They managed to vote the worst way on like 80% of the ballot measures
Who the fuck opposes rent control? Who's against employee protections for Uber drivers?
Even Florida voted to raise their minimum wage.
Mass voted against ranked-choice also. My mom's reasoning: "I just want things to stay the same." 🤦
My parents were like "it makes your vote not count it's dumb." and then me and my sister explained how it worked and they were like "oh" and then they still voted against it.
Apparently that wasn't on the ballot? I didn't see it. https://ballotpedia.org/California_Ranked-Choice_Voting_Initiative_%282020%29
In terms of 22, Uber and the other supermutant gig behemoths spent over two hundred million dollars on propaganda (vs. about 25 million on the other side). There were slick youtube ads in front of every single video over the last month+ in Cali with all these "uber driver" actors talking about how 22 will keep them freed up to work when they want. They also cooked their own books when reporting that "75% of drivers support prop 22" - they sent all their employees - ahem - I mean "contractors" - a survey, but it was vaguely/manipulatively-written so as to elicit a "yes" response if you weren't already educated about the proposition.: "Do you want to be able to choose your own hours, or do you want to get raped by Satan?" They then got to turn around and say, "see? It's what the workers want!" when more people chose "choose my own hours."
I fucking hate California with the passion of a thousand burning suns. I was born, raised and still live in what is supposed to be an ultra-progressive, mega-enlightened part of the state, and pretty much
95%(95% is a bit high, let's say 3 out of 4) of the people I know are complete airhead resistance-poisoned libs who can't a get a single political idea straight in their jumbly goo brains. They believe in all the fucking capitalist fairytales they were taught when they were children, and outright reject any kind of socialist project. Like an alien who can't see the color green or whatever, you hold it right in front of their face and their eyes glaze over.as a [redacted] resident I saw the prop 22 ad over 50 times the past month, and I don't even use uber. the brute force of that ad campaign was fucking astonishing and disgusting
even worse that my partner does legal work specifically to stop prop 22 and educate Californians about how harmful it is, and we had to watch those fucking ads every day, over and over, for over a month
btw, on the ballots themselves it straight-up lies about what the props actually do -- in a shockingly similar way that the ads on props lie (hmm) about what they actually do. haha go figure
every fucking prop is worded so you have no idea what the hell you're voting for in the ballot booth, and the "for" and "against" supposedly "neutral" descriptions of each prop are also complete bullshit and equally confusing to read; so its not even that californians are just stupid/dont want rent control, which of course they still are by and large, but they're also openly lied to about what they're even voting on, which they dont understand bc theyre libs
For real, I had to take out my voting guide the state gave me and then double checked it online.
yup, bc ofc it isnt illegal to bombard every media outlet in CA with outright lies about a ballot measure that PERMANENTLY denies healthcare to a MASSIVE number of people
Oh yeah Cali is definitely not that progressive overall. What happened was all the leftists here relentlessly bullied all of our white lib family and friends who normally would have voted Warren or Pete or Kamala. Got em all feelin the Bern by threatening them with broken friendships/relationships and calling them dumb libs. Sometimes bullying works, folks.
Also Latinxs were high as fuck on tio Bernie. Remember them carrying Nevada over the finish line?
Gentrifiers, predominantly petty-bourgie and PMC techbros who vote for center-right Dems, have spent the last decade taking over the left coast and eastern seaboard in the wake of the 2007 housing market collapse. The working-class renters who would immediately benefit from rent control measures and forcing Uber and Lyft to pay for their drivers' health insurance and ranked-choice voting have been increasingly priced out of living in a lot of these places.
Rejecting the authority of academic economists essentially requires recognizing the ideological roots of neoclassical economics. Marx and Engels extrapolated from classical economists like Smith and Ricardo, who also assumed labor theory of value, when formulating Marxist economic theory. Starting in the late 19th/early 20th century - around the same time Engels and Lenin would have been writing about the contemporary emergence of oligopolistic capitalism and imperialism - neoclassical economists would end up rejecting labor theory of value and develop an alternative subjective theory of value, necessarily a rejection of one of the foundational premises of Marxist economics and itself a foundational premise of orthodox economics as it's typically taught in universities.
The framing shifts from workers and capitalists to households and firms - distinctions between people of different economic classes (in terms of relationships to the means of production) are blurred, and distinctions between wants and needs are for the most part blurred as everything is modeled as a commodity and everything is subject to the logic of markets, cost-benefit calculations, and rational selfish expected utility-maximization or profit maximization, unless explicitly stated otherwise. What Marx called "labor power", the capitalist or liberal economist calls "human capital". The firm profits, not the capitalists (i.e. households whose income doesn't come from a wage) who extract rent, interest, and dividends from the firm. Consumer preferences are assumed to be unchanging and exogenous (marketing? propaganda? what are those?).
This is the same underlying logic - especially that of "economics imperialists" like Gary Becker who use these models to answer questions that other social scientists would normally be answering - which if abused can produce odious concepts like "sexual market value", or arguments in favor of price-gouging during moments of heightened scarcity. This is also why many neoliberals don't see a problem with the US's hellish health insurance system - they ignore the psychological toll of having to make difficult cost-benefit calculations, a concept beyond an understanding of consumer behavior that models consumer choice by solving the first-order conditions from a constrained optimization problem.
Disagree, they know exactly how nice it is to have because they never vote to change anything regarding prop 13 which ties property tax increases to inflation or 2%, whichever is lower.
See: prop 15 this election which would have repealed prop 13's protections for commercial and industrial properties owned by large businesses and they still voted no on that.
I said this elsewhere, but "minimum wage go up" is hard to spin in a dishonest way, whereas Prop 22 is written pretty confusingly, which is the point. It's not always talked about a lot, but there is usually a huge power struggle behind the scenes to have control over how a proposition is worded, and it absolutely can affect how people vote on it. It's the difference between a M4A prop that says "Vote Yes to enact Medicare for All" and "Vote Yes to let the government decide when you die by changing your health insurance." That's not even getting into the money and power being the Yes on 22 campaign.
Also posted elsewhere, but the Yes on 22 campaign is the highest funded prop in California history, and their marketing was very good. I got text banked in addition too a shitload of junk mail.
California Capital knows that so long as they can push out these twisted ballot measures, the state will never be as left as it's reputation.
The state is the political birthplace of Nixon and Reagan. It only goes dem because a GOP governor basically tried to create Jim Crow for immigrants 30 years ago.
Urban areas dominated by real estate and tech. Rural areas dominated by the largest ag interests in the world.
The idea of California as this progressive place is a mirage.
CA has their weird form of third way social democracy that's literally just the worst of both worlds. Plays a big role in why utilities and housing costs are messed up. Certain parts of the state have been good for LGBT rights compared to other areas as well.
Progressive doesn't mean socialist. California is basically just the same as Canada.
So most White Californians look down on service sector employees and like cheap rides to brunch?
:surprised-pika:
Not really lol California is just a shithole.
Large corp dominated literal police state with prisons that rival the deep south in their absolute cancerness. High taxes that they use almost exclusively to prop up the massive corporations that are headquartered there does not make them progressive. Honestly fucking despise California.
California's prison system is probably the worst in the entire country.
They have completely segregated prisons by race and gang affiliation. Their prisons have always had a lot of inner politics with the gangs and inmates, cause the wardens and COs are notorious for playing them against one another with their yard politics and escalating violent tensions (this is also how drugs are often smuggled into prisons more often than not. With all their super tight security with visitors, it ain't getting in from that. It's COs and Wardens hustling). If there is anything I learned from Big Herc and his Fresh Out/Prison Talk videos, it's that.
Furthering on, they have built so many prisons in California that in the past 20 years, they've been moving the for-profit run ones out of state with California prisoners. These are the prisons built usually out in the middle of nowhere, in a de-industrialized rural small town somewhere in Utah or Nevada. The prison becomes the main source of a steady job in that local community and it beats having to work at a dollar store or McDonalds for shit wages, hence why a lot of people in these small towns will end up going into police academy and working to become a CO. It's easier for them to get employed at for-profit prisons cause they're ran like walmarts.
And last but not least; the forced labor in California, indeed is as bad as a southern prison. They are probably worse than Louisiana when it comes to that.
Tech bros are an invasive species with almost universally bad politics
The valley was actually the only part of the state that voted against prop 22. Either the people there had so much direct experience with the corps to no be duped by the propaganda, or a good chunk of tech bros voted against it.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EmAmRf8XgAAol2Y?format=jpg&name=900x900
Tech bros want that 70k, but they understand that particular issue and aren't evil.
California has a really cancerous proposition system. I have friends in California who will just vote no on everything just because they hate it. As for 22, the proposition to fuck over uber, lyft drivers there was a massive propaganda campaign in favor of that, and in addition it was confusingly worded so some people voted for it thinking that it would help protect drivers, instead of the reverse
Who the fuck opposes rent control?
My entire family, including the ones who argued in favor of voting for third parties because Democrats won't make concessions to the left.
Same types of libs who supported McGrath over Booker. I talked to a LGBT liberal vet from CA a few months ago who donated tons of money to McGrath. I tried to get her to pay attention to Booker and she said, "No thanks. I'm not really for everybody getting healthcare and GND is way to communist to get support in KY. People in KY don't care about those issues, they want someone closer to the center."
She really said she's not for everybody getting healthcare? Wow holy fuck.
Lol yeah. I asked her to expand on that and she said, “I had to join the military to get my healthcare. It’s not fair for everybody to get it for free.”
Something about the combination of "fuck you, got mine" and "if I had to suffer/struggle, so should you" strikes me as almost uniquely American.
Yeah honestly anyone who thinks California would turn into some sort of socialist state if it split off the main US is drinking some sort of toxic waste with mind altering properties. This state and its people are mentally colonized by the landlords, the construction industry, and the techbros.
Lmfao literally the only one that went the way I wanted it to was letting felons vote. Who the fuck even cares enough about letting 17 year olds vote in primaries if they'll be 18 by the election enough to actively vote against it??
This one blew my fucking mind dude. I figured that was a slam dunk.
Everyone who used Uber or Doordash or any of these apps got "Yes on 22" messages on their phones. It's terrible but kind of excepted.
15 is close, I hope that one goes through.
Every once in a while, there are murmurings of California secession if Trump wins, if ACB is rammed into the SCOTUS (which she was), and so on. It's hard to imagine that, even if this happened, anything will actually change: CA would still be a liberal hellhole, just a smaller one that doesn't involve 49 other states.
Cali libs are absolute cowards and wouldn't throw themselves in front of any bullets for Biden. These people will huff and puff, but accept whatever meager outcome they can get to avoid doing anything
To be fair that's most libs.
