The Fight for Prop 15 Isn’t Over. It’s Just Begun. - LA Progressive

The Fight for Prop 15 Isn’t Over. It’s Just Begun. - LA Progressive

The Fight for Prop 15 Isn’t Over. It’s Just Begun.

Many of us worked hard this year trying to pass Proposition 15, which would have taxed commercial properties worth over $300 million and given the proceeds – some $12 billion a year – to local governments and schools. Post-mortems have begun trickling in about why Prop. 15 suffered defeat, some of which lay the groundwork for arguing Prop. 15 should be abandoned in the future, lest proponents alienate potential Democratic voters. This argument should be ignored.

Protection of property tax rates is deeply ingrained into the political DNA of California, and Prop. 15’s opposition milked this fact for all it was worth. Nevertheless, Prop. 15 ended up a couple percentage points away from significantly taxing the rich and permanently returning large amounts of money to the public. That’s a victory to be proud of – one to build on and fight for again.

Protection of property tax rates is deeply ingrained into the political DNA of California, and Prop. 15’s opposition milked this fact for all it was worth.

Prop. 15 proposed to alter laws created by a different ballot measure, Prop. 13, which passed back in 1978. Prop. 13 came at a time when property values, and consequently property taxes, were skyrocketing statewide. The Prop. 13 campaign used stories of elderly people being forced out of their lifelong homes because they could no longer afford to pay their taxes to gin up support for the measure, which locked in property taxes at 1978 levels, with only minor increases allowed each year. In a bold but under-publicized move, commercial properties snuck their way into Prop. 13, and ever since Californians have lost out on a massive source of revenue as many of CONTINUE READING: The Fight for Prop 15 Isn’t Over. It’s Just Begun. - LA Progressive

Donald Trump Exemplifies Plutocratic Populism Run Amok: the Implications for All of Us | janresseger

Donald Trump Exemplifies Plutocratic Populism Run Amok: the Implications for All of Us | janresseger

Donald Trump Exemplifies Plutocratic Populism Run Amok: the Implications for All of Us

The United States has become a textbook case, and I don’t mean merely a textbook case of pandemic denial, although that is also true.  Last July, two political science professors, Jacob Hacker of Yale University and Paul Pierson from the University of California at Berkeley, published a thorough analysis of the politics of today’s Republican Party. They explain that President Donald Trump is a mere symptom of what the Republican Party has become.

In Let Them Eat Tweets, Hacker and Pierson define “plutocratic populism.” They preview what we subsequently watched through the fall’s presidential election campaign, and what we were still observing this past weekend in Washington, D.C. as Donald Trump’s bullies paraded en masse, ending in a violent melee.  Here are Hacker and Pierson on the rise of Republican plutocratic populism over recent decades:

“As the GOP embraced plutocratic priorities, it pioneered a set of electoral appeals that were increasingly strident, alarmist, and racially charged. Encouraging white backlash and anti-government extremism, the party outsourced voter mobilization to a set of aggressive and narrow groups: the National Rifle Association, the organized Christian right, the burgeoning industry of right-wing media. When and where that proved insufficient, it adopted a ruthless focus on altering electoral rules, maximizing the sway of its base and minimizing the influence of the rest of the electorate through a variety of anti-democratic tactics, from voter disenfranchisement to extreme partisan gerrymandering to laws and practices opening the floodgates to big money. And more and more, it coupled this vote rigging with even more extreme strategies to undermine the checks and balances in our system, weakening CONTINUE READING: Donald Trump Exemplifies Plutocratic Populism Run Amok: the Implications for All of Us | janresseger