The New York Times explained without really explaining why Vice President Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump:
When Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to a locally owned brewery in New Hampshire to talk about helping small businesses — a major plank of her economic platform — she made sure that one group of Americans felt included: millionaires who wanted to keep more of their profits from selling stocks and real estate.
“If you earn a million dollars a year or more, the tax rate on your long-term capital gains will be 28 percent under my plan,” Ms. Harris said in that campaign speech this fall. “Because we know when the government encourages investment, it leads to broad-based economic growth.”
The moment stuck out. In remarks that her campaign had pitched as a major address to the middle class, Ms. Harris offered a striking concession on tax rates for the wealthy — an olive branch that she used to present herself as more business friendly than President Biden, who had sought a higher rate.
Her speech underscored just how much the advice of her allies and donors from Wall Street and Silicon Valley — as well as her own longstanding belief in pragmatic, incremental progress over sweeping, ideological change — was driving her messaging on the economy.
If this election showed anything, it showed that you can’t be a Democrat who embraces Wall Street and dismisses working-class voters and still put together a winning coalition against right-wing populism.
You can’t be the darling of hip Silicon Valley folks and still convince the old Democratic base to vote for you.
I don’t know if Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose presidential campaign clearly stared Nov. 6, is paying attention.
The Board of Supes Budget and Finance Committee will consider a measure Wednesday/13 by Sup. Hillary Ronen that would set up a fund to pay workers who were stiffed by their employers—and use fines against companies that violate labor laws to pay for it.
Ronen, who before her political career was a lawyer representing workers who struggled to get paid by unscrupulous contractors, wants
to establish the Worker Justice Fund to provide financial restitution and timely payment to workers who have not received payment from their employers for violations of City worker protection laws; to authorize the Fund to receive monies paid to the City as penalties and liquidated damages by employers as well as additional monies appropriated in the future; and to require the Office of Labor Standards Enforcement to administer the Fund and make payments to workers based on specified criteria.
This could be a huge game changer for day laborers and other marginalized workers—particularly in the Trump era, when undocumented workers will be terrified about reporting to the federal authorities bosses who don’t pay them.
Ronen has three co-sponsors, Sups. Shamann Walton, Dean Preston, and Aaron Peskin. That meeting begins at 10am.
I was on Hard Knock Radio this week, Davey D’s show on KPFA, and we were talking about Trump’s deportation plans, and I suggested, as have many others, that the entire California agricultural economy will collapse if all the immigrants are arrested.
He reminded me that California voters just refused to outlaw prison slavery—which could mean that agribusiness will seek to use inmates (in chain gangs?) to replace immigrant workers in the fields.
That’s a scary thought—and sadly, in these times, something we may need to actually worry about.
