The pro-development "Build Baby Build" San Francisco Renters Federation (SFBARF) disseminated a power-point presentation over four months ago on their listserv. In it, they include a slide describing their methods. As they state: "Connect pro-density, pro-building individuals to each other. Continue to testify in favor of large projects. Disrupt the alliance between rent-control advocates and affordable housing advocates." The last of these goals includes a time frame of 4+ months.

As their four month goal comes to a close and as they wield their accumulated wealth in an attempt to defeat Proposition I in San Francisco (which would impose a moratorium on luxury development), it behooves us to stop and wonder how successful their divide and conquer agenda has been. Their leader Sonya Trauss recently likened her ideal mode of governmentality to that described by Machiavelli in his 1513 "The Prince" to justify her group's entanglement with capitalist interests. And as Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez reported of an interaction with Trauss on October 13th (http://www.sfexaminer.com/sfbarf-goes-progressives-political-jugular/):...

So not only does the Trauss-led SFBARF actually aspire to Machiavelli's disastrous ideal of governance, but further she and her group embrace the divide-and-conquer techniques long used in colonial and totalitarian agendas. Many housing rights activists in San Francisco have received cruel communications from members of their group over the last several months, but fortunately nobody takes them seriously. The attempt to ""Disrupt the alliance between rent-control advocates and affordable housing advocates" is not working.

Clearly the housing rights movement in San Francisco cannot be broken through an outmoded Machiavellian epistemology nor through techniques of divide-and-conquer.