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The Rise of the Billionaire Lobby (jacobin.com)
submitted 2 days ago by technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/politics@lemmy.world
12 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

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[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 15 points 2 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Jax@sh.itjust.works 9 points 2 days ago

The end goal is slavery

[–] MagicShel@lemmy.zip 7 points 2 days ago

They don't care because long before that doctor retired they will be invested in octopus futures or something.

[–] CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

What did she say/write?

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? (this is the paper that got her fired from Google)
https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3442188.3445922

A breakdown of the ideas in her paper from the MIT Technology Review:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru/

Other research from Gebru also led to Amazon putting a one year moratorium on selling facial recognition to police:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/12/1003482/amazon-stopped-selling-police-face-recognition-fight/

Gebru is also credited with creating the term TESCREAL which is a descriptive term of all the inter-related ideologies that drive the Nerd Reich:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TESCREAL

Anyway, she's been loud and open and mostly ignored, sadly. Understandably, she is saying this stuff very recently and the seeds of it all actually go very far back, so I would hope the Nerd Reich delves more into where the ideologies of TESCREAL arose and what they arose from.

[–] CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Well, both her name and the term TESCREAL are in the index, so she and it must be getting covered. I'm still on the intro.

Weird, as someone who has been interested in futurism (extropianism, transhumanism, etc.) ever since first introduced to the idea, probably by way of Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary, I don't think it has to lead to the douchebaggery of an Elon, for example. Also, I've never heard of this acronym until now, so that's interesting...

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 2 days ago

Oh, for sure, I agree, I have been interested in similar ideas, but these ideas held by the tech elite are some kind of weird insanity of thinking they will have a hand in shaping the future and not that the future is something that is emergent, not controlled.

[–] ShutUpWesley@piefed.zip 6 points 2 days ago

The aristocrats never went away, they just switched Lord to Executive

[–] bitjunkie@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago

In case anyone needed more evidence that Newsom is a tough-talking corpo cuck

[–] SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.social 2 points 2 days ago

I can’t wait to vote for Gavin Newsom as president.