Earlier this month, an audio leak exposed three Latino Los Angeles city councilmembers and the president of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor engaging in shockingly casual racism behind closed doors. Their comments were targeted at indigenous Mexican residents of LA and the two-year-old black son of a fellow councilmember, among others. They also blatantly discussed their motivations for redistricting along political lines.

While journalists have made much of the racist content of the recordings, they’ve paid little attention to how political formations like the “little Latino caucus,” as Federation of Labor president Ron Herrera dubbed the crew in the leaked audio, fit into the larger project of the Democratic Party in California and the nation. Nury Martinez, Kevin de León, and Gil Cedillo conspired with Herrera to draw district lines in a way that protected both their own political power and the interests of their allies in private real estate development and political philanthropy. In LA, similar partnerships between business, labor, and politicians have generated massive private wealth and political power for a few on the backs of renters and working families — and at the expense of public education.

Nowhere is this partnership more blatant than in LA’s most expensive district election of 2022. That election is not for city council, the state assembly, or state senate, but for Board District 2 of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). In that competition, the local nonprofit director María Brenes has benefited from over $8.8 million in independent contributions from just three donors. Of those, the two largest individual contributions originate from two billionaires: Reed Hastings of Netflix and the real estate mogul Bill Bloomfield.