Midway through this summer, a high-quality poll found that Democrats in California were overwhelmingly in favor of the upcoming ballot measure for a one-time 5% tax on billionaire wealth.
The ratio was more than 4 to 1. But the state’s most powerful Democrats – including the governor Gavin Newsom, his near-certain successor Xavier Becerra and the Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass – have lined up with Silicon Valley billionaires who’ve raised upward of $340m to defeat the initiative.
I’m confused. Are you implying the person who wrote this article, Norman Solomon, is some kind of Russian operative? Or that his data comes from bots? I’m not sure what this is supposed to mean tbh. Seems like a pretty simple “sweep this under the rug” move from you.
Think a couple of levels deeper.
We already know that establishment democrats are fiscally captured. That’s the whole point of the DSA candidates. This isn’t news. So why now? Obviously, the midterms.
California isn’t in play next week, but lots of other places are. So a story running now doesn’t really harm establishment Californian Democrats. They’re safe. It harms other democratic candidates (probably more socialist leaning candidates) in other knife-edge states by party association.
What does somebody, who’d like these progressive democrats to lose, do a couple of days before national elections? They call up a journalist who is already pro-wealth-taxes and feed them a (true) story about Californian Democrats fighting against wealth-taxes. Story goes viral and a few blue voters stay home because “the Democrats are corrupt”. Republicans edge a seat or two that they’d otherwise had lost.
That’s what they hope, at least.
Who fed the story to the journalist? Don’t know. Could be pro-Trimp factions. Could be a Republican campaign. Could be establishment members of the Democrats that would rather see the midterms lost than lose control within the party.
Regardless, it’s all voter manipulation and needs to be ignored until after the election.
I don’t think you read this article before creating wacky conspiracy theories about it.
So then why is it Russian disinformation to write an article highlighting exactly how? Even if you don’t think this is a problem, the article clearly outlines that it is. The fact you just dismiss it as Russian disinformation kinda proves to me this information is important for Americans to read. American billionaires have infinitely more influence on American elections, both Dem and Republican, than Russia ever will.
It IS news. It’s news because people like the author of this article (which you obviously didn’t even read before commenting) are reporting on it, as someone who is anti fascist and anti billionaire I am a person who benefits from this type of reporting. You are too.
You don’t know because you didn’t read the article you just spouted crazy conspiracy nonsense about Russia. You are claiming the American Institute for Public Accuracy is compromised directly by Russia.
If you actually read what you are commenting about, you’d see he sources literally everything he’s speculating from public info that is linked within the article. He also speaks with establishment directly.
Your “thinking deeper” is going off the deep end into stupid qanon type rhetoric. Again, baseless conspiracy slop nonsense.
Why now? Because Prop 40 is on the ballot on November 3rd. Its not a coincidence that it ties into the midterms - it’s the same ballot
Its an opinion piece by ‘the director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy’ - someone who’s whole thing is the tension between corporate and progressive Democrats, and wealth inequality. Not some random journalist ‘tipped off’ about prop 40 by a Russian