the union who sponsored the proposal is trying to scale. the academics who wrote and influenced it are trying to counter billionaires’ control over ‘prevailing ideology’
What follows is an introduction to the key players, with an analysis of their goals, based on their books, speeches, public statements, and interviews.
First up: meet the union and its president, Dave Regan.
SEIU-UHW, the proposal’s sponsor, is one of the most powerful unions in the US. It represents 120,000 healthcare workers in California, most of whom work for Kaiser Permanente (where, in 2023, Regan led the largest healthcare worker strike in US history).
SEIU-UHW claims a budget shortfall caused by Republican cuts to Medicaid could literally shutter hospitals in the state (and, by extension, leave some of its members without jobs).
“We have to do something because if we don’t, people are not going to have a hospital to go to,” Suzanne Jimenez, SEIU-UHW’s chief of staff, told Bloomberg.
But it’s important to understand that, under the leadership of Regan since 2011, SEIU-UHW has become a professional ballot proposition factory or, as Bloomberg put it recently, “one of the nation’s most aggressive users of direct democracy.” And in California, the approach has won Regan something of a cutthroat reputation.
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The West has two kinds of elites. Those who earn their money from suspiciously skyrocketing asset prices. And those who earn it from fraudulent nonprofits with government contracts. The former wants to audit the government. The latter wants a tax on unrealized capital gains.