I attended a fundraiser for Jocelyn Benson recently. More exciting than most fundraisers, because Benson used the occasion to announce her running mate, the current Michigan state senate majority leader, Winnie Brinks.
For the last ten years or so, I have chosen just a couple of candidates to back, and Jocelyn Benson is one of mine for this cycle. The other two are Abdul El-Sayed and Rebecca Amidon. Of the three, only El-Sayed is a perfect fit for me ideologically but I’m a practical person and ideology isn’t the only factor I use.
Benson is a popular moderate, so I think she will be easy to elect (and will benefit my favorite candidate, El-Sayed) but more importantly to me she was a very, very good Secretary of State, so is an expert on voting process. I think state level actors will be absolutely essential when the Right contests the midterm elections, because Democrats at the national level are (again) unprepared for the next attack on voting rights. Support some state level backups, is my advice, because although this Party is absolutely lousy with lawyers, apparently we’re not willing to invest in a national legal team to protect voting rights.
Anyway, Benson won’t be where we want her to be on data centers or Flock cameras or Michigan’s (absolutely appalling) charter school sector but she’ll fiercely protect the votes of Black and poor people when the douchebags on the Right start stealing them, and that’s enough for me at this juncture. We need a good lawyer who knows elections inside and out, and she is one.
This was a well-heeled crowd, event was held at a Lake Michigan resort area, and included members of the local yacht club, golf and tennis clubs (although tennis is all pickleball now). The individual max ticket was $8325, which is obviously way too much for ordinary people to pay. I see a lot of slagging of people like this online, my bourgeois buddies wearing their summer linens, but I think it’s bullshit for a couple of reasons. First, most of the criticism comes from Right leaning Democrats or Republicans with their ultra-clever “zingers” about Millionaire Marxists, or whatever when they’re attacking the Left side of the Party. Limousine Liberals! Again. Ugh. So boring. I confess I don’t understand the objection. They’re wealthy people who are Left-leaning. Arguably they’re voting against their own self interest and class, which is admirable to me, not hypocritical.
Second, there is absolutely nothing hypocritical or contradictory about people who probably have between a couple million and twenty million dollars donating to stop billionaires from taking over the United States and ruining it. Equating billionaires with these people tells me only that the critic is innumerate. Twenty million is not twenty billion. As AOC said, one can earn 20 million. No one earns 100 billion.
The millionaires at this shindig gave 8k because they agree with us. This is what billionaires who hate us give:
Google co-founder Sergey Brin has donated another $20 million to Build a Better California, an organization advocating against California’s proposed billionaire tax, according to a new filing. That means that the world’s fourth-richest man, whose net worth hovers around $267 billion, has now spent more than $100 million to avoid an estimated $13.3 billion tax payment.
The general public need to start recognizing how extreme income inequality and billionaires and trillionaires buying our politicians has become. It is measurably worse since 2012. It’s 4X as bad. The “populism” you’re seeing on the Left is a rational response to a material fact - the fact that billionaires and trillionaires are buying our country on a scale that is unprecedented. Politics changed because the facts changed. Conflating multimillionaires on the Left with billionaires on the Right serves only to protect Right wing billionaires.
