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.
With moves like that, we all KNOW the Dems are going to hold all of the rich pedophilic traitors responsible for their illegal actions FOR SURE!
I mean, he won’t tax them, but he will DEFINITELY arrest them, and have them convicted and imprisoned FOR SURE
With all of the illegal actions and stealing of our cash, the DEMS will DEFINITELY hold the tech bros responsible for their pedophilic and traitorous actions! Nevermind that the dem leadership is ALSO PAID BY THIEL. They will hold musk and co responsible and imprison them FOR SURE
Just keep voting for Dems and you will be able to beat those random two (or 6) that flip at key votes. If you vote a little harder for Democrats, they will be able to defeat the parliamentarian when they have the votes.
Nevermind that the Democrats have NEVER restored any benefits or programs that Republicans have cut (they had the votes in '96 and didn’t, Newsome could have done universal healthcare and he didn’t)
ITS TIME FOR SOMETHING ELSE. NO MORE FASCISM
Voting strategically for the least bad candidate presented by the two major parties is the only thing that has been shown to work. It’s how we have the DSA candidates in government that we actually have. None of them have ever won by running as a third party. Not a single one.
Which is why it’s so important to turn out during the primaries. Make sure Gavin isn’t the candidate by voting for candidates you actually like during the primaries. If he wins the nomination, and I sure hope he doesn’t, I’d still vote for him over JD Vance or whatever sick fascist wins the GOP nomination. That’s how it works.
You would, I would, but the 2024 election showed that this doesn’t speak to enough voters to win. If the Democratic Party leadership doesn’t act on that info, I’m not sure what to do
That doesnt work because always being the side that compromises means you lose ground every time.
The solution to this is electing politicians who promise not to compromise during primary season, NOT allowing your political enemies to win general elections. Even in a worst case scenario where your candidate is prancing around saying, “I love compromise!”, it’s still preferable to have a candidate who supports 50% of what you want than one who wants nothing you want and everything you don’t.
The person I voted for in the primary has won the general exactly once in my 26 years of voting and that person was Fetterman.
don’t forget running for office yourself. you can make a really big positive difference in local politics
My dad had that idea and he got roped into a position where he has no power and just receives complaints. He’s not running for reelection.
Yeah, if you stick with it you end up having a project or two you’re proud of and a lot of constituents who are upset no matter what you do. I swear being upset is some people’s hobby (is there a club I can join for that or something? No I’m not going to law school)
Forgive my oversight. Running for office yourself is certainly one of the best things you can do.
There are a bunch of other actions you can take, of course. Phonebanking, doorknocking, etc. And once whoever wins assumes office, call them every day.
Nothing to forgive. Just I would love it if there were more like-minded people getting personally involved (it’s kind of one of my hobby horses). Purely selfish reasoning too, I want to make it easier for my mutual aid network to function and get funding.
great but he cant win. Dems will just sit on the couch if he runs, same as with Harris.
It hasn’t worked. It gave us Clinton, the OG Epsteincrat. Then it gave us a string of loser shitlibs who caved to fascism at the first shove. And a long string of corporate cutouts - from Biden to Lieberman to Manchin to Fetterman - who only knew how to obstruct from within the Democratic party.
This strategy is why America is the only country in the industrial world without a public health care policy. It’s why we have exploding student debts and a housing crisis. Neoliberalism is a curse.
Not trying to be pedantic but the housing crisis is not specific to the US, it’s a problem that exists in a lot of the Western world. The leave the other two as special US issues along with gun violence, incarceration rates along with a whole string of other issues that are American exceptionalism.
The US expanded it’s housing model to the rest of the world. The concept of a mortgage - a lifelong debt to some faceless creditors for the privilege of not being homeless - is recent and local. And the hyper-financialization of these debts, resulting in exploding administrative costs, is even more recent and local.
It’s a creature of the American economy that has been spread by American banks for the purpose of juicing American profits.
You should look into serfdom or feudal land tenure if you think mortgages are something new. They’re just an iteration of a system that has existed for a long time. Also, unsurprisingly, mortgages exist pretty much everywhere. The financialization of them might be more of a US problem indeed but the other points stand.
Serfdom was a consequence of Land Barony, which became a formal process of effectively robbing peasant farmers at swordpoint. Land tenure was a consequence of Enclosure, which was a formal fencing off of public grazing lands by these same land barons. Both of these were prerequisites for the eventual advent of mortgages. But they required a lot more direct application of armed goons. And they were designed to expel native peoples to clear the way for settlers.
Mortgages are a debt vehicle used to move settlers onto seized land, not a military occupation designed to force native people off of it.
Post-WW2 US Hegemony cast a long shadow.
But you see mortgages in places where native people have been expelled, land has been enclosed and financialized, and new settlers have been ushered onto the land under debt peonage. Native people who have held onto their lands don’t pay mortgages. They have no one to pay mortgages to, because nobody else has title to their property.
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.
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?
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.
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.
When has this ever worked?
If this is the system working then the system is bullshit.