More than two decades ago, helicopters, soldiers, and oil workers descended on the territory of the Kichwa people of Sarayaku, in the heart of the Ecuadorian Amazon.
The post A Living Forest, Not an Oil Field: Sarayaku’s Vision for the Amazon first appeared on Amazon Watch.A political storm has been sweeping through the Golden State for the past half year. It’s called “The Billionaire Tax”. Its detractors, until now, have mostly been a handful of the ultrarich conservatives targeted by the proposed tax itself, and their ostentatious shoveling of tens of millions of dollars into a “No” campaign has helped buy them the public anger that these sociopathic tech bros so deeply deserve.
On the other side, along with SEIU-United Healthcare Workers (sponsor of the measure), were to be found progressive stalwarts like California congressman Ro Khanna, Bernie Sanders, and several unions. To all intents and purposes—at least from the outside—it had the look of a class struggle in political form.
But with the elimination of the lone gubernatorial primary candidate who supported the measure, Tom Steyer, from contention in November, things have pivoted quickly, revealing complex dynamics largely unseen in public view until now. In the past couple weeks, unions and progressive organizations have joined the opposition; and under pressure, the SEIU-UHW is now offering to withdraw the ballot measure if the governor and Legislature agree to back a smaller but still substantial tax on the state’s billionaires.
Two tax the rich measures
There are in fact two ballot measures seeking to raise state revenues via progressive taxes in November: the Billionaire Tax (a wealth tax), meant to fill the massive budget hole created in the state’s Medi-Cal system due to federal funding reductions, and the Education and Health Care Act (an income tax), which already exists, but is a temporary tax, the revenues of which go to schools and services. Its principal backers, public education unions, are seeking to make it permanent.
You might think that it would be a no-brainer for unions to stand united on these measures. The Billionaire Tax would affect a grand total of 250 people in the state who collectively hold two trillion dollars in wealth. They would pay out five percent of their hoard over five years, and then the tax would sunset. This would amount to one hundred billion dollars, or twenty billion dollars a year, so that millions of working class Californians, mostly children, would keep their access to health care.
The initial proponent of the Billionaire Tax, SEIU-United Healthcare Workers, was joined along the way by AFSCME California, the California Council of Teamsters, and UNITE HERE Local 11 in Los Angeles, among others, because they recognized that the outrageous economic inequality symbolized by the growing wealth of a tiny fraction of the population, making Gilded Age inequities of yore seem quaintly egalitarian, contained the seed of a solution. More importantly than the symbolism, they also understood that many of their own members’ families are served by Medi-Cal, which covers close to 15 million state residents.
The Education and Health Care Act is likewise a progressive tax. Since its enactment as Prop 30 in 2012, and renewal as Prop 55 in 2016, it has raised over one hundred billion dollars for the state’s general fund through its creation of three high end marginal income tax brackets, affecting roughly the top two percent of income earners. Last year it brought in 14.5 billion dollars, or six percent of the state general fund. Here the charge is led by the California Teachers Association, the California Federation of Teachers, and the SEIU State Council, all of whom have been involved in a progressive tax advocacy coalition since the 2012 campaign. The Secretary of State’s office has recently announced that it has validated the signatures for ballot qualification of both measures.
Strange bedfellows?
Last week CTA came out against the Billionaire Tax. So did the state Building and Construction Trade Council, the umbrella organization of construction unions. What was their reasoning? For CTA, the opposition was not entirely surprising. The Billionaire Tax represents a violation of their prime objective: defense of Proposition 98. Passed by voters in 1988, it sets aside 40% of the state budget for K-12 schools and community colleges. The 300,000 member association considers this a bright red line and marshals its considerable resources every time legislators or opponents seek to cross it. As written, the revenues of the Billionaire Tax are tightly aimed at saving Medi-Cal, with just ten percent allocated to education.
Fair enough. There is principle involved here for CTA. Not so much with the building trades, as far as I can tell, whose public justification echoes the transparently false propaganda of the right wing billionaires opposing the Billionaire Tax, i.e., that all the “job creators” will flee California and take all the jobs with them in their gold-lined suitcases. This was the argument offered by opponents of Prop 30 in 2012. It is, in fact, always the first line of defending ultra-privilege every time any progressive tax is ever offered anywhere. Copious research has shown this to be untrue. Here in California by 2015, three years after passage of Prop 30, 1.5 million new jobs had been created, and tax records demonstrated that ten thousand new millionaires had been minted. (Let’s set aside for now the question of what the current California “job creators” are actually creating: AI, which destroys more jobs than it generates.)
But as one of the big dogs in California politics, CTA’s position also merits a deeper look. The union claims it opposes the Billionaire Tax because “this policy will not provide the sustainable and long-lasting funding that our schools and communities deserve”, i.e., it is temporary. Ahem, so was Prop 30 and 55, which didn’t stop CTA from supporting the earlier temporary iterations of the measure it’s backing to make permanent now.
Worse, and bizarrely, the only visible sign on CTA’s website about its position on the Billionaire Tax is to be found in its November election recommendations, where alongside the “Oppose” notation, a link is posted to the “Building a Better California” website, which nowhere says anything directly about the Billionaire Tax, but happens to be the web footprint of a front for the right wing billionaires dumping their couch cushions into the anti-Billionaire Tax campaign, a PAC whose contributors are headed up by tech bros Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt and Peter Thiel. Strange bedfellows—along with Governor Gavin Newsom, who has never met a progressive tax he likes.
So what’s really going on? Before SEIU-UHW launched the Billionaire Tax its leaders briefly consulted with the members of the progressive tax coalition. That coalition had a plan: get Prop 55 renewed and made permanent in 2026 before it expired in 2030, and then go after a wealth tax or take another swing at commercial property tax reform (narrowly lost due to COVID in 2020) in 2028. This plan was disrupted by the UHW, leading to the fear (plausible, but debatable) that another progressive tax on the ballot would muck up the works. Even SEIU State Council, the parent organization of UHW, isn’t on board the Billionaire Tax. When UHW went ahead on its own, nearly every member of the coalition that had been doing this work for fifteen years was pissed.
But alongside the fear of voter confusion over the two measures lurked another potential issue, one that has now been revealed as a valid concern. UHW leader Dave Regan has a well-known history of running state ballot measures as bargaining chips to gain traction in the state legislature. One example: a proposal to require higher minimum staffing levels in dialysis clinics, which lost on three separate occasions. Queried opponents and supporters alike, was the Billionaire Tax real or legislative leverage?
With the offer to withdraw the ballot measure if the legislature acts to find some significant funding for Medi-Cal, that question has regained life—although the governor’s office, which solicited the late-in-the-day negotiations with UHW, hasn’t made a substantial proposal, according to UWH sources. Thus at this point it appears likely the measure will go to the voters.
Where is an alternative solution?
California DSA, a small mammal scurrying around the ankles of the dinosaurs duking it out, and supporting both measures, is one of the few exceptions to the side-taking (AFSCME California and the California Teamsters Council are others), which has now become increasingly contentious.
The Billionaire Tax was addressing a problem no one else was: a gutted Medi-Cal means people will get sick and die. The CTA in its opposition statement remained silent on this end of things. As communications director for the California Federation of Teachers, sometimes rival and sometimes partner with CTA, through a fair amount of the earlier history, I can attest that this is not new. The fierce defense of Prop 98 guarantees tended, for CTA, toward rigidity, while CFT, part of the AFL-CIO, and likewise a strong defender of school funding, nonetheless always bent one principle against another, acknowledging at moments like this, “We can’t teach children who come to school hungry or sick.”
In fall of 2011 and 2012, CFT was leading a labor-community coalition effort to get a Millionaire Tax on the ballot to address the giant state budget deficit left in the wake of the housing crash and Great Recession. Governor Jerry Brown, with a competing ballot measure, a mix of progressive and regressive taxes, refused CFT’s offer to come aboard the millionaire tax. Instead, he stripped away the other unions in the coalition (including CTA) by threatening to withhold his signature from their legislative programs. The pressure on CFT was enormous to cave, much like what UHW is undergoing right now.
But CFT prevailed, due to its careful coalition building over several years. It had solid allies in the community who weren’t stepping away. Many union leaders told us in private that while they couldn’t publicly resist Brown’s blackmail, they were with us in spirit. After a half dozen straight opinion polls showed the Millionaire Tax likely to win, and following a massive rally in front of the state capitol, Brown capitulated, merging his measure with CFT’s, which became Prop 30, the largest bump in state income taxes on the rich since World War 2.
The same gubernatorial agreement is unlikely for UHW, both because of the transparent desire of Gavin Newsom to keep billionaire pocketbooks within reach for his presidential run, and because in place of the spadework of coalition-building over time that builds trust and loyalty, UHW leadership accomplished precisely the opposite, alienating its most likely progressive tax partners. Let’s sum up: good cause, bad process. And now we approach midnight.
Possible outcomes
All might not be lost for the Billionaire Tax. If its proponents and the governor and legislature are unable to reach a deal, it’s still possible to win at the ballot box. Yes, there will be a hellstorm of billionaire opposition funding. We won’t be able to watch TV or surf the web or go on social media without popup ads telling us that sad billionaires are taking all of California’s jobs with them when they move to Texas.
But billionaires are not exactly popular at this historical moment. Even with a hundred million dollars already spent by the opposition before the measure qualified, the most recent polls show the Billionaire Tax with a 20-point lead, with 23% undecided. There might just be enough voter animus for the richest Californians—especially the ones that have publicly embraced Trump, who happen to be the ones making all the noise about the Billionaire Tax—that pitchfork fever could carry the measure across the finish line.
The California Federation of Labor Unions, AFL-CIO hasn’t weighed in yet. This is an important factor in how things will play out. The CTA’s opposition, while significant, is not the final word. As an independent union outside of the labor federation, it has no direct say on Labor Fed policies. The Building Trades’ votes are more to the point here. But if the UHW can rally an endorsement from the fed there will be new life in the measure. The CFLU convenes in early August.
One of the arguments that makes the Billionaire Tax a problem for the usually progressive groups like CTA is also why they should let it go: it’s temporary. True, if pieces of the budget are carved away for more health care, that will not help education’s forty percent. But the tax as written does not compete for state budget dollars—it augments them with a five-year tax on billionaires that will expire after Democrats are in control of Congress and the White House, and the federal government will be able to resume paying its way in California.
That’s a pretty big assumption, you might say. My answer is that if it’s not the case, and the fascists are still running the federal government in 2030, we will all have bigger problems than preserving Prop 98.
BOOK REVIEW
Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See (Second Edition)
Mike Davis, Kelly Mayhew and Jim Miller
Seven Stories Press, 2026
Beyond the Theme Park: Struggle and Solidarity Under the San Diego Sun
Interviews by Kelly Mayhew and Jim Miller
Center for Policy Initiatives and American Federation of Teachers Guild, Local 1931
This year’s republication of Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See has been anxiously awaited by San Diego progressives and leftists. A master work by the late Mike Davis and his co-authors Jim Miller and Kelly Mayhew, Under the Perfect Sun went out of print only a few short years after its original publication in 2005, and has since then been passed around, checked out via interlibrary loan, and transmitted via PDF among organizers and activists hungry to learn about a city that hardly seems to know itself. Yet the new edition means more than an opportunity for San Diego leftists to finally have and hold their own copy—it’s an opportunity for our comrades across California and beyond to understand how one city’s development shaped the contemporary forces we must map, move and overcome in our quest for working-class rule.
Under the Perfect Sun stands alone as a record of San Diego’s left and labor history, but it’s also distinguished by the structure of the collaboration. The book is made up of three main sections, separately authored or, in the case of Mayhew’s contribution, curated. Following an introduction by journalist David Reid is a political and economic history by Mike Davis, then a chronicle of insurgent fights by Jim Miller, and the book concludes with a compendium of oral histories gathered by Kelly Mayhew. The new edition includes a sampling of contemporary testimonials gathered by Mayhew and Miller to accompany this year’s republication; available in full free and online as the companion publication Beyond the Theme Park (download available from the Center for Policy Initiatives website). (Full disclosure: I am one of the activists interviewed for that book.)
Structuring opportunity
Flipping the order, let’s start with the oral histories. And what a start. In both Under the Perfect Sun and Beyond the Theme Park, Mayhew opens with leaders in San Diego’s civil rights fights – Harold Brown in the former, Shirley Weber in the latter. I want to be very clear: DSA members and other leftists who only know Shirley Weber as California’s current secretary of state nonetheless need to read her story. It reveals what is possible once a structure is changed to unblock opportunity, and consequently how crucial it is to examine and understand structures at all levels. From Harold Brown, you’ll learn the lonely experience of fighting for economic parity and how that focus determined agendas of the early 2000s. Also in Beyond the Theme Park is Center for Policy Initiatives’ executive director Kyra Greene, who at the launch event for the new edition noted that the comparatively small civil rights movement in San Diego factors into the persistent struggles of the left today.
Also featured in both books are many of the area’s most significant labor leaders, movement organizers, nonprofit directors and politicians. As Mayhew put it at the launch, what you get from oral histories rather than third-person narratives based on newspaper articles and other archives is an understanding of experience. It matters to know what moved Lorena Gonzalez and Sean Elo-Rivera into their current positions and commitments (Beyond the Theme Park), just as much as it matters to see how binational activist Enrique Davalos ended up choosing San Diego, and what working for the Environmental Health Coalition looked like for Sonia Rodriguez, who lived the toxicity of Barrio Logan firsthand (Under the Perfect Sun).
The IWW Free Speech Fight was a landmark struggle in San Diego labor history.
Repression and amnesia
Jim Miller’s episodic journey through San Diego’s left struggles changed my perspective utterly when I first read it 7-8 years ago, newly activated and unsure why everything in San Diego’s mainstream political life seemed so remote. Though I am myself a transplant, San Diego was always a fixture in my life as the birthplace of my military-family parents, who continued in that tradition. They graduated from UC San Diego’s first bachelor’s degree cohort. They grew up with the city as it boomed through the Cold War years. Yet I never learned anything from them about San Diego’s political life, and in the truest sense possible, San Diego hid itself from many of its own children. As Miller writes, struggles beginning with the Free Speech Fight in the early 20th century onward were dealt with by both repression and amnesia, summarily dismissed or distorted beyond recognition by credulous historians drawing exclusively from tilted accounts.
Chicano Park is the largest collection of public murals in the nation, and extraordinary in their virtuosity.
What’s so significant about memory? After all, capital manipulates government and its aligned institutions everywhere; newly developing leftists might understandably believe that since the factors of capital control are continuous, the dynamics of contesting them are transferable from one place to the next. What is so critical about Miller’s history, though, is learning about the victories alongside the setbacks. While the Magonista revolt was a rout and Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organizing was effectively suppressed by vigilantes in the early twentieth century Free Speech Fight, the establishment of Third College at UC San Diego and the creation of Chicano Park are examples of community interests consolidating as exercised power. What’s so significant about erasure? Last year I walked my elderly parents around Chicano Park – the largest collection of public murals in the nation, and extraordinary in their virtuosity – and told them the story of its founding. They had no idea. Not even that it exists.
Completing the flipped order, Mike Davis’ history of political and economic power in San Diego visits many of the themes in his Los Angeles histories, such as City of Quartz (1990) and his last-published book, Set the Night on Fire (2020). While Davis is recognized as one of the last century’s most influential Marxist authors, many DSA members may be new to his work. Under the Perfect Sun is a fantastic start. The section asks who rules San Diego, answered by the overriding contest of “smokestacks” versus “geraniums.” With smokestacks understood to be the faction driving for infrastructure that could enable large industry, the geraniums of San Diego’s past and present generally prevailed, focused on slow urban growth and economic sectors that alienated mass organizing and working class consciousness by their very nature – tourism and the military.
Davis’ thesis is that through these competing capital factions, San Diego’s power has oscillated between what can be thought of as private governments, with the government of publicly elected officials acting primarily for those interests. As this history progressed beyond the publication of Under the Perfect Sun his thesis and indeed the center have held: first Republican, now Democratic, San Diego’s officials stand on a continuum of stewardship for private elites. Without working class institutions effectively contesting for power, that center has reconstituted in the last 20 years to include the racial, ethnic, gender and sexual orientation minorities rebuffed by a myopic GOP. At a time when parties are first and foremost brands, the center-right now makes its approach through campaigns formally unaffiliated with the GOP like Larry Turner for mayor in 2024 and now Richard Bailey for city council, who adopted Zohran Mamdani’s design palette for his primary campaign.
Look beyond slogans, follow the money
Tracing how these fights have articulated is critical for leftists across the U.S. as urban politics are gripped by the polarity of “YIMBY” versus “NIMBY.” As climate change advances – a key concern of Davis in his later years – leftists, unions and working class communities of interest draw factional lines around what is to be done about unaffordable housing, the unequal and unjust distribution of pollution, rapid transportation and the U.S.’ overreliance on home ownership to build social security. Reading about the stratagems of San Diego’s smokestacks and geraniums illustrates just how handily working class anxieties can be manipulated to serve masters we did not choose – even to the extreme of surrendering public resources to a power as remote and impervious as the U.S. military. Look beyond the slogans and follow the money.
In the 2026 coda, Jim Miller reflects on the changes in San Diego in the last 20 years and narrates some of the most significant events since Under the Perfect Sun was first published. While the cost of living is now driving workers out, the representation of historically marginalized groups in office is marked as a welcome change. A recent win is the reversal of bans on project labor agreements (PLAs) by municipalities across the county and the commitment by the City of San Diego to adopt PLAs going forward. Often, labor in San Diego now leads where our politicians falter, and the closer cooperation between unions and community organizations like DSA gives hope that someday we’ll escape the recurrent corruption dogging San Diego as Enron-by-the-Sea.
Under the Perfect Sun gives a view of collaboration as process and praxis, with each author bringing to the book a life of service in its different forms. Mayhew and Miller have both served as leaders in their local AFT chapter, bringing their San Diego City College students into organized activity through the AFT internship program they launched as a pedagogy of experience. Together they founded City Works Press and with it the San Diego Writers Collective, and with journalist Doug Porter publish The Jumping Off Place, an online platform for independent writing. Their legacy is still evolving, and humbling in its scope. The presence of Mike Davis the organizer and working class son in his writing gave us one of the clearest voices in a quintessentially American Marxism, and a view to how the natural riches of Southern California can be ours when we fight. Elbows up and solidarity bound, let’s carry his spirit on.
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