Not only has Gov. Gavin Newsom vocally opposed the proposed California billionaire tax, but he also wants to prevent the state from ever passing a wealth tax in the future.
On Friday he endorsed Proposition 42, a ballot measure that would cancel out Proposition 40, the proposed billionaire tax. Prop. 42 would prohibit retroactive taxes like the one-time 5% tax on assets that would apply to any billionaire who lived in California on Jan. 1, 2026 if Prop. 40 passes.
But Prop. 42, funded and placed on the ballot by billionaire and Google co-founder Sergey Brin to defeat the billionaire tax, also would go further, by banning any new taxes on personal property.
That includes pensions and 401K accounts before retirees start drawing retirement income from them. It also includes other investments, financial assets, business holdings, art collections and all other forms of personal wealth that would be affected by the billionaire tax or any future wealth tax.
Newsom’s decision to support Prop. 42 runs counter to his own Democratic Party and some labor unions. It also aligns him with some of the wealthy tech donors with whom he’s maintained longstanding relationships dating back to his days as mayor of San Francisco.
What is your strategy and can you point to it having worked recently? Electing Obama was preferable to electing McCain, was it not? Electing Clinton was preferable to reelecting Bush Sr., was it not? Electing Hillary would have been preferable to Trump. Y/N? Electing Biden was preferable to reelecting Trump. Y/N? Electing Harris would have been preferable to Trump. Y/N?
This isn’t complicated. The system is dead simple, and certain people keep making the wrong choices. We are a democracy. We have the government we have not because choices are being forced on us, but because our citizens keep making shitty choices. Can we not? Please?
If you have a democracy how come the US government so often does things no one voted/asked for? Unless the US government tricks everyone into thinking it’s a democracy so they can shift the blame away from themselves whenever they do something horrible.
That’s the thing: we did vote for this. Look who won the last election.
Can you blame people for voting red when all the media in the United States is made by rich people designed to convince workers that fascist policies are good for them? A fair democracy can’t have corporate owned media.
On one hand, I totally, wholeheartedly agree.
On the other, it is the duty of the people to maintain their democracy, irrespective of the attempts of the wealthy to subvert it.
The democrats aren’t much better either though. Supporting imperialist wars, being pro Zionism, receiving the majority of their funding from extremely rich people. I haven’t seen them implement some extremely obvious and beneficial policies like a proper universal income, decent minimum wages, free healthcare, etc.
Regardless of all of that, do you see a future where people actually vote for democrats consistently? After 200 years of back and forth I personally don’t see it changing any time soon.
Your definition of “much better” seems lacking.
The GOP not only supports all of those, they are the origin.
But you have seen them implement things like negotiating drug costs, building infrastructure to poor people, providing disability benefits to people affected by toxic chemicals. Is this nothing to you? Is this literally nothing? Is this not preferable to the alternative?
Does a simple preference exist? Y/N?
Y I’m not saying they are exactly the same, of course democrats have some benefits over republicans but not funding a genocide is a pretty low bar. The democrats haven’t been taking any real steps to reverse the fascist rabbit whole the US is sliding into. I don’t think voting for democrats and expecting real change is a good tactic.
That would be a bad tactic, which is why I’m not espousing it.
The tactic is thus:
Primary status quo Democrats anywhere and everywhere we can with better candidates.
Whether or not that succeeds, vote for the person running on the Democratic ticket. (Hopefully it’s a progressive.)
If we don’t do #2, we’ll get fascists. If we don’t do #1, we’ll get status quo assholes, but at least they are preferable to fascists.
No one has suggested a better alternative to me. I’d love to hear it, because #2 isn’t fun most of the time. It doesn’t give me or anyone else the warm fuzzies, but it’s important.
The person who promised no more wars, an end to the genocide in Gaza, and an end to the Russo-Ukrainian war? Hmmmm…
That person who lied thousands of times before, and had a clear track record? The people that elected him should and could have known better.
Is it the fault of millions and millions of under educated desperate poors? Or a handful of some of the most powerful people on the planet running the opposition to Donald fucking trump, who couldn’t even manage to beat his empty promises?
Yes. It is the fault of the electorate. The rich cunts are owed plenty of blame for buying up our media ecosystem and using it to propagandize the public, but ultimately, the public has the education system because they voted for it, and the public elected their leaders because they are assholes.
I sense your US-centrism. You don’t want to be blamed, do you? Well how about Israel? Are Israelis not responsible for Bibi having power since 1996? Are Israelis great, blameless people as they vociferously support a genocide?
Think, dude.
Absolutely not American, lol. I think America and Israel should be sanctioned out of existence ✌️
The system is incredibly complicated. You’ve just been too absent to notice, and this is not a good system… Its terrible.
And wow… What a choice we have! Corpo pigs or corpo pigs with sharper teeth. Elections have some effect but that study from Princeton years ago LITERALLY showed that elections are mainly useless. https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
Organizing, community structuring, mutual aid, decentralizing, educating are all completely necessary alongside it. Honestly, often in replacement of the complete failure our system is.
And I know I’m about to be accused of being a anti-voting shill who has been recruited right before midterms. I’m not, I do vote (very intentionally and informed) every election, but I think we need to do SOOO much more.
Show me the better alternative to voting strategically. I never claimed the US system is great and perfect and directly produces wonderful results. Nobody over age 12 believes that bullshit, especially not lately.
In our deeply, deeply flawed system, consistently voting strategically is one of the most effective things we can do to effect change for good. Not perfect, but good. I urge all my fellow citizens to master the art of holding their noses and voting for the candidate more likely to improve their lives, or less likely to fuck them over. The alternative is accelerationism towards collapse, and the people on the left who say they want that are all woefully unprepared for the consequences. (The accelerationists on the right are also unprepared, but at least they have a lot of guns.)
As for doing more: I agree. AFTER we charitably elect the lesser evil, we should be calling their offices every day. We should be demonstrating. We should be engaging in civil disobedience. Our jobs do not end on election day, but we should never, ever allow the GOP to seize power electorally when it’s so easy to keep them out. That is tying both hands behind our backs and making sure the people in power not only disregard us, but despise us.
You will never take apart the master’s house with the master’s tools. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing as well, in addition to our other defenses and offenses.
We live in a democracy. What masters are you referring to? You never answered my very, very simple question. Every time I have this discussion with you guys, I’m disappointed further. You have no plan, but you want to criticize mine.
We don’t live In a fucking democracy!! You’re chowing down the propaganda they’re feeding you. What has ever given you an idea that we live in a democracy? Before this oligarchy, it was a plutocracy at best. Companies run EVERYTHING, and they have spent the last 80 years undoing every drop of the New Deal (which is still capitalism), because even that is too progressive for them.
You can’t vote in change to an empire that overthrows foreign governments, oppresses its own populous, and destroys the environment. And the worst part, citizens united is just the cherry on top. It made things way worse, but we wouldn’t magically live in a utopic democracy if citizens united was overturned tomorrow.
Sure, bud.
Nope. People are bastard coated bastards with bastard filling and will continually fuck things up for stupid reasons.
I’m reminded of a quote,
Which is why we are doomed. The best we can come up with is awful.
It’s difficult to say. Would a John McCain Presidency with a Dem Congressional majority have produced the kind of progressive compromises that Bush/Pelosi and Reagan/O’Neil gave up?
Would it have all ended like Clinton’s second term, with Corporate Dems selling off the farm while crying about how the President made them do it?
In the same way it’s difficult to say “Hillary would be better than Trump” without knowing the fresh new horrors her campaign would have inflicted. Or, for that matter, whether a Hillary 2016 just ends in a Trump 2020.
It’s all empty speculation. And it’s all just predicated on eating what these corrupt organizations churn out.
The system is what it does. If you think the outcomes are wrong, then you either acknowledge the system itself is broken or you give up on the concept of liberal democracy.
Because the US isn’t unique. Trumpie candidates have been popping out of neoliberal democratic systems for over a century. “The voters are wrong” is a sentiment directly at odds with the democratic model. The voters can’t be wrong, unless you’ve identified some Guardian Council better suited to select the candidates.
I really don’t think it is. Can you really look around at our current reality: an executive branch shamelessly enriching themselves, a Congress that has ceded all power, a SCOTUS that has enshrined corruption and abuse of power, military and paramilitary in the streets, etc., and think, “well who knows if Harris would have been worse?” Come on, dude. Don’t let your urge to win interwebs arguments override your intellectual honesty. This shit is objectively worse than the alternative, and we don’t have to speculate about it.
We had all this shit in 2024. We had all this shit in 2004.
Liberals have an opportunity to clean up politics through prosecution and legislative reforms. They control numerous big wealthy states. They have oodles of cash and a wide network of friendly business interests.
What would have happened under a Harris Presidency with a Republican Congress? Same shit we got in 2011. Debt crisis. Economic slowdown. More wars. Business bailouts. Hordes of angry racist voters blaming women and minorities for all their problems. An incompetent boob in the White House poisoning the country against everything they stand for.
Worse than what? We’ve been sliding downhill since 2001. Every year is worse than the last, with vanishingly few exceptions.
This isn’t a problem of a single person making a handful of bad decisions. It’s endemic to the entirely national leadership, from city councillors to SCOTUS judges.
You’re delusional.
Go run Hillary again and find out.