Protesting California’s Billionaires

By SETH SANDRONSKY

While the pandemic economy has left every fourth US worker either drawing jobless benefits or waiting for them, the deadly disease has been golden for California’s 161 billionaires. Some of the state’s low-income residents are resisting that wealth grab and demanding social justice.

The spread of anti-police brutality protests nationally has given wind to the sails of those demanding such justice. In the Golden State on July 1, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment organized car caravans to demand that these uber-wealthy few help the populace to recover from the health and economic crises. Without federal help, the crash in state and local tax revenue and hike in pandemic services will worsen these crises.

Labor unions such as SEIU, USW, UNITE HERE Local 11, UNITE HERE 2850, and UAW 2865 participated. According to the California Federation of Teachers, a billionaire tax of 1% on individuals with net worth over $50 million and 1.5% on wealth over $1 billion would add about $18.5 billion to the state budget ($202 billion for 2020-21) annually.

That tax revenue could help to fund social programs for struggling Californians to access affordable shelter, healthcare (as President Trump attacks the Affordable Care Act), while helping public schools and workplace standards. Billionaires can and do have wealth to fund such public services.

At press time, California’s 161 billionaires had increased their wealth by over $180 billion more since the pandemic began in mid-March, according to ACCE. “It is utterly disgusting that the financial burden of this pandemic could once again fall on the backs of people like me who are already living paycheck to paycheck,” Kristen Lopez, ACCE member, told The Progressive Populist in an email. “We are here to demand our elected leaders do the humane thing by making the uber rich and ultra-wealthy pay for a just recovery for all Californians.

“It is wrong when so many of us are barely surviving that we allow millionaires and billionaires to sit comfortably in their mansions while we lose our own homes. It’s time they do their part and pay for the recovery.”

Organized in cars, the protesters visited the homes of California billionaires such as Elon Musk, owner of Tesla Motors, in their white, opulent neighborhoods in San Diego, Los Angeles, Oakland and Sacramento. Billionaires with less name recognition than Musk are Bruce Karsh of Oaktree Capital, Douglas “Papa Doug”  Manchester of Manchester Financial Group, Angelo K. Tsakopoulos of AKT Development and Phil Tagami of California Commercial Investment Group.

The billionaires’ wealth grab in California is part of a larger national pattern. Robert Brenner is a progressive scholar and writer. “Between 18 March 2020 and 4 June 2020, the wealth of US billionaires increased by $565 billion, reaching the level of $3.5 trillion in total, up 19% in the interval,” he writes in the May/June edition of the New Left Review.

The coronavirus pandemic has harmed nonwhite and working class people savagely, further revealing the structural inequalities baked into the system, according to an ACCE statement.

Seth Sandronsky lives and works in Sacramento. He is a journalist and member of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2020

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