I'm going to start with kind of a mean question, but I think you can handle it.

Okay.

Are you a shakedown artist?

No, absolutely not.

This is a guy named Dave Regan.

Dave leads one of the largest health care unions in the country, UHW.

And he's just taken on this big fight, campaigning for a one-time tax on billionaires

that Californians are going to vote on come November.

That's where this whole shakedown artist allegation comes from.

You know, it's obviously weird to hear those kinds of things.

And what I keep coming back to is when you're trying to accomplish things or solve problems for ordinary people, there's this pejorative language that everybody uses.

You know, sometimes I think if the union called itself a hedge fund, nobody would say those kinds of things about us.

You have really freaked billionaires out.

Like, I was just looking around for videotape, how the billionaires tax has been

talked about, and it's really hair-on-fire time for rich people in California. I get the sense

maybe you relish that, though. You know, sort of the juvenile delinquent in me kind of gets a kick out of that, you know, but the reason for that is it's just crazy.

And particularly in California, that's home to more billionaires than any other state in the country and not just garden variety billionaires, but these

huge billionaires, people like the Google founders and the Oracle founder, Larry Ellison,

and others, Mark Zuckerberg, life is really good for the billionaires in California, and

life is not so good for everybody else,

particularly when we look at what's going to happen to the health care system.

What's going to happen to the California health care system is cuts, lots of cuts. Many of them

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