California Governor's Billionaire Task Force. Making Capitalism Great Again

FILE – In this June 3, 2004, file photo San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, left, Gordon Getty, center, and Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, right, enjoy a pre-dinner glass of wine during a hospitality event of the Napa Valley Wine Auction at the PlumpJack Winery in Oakville, Calif. Plumpjack was co-founded by Newsom with financial backing from Getty, the heir to an oil fortune. Newsom, the front-runner in the race for California governor, is adamant he won’t sell his interests but otherwise is deferring decisions about how to handle potential conflicts until after the election. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg, Source:Orange County Register

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

4-20-20

The future looks bright for us Californians and all will be well in the post pandemic era. Unlike the federal government, saddled with the somewhat disturbed sexual deviant and racist Donald Trump, we have the dashing millionaire Gavin Newsom at the helm and he is on the ball.  Governor Newsom has set up an 80-member task force to “restart” the California economy that has stalled since he issued a stay-at-home order last month.

The task force will be headed by the governor’s chief of staff Ann O’Leary and the tech billionaire Tom Steyer. The task force will make recommendations that can, “….advance California’s environmental and racial equity goals. Its mission, in part, is to “shape a fair, green and prosperous future.”. “We want to make this meaningful.”, he has stated publicly.

Who are some of the leading figures that are about to design this new, fair, green and prosperous future?

First there’s Newsom himself who is worth some $10 million. He’s married to Jennifer Siebel. She’s an actor and film director. The Siebel family are involved in investments and other lucrative ventures. Both Larry Page (worth $58 billion) and Sergei Brin co-founders of Google are close friends. In February 2019, Gavin and Jennifer listed their home in Kentfield, California for $5.995 million. They purchased the house in 2011 for $2.225 million. Soon after Gavin was elected Governor the couple bought a $3.7 million house in Sacramento. So basically, the Newsom’s are just plain folk.

During the hotel strikes and retaliatory lockout 15 or so years ago, Newsome commented that, “The hotels now have gotten their two weeks in after the two-week strike….fair is fair. As far as I’m concerned you’re even. Now let’s all grow up and get back to work.” This is a politician that the Labor leaders gave money to and expected their members to vote for. He threatened MUNI (SF transit system) workers for not voluntarily giving concessions. He urged the city workers to take another vote and accept concessions or “face real consequences” when SEIU members rejected a concessionary contract. He was talking about layoffs. Read about Newsom's rich backers.

An Economy That Works For All of Us

Here are some other important members of the task force who will be determining the post pandemic future.

Tom Steyer, who is described as a “civic leader” is to head the task force, and is a chief advisor to Newsom on business and jobs recovery. Steyer is a tech entrepreneur worth $1.6 billion. He made is money managing a hedge fund he started.

Marc Benioff, another tech billionaire worth $8 billion is the CEO of Salesforce. He’s from a family that owned a number of apparel stores. I am not sure they are known for paying great wages.

Tim Cook is the CEO of Apple Inc and unfortunately had a bad year in 2019 as his salary, bonus and vesting compensation for the year declined by 8% from $136 million in 2018 to a little over $125 million.

Bob Iger is the former CEO of Disney Corp and has a net worth of $700 million. He earned $47.5 million as chairman and CEO, in 2019 down from $65.6 million in fiscal 2018. He has agreed to “forego” his entire salary during the pandemic apparently.

All of California’s former governors and California’s legislative leaders across both political parties are on the task force. All of them participants in the driving down of wages and working conditions of California’s workers. Schwarzenegger, Pete Wilson, Gray Davis and Jerry Brown are all there. Gray Davis likened himself to a “Heat Seeking Missile” at one major union conference I was at where he was a keynote speaker. Not one of these people can be called friends of the working class of California. The huge homeless crisis, the inequality, the housing problem and the rule of the landlords and the massive incarceration rate have all grown under the political influence of these people. Newsom is linked to the powerful San Francisco elite.

There is one labor official on the panel as far as I can tell and that is Mary Kay Henry, International president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Members of the labor hierarchy are very excited when they are asked to participate with business leaders and their politicians on panels to figure out how workers can become more competitive. How best to make capitalism work.  The aim is to give the impression that the interests of millions of union members and the wider working class are represented and it makes the labor official feel important, recognized as “reasonable” people by those they admire.

Clinton’s Competitive Council had a few of them on it. The labor hierarchy see themselves as labor brokers so they assist the bosses in getting labor at a cost and under conditions that will keep their members competitive with the unorganized workers and workers internationally. This results, as most workers understand, in a race to the bottom as workers compete with each other for who can work the cheapest, the fastest and with the least impediment to profit making.

In the Great Recession of 2008, workers and the middle were called on to save the capitalist system from itself. Let’s not fool ourselves; the trillions of dollars that is being distributed to prop up the economy today will be extracted from the very same people that bailed the system out in 2008. We have some 22 million people filing for unemployment benefits in the matter of a few weeks. Imagine the strains this puts on these people and those essential workers who are keeping this going. We have heard from delivery personal, health workers, retail clerks and so on.

Small community businesses, the local bars and restaurants, the locally owned coffee shops are struggling and many of them may, no, will not make it through this crisis. They too will be sacrificed in favor of the corporate and larger firms. The banks will not be so generous to them.

Just as they pit worker against worker in general, there will also be efforts to pit these vulnerable concerns against the wage worker for relief, who gets what and when.

We see that in the protests to open up the economy. These are being bankrolled and organized by right wing sections of big business that want to privatize all things public. In the main, this tactic draws in right wing, religious fanatics, racists, white nationalists and others who rail against big government, welfare, immigrants and so forth. They are overwhelmingly white/European. In the absence of an alternative, some desperate sections of the small business community will fall prey to this tactic, so will some desperate workers.

In Michigan, one of the organizers of the protests is the Michigan Conservative Coalition The MCC describes itself on its website as: “Trump loving Americans who are sick and tired of the political establishment and the political machine that is solely focused on tearing down our President and his agenda. The establishment focuses on everything BUT hard working taxpayers and voters.” One of the members, Meshawn Maddock is the wife of Matt Maddock, Republican member of the Michigan House of Representatives who is involved with the group. Maddock and his wife have a bail bond business, A-1 Bail Bonds. They’re moneylenders to the poor and most disenfranchised in society.

Then there is the Michigan Freedom Fund .

The MFF is run by Greg McNeilly, an employee of Dick DeVos and his investment company. DeVos is the husband of Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos who wants to privatize public education.  Her brother, Eric Prince was the founder of the US Military organization Blackwater that trains mercenaries for foreign (and if needed, domestic) ventures aimed at protecting US capitalism’s profits.

These folks all talk about tyranny and individual freedom and so on. But mention nothing about the people of Flint, a few miles from last weeks protest against governmental tyranny who have been drinking poisoned water for years, the result of a conscious political decision by politicians most of these protestors support. Or the firing of GM worker Travis Watkins Bargaining Chair at UAW local 167 who complained about safety on the job amid the coronavirus pandemic. No mention of him last week. He describes his situation on video here.

Newsom’s Task Force

Is it possible we can we rejoice in this bright future Newsom’s Task Force his going to design? After all, our situation is unique as the Democratic Party has such a tight grip on the California legislature that we have even been called a one party state.

We only have to look at the participants to answer that question. It’s the same people, defending the very system that has brought us this far. Things were not so bright before Trump or this pandemic. Newsom said that “restarting” the economy which is the goal of the task force, “would be guided first by health and safety considerations.”

No it won’t. Profits trump health and safety any day. Benioff didn’t accumulate $8 billion by taking care of working people and the poor. Bob Iger is the former head of Disney Corp. Ask a worker at Disneyland how that played out. Tim Cook owes his wealth to the hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers who work under inhuman circumstances making I Phones. Conditions were so unbearable, nets were installed outside dorm windows because too many workers were committing suicide. Apple has more cash money than many nations and uses tax havens like Ireland.

Governments in other countries like Spain immediately nationalized hospitals and other industries. Ireland did the same, a right wing government in that case. Of course, they will reverse this (if we let them) when the crisis subsides. The response in the US has been so poor partly due to the unhinged character in the White House but also because the capitalist class and its media is so dominant here, so powerful; we are in the belly of the beast.

Newsom’s panel is a group of capitalists trying to figure out how best to get back to normal and that means, profits.  The only politicians on it are capitalist politicians from one of the two parties that have dominated US society and politics for over a century. Working people have no party and consequently no voice. The SEIU official has the same world view as the business representatives on it and will do her best to ensure organized labor cooperates and acts responsibly in getting the so-called free market back on its feet. No strikes, no disruptions, we’re all in this together.

There may be some relief but it will only be temporary and all debts will have to be repaid. It will be our children and grandchildren, the future generations that will pay for a long time.

The response to the pandemic has shown who is important in society and who isn’t. It’s revealed the complete bankruptcy of the market and its adherents in the most powerful economy on the planet. Millions of workers will see this and mass consciousness will not be the same.

The banks and financial industry should be taken in to public ownership and the public sector expanded. The private sector has not and will not provide a decent life for most people. Public services have to be expanded and social infrastructure needs can be met ass workers are put to work. Major construction unions can expand on their training programs in our communities teaching young workers crucial skills necessary for these projects and community business can benefit as workers receive more money in their pockets and pass it on as consumers. Small business can be liberated from the clutches of the insurance companies and banks through access to cheap loans.

The health and pharmaceutical industry should also be a public utility as health care should not be a business. Education and any essential social service should be public. These are among the issues that should be being discussed in a legislature that purports to represent the working people of a country.

No worker with a functioning brain surely believes we can rely on billionaires to draw up a plan to eliminate homelessness, inequality and save the planet. It’s like expecting the fox to not eat the chickens.