California’s Proposition 40 would tax roughly 200 billionaires to fund health care for millions. Google cofounder Sergey Brin and friends have responded by inventing a new kind of pressure group: a lobby whose only client is the billionaire class itself.

A handful of billionaires led by Google cofounder Sergey Brin are out to prove that money can buy anything. They are pouring unprecedented resources into a political campaign to convince — or if that doesn’t work, to trick — California voters into prioritizing billionaires’ wealth over their own livelihoods.

The billionaires also enlisted the help of Governor Gavin Newsom. Shortly after chatting with Brin about the matter at a crypto mogul’s holiday party, Newsom took a stand against the billionaire tax, vowing he’d defeat the campaign one way or another. Following the lead of Newsom and billionaire donors, a handful of liberal nonprofits and labor unions came out against the billionaire tax as well, joining forces with Republicans and business groups to defeat it — all without an alternative plan to fund Medi-Cal once Trump’s cuts kick in next year.

So far, all these efforts have come to naught. The billionaire tax qualified by submitting over 1.6 million signatures, more than double the required number, becoming Proposition 40 on November’s ballot. It’s since been endorsed by the California Federation of Labor Unions and a host of other labor groups, the California Nurses Association, and recently the state Democratic Party. Now Brin and his billionaires must convince a majority of voters that closing hospitals, clinics, and emergency rooms is preferable to taxing billionaires who won’t miss the money.

  • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    15·
    2 days ago

    It’s so interesting to me that they simultaneously think that they can privatize everything and that there will always be people there to care for them somehow. One of the real issues with privatization is the problem of businesses not wanting to train the next generation of workers, they want workers coming in already knowing the ropes, they don’t want to spend money on training them.

    So what happens after all the avenues of becoming a doctor shut down, and their private doc retires, and they struggle to replace them because now there are no new doctors? It just doesn’t make a lick of sense, honestly, because shutting down these places will result in people in the medical field having to find other jobs (and they no longer exist in their field once its all shut down) and those skills will end up fading as they move to other fields and the number of people in the medical field able to support ANYONE including the billionaire class continues to shrink.

    Everything about what they do is so completely short sighted.

  • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    2 days ago

    Why do you think these shitheads love the idea of ending democracy?

    I’m currently reading The Nerd Reich - only a few pages in and can tell it’s one to recommend.

    Of course, The Sovereign Individual gets mentioned in The Nerd Reich. Everyone should be familiar with that book, or at least the general outlines of that book. It’s really quite amazing how these people take such a haughty tone toward most of humanity, really.

    • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      I wasn’t sure if the Nerd Reich was going to be telling me stuff I already knew. I kind of felt like Timnit Gebru called this all when she got shitcanned from Google… because they couldn’t have her talking so openly about what their plans clearly are and were. To the people in charge at Google, it was a feature, not a bug, and they didn’t need this woman (a brown African woman no less, the horror!) telling the world exactly what they were planning and asking them to change it.

      I may be more interested if it goes pretty deep into the history of how these people came to be who they are, and what sources influenced their thinking in this perverse “its only utopia if we build it, and if you dont think its utopia you are wrong” attitude they all seem to have.