California: Taxing the Billionaires, a Vote That Says a Lot About Hunger Elsewhere

According to RFI, Californian voters will decide, alongside the midterms, on "Proposition 40". It would create a special tax on the state's 250 billionaires: a levy of 5% on their financial assets, real estate excluded. It would be a world first. Voters, still according to RFI, appear torn between a desire for social justice and a fear of seeing these billionaires leave California.

That's the facts. The rest is our reading.

We are asked to link this ballot to the hunger crisis in Somalia, where millions of people are threatened with malnutrition. Let's be frank: the RFI dispatch says not a word about Somalia. We have here no figures, no dates, no testimony about that country, and we will not invent any. What follows is therefore an argument, not a numbered finding.

The argument goes like this. Hunger in the Horn of Africa is readily presented as a whim of the sky: droughts, failed rains. Climate matters, obviously. But a drought becomes a famine when a country has no reserves, no credit, and no food system to protect it. Now peripheral economies were shaped to supply raw materials, cheap labour and outlets to the centre. Debt, unequal exchange and conditional loans lock this position in place, according to the Gazette's conceptual notes on dependency. Independence, Fanon and Cabral reminded us, changes the flag without necessarily changing the structure. Land and crops turned towards export, dependence on grain imports: that is the ground on which the drought strikes.

And California? It offers an instructive contrast. Cabral defined imperialism as the global quest for profit and the accumulation of surplus value by monopoly finance capital, centred first in Europe, then in North America (our translation, "L'arme de la théorie"). The financial fortunes that Sacramento is considering taxing are the product of this system, not a local accident. That a 5% tax should be presented as a risky adventure, on the grounds that its targets might move, shows the balance of forces: capital moves, the hungry do not.

The threat of fiscal exile is the ordinary blackmail of mobile capital. It holds in California as it does across the world, where poor, indebted states don't even have the luxury of debating it by referendum. They repay, they adjust, they export.

What we do not yet know: whether Proposition 40 will pass, how it would be applied, and above all whether a single cent of such a levy would ever reach those suffering from hunger. Nothing in the dispatch indicates it. The real question, however, is posed: who decides how wealth is shared, and who pays when the rain does not come? Somalis threatened with malnutrition do not vote in California. Their fate is nonetheless being played out there, in part.