I was taught from an early age that there are two sources of power in politics. On the one side you have organized people, and on the other you have organized money. This was, and is, a fair approximation of the state of play, at least within the reform-oriented social movement/civil society circles in which I travel.

You want to stop a data center from being built? You’re going to need to organize enough people to create counterforce against the voice of organized money. You want to change zoning rules to allow more mixed-use development in your city? Organize people. This is what we do. It is, as the old saying goes, what democracy looks like.

Right now there’s a ballot initiative in California to pass a billionaire’s tax — a one-time, 5% levy on the state’s 200 billionaires. The SEIU (organized people) has spearheaded the effort. The billionaires, as you might imagine, are not exactly being cool about the whole thing. They started a Signal chat to coordinate their response. Emily Shugerman of the SFStandard got a look at the chatlogs, and shared the details in an article titled “the 5% freakout: Inside tech’s madcap war against the California billionaire tax.”

This has been one of the defining trends of the past decade. Organized money has gotten frisky and creative. Wealth concentration, plus owning multiple branches of the government, has left them with few limits and fewer scruples. There aren’t many obstacles that they cannot just buy.