remains open is whether that growth has produced sustaining machinery, or just a larger version of the same ephemeral crowd. The organizational work that produces electoral wins (door-knocking, union endorsements, chapter infrastructure) is real. The feed does not produce it; the feed only announces it. What the feed forecloses is the symbolic recognition of that work. In the digital stream, the “historic vote” becomes the content. The organization that produced it recedes into the background.

The national DSA mayoralties do not resolve this question; they press it. Winning the mayor’s office is not yet evidence of the party that would hold the mayor accountable or the chapter infrastructure that would outlast the term. The inaugural address, the hundred-day tour, the reading-to-toddlers photograph — these are feed-events. A socialist mayor is not the same as organizational change.

The Democratic Socialists of America exists—it has members, holds conventions, and endorses candidates. In a conventional sense, it is a party. But the party-form Dean describes is not a membership organization with a logo and a dues structure. It is a body that holds its members accountable, concentrates scattered affective energies into a durable force, and ensures a comrade is never alone. Historically, the Communist Party achieved this through cadre discipline, democratic centralism, cell-level accountability, and the ownership of its own media. The contemporary DSA, a multi-tendency organization with roughly 80,000 members, does not. This comparison does not criticize the DSA so much as it distinguishes a modern membership organization from the specific functions the party-form once fulfilled. A DSA-endorsed mayor is a member of an organization; whether the office is backed by a party is the question the mayoralty tests.

The question of what is to be done under these conditions remains open. This essay has argued only that the feed cannot answer it.

The state is a reader of the same feed on which the Left assembles, and it reads to surveil, to map, and to neutralize. The communist horizon is not a destination the feed can reach. It is the division that the feed was built to swallow. The machinery that would let that division become a sustained political struggle is what the feed has replaced.

Sources

Jodi Dean, Crowds and Party (Verso, 2016) and Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging (Verso, 2019). Dean's earlier work on communicative capitalism is most fully developed in Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Polity, 2010) and Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies (Duke, 2009).

The piece contains four major tells.

1. The Omission

The article reports that the union’s non-dues-paying membership has risen from fewer than 3,000 in 2018 to more than 10,000 today, representing roughly $5 million in lost dues annually. It presents this number as a simple market signal about union performance.

In reality, this figure is the intended outcome of a 40-year, union-defunding campaign culminating in Janus v. AFSCME. This campaign has been documented by Gordon Lafer in The One Percent Solution and traced organizationally through the Bradley Foundation, the State Policy Network, and the Freedom Foundation, the latter of which has run publicly acknowledged, door-to-door defunding operations across the Pacific Northwest.

Two things can be true concurrently: the legal and operational conditions were deliberately designed to weaken the union, and the 10,000 individual opt-outs reflect teachers’ choices in response to that environment.1 The post-Janus organizing failure is certainly OEA’s to own. However, reporting the decline in numbers without reporting the massive, funded campaign that produced those conditions is not investigative journalism.

2. The Sourcing

The OEA represents more than 40,000 educators across 197 school districts. Jaquiss interviews exactly none of them.

Instead, he interviews a retired lobbyist for the school administrators’ coalition, a graduate school dean, a centrist Democratic state senator, a Republican legislator, the founder of a charter-aligned reform group, and a former senator who left office five years ago. He includes only the union president and the lobbyist for obligatory response quotes. It is a thorough survey of opinion, provided you have decided in advance whose opinions count.

The article asks who speaks for kids and answers: legislators, deans, and policy entrepreneurs. The teachers themselves—the people whose working conditions and salaries the piece purports to analyze—appear only as a collective noun. They strike, they collect strike pay, and they picket. But they do not speak.

3. The Double Standard on Money

When Senate leadership funnels nearly $40,000 to defend Senator Janeen Sollman, Jaquiss treats the contributions as principled support for a colleague under attack. Yet, when the OEA gives Sollman’s primary challenger $10,000, he frames the contribution as bullying.

Defending an incumbent who voted with you is standard political practice; running a primary candidate against a legislator who voted against your priorities is the exact same practice in the other direction. Senate leadership out-contributed the OEA by roughly a 4-to-1 margin in this single race, but Jaquiss reverses the moral valence depending entirely on who is writing the check. This is not investigative journalism.

4. The Numbers

The article highlights ten employees earning over $230,000, a $30 million budget, $6 million in strike pay, and 25 days on the picket line. None of these numbers is provided with the necessary context.

The OEA represents 41,000 members across a state of 4,000,000 people. It employs staff to defend teachers in disciplinary proceedings, manages contract negotiations across 197 districts, runs lobbying operations, and maintains a strike fund that covered 25 days of work stoppage in Portland alone. Against that backdrop, the budget and compensation are wholly unremarkable. Portland Public Schools, as one contrasting example, operates on a $1.09 billion annual budget. By any standard the rest of Oregon’s nonprofit sector would recognize, an organization with a $30 million budget representing 41,000 members is not lavishly resourced.

On Who Gets to Speak

Having spent more than 25 years teaching, mentoring, and training educators and five years before that as a classroom teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District, I know what this kind of writing does. This is a genre in which working educators are described in aggregate, never in particular, ensuring that no actual teacher nor parent can be quoted to contradict the narrative.

Talk to actual teachers, and the frame falls apart. What educators will tell you about class size, behavioral support, administrative bloat, and the vast gap between administrator salaries and teacher pay simply does not fit the “union-versus-kids” narrative the OJP presents.

The Story Not Written

I will concede the underlying issue the OJP article gestures toward, even if it fails to actually investigate it. John Logan, the labor historian quoted briefly in the piece, makes the real point, though it is buried two-thirds of the way through.

Post-Janus, public-sector unions can no longer rely on agency-fee revenue. They must rebuild themselves as organizing institutions rather than mere service providers. Jane McAlevey’s No Shortcuts is the canonical text for this transition, and her framework is exactly what is required to make a rigorous critique of OEA’s post-2018 trajectory. New members must be actively recruited rather than automatically enrolled; member voice must be cultivated rather than assumed; and union democracy and organizer-to-member ratios must be rebuilt from the ground up.

These are the real post-Janus challenges. Instead of exploring them, the OJP article produces the shallow proxy of membership decline and presents it as absolute proof of failure. This editorial choice points directly back to the donor list.

The Donor List

The Oregon Journalism Project publishes its funders on a transparency page. The Founder’s Circle is anchored by the Ford Family Foundation (built on the Roseburg Forest Products fortune), the Harry A. Merlo Foundation (built on Louisiana-Pacific Corporation), Pacific Seafood, and Columbia Sportswear’s Tim and Mary Boyle (OJP’s board president, Peter Bragdon, is also a long-time Columbia executive). Columbia Sportswear established its global brand on offshored supply chains, while the timber foundations represent a political tradition that has rarely, if ever, allied itself with public-sector unions or progressive taxation.

There is no teachers’ union on the list. There is no AFSCME, no SEIU, no AFL-CIO affiliate, and no labor council. The dominant weight of the donor base is corporate Oregon establishment wealth, drawn from sectors whose material interests rely on constrained public budgets and weakened public-sector labor.

The OJP transparency page states that the organization “retains full authority over editorial content” and “maintain[s] a firewall between news coverage decisions and all sources of revenue.” It is standard boilerplate; every newsroom funded by interested money uses some version of it. You cannot definitively prove a firewall fails in any single article. But you can clearly see the pattern across many.

When a corporate-funded newsroom publishes an investigative feature that frames the state’s largest teachers’ union as the primary obstacle to educational improvement, the real finding is the bias itself. By declining to interview rank-and-file teachers and treating a union-defunding campaign as objective proof of failure, the coverage directly serves the donors’ political and economic interests. A stated editorial “firewall” does not erase this alignment; it simply allows the conflict of interest to operate without being named.

Bennett, the retired school administrators’ lobbyist that Jaquiss leads with, claims the OEA is “the gorilla in the room.” The real gorilla in the room of this article, however, is the donor list.

Oregon’s classrooms are in crisis. The funding has not produced the outcomes the Student Success Act promised, and reading scores remain unacceptable. None of this is in dispute. But none of it is a reason to accept the narrative the Oregon Journalism Project has chosen to publish.

A real investigation of Oregon’s schools would name the crisis, identify the defunding campaign, interview the actual teachers, track where the money went, and ask a critical question: Why does a reform coalition—funded by the exact same corporate sector that has spent 40 years working to defund public-sector unions—suddenly conclude that public-sector unions are the problem?

The Oregon Journalism Project will never produce that investigation. Their donor list explains why.

On October 25, 2025, a strategic document on the Democratic Socialists of America blog disclosed that the tenth floor also hosts the DSA-LA chapter’s leadership meetings.¹ The UTLA membership was not consulted about the arrangement and learned of it, if at all, through the publication.

“Laying the Groundwork for a Class Alignment Labor Strategy”, written by Daniel C. of Louisville DSA, Lyra S. of Chicago DSA, and Sumter A. of Atlanta DSA, is scheduled for presentation at a convening in early 2026 for a membership vote. Whether or not the proposal is adopted, the document is a roadmap for how an outside political organization proposes to redirect unions’ mission to its program without informing those unions’ members.

The authors identify UTLA, UNITE-HERE Local 11, and the Chicago Teachers Union as among the “already-aligned unions,”² which, they propose, should serve as the foundation of a coordinated nationwide strategy to convert additional unions. It cites Vladimir Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? as theoretical scaffolding and the Congress of Industrial Organizations of the 1930s as a historical precedent.

The long-term goal, they say, is to create “a social and legal environment where allied democratic, militant, and left-wing unions can officially affiliate with DSA, as the militant shop-floor element of a socialist party.”³

UTLA presents itself as a democratic, member-led union committed to “social justice unionism”, according to its public communications and caucus materials. Its current leadership comes from a UTLA reform caucus called Union Power, which swept the citywide officer positions in the 2014 officer election and has held them ever since.⁴

Alex Caputo-Pearl served as president through 2020, after which Cecily Myart-Cruz succeeded him. DSA’s national organization featured Myart-Cruz as a keynote speaker at its 2019 convention in Atlanta.⁵ During the 2023 contract fight, Jackie Goldberg chaired the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education and is identified in DSA-LA’s published materials as a “DSA-LA member.”⁶ Another LAUSD school board member, Rocío Rivas, was elected in a campaign that, according to DSA-LA’s own published account, was “hand in glove” with the teachers’ union.⁷

By the time the 2023 contract was ratified, three of the most consequential positions affecting the school district’s labor relations—the union presidency, the school board chair, and a key board seat—were held by figures publicly affiliated with a single outside political organization, all elected through overlapping campaigns for which that organization’s chapter openly claimed credit.

A supporter might point out that UTLA’s members chose to be led by Union Power, returned it to office, and ratified the 2023 contract by clear margins. That is true, but it misses the point. Electing officers does not constitute informed consent to structural alignment with an outside political organization. Members voted for a social-justice-unionism platform, not on whether their union would serve as proof of concept for a national strategy described on a caucus blog in Louisville, Chicago, and Atlanta. Endorsing leaders is one thing; disclosing how those leaders were being catalogued, by whom, and for what purpose is another. The Groundwork document is the first place where that disclosure appears in writing.

The doctrine the membership endorsed made the catalog possible. Social justice unionism holds that workers’ welfare is inseparable from the broader community’s welfare and that union activity properly extends beyond wages, hours, and working conditions. The doctrine has genuine intellectual roots and has produced real organizing gains. But it also broadens the range of matters the union can credibly address and, with that, the range of programs from outside the bargaining unit that can be presented to the membership as aligned with the union’s own work.

Once every social question is understood as a labor question, the union’s lack of procedural resistance to an outside organization’s program becomes unremarkable rather than inconceivable. Cleverly, this doctrinal expansion allowed the Groundwork catalog to take shape without the membership understanding that it was being imposed.

For years, DSA-LA documented the relationship in its own publications. Its coverage of the 2019 UTLA strike named specific rank-and-file strikers, identifying them as dual members of DSA-LA and UTLA.⁸ During the 2023 strike, the chapter also mobilized phone banks to turn out DSA members to UTLA picket lines.⁹ The California DSA site likewise describes “dual members of DSA-LA and United Teachers Los Angeles” who organized a joint UTLA turnout at Writers Guild of America picket lines in 2023.¹⁰ The same post names Rocío Rivas as a DSA member and credits DSA-LA’s work “hand in glove with UTLA” for her election to the school board. In other words, the relationship was disclosed incrementally in DSA-LA’s own coverage, but not to the broader, dues-paying UTLA membership in its entirety. The October 2025 Groundwork document completed that process: what had previously been scattered across chapter blog posts and campaign materials was now presented explicitly as the national template.

A union’s bargaining strength depends on maintaining an adversarial distance from the employer. But when overlapping affiliations are documented in an external strategy memo, the adversarial premise is undermined. At times, the same individuals are effectively on both sides of the bargaining table.

The alignment had been on the record for years. What changed on October 25, 2025, was that Groundwork committed it to writing as a program. In Groundwork’s account, the Los Angeles case is presented not as an embarrassment, an accident, or a coincidence of individual political commitments, but as a deliverable. The building, the overlapping elected positions, and the joint candidate endorsements are offered as evidence that the Class Alignment Strategy works. UTLA is framed not as an ally, but as an asset.

The strategy’s proposals follow directly from this logic. It calls for DSA members in a given union, together with DSA staffers there, to form what it describes as a “section” within the union.¹¹ The term is significant. In the 20th Marxist lexicon, a section was a subunit of a larger political body, accountable to that body’s program. The Groundwork document adopts both the term and the discipline it implies. These sections, the authors say, would be aligned with chapter and national priorities through a new body called Socialists in Labor committees, modeled on the existing Socialists in Office committees that coordinate DSA-backed elected officials.

Harmonization from above is upward accountability by another name. DSA also proposes chapter-level Labor Circles to organize members by employment sector, nationwide industry-specific, rank-and-file networks modeled on an existing Amazon SALT network, and tighter integration of DSA’s national labor and electoral bodies. The overall architecture is built for scale.

The blueprint also defines the roles individual members are expected to play. DSA members in unionized workplaces are organized into industry-based Labor Circles, which feed into national rank-and-file networks. Within each union, members and staffers form a section that coordinates through the Socialists in Labor committee, which in turn works with the Socialists in Office committee for the same geographic area. At every level, electoral and labor work are integrated.

The result is a structure that operates alongside the union's official organizational chart, drawing on members of both organizations while remaining accountable to a different program. For a union member who joins DSA, workplace, industry, union, and political activity are all folded into a single coordinated apparatus designed by people they have never met and for purposes the union itself did not authorize.

The authors are candid about what happens when section priorities diverge from union priorities. They state that sections “will be given latitude to decide their orientation toward their local and international unions and to choose between supporting existing leadership in the case of an aligned union, working within a broader reform caucus, or creating an explicitly socialist caucus.”

In other words, that choice belongs to the section, not the union. The union is treated as the terrain on which the section operates. Whether the section supports, reforms, or opposes the union’s elected leadership is decided internally by the section, in coordination with the Socialists in Labor committee and the broader DSA program. Union membership is not a party to that decision.

The authors make clear that unions are expected to be politicized and spell out what that means in practice. They urge members to “pressure their unions to fight back against right-wing attacks on immigrants and multiracial democracy, and endorse an arms embargo on Israel.”¹² While a national political organization may take a position on Israeli arms exports, a local teachers’ bargaining unit would not ordinarily address such an issue. The section bridges that divide by expecting the union to carry out the outside organization’s program on matters unrelated to class size, salary schedules, or workload. Even internal DSA critics do not dispute the program itself; they debate only how it should be implemented.¹³

The historical precedent the Groundwork authors invoke deserves closer scrutiny than they give it. They point to the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 1930s as a model for the scale of organizing they hope to reproduce. During the CIO’s expansion, Communist Party organizers played major roles in chartering new locals and building industrial unionism, and many were extraordinary unionists. But the historical record also shows that Communist Party cadres within CIO unions maintained discipline to an external political line that shifted according to directives from Moscow rather than to conditions on shop floors in Pittsburgh or Detroit. The no-strike pledge during the Second World War and the 1948 Wallace campaign are among the clearest examples of this. CP-aligned union officers coordinated their positions with decisions made elsewhere.

In 1949 and 1950, the CIO expelled eleven international unions. Those expulsions were driven from the top by Cold War anticommunism and the Taft-Hartley regime’s non-Communist affidavit requirement and were, in that sense, acts of political coercion. But they also succeeded because rank-and-file members had seen the pattern and drawn their own conclusions. The Groundwork document cites the CIO’s expansion but omits the CIO’s expulsions. That omission reveals what the authors do not want their readers to consider.

The Groundwork document clearly identifies its next targets: public-sector unions. The authors’ target, SEIU and AFSCME, argue that aligning those unions would “deprive the Democratic establishment of key allies.”¹⁴ Their horizon stretches from Los Angeles to every multiracial public-sector union in the country.

Twentieth-century literature on “entryism”, which the Groundwork authors explicitly invoke, describes the tactic as something external organizations quietly do to mass organizations. They present it openly. Subversive and unapologetic entryism remains the same tactic; the difference is whether the membership is informed.

UTLA members are now being informed, by a document they did not ask for, written by authors outside their union, that catalogs UTLA as an asset of an organization whose program reaches far beyond any collective bargaining agreement. The document states that the union’s leadership building serves as a convening site for the outside organization’s meetings. It presents UTLA as a national model to be replicated in other unions. What it does not explain is how any of this was decided. Members were neither asked nor balloted.

When a union’s officers answer to an outside master, its building hosts that organization’s meetings, its school-board interlocutors come from the same organization, and its strategic value to that organization is laid out in a document meant for internal cadre, that union has been turned into something other than what its members joined, converted without consent. Now, these facts can be read, and every union targeted for future absorption can decide what to do with the movement when it lands at their doorstep.

Ramin Farahmandpur is a former middle school teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District. He supervised student teachers in UCLA's Center X program while earning his doctorate in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. He is now a professor at Portland State University, where he teaches sociology of education, education policy, and organizational theory, and writes Academic Gadfly.

Notes

1. Daniel C., Lyra S., and Sumter A., “Laying the Groundwork for a Class Alignment Labor Strategy (COMPLETE),” Building Up (Groundwork caucus of DSA), October 25, 2025, https://www.groundworkdsa.com/building-up/class-alignment-complete. The disclosure of the DSA-LA leadership meeting location appears in Part 4, in the concluding summation of the Los Angeles case: “DSA Los Angeles has its leadership meetings in the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) skyscraper in Koreatown.”

2. Ibid. The three unions are named in Part 4: “Already-aligned unions such as UNITE-HERE, UTLA, and CTU should be the first unions brought on board for this project.”

3. Ibid., Part 4. The passage reads in full: “The second, more long-term goal is to create a social and legal environment where allied democratic, militant, and left-wing unions can officially affiliate with DSA, as the militant shop-floor element of a socialist party.”

4. Alex Caputo-Pearl, "Los Angeles Teachers' Road to Durable Power, Part 1: 2014–2016," Jacobin and Convergence (co-published), September 2, 2024, https://jacobin.com/2024/09/utla-los-angeles-teachers-organizing. Caputo-Pearl names the full Union Power slate that won citywide office in 2014 and confirms the caucus captured more than half the board of directors seats.

5. “2019 Convention: A World to Win,” Democratic Socialists of America, September 2019, https://www.dsausa.org/2019-convention-a-world-to-win/. DSA’s national website identifies Myart-Cruz as one of the keynote and plenary speakers at the biennial convention in Atlanta, writing: “Cecily Myart-Cruz, Vice President of United Teachers Los Angeles/NEA, helped lead over 30,000 teachers on strike earlier this year … she brought the house down at this year’s YDSA conference and again at the DSA National Convention!” DSA-LA subsequently featured Myart-Cruz as a presenter at its own “Democratic Socialists for Schools and Communities First” education series in July 2020; see https://dsa-la.org/event/democratic-socialists-for-schools-and-communities-first-part-3/.

6. "What We Accomplished in 2019," DSA Los Angeles, February 2020, https://dsa-la.org/what-we-accomplished-in-2019/. The chapter's year-in-review describes its 2019 electoral work: "We campaigned for DSA-LA member, Jackie Goldberg, to take the open Los Angeles Unified School District School Board seat in 2019." See also "DSA-LA for Jackie Goldberg Campaign," DSA-LA campaign site, 2019, which introduces her as "DSA-LA member Jackie Goldberg."

7. “WGA/UTLA Picket,” California DSA, 2023, https://www.californiadsa.org/news/wgautla-picket. The post credits “Rocío Rivas (also a DSA member), who DSA-LA worked hand in glove with UTLA to elect last year.”

8. “Los Angeles Teachers Win Big After Massive Strike,” Democratic Socialists of America, January 2019, https://www.dsausa.org/news/los-angeles-teachers-win-big-after-massive-strike/. The post identifies Madee Weisner and Mark Campbell by name as dual DSA-LA and UTLA members during the 2019 strike.

9. “Phonebank for SEIU 99 + UTLA Strike Support,” DSA-LA events, March 2023, https://dsa-la.org/event/phonebank-for-seiu-99-utla-strike-support-2/.

10. “WGA/UTLA Picket,” California DSA, 2023, https://www.californiadsa.org/news/wgautla-picket.

11. Daniel C., Lyra S., and Sumter A., “Laying the Groundwork for a Class Alignment Labor Strategy,” Part 4. The section proposal reads: “The authors call for unionized DSA members and DSA staffers to create ‘sections’ within their unions. These sections are to organize within their unions to make them more militant, democratic, and left-wing.… Sections will be harmonized with chapter and national priorities through the creation of Socialists in Labor (SiL) committees, tasked with liaising with the sections to determine how they can support wider DSA priorities and how DSA can support them.”

12. Ibid., Part 4, under the heading “Fourth, the authors call for DSA union sections to politicize their unions.” The full passage reads: “Regardless of a DSA section’s decision as to whether or not to support existing leadership, a reform caucus, or form a socialist caucus, they should pressure their unions to fight back against right-wing attacks on immigrants and multiracial democracy, and endorse an arms embargo on Israel. These efforts should be coordinated with national and local DSA campaigns.”

13. Thomas Malone and Carlos Callejo III, “Don’t Mistake Access for Power: A Response to Class Alignment Strategy,” The Call (Bread and Roses caucus of DSA), February 3, 2026, https://socialistcall.com/2026/02/03/dsa-los-angeles-unions-class-alignment-strategy/. The response disputes the emphasis on top-down coordination and staff relationships but accepts the Los Angeles arrangement as the shared terrain of the debate, arguing only that the coalition should be built through rank-and-file shop-floor organizing.

14. Daniel C., Lyra S., and Sumter A., “Laying the Groundwork for a Class Alignment Labor Strategy,” Part 4: “These unions and their vast resources will provide not just inroads into demographics historically suspicious of DSA, but their alignment will also deprive the Democratic establishment of key allies. These public sector unions are to be considered strategic priorities for the class alignment strategy.”

Vance took issue with the Pontiff’s statement that Jesus is “never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.”

“It is very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology,” Vance said at the Turning Point USA event.

The Vice President, who converted to Catholicism in 2019 after periods as an evangelical Christian and atheist, lectured the Pope regarding God’s historical military preferences.

Pope Leo, who holds a doctorate in canon law from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas as well as theological training at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, was evidently unaware that divine favor extends to certain combat operations.

Vice President offers theological guidance at Tuesday's university event.

Nevertheless, Pope Leo forged ahead. Speaking Thursday in Cameroon, the Pope expanded his commentary, stating that the world is “being ravaged by a handful of tyrants.” Vatican sources could not confirm whether this remark referenced any specific individuals.

Vance, who has a memoir titled “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” scheduled for publication in June, was not available for follow-up questions regarding his theological resumé. His office issued a statement noting that the Vice President “stands by his comments” and “looks forward to continued dialogue on matters of faith.”

The investigation into proper ecclesiastical advisory procedures remains ongoing. No word on whether Vice President Vance’s theological understanding exceeds Pope Leo’s expertise on global affairs.

The incident was first reported when this correspondent, waking to find the dog absent from his usual sleeping location, conducted a room-by-room search. Zuki was located in the bathroom. He was not bathing. He was not drinking from the faucet. He was standing upright in the center of the tub, facing the door, and appeared to be waiting for someone to arrive and account for the situation.

Eyewitness testimony from the sole human present describes the dog’s expression as “uncertain.” Whether Zuki had entered the tub on his own, had been transported there by forces unknown, or had simply awakened in the tub after a period of unconsciousness could not be determined from his demeanor alone.

The scene as discovered at approximately 4:00 AM. Zuki's expression remains unexplained.

Through counsel, Zuki issued the following statement: “No comment.”

Counsel further indicated that Zuki would permit a single authorized illustration of the incident to accompany any press coverage, but would not consent to photographs, video documentation, or interviews. The illustration, Zuki’s representative emphasized, should not be construed as an admission of anything.

Zuki has since returned to his regular sleeping quarters and resumed his ordinary schedule of meals, beach walks, and observing seagulls from the hotel balcony. Sources close to the dog describe him as “unbothered” by press inquiries. He has asked that his privacy be respected during this difficult period.

The investigation is ongoing.

Then the eighth P.

Portland State University, she told the Council, is in the process of a historic institutional contraction, likely to lose 200 of its 1100 academic faculty and professionals. The number is the Article 22 retrenchment translated into the language of municipal hearings. It is the institutional contraction stripped of its acronyms, its task forces, its working groups, its dashboards, its strategic narratives.

Two hundred of eleven hundred. Roughly one in five.

Eight categories, each headed by a P, and PSU is the eighth. The placement makes PSU grammatically equivalent to firefighters, parks workers, building trades, and grocery clerks. The equivalence holds because the prior seven Ps have an unambiguous municipal connection. Each names a category over which the Council exercises direct authority or budget influence. PSU’s inclusion in the same series claims the same status for the university. The form of the testimony enacted what the sentences would later state. A Council member moving through seven items they accept as their business arrives at PSU without any change in the register. The sequence does the persuading.

This is a city issue, not just a higher education problem. The chiasmus follows: the fate of the city is the fate of the college and vice versa. The sequence of the testimony has already established the premise these lines depend on. Municipal officials are accustomed to deferring the university to the legislature, the Board of Trustees, the Higher Education Coordinating Commission, or the federal Department of Education. The deferral is convenient. It permits the City Council to treat PSU’s losses as someone else’s responsibility, occurring at an institution that happens to occupy several downtown blocks but whose fate belongs to a different governance map. The eighth P collapses the map.

What the testimony did next is worth noticing for what it withheld. She named no administrator. She named no restructuring acronym. She did not litigate the causes of the contraction beyond the decade-long enrollment decline and the perception of downtown as unsafe. The frame she offered the Council positions the city and the university as parts of one operation rather than as parties to a quarrel. The Council heard an appeal it could accept without being conscripted into an internal university dispute. This restraint is itself a tactic. It opens a door that polemics would have closed.

Portland cannot meet its commitments in education, behavioral health, housing, public service, and economic recovery while one of its core public institutions and workforce engines is so dramatically weakened. The sentence places the university inside the city’s operational obligations rather than alongside them.

She made PSU the city’s problem.

In Labaree’s framework, democratic equality views schooling as preparation for citizenship in a self-governing society, while social efficiency treats it as a mechanism for sorting students into the labor market. Social mobility, on the other hand, frames education as a private good—a credential that primarily benefits the individual who accumulates it. Because American public schooling has never chosen among these competing goals, Labaree argues that this ongoing tension is not a problem to be solved, but a tension educators must navigate.

The tension Labaree describes is now playing out in Austin, Texas, where the State Board of Education’s rewrite shows what curriculum adoption reflects. The Texas State Board of Education is rewriting the social studies standards for 5.5 million Texas students, and the rewrite is not a curriculum dispute. It is the public face of a long campaign to treat state standards as the most efficient lever for moving 5.5 million students into a conservative ideological frame, aligning what they learn with the policy preferences of a small donor class. The mechanism of that campaign — the funding chain that turns ideological preference into classroom content — is now documented in a $70,000 grant from the Texas Public Policy Foundation, disclosed in federal tax filings and first reported this month by The Texas Tribune.

The rewrite is part of a statutory update of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS), the state standards that determine what public school students learn at each grade level. In September 2025, the State Board of Education approved a new social studies framework that emphasized Texas and United States history and de-emphasized world history and world cultures. A panel of nine content advisers, appointed by the board, drafted a list of historical topics under that framework. The board began debating the list in January 2026 and gave preliminary approval to the full package on April 10.

During the January 28 session, board member Staci Childs (D-Houston) challenged the draft’s clinical description of the Civil War. She proposed replacing the abstract phrase “slavery denied liberty and was the main cause of the Civil War” with language that humanized the cost of the institution: stating that slavery took away people’s freedom, treated Africans as property rather than human beings, and that the Civil War was fought to decide whether slavery would continue in the United States. Childs argued that the original draft was not only too abstract for second graders but also insulting to the descendants of the enslaved.

In response, board member Julie Pickren (R-Pearland) objected that this humanized framing was “too heavy” for seven-year-olds. To further dilute the focus on the African American experience, Pickren noted that white Europeans, Native Americans, and Chinese laborers had also endured forms of bondage. Despite this, the amendment passed eight to five, though five of the ten Republicans on the board voted against it.

All five Democrats on the board have since signed a letter calling for the process to be paused pending an independent investigation. This request was not granted. The preliminary package moved forward on schedule, and the standards will return to the board for final approval in June.

The list of historical topics was drafted by a panel of nine content advisers appointed by the state board in 2025. Almost none of the advisers have K-12 classroom experience in Texas, and several have public ties to conservative advocacy organizations. Critics of the process have noted that in previous TEKS revisions, Texas teachers led the development of the standards.

While the advisory panel assumed the lead role in the revision, panel board member Donald Frazier, a historian who directs the Texas Center at Schreiner University, was being paid by the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) to help shape the rewrite, under a financial arrangement he had not disclosed to the full board. Its discovery in a 2024 federal tax filing prompted all five Democratic members to sign a letter requesting an independent investigation into his ties with the think tank. This request was effectively sidelined when Republican board chair Aaron Kinsey declined to schedule a discussion, allowing the preliminary vote to proceed as planned.

The grant documents do not reveal a scandal; they document an ordinary arrangement that typically operates without a paper trail, traceable in this case only because a 2024 federal tax filing made it so. A small number of ideologically aligned funders shape what millions of American children will be taught. They fund the research centers, which produce the content advice, which shapes the drafts state boards adopt. This chain is detectable only when a tax filing, a reporter, and a board minority make it so. The Texas rewrite illustrates the coordinated apparatus of the American Right, which uses think tanks, advisory panels, and state boards to manipulate public school curricula.

The Texas story is not an isolated case. As of spring 2022, 17 states had enacted policies restricting how K-12 public school teachers could address topics the statutes label ‘challenging concepts’ — race, gender, and the country’s complex past. Research from the RAND Corporation’s American Educator Panels found that roughly one in three U.S. public school teachers was working under such restrictions at the time (Woo, Lee, Prado Tuma, Kaufman, Lawrence, and Reed, 2023). By January 2023, follow-up RAND research reported that 51 percent of U.S. teachers were subject to state or local restrictions, and even teachers under no formal restriction reported limiting their classroom discussions of political and social issues (Woo, Diliberti, and Steiner, 2024).

This chain—stretching from a think-tank grant to a library shelf in a second-grade classroom—is s documented. The institutional pressure it produces has coincided with a rising sense of professional anxiety among educators, who increasingly rank the intrusion of external political opinions into the curriculum as a top source of job-related stress.

My course asks practicing educators to analyze their institutional roles within a framework that assumes the three goals of public schooling exist in productive tension. Labaree believes the tension is constitutive of the work; the educators in the seminar believe it too. They choose democratic equality as the goal that best describes the purpose of public schooling.

The Texas rewrite is teaching a different lesson. When one of the three goals has the backing of a financial and policy apparatus, the tension is resolved by administrative fiat. Instead of functioning as a framework of three competing purposes, this board tipped the scales to assert the dominance of one. Democratic equality survives as a decorative mission, the value teachers carry while the institutional machinery is hard-wired to ignore it. The educators in my course accurately read the tension between their professional commitments and such institutional constraints. A profession must now decide what it does when ideological interference becomes the primary condition of the work.

The State Board of Education is set to vote on the final social studies standards in June. While parents, educators, and historians continue to offer testimony and Democrats on the board voice their objections, the board remains on track to ratify a package that will define the educational landscape for 5.5 million Texas students starting in 2030.

Though the grant was disclosed and the conflict of interest identified, the request for an independent investigation was refused, allowing the vote to proceed unimpeded. Beyond the immediate curriculum, this outcome doesn't address the board’s procedural machinery. It fails to determine whether public disclosure is sufficient to alter future staffing or whether content advisers will continue to be recruited from the ideological ranks of their funders. Ultimately, the June decision ensures that these arrangements operate under strategic nondisclosure, becoming public knowledge only after the window for meaningful intervention has closed. This coordinated opacity reflects the broader critique of educational policy and market-driven reforms analyzed in Farahmandpur and Wimmer (2024).

The conventional explanations for what happened to downtown Portland after 2020 are three: crime drove businesses out, the protests made the city ungovernable, and remote work emptied the offices. These narratives function as ideological inversions, framing the results of disinvestment as its catalysts. There are, however, alternative explanations for this phenomenon: the macroeconomic condition of capital accumulation in the late phase of a long downturn, and Portland as the site where a 40-year economic cycle culminated in the vacancy of a single zip code.

I. Devaluation, Consolidation, and Exodus

The first is the devaluation of commercial office space, and Big Pink is only the local emblem of a citywide and national pattern. Downtown Portland office vacancy stood at 34 percent in late 2025. It was the highest of any major American city, a rate that is severe in Portland, which lacked the financial-center functions that kept Manhattan and San Francisco partially tenanted, the federal subsidies that cushioned Washington, and the legacy industrial base that held Boston and Chicago. The downtown functioned as administrative office space for a regional service economy through the 2010s, with asset values inflated by a decade of zero-interest rates and the exhaustion of more productive outlets for surplus capital. The regional service economy that filled the downtown has contracted, decentralized, and moved online. The office towers built to house this sector remain.

The second is the consolidation of corporate landlords in the residential housing market. The buyers of single-family rental homes in Portland over the past decade have not, for the most part, been individuals; they have been Blackstone, Invitation Homes, American Homes 4 Rent, and a handful of smaller institutional players coordinated through pricing software.

In August 2024, the Department of Justice filed an antitrust suit against RealPage, whose YieldStar algorithm sets rents for more than four million units nationally, with Oregon joining as a plaintiff state. The suit alleges that competing landlords outsourced their pricing decisions to the same software and thereby colluded, passively, to raise rents. Algorithmic rent-setting is what the spatial fix looks like in its terminal phase: when there is no more room to build, the yield has to come from squeezing the existing stock harder, and YieldStar is the instrument of the squeeze.

The same housing market that extracts rent from Portland’s working-class tenants is also the primary wealth-building vehicle for the city’s middle class, through homeownership, accessory dwelling units, and short-term rental arbitrage, which means that the middle-class homeowner and the institutional landlord occupy the same line on a balance sheet without occupying the same class position. When capital circulates, the landlord sells the portfolio and moves the proceeds to the next position, while the homeowner is stuck with the house, the mortgage, the property tax bill, and the neighborhood. The balance sheet is shared. The exit is not.

The third is the corporate tenant exodus from the downtown core. U.S. Bank, the tower’s namesake tenant, moved its regional headquarters out in 2024, retaining only four branches and a client center at 900 SW 5th Avenue. Unitas Community Credit Union left downtown for a $27 million property on SW Durham Road in Tigard, reframing the move as a “distributed work strategy” and an “activity-based working environment.” KinderCare, headquartered in Portland for decades, completed its move to Lake Oswego in 2022. Standard Insurance consolidated its remaining downtown workforce at its Hillsboro campus, citing, in the words of its community relations director, properties that had “sustained significant vandalism” and employees who had been “assaulted in recent months.” SOREL, the Columbia Sportswear-owned footwear brand, relocated its headquarters, and REI closed its Portland flagship after reporting the highest number of break-ins and thefts in two decades. Colliers reported in June 2023 that companies representing more than one million square feet of vacated downtown space had significantly downsized and relocated most of their operations. Between 2020 and 2021, Multnomah County lost $1.08 billion in aggregate adjusted gross income to out-migration, compared with an annual average of $96.6 million over the prior three years.

The Silicon Forest was never in Portland proper; Intel has been in Hillsboro since 1974, and the tech firms that anchor the regional economy have been on the Westside for half a century. What Portland’s downtown provided before 2020 was an administrative shadow cast by that productive base. The law firms, accounting firms, management consultancies, architecture firms, and financial services that needed to be within driving distance of the sites of material production clustered downtown to serve them. Historically, those administrative functions had to be located near the sites of production. Remote work rendered that spatial requirement obsolete. The administrative functions that had been based in Portland to serve the Westside could now serve it from anywhere, and most of them chose to do so from somewhere cheaper.

II. The Spatial Fix and the Long Downturn

Global capitalism has been in a profitability crisis since the early 1970s, a condition Robert Brenner identifies as the long downturn. Manufacturing overcapacity in advanced economies, intensified by the entry of Japanese, German, and then Chinese producers into sectors the United States had once dominated, eroded profit margins across the productive economy. Capital in productive sectors, facing declining profits at home, sought higher returns elsewhere: in finance, in real estate, in rent extraction, in the various forms of asset inflation that characterized the neoliberal era. The long downturn is not a cyclical recession. It is the 40-year condition within which every post-1973 boom has been constructed, pursuing returns outside the productive economy.

Capital found its primary outlet in the built environment of the city, a mechanism David Harvey identifies as the spatial fix. The built environment, in Harvey’s sense, is the physical fabric of a city: its buildings, its infrastructure, its real estate assets considered as a form of fixed capital. When capital generates more surplus than the productive economy can profitably absorb, it faces what Marxists call overaccumulation. Harvey’s argument is that capital responds to overaccumulation by moving through what he calls a secondary circuit, which routes investment into the built environment rather than into production. The fix works until it no longer does. When the secondary circuit cannot absorb further investment at acceptable returns, the investor class divests, and what remains behind is what cannot be moved: the buildings, the debts, the infrastructure, the workers, and the residents whose lives are anchored to the place capital has abandoned.

The downtown office towers were the spatial fix of the 2010s, absorbing capital that could not find adequate returns in the productive economy and placing it in a physical form that yielded rent until it did not. The subsequent commercial real estate collapse is the unwinding of that fix. Landlord disinvestment, the service firm exodus, and the corporate tenant exodus are not three separate phenomena but the same withdrawal seen from three angles: capital abandoning a fix that has ceased to yield.

Capital extraction enforces a hierarchy that runs through multiple classes rather than between two. The actors named in this essay do not constitute a single investor class acting in concert. The owners of commercial office buildings like Big Pink suffered write-downs when tenants left; corporate tenants like Unitus relocated to cheaper sites and shifted their own costs onto the landlords they left behind; institutional residential landlords like Blackstone continued to operate in Portland, extracting rent from tenants while commercial capital fled. These are different positions within capital, and their interests diverged as the secondary circuit unwound. What they shared was mobility. Each could reposition its holdings, leases, and portfolios in response to changing returns. The classes that absorbed the costs could not. The working-class renters whose wages stagnated while rents rose, the middle-class homeowners whose principal wealth is locked into a house in a city whose commercial capital was devalued, the service and retail workforce displaced when the firms they served relocated, and the families manufactured into homelessness by the same process—these are the immobile classes. The movement of capital is the subject, not the failure of a city. Still, the residents of Portland are paying the exit costs.

III. Manufacturing the Cover Story

Four explanations circulate in public discussions of downtown Portland’s decline: the tax burden drove capital out, the crime drove businesses and consumers out, the protests made the city ungovernable, and remote work emptied the offices. Each arranges a fact around the wrong cause, and each serves a second function beyond explanation. The explanations make the disinvestment palatable as a story the city told itself rather than as a trajectory the city was subjected to, providing the ideological cover necessary to finalize the extraction. The four are not competing explanations. They are four versions of the same inversion.

The tax explanation comes from the Metro Chamber, which has for at least two years published economic analyses arguing that Portland’s tax rates are incompatible with retaining or attracting business investment and that the revenue base is no longer adequate to sustain services at current levels. The Chamber has the numbers right. Portland businesses pay the Portland Clean Energy Fund surcharge, the Supportive Housing Services tax, the Preschool For All tax, commercial property taxes, and a schedule of license fees that, according to the Chamber’s comparative analyses, produce an aggregate tax burden higher than that of peer cities. This revenue base is contracting.

The Chamber’s focus on the tax burden ignores the fact that fiscal pressure is a lagging indicator of a weakened economic base. The tax burden is not the cause of the extraction; it is the consequence, the accumulated cost of a city attempting to fund services for a population whose needs have grown as the economic base was stripped. To argue that the remedy is further concessions to capital is to argue that the city should pay capital to return, and the concessions do not come out of nowhere: they come from the service budget. The working-class renter pays when the Multnomah County shelter system is cut, the displaced service worker pays when TriMet runs less often, and the homeowner pays when Portland Public Schools consolidates neighborhood schools. An investor class that has divested from a spatial fix does not return on tax concessions. Investment returns only by the next spatial fix in such a major repurposing of the downtown core as a cultural Mecca.

The encampments have become the dominant feature of downtown core because the commercial density that once regulated social space has collapsed. Then came the abandonment of downtown by office workers, shoppers, and tourists, which then led to the retail sector’s withdrawal, removing the economic activity that had formerly masked and managed chronic social failure. But the divestment did more than reveal a hidden population; it manufactured a new one. The unhoused demographic of 2024 is not merely the 2019 demographic stripped of its commercial cover. Workers displaced by relocating firms, tenants priced out by algorithmic rent monopolies, and families whose stagnant wages could not meet the yields demanded by secondary circuits were pushed onto the streets during this period of extraction. What the streetscape now displays is not just a pre-existing condition exposed by the absence of commerce. It is the direct, material consequence of capital flight.

The 2020 protests masked the true causes of this massive disinvestment, allowing it to be reframed as a response to a local crisis rather than part of national capital flight. This narrative allowed the exit to be presented to shareholders, boards, and ratings agencies as a localized crisis. By centering the protest as the reason for the exit, the entities that benefited during the accumulation phase successfully obscured their participation in a broader movement of capital.

The remote work narrative treats technology as a cause. Remote work is an instrument that served the needs of both capital and labor during a long downturn: workers used it to avoid the commute tax on stagnant wages, and capital used it to abandon office towers that had ceased to deliver adequate returns. Both sides used it, but only the investor class retained the mobility to profit from the resulting devaluation.

The mayor’s office, the Portland City Council, and Prosper Portland, amplified by the Oregonian editorial board, have accepted the exit as given and proposed a response that asks the immobile population to pay its costs. The response does not, and cannot, penalize capital that has already left, because capital that has left pays no taxes to the city and cannot be reached by local policy. The response instead targets the businesses that remain and the residents who cannot leave. Businesses that stay in Portland are offered the downtown tax abatements the Chamber recommends, in the hope that the reductions will attract new capital to replace what has departed. Residents who cannot leave are asked to absorb the exit costs through increased utility fees, reduced municipal services, and the fiscal consequences of the abatements offered to prospective businesses.

The state’s inability to challenge the mobility of commercial capital is not a matter of political will; it is a mandate. The U.S. Commerce Clause prohibits state governments from regulating interstate commerce in ways that burden out-of-state actors, which means Oregon cannot pass a law penalizing capital flight from Portland without running afoul of federal constitutional doctrine. However, acknowledging this constitutional constraint does not excuse the municipal response; it clarifies the mechanics of the transfer. Confined by federal doctrine, the city’s chosen strategy—tax abatements for commercial capital funded by service reductions for remaining residents—functions as a systemic wealth transfer. The narrative offered to the public, which is that Portland failed itself and must now reform itself to win capital back, is the cover under which this transaction is conducted. The cost of capital extraction is transferred from the classes that benefited during the accumulation phase onto the immobile population that inherited the aftermath.

IV. The Immobile City

Big Pink is still there, the rose-granite skin still catching the light. Someone bought the building for $75 million in 2025 and will do with it what the market permits: convert the upper floors to residential, seek federal subsidy for an adaptive-reuse project, hold the asset against a recovery the long downturn will not produce, or write it down again and sell it to the next buyer at the next floor price. The building is no longer an engine of regional administration. None of the available futures returns the building to its original state.

The people who cannot leave will remain. The working-class renter whose rent is set by an algorithm located in Richardson, Texas; the middle-class homeowner whose principal wealth is the house on SE Clinton Street; the displaced retail worker; the displaced service worker; and the residents of the encampments on the sidewalks of a downtown built for a different economy are the population the disinvestment has left in place. They are not passive recipients of the devaluation. Rent strikes, unionization drives in the service sector, and the refusal to clear the encampments are the political friction of classes forced to inhabit the ruins of the secondary circuit. The city will be asked, through fee increases, service reductions, and further concessions to the capital that has already left, to fund the costs of a trajectory to which it was subjected but did not participate.

References and Sources

This essay draws on Robert Brenner’s analysis of the long downturn, developed in The Economics of Global Turbulence (Verso, 2006) and extended in his 2020 New Left Review essay Escalating Plunder. The concepts of the spatial fix and the secondary circuit of capital are from David Harvey, developed across The Limits to Capital (1982) and The Urban Experience (1989), with further elaboration in his essay Globalization and the Spatial Fix.

The commercial real estate figures, including the 34 percent downtown vacancy rate and the $1.08 billion loss in aggregate adjusted gross income in Multnomah County between 2020 and 2021, are drawn from Colliers reports published in June 2023 and covered by Willamette Week. The account of corporate relocations, including U.S. Bank, Unitus Community Credit Union, KinderCare, Standard Insurance, SOREL, and REI, draws on reporting from Portland Business Journal, OPB, KGW, and The Oregonian between 2020 and 2024. The Standard Insurance statement quoted in section I is from KGW’s coverage.

The Department of Justice antitrust suit against RealPage was filed in August 2024 in the Middle District of North Carolina, with Oregon joining as a plaintiff state. Documentation is available through the DOJ Antitrust Division’s public filings.

Claims about tax policy draw on the Metro Chamber’s published economic analyses and on the Oregon Center for Public Policy’s reports on the revenue consequences of Measure 5 and Measure 50. The homelessness figures implied in section III are drawn from the Portland and Multnomah County Point-in-Time Count, published annually by the Joint Office of Homeless Services.

During the April 2026 Faculty Senate meeting, a senator posed the question that should have framed the entire discussion: whether the formula governing the university’s reserve buckets remained appropriate and required periodic review as conditions change. The senator observed that institutional failure would spare no department, making it necessary to examine whether the reserve buckets are funded sustainably. The administration provided no answer.

The Senate received instead a prepared address on the inviolability of fund accounting, tied to an organization most faculty have never heard of: the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO). President Ann Cudd described NACUBO as “the primary authority for higher education financial management.” She stated that the university “relies on standards set by” the organization, invoking its name to explain why non-Education and General (E&G) reserves could not be redirected to cover academic operations. This framing presented fund segregation as a matter of strict institutional compliance rather than administrative choice. The claim carried weight. It was delivered with the cadence of settled law. And it was misleading.

The Illusion of Authority

NACUBO is a membership trade association founded in 1962. It represents more than 2,500 colleges, universities, and higher education service providers by publishing the Financial Accounting and Reporting Manual, running professional development programs, conducting endowment surveys, and lobbying Congress on behalf of campus finance officers.

NACUBO is not a regulatory body, a standard-setting authority, or an enforcement agency. It does not issue binding rules, audit institutions, or possess the power to sanction a university that departs from its recommendations. The actual standard-setting authorities for a public university like Portland State are the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB), which governs accounting standards for state and local entities, and the state legislature and Board of Trustees, which set governance and fiscal policy.

Within the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) hierarchy for public institutions, NACUBO guidance is classified as nonauthoritative literature. The University of Colorado’s Controller’s Office, for instance, lists NACUBO alongside several other nonauthoritative sources, noting that the appropriateness of such literature depends on its relevance, specificity, and the general recognition of the issuer. Calling NACUBO “the primary authority” for university financial management is akin to calling the American Medical Association the primary authority for federal drug regulation. The AMA publishes guidelines. The FDA makes rules.

The Prepared Text

The Senate record captures an abrupt shift in register. In the minutes preceding the NACUBO passage, President Cudd spoke in a conversational mode, noting that tuition revenue and state appropriations fund the E&G reserves. Without transition, the language changed: “The university relies on standards set by the National Association of College and University Business Officers, often referred to as NACUBO, which serves as the primary authority for higher education financial management.”

That statement is not extemporaneous speech; it is a prepared text read into the record. It was deployed to answer a question no one asked. Senator Peters had inquired about self-support courses as an alternative revenue source for departments. President Cudd dismissed the idea as “not best practice” and immediately pivoted to the NACUBO address, which concerned fund transfers rather than revenue generation. The script awaited a prompt, but it did not wait for the right one.

The Buried Admission

The NACUBO statement constructed a layered argument against using non-E&G reserves for academic operations. According to the administration, NACUBO standards prohibit it. Fund accounting methodology prohibits it. Clifton Larson Allen (CLA), the external auditor, prohibits it. Student Fee Committee guidelines, the Board’s reserve management policy, and the January 2025 Executive and Audit Committee memo all ostensibly prohibit the action.

Then, in a single subordinate clause near the end of this litany, President Cudd stated: “While no specific law forbids a one-time reallocation, it is the judgment of the administration and the board that doing so would be fiscally irresponsible.”

After several minutes of constructing the impression that external authorities, professional standards, and legal constraints foreclosed the option, the president conceded that no law actually forbids the transfer. The entire preceding structure was erected to make an administrative preference sound like a regulatory prohibition.

The Internal Concession

The administration’s own finance officer offered a second concession. Before President Cudd launched the NACUBO address, she asked the Vice President for Finance to speak to the risk management reserve. The Vice President confirmed the reserve is funded primarily through a charge on the general fund and volunteered: “That is the one reserve that we can absolutely revisit how we do it.” She noted the risk management fund is the smallest reserve, totaling $2.5 million.

Minutes later, President Cudd characterized any reallocation of non-E&G reserves as “a breakdown of that integrity and a diversion of resources from the specific services they were intended to support.” The university’s finance officer had just told the Senate that one of those reserves could absolutely be revisited. The president then told the Senate it could not.

The Purpose and the Weaponization

Governmental Accounting Standards Board and GAAP frameworks require public universities to segregate funds to prevent fraud, ensure restricted funds are spent for their intended purpose, and maintain accountability to revenue sources. Student fees collected for health services should fund health services, just as housing revenue should fund housing. Bond covenants and state law create genuine statutory firewalls between certain categories of funds.

The issue at Portland State is not whether fund accounting is legitimate, but whether the administration uses the practice as a shield against scrutiny of its own allocation decisions. E&G reserves are generated by tuition and state appropriations; using them to cover E&G operations such as faculty salaries is legally permissible, even if fiscally imprudent, as a recurring practice. Non-E&G reserves, including auxiliary funds and designated student fees, are subject to restrictions that may limit their use for general academic purposes.

However, President Cudd did not argue that statutory restrictions prevented reallocation; she conceded that no law forbade a one-time transfer. The Vice President for Finance volunteered that the risk management reserve, a non-E&G fund, could be revisited. If statutory firewalls were the actual barrier, neither official would have made those concessions.

The true barrier is administrative judgment. The unanswered question is whether the formulas governing the flow into each reserve bucket are appropriate or whether they create artificial scarcity in the academic budget while padding non-E&G accounts that the administration then declares untouchable.

The Circular Authority

President Cudd’s argument rested on multiple ostensibly independent sources: NACUBO guidelines, CLA audit opinions, the Board’s reserve policy, the January 2025 Executive and Audit Committee memo, and the Student Fee Committee charter. These citations created the impression of convergent external oversight.

In practice, these sources lack independence. The Board sets its own reserve policy and hires its own auditors. The administration drafts the memos the Board reviews. CLA audits the financial statements the administration prepares. NACUBO provides best-practice literature the administration selects and interprets. Five apparent external checks on a single decision functioned as a single administrative apparatus citing itself through different institutional voices—a closed loop of self-authorization.

Furthermore, the external authority President Cudd cited most forcefully, CLA, does not say what she claimed it says. CLA’s published guidance on reserve policies states that deploying reserves “does not imply spending without discipline,” that organizations should consider using reserves for “risk management,” including “restructuring efforts for sunsetting programs,” and that the deciding factor is whether “leadership can clearly articulate the why behind them.” President Cudd cited CLA as prohibiting the use of reserves to cover operating deficits. CLA’s published position remains conditional: reserves can be deployed if the rationale is sound, the drawdown is planned, and the governing body exercises informed judgment.1

The Selective Principle

The Board has already approved the use of $12.3 million from E&G reserves to support the E&G operating budget. This drawdown will bring the projected reserve balance below the Board’s required 25 percent minimum by June 30. Using E&G reserves for E&G operations is a categorically different action from transferring non-E&G funds across fund boundaries.

However, the underlying principle President Cudd invoked was not limited to the fund’s boundaries. She argued that “ongoing expenses such as salaries and benefits require ongoing revenue,” that “reserves are a one-time bucket of funds,” and that using them to pay recurring costs “merely delays the point at which funding runs out.”

That principle applies with equal force to the $12.3 million E&G drawdown. The administration applied the principle selectively: reserves cannot cushion retrenchment, but reserves can cover the operating deficit the administration has already authorized.

The Questions Ignored

Throughout the meeting, senators asked about financial flexibility, and the administration answered with bureaucratic roadblocks. A senator asked whether the university could evaluate contribution margins across all revenue streams, noting that all departments sink or swim together. President Cudd deflected to capital funding and housing revenue without engaging the concept. Senator Peters asked about self-support courses; President Cudd dismissed the idea and launched the NACUBO address. The senators asked whether the current financial structure served the university’s mission. The administration responded by explaining why the current arrangement is non-negotiable.

The Verdict

NACUBO is a professional association that publishes guidance; it does not set binding standards for public universities. Invoking the organization as “the primary authority” to foreclose a policy option overstates its institutional role and obscures that reserve allocation at Portland State is governed by Board policy and administrative discretion, not external regulatory constraints. The president’s own finance officer confirmed as much on the record, minutes before the president’s prepared text stated otherwise.

The NACUBO defense is not a financial argument. It is a governance failure dressed in the language of fiduciary responsibility. The administration has chosen to protect reserve balances over faculty positions and has invoked a trade association manual to avoid accounting for that choice. Faculty facing elimination are entitled to know that the supposed authority cited against them is a trade association’s recommendation, the legal prohibition cited against them does not exist, and the principle invoked against them was waived when the administration found it convenient.