The Billionaires Are Organizing Against Us — DSA-LA Should Too, by Endorsing Raman and Roy

The 2026 LA Mayoral election is an opportunity to change things for working people—and clearly business interests feel the same way. Billionaire corporations are attempting to hijack the Bass reelection campaign to create a political opening to exploit the multiracial, working class of Los Angeles. Electing Councilmember Raman as Mayor and Marissa Roy as City Attorney would be disruptive to the network of corporate elites who are seizing power in LA.  That is why we, DSA-LA members, who are rank-and-file leaders of progressive Unions, like UNITE HERE and UAW, have advocated that our Unions endorse and elect a Raman and Roy ticket as the leaders of the city. We advocate for DSA-LA to do the same.

We cannot consider these candidates in a vacuum devoid of the actual political context we confront today. The tech billionaires at Airbnb have poured $750,000 into an independent committee working to reelect Mayor Bass. In the June primary, Airbnb teamed up with the Police Protective League and the Central City Assn., a group representing downtown Los Angeles businesses, to fund ads in support of Bass and city attorney candidate John McKinney. As primary results rolled in, Justin Wesson, Airbnb senior manager of public policy in California, crowed that, “Airbnb has arrived in L.A. politics — not as a guest, but as a permanent resident.”

Earlier this year, Mayor Bass included a provision in the city budget, backed by the company, to loosen the very short-term rental (STR) restrictions Raman spent years trying to enforce. If it had passed, it would have created nearly 31,000 new deregulated STRs in addition to the 9,000 we already have—giving landlords and corporate speculators an easy way to kick out tenants. This would especially have hurt tenants in working-class Black and Latino communities in South Central, close to Olympic venues, where gentrification is already occurring. 

While the City has repeatedly failed to protect tenants from the STR threat, someone stepped up and provided leadership: Councilmember Nithya Raman. Nithya has been the strongest and most consistent voice fighting these tech billionaire STR platforms and protecting our housing from corporate exploitation. In 2022, Councilmember Raman pushed for tighter enforcement of the STR ordinance and improved legislation to protect tenants; what she said then is just as true now: "In our city, we cannot afford the consequences of losing any more affordable housing units from a supply that is already in a desperate deficiency." 

The Mayoral and City Attorney races pit the two most progressive candidates that will ever have been elected to these citywide positions against the corporate billionaire class who believe their money will reshape Los Angeles in this election.   The outcome will impact the material lives of working people in this City, from families who cannot find another apartment to rent, to mass displacement driven by the Olympics, to workers whose organizing efforts will be governed by the next Mayoral administration.  These are the immediate stakes for the multiracial working class, which DSA-LA represents. We should consider these impacts carefully.

Councilmember Raman fought to protect our housing stock, and she has the enemies to prove it.

Raman has been a champion on tenants’ rights—she fought to pass some of the strongest tenants’ rights in the nation and fought to update the Los Angeles Rent Stabilization Ordinance to cap rent increases at 4%. It’s no exaggeration to say these were transformative for working-class people—and she earned the anger of landlords by doing it. 

It should be evident where Raman’s allegiances lie when Airbnb and Douglas Emmett have taken to the other side of the ledger in this election. Follow the money and the record—they tell the same story.

The Olympics represent a historic organizing opportunity.  We need the City leadership that gives us the best opportunity to win the fights of the next four years.

Los Angeles will see an extraordinary set of challenges in the future: the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games, as well as the real possibility that many of LA’s unions will be on strike in early 2028, at exactly the moment when the world's eyes are on the city. That is not a coincidence. It is exactly the moment that this country’s largest corporations will be leaning hardest on City Hall to keep workers quiet, keep hotels and grocery stores running, and keep the optics of the Games clean—no matter what sacrifices the people actually doing the work have to endure.

And it isn't just about who stands on a picket line and picks up the bullhorn. The Mayor appoints the people who sit on commissions most Angelenos never think about that shape our working conditions: the Board of Airport Commissioners, the Board of Public Works, and the Board of the Department of Water and Power, to give just a few examples. We need a Mayor who fills those seats with people who understand the working poor.  We need these boards to work with a City Attorney who takes the work of these boards seriously.

This city is already in crisis, and the Games will not fix that — they will exacerbate it. LA is grappling with a homelessness crisis, a housing shortage, and transit and city services that already strain to meet residents' needs. Hosting the Olympics on top of that means more pressure on transit, more competition for housing as hotel and short-term rental demand spikes, and city dollars pulled toward security perimeters and sponsor logistics instead of the people who live here year-round. And LA28's own board tells you who this is really for: it has been stacked with MAGA-aligned figures like Reince Priebus and Kevin McCarthy, alongside corporations positioned to profit handsomely off these Games. Taxpaying Angelenos will foot the bill — in dollars and in disrupted lives — while those decision-makers and corporations rake in the upside. We need to prepare for an epic conflict over these questions, and this election will determine who we will be negotiating against.

Courage on living wages

In Los Angeles, the hotel, airline, and hospitality industries made their play earlier this year clear: threaten to upend the system unless workers get squeezed. They used every trick in the book to try to quash the Tourism Worker Living Wage Ordinance: ballot measures, council delays, and political threats. But those threats only work on politicians who blink. Those who did worked overtime to try to gut our ordinance, and it was only thanks to the intervention of the DSA-LA Socialists in Office and allies from across the City that we managed to save the ordinance and help the workers who needed those wage increases the most. 

We need a Mayor who stands up to corporate threats. One who will defend living wages when the industry throws its money around, and who will build a City government that respects workers who organize. Councilmember Raman stayed strong when others backed down in the face of corporate pressure on the living wage. 

Politics is an opportunity for workers to exercise power. Politicians are not the key to that exercise. The organizing is.

Let's be clear about something: no single candidate or endorsement represents the political aspirations of working people. No politician alone will save us. The most courageous thing any worker can do is organize their workplace and to use that organized power to disrupt capital, even when it means risking time, money, and social standing. This is the case when we go on strike, this is the case when we march, and this is the case when we vote. 

Here, the most disruptive thing we can do as workers in this election is to disrupt the lobbyist machinery that billionaires are using to hijack City Hall.  We should embrace that this involves a passionate Citywide effort. We are already doing a citywide effort in the City Attorney race.  Endorsing in the Mayor’s race makes that effort to elect Marissa Roy more powerful, not less, because it acknowledges how much is at stake in this citywide election. It also does something else DSA-LA should care about: it gives people a reason to believe their organizing can win something. People do not join a movement out of economic duress and despair—they join because they shed their fear and see that fighting changes outcomes. An optimistic case for power is how we grow our ranks, even when a candidate is imperfect.  We do this by emphasizing the power of action, not candidates. We do this by engaging, not sitting it out.

Some will worry that this kind of outreach means watering down our politics. We should not mistake growth for dilution. The purpose of socialist organizing is not to wait for workers to arrive fully formed at every one of our political conclusions. It is to meet working people where they are, bring them into struggle, and organize with them toward a clear understanding of their own power. Nor should we draw a false distinction between DSA and labor when our fundamental task is the same: building the power of working people against capital. A DSA-LA endorsement can be more than an expression of the politics of those already inside the organization. It can be an invitation to the workers watching this race, many of whom may not yet see themselves as socialists or DSA members, to enter the movement, meaningfully exercise their power, and grow through collective action. We do them a disservice when we delay that work or turn away from opportunities to bring them in. We must believe in the capacity of everyday workers not only to join this movement, but to become more engaged, more organized, and more powerful through it.

As union members and DSA-LA members, we urge you to endorse the Mayor who has already stood up to corporate power and whose election is feared by the most powerful billionaires in Los Angeles. Endorse Nithya Raman.