From: fedora@fea.st   
      
   On Thu, 12 Feb 2026 13:06:13 -0800, Dude  wrote:   
      
   >On 2/11/2026 12:20 PM, Noah Sombrero wrote:   
   >>   
   >> February 11, 2026   
   >>   
   >> Class war is the future of American politics   
   >> By David Wallace-Wells   
   >>   
   >> The San Francisco Bay Area is home to at least one-third of the value   
   >> of the entire U.S. stock market. Late last year, you couldn’t escape a   
   >> chilling billboard campaign, meant to be cheeky, from an artificial   
   >> intelligence start-up: “Stop Hiring Humans.” And on Saturday, somebody   
   >> tried to AstroTurf a trollish Billionaires March through the city in   
   >> defense of Silicon Valley’s 21st-century robber barons. Only a few   
   >> dozen people showed up, heckled along the way by passers-by.   
   >> The billionaires themselves also seem to be on the move. In recent   
   >> months, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Sergey Brin have all purchased   
   >> homes outside California, potentially bringing their hundreds of   
   >> billions of dollars with them. Others have spent the past few months   
   >> raging about the injustice of the state’s new politics of class   
   >> warfare.   
   >>   
   >> Why? A proposal — supported by the local congressman Ro Khanna but not   
   >> the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and currently floating in limbo as   
   >> a potential ballot initiative tentatively scheduled for the fall —   
   >> that would impose a one-time 5 percent wealth tax on the state’s   
   >> billionaires, whose wealth has soared since the pandemic.   
   > >   
   >This makes sense - California faces a projected budget deficit for the   
   >2026-27 fiscal year, with estimates ranging from a $2.9 billion shortfall.   
   >   
   >However, California Governor Gavin Newsom is not in favor of the   
   >proposed California wealth tax. Why?   
   >   
   >It could damage the state's economy, drive away top earners, and reduce   
   >funding for public services by reducing overall tax investments.   
   >   
   >He has consistently opposed such measures, stating years ago that wealth   
   >tax proposals were "going nowhere in California".   
      
   A citizen's ballot initiative might change his mind.   
      
   >> This isn’t exactly pitchforks in the streets, the nightmare   
   >> entertained by every generation of aristocrats and oligarchs as a   
   >> supremely flattering form of status paranoia. But about the symbolism,   
   >> at least, the horrified billionaires and would-be billionaires are   
   >> basically right. There has never been a tax of this kind so seriously   
   >> considered in the United States before, and the policy would mark a   
   >> genuinely new era of the politics of extreme wealth in this country.   
   >> Or is that new era already here? Politicians now casually invoke “the   
   >> Epstein class” and more routinely name-check affordability than they   
   >> ever campaigned on its close cousin inequality. Prominent plutocrats   
   >> talk much more openly about their right to great fortunes and their   
   >> hostility toward oversight and interference from the government, and   
   >> leftists talk more openly about their hostility toward extreme wealth.   
   >> Last year was marked by class-warfare bookends: In January, as the   
   >> tech right joined the president’s MAGA army for his inauguration in   
   >> Washington, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man was handed close to   
   >> unilateral control of the machinery of government, partly as a   
   >> thank-you for political contributions of nearly $300 million. And in   
   >> November a democratic socialist was elected mayor of the world’s   
   >> financial capital, relying on public matching funds against the many   
   >> millions spent opposing him and almost universal hostility from the   
   >> banking class.   
   >>   
   >> One big question is whether this backlash will go beyond lip service —   
   >> whether the country’s partisan coalitions, which have seemed so   
   >> unshakable in the time of President Trump, will be reshaped by   
   >> antagonism for billionaires, and the response of those billionaires,   
   >> as the sunset of Trump’s long reign comes slowly into view.   
   >> “Masks off — that’s the right way to put it,” says Gabriel Zucman, an   
   >> economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has helped   
   >> craft wealth-tax proposals like the one in California and similar ones   
   >> being considered internationally.   
   >>   
   >> One year in, Trump’s second term is transparently and by many orders   
   >> of magnitude the most brazenly corrupt administration in American   
   >> history, with crypto meme coins and the president’s personal lawsuit   
   >> against his own I.R.S. The outward deference of tech oligarchs to   
   >> Trump seems to have outlasted the so-called vibe shift of young, Black   
   >> and brown voters, many of whom have since abandoned him. And the   
   >> billionaires’ apparent comfort with transactional, acquisitive MAGA   
   >> politics seems to illustrate what Khanna — who represents parts of the   
   >> Bay Area and many of those billionaires — has called Silicon Valley’s   
   >> broken social contract.   
   >>   
   >> Musk’s purchase of Twitter more than three years ago looks even more   
   >> politically consequential both in retrospect and because of how widely   
   >> it is now being imitated by others who share his desire to shape the   
   >> country’s information diet from above. Larry Ellison’s Oracle now   
   >> holds an ownership stake in TikTok, and his son, David, owns CBS News   
   >> and is vying for control of CNN. Jeff Bezos just neutered what was   
   >> either the country’s second- or third-most-important newspaper, about   
   >> a year after he took control of its editorial page and steered it   
   >> unmistakably to the right.   
   >>   
   >> Then there is the flood of scandal contained in the recent release of   
   >> files related to the Epstein investigation. So far they have failed to   
   >> land any prominent American in obvious criminal jeopardy, but they fit   
   >> neatly into a noxious vision of elite impunity and entitlement. “We   
   >> were told that MAGA was for working-class Americans,” Senator Jon   
   >> Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia, said in a speech last weekend. “But this   
   >> is a government of, by and for the ultrarich. It is the wealthiest   
   >> cabinet ever. This is the Epstein class, ruling our country.”   
   >> That is all prologue, of a kind. Up ahead looms the prospect of   
   >> radical social and economic transformation at the hands of A.I., whose   
   >> ultimate effects remain largely unknown but were sold first as   
   >> existential and now as merely epochal.   
   >>   
   >> One consequence of that talk has been to remind people that they   
   >> already feel pretty out of control of their own lives, in an age of   
   >> big tech and a cost-of-living crisis. A.I. seems to promise another   
   >> step in that same direction — handing what looks like a lot of social   
   >> control over the whole human future to perhaps fewer companies, run by   
   >> fewer executives, empowering perhaps even fewer algorithms, over which   
      
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   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)