Lasting change takes collective action, not one rich guy throwing money around.
People like to toss out the factoid that Elon Musk could end world hunger with a tiny fraction of his hoarded fortune, and that’s true, as far as it goes. He could pay to feed everyone on earth. But if the structural, political, and economic factors that made those people hungry in the first place aren’t fixed, then weeks or months or years later they’ll all be hungry again.
I mean, take California’s high speed rail. Newsom and his predecessors have thrown something like thirty billion dollars at building a line from San Francisco to LA or wherever the hell it’s supposed to go, and it doesn’t really matter where it’s supposed to go, because they haven’t built shit. But the reason they haven’t built shit isn’t a lack of money - it’s because of landowners not wanting to give up their land for train tracks, it’s because of the glacial pace of environmental review and permitting, it’s because of sabotage by the richest man in the world who owns a car company and hates public transit on principle, it’s because of a hundred other things that a billionaire can’t fix by throwing money at it.
I don’t like Steyer, but he’s not wrong to believe that reforming California’s government is the only way to actually fix what’s wrong with California. He’s just wrong to think he can do it through the Democratic Party.
If he were truly progressive he could already have done most of what he’s proposing out of his own pocket instead of spending it running for Governor.
I have a standing rule that I won’t vote for billionaires, but if we end up with a billionaire Democrat against a MAGA, I’m NOT voting MAGA.
I may not like voting for a billionaire, but I remember FDR was rich, and do it anyway.
Well yeah
Lasting change takes collective action, not one rich guy throwing money around.
People like to toss out the factoid that Elon Musk could end world hunger with a tiny fraction of his hoarded fortune, and that’s true, as far as it goes. He could pay to feed everyone on earth. But if the structural, political, and economic factors that made those people hungry in the first place aren’t fixed, then weeks or months or years later they’ll all be hungry again.
I mean, take California’s high speed rail. Newsom and his predecessors have thrown something like thirty billion dollars at building a line from San Francisco to LA or wherever the hell it’s supposed to go, and it doesn’t really matter where it’s supposed to go, because they haven’t built shit. But the reason they haven’t built shit isn’t a lack of money - it’s because of landowners not wanting to give up their land for train tracks, it’s because of the glacial pace of environmental review and permitting, it’s because of sabotage by the richest man in the world who owns a car company and hates public transit on principle, it’s because of a hundred other things that a billionaire can’t fix by throwing money at it.
I don’t like Steyer, but he’s not wrong to believe that reforming California’s government is the only way to actually fix what’s wrong with California. He’s just wrong to think he can do it through the Democratic Party.