向超级富豪征税之争，与无处不在的保密协议

Will Jarvis: From The New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Will Jarvis, in for Tracy Mumford. Today's Tuesday, October 20th. Here's what we're covering.

Will Jarvis: As of today, the midterm elections are just two weeks away. And beyond the races that will determine control of Congress, the Times is looking at some of the major policy issues that voters are weighing. Leading up to election day, we'll be diving into a few key themes that are appearing on ballot measures across the country. To start, we're going to take a look at the push to tax the ultra-wealthy.

Supporter: We have never been so close to taxing billionaires than we are today.

Will Jarvis: That's on full display in California.

Opponent: They snuck in a provision that allows them to turn the tax on you.

Will Jarvis: There, voters will decide whether to levy a one-time 5% wealth tax on the state's billionaires. There are about 250 of them.

Laura Rosenhall: This is landing at a time when there is a lot of anxiety about economic inequality nationwide and also here in California, where the AI explosion just means that some people are so incredibly well off right now, while the masses of people are just struggling for their day-to-day expenses.

Will Jarvis: My colleague Laura Rosenhall has been covering the fight over this measure. She says supporters of the tax say it would raise around $100 billion, most of which would be used to offset federal cuts to Medicaid. At the same time, opponents argue that it would be a disaster for California's economy, encouraging the biggest earners to leave the state. And still others say they support taxing the rich, but not the way this measure is structured.

Laura Rosenhall: It's uncertain if this will pass. Part of that is because of the debate over the details, but part of that is because billionaires who would have to pay the tax have absolutely bombarded the airwaves with advertising opposing the measure. There's been an enormous amount of money raised to defeat this tax proposal.

Will Jarvis: Californians aren't the only ones considering new taxes on the wealthy. In Washington state, voters will decide on whether or not to keep in place a new 10% income tax on millionaires. And

Abdul El-Sayed: tax billionaire wealth. It's that simple.

Will Jarvis: Several Democratic candidates, including Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, have brought the question into the fight for the House and Senate, pledging to try and raise taxes on the super-rich at the national level if elected. The efforts come as the gap between the rich and the poor has grown at an accelerating rate. In roughly the past decade, the net worth of the wealthiest Americans has more than doubled, and Americans in the top 1% now control more in assets than the GDP of the US and China combined. We'll have more on other key policy issues around the country over the next few weeks.

Will Jarvis: Meanwhile, in Kansas last night

Donald Trump: And I'm thrilled to be back in this incredible state, which by the way, I don't want to brag, I won all three times.

Will Jarvis: President Trump kicked off a campaign blitz through deep red states, hoping to boost enthusiasm among Republican voters in races that increasingly seem to be toss-ups.

Donald Trump: I think Republicans, all you have to do is turn out. If you turn out, we win. You know we

Will Jarvis: His itinerary, Kansas, the Carolinas, Iowa, Florida, Georgia, includes states and districts Trump won by double digits. Now though, some of those have become battlegrounds, with Republicans neck and neck with their Democratic opponents. Vice President J.D. Vance is making a similar last-minute push. He kicked off the week in North Carolina and will end it in Nebraska, in a district he and Trump won by more than 50 points.

Emily Davies: It's a defensive strategy, as one Republican strategist said to me today. And it really shows what the White House is doing to try to prevent a blue wave.

Will Jarvis: Emily Davies is a Times political correspondent. She says that right now the GOP is hoping to galvanize the MAGA base and get Trump supporters to the polls instead of trying to persuade swing state voters.

Emily Davies: Advisors to President Trump have told us that they understand that it might be counterproductive to deploy the president to states like Maine and New Hampshire where he remains incredibly unpopular. Some of his policies are having negative effects on the economy and the Republican candidates for Senate are trying to distance themselves from the White House.

Will Jarvis: In Israel, police say they've detained at least 10 Israeli settlers as authorities there face growing international pressure to crack down on a surge of violence in the West Bank. The arrests came after a series of recent attacks by settlers, including one a few days ago on Palestinians who were gathered for an annual olive harvest.

Azam Ahmed: When we got there it was even more violent than I think we expected. I mean the first thing we did when we ran kind of up to where the confrontation was was we saw someone being carried out by medics who'd been badly beaten I think and was sort of hustled off into an ambulance.

Will Jarvis: My colleague Azam Ahmed witnessed part of the attack where dozens of settlers dressed in black with their faces covered descended on the people taking part in the harvest.

Azam Ahmed: There were fires raging across there olive harvest area where settlers had set fire to olive trees and the settlers were throwing these giant stones and sort of using slingshots to you know, these things are massive and heavy. They can kill you if you get hit by one.

Will Jarvis: One of the people injured was an American photographer working for the Washington Post who suffered a broken rib and shattered vertebrae according to her family. After that attack, the settler violence continued in another town in the West Bank with a group of men armed with clubs going after Palestinians and a European diplomatic convoy, according to witnesses. The violence was denounced by European officials. The French Foreign Ministry called on Israel to stop what it described as acts of terror. And the US ambassador to Israel, who's long supported the settler movement, called the attack on the journalist in particular, quote, despicable. The assaults were the latest in a wave of sometimes deadly extremist violence that has driven out entire Palestinian communities in the West Bank in recent years. While Israeli authorities have brought charges in some of the more high-profile cases, one rights group in Israel found that the vast majority of those inquiries into settler violence do not lead to convictions. According to the group, 93% of investigations they tracked over the past two decades ended with no indictment.

Will Jarvis: For decades across the US, NDAs, or non-disclosure agreements, were mostly a thing in the business world to try and keep employees from spilling company secrets. But now, The Times has been looking at how they become a go-to tool in the everyday lives of the wealthy. People are asking their housekeepers, private chefs, tutors, landscape designers, fitness trainers, anyone who comes onto their property to sign an NDA. A managing partner at a Connecticut law firm said over the last 10 years, the number of inquiries he gets about NDAs has, quote, easily increased a hundredfold. He said one factor driving it, which isn't that surprising, is that it's never been easier to snap a photo and post something online. The internet makes it hard to keep secrets. To account for that, the documents themselves are also getting more complicated. The founder of a staffing agency that specializes in providing nannies and other household workers said contracts that used to be a simple paragraph can now run 15 pages. Interestingly, the wealthy aren't the only ones leaning into NDAs. The Trump administration has said it wants to make current federal employees and new hires sign them to prevent leaks to news outlets. And as of a few years ago, the Supreme Court started pushing clerks and other employees to agree to NDAs, too.

Will Jarvis: And finally, this week fans of The Simpsons got a big surprise.

Apu: I am Apu.

Will Jarvis: As the character Apu of Kwik-E-Mart fame made his return to the show after almost a decade away.

Apu: You thought you could just get rid of me? That I disappeared? That there wouldn't be consequences for the horrible thing you did?

Character: Uh what did we do again?

Will Jarvis: For almost 30 years, Apu had been voiced with a thick, cartoonish Indian accent by the actor Hank Azaria. That is until 2017, when the comedian Hari Kondabolu made the documentary The Problem with Apu.

Hari Kondabolu: You know that a white guy does the voice?

Passerby: Huh?

Hari Kondabolu: A white guy doing an impression of a white guy making fun of my father.

Interviewer: How do you feel about that?

Hari Kondabolu: Oh, I'm making a movie about how much I dislike it.

Will Jarvis: The movie surfaced what many South Asians had long felt, that Apu's character was a clumsy stereotype. And almost immediately, Azaria expressed discomfort with playing the role, saying at one point that quote part of me feels like I need to go to every single Indian person in this country and personally apologize. He never played the role again. Instead, the new Apu is voiced by Sunil Malhotra, who's of South Asian descent. In an interview with Variety, he said that over the years he'd walked away from other offers to voice South Asian characters when he felt they were caricatures. But he said when it comes to Apu, he saw an opportunity. Quote, Could I make the character my own and reclaim him in some way? The producers of The Simpsons have also brought on a woman of South Asian descent to play Apu's wife, Manjula, and the two of them could be in for long careers. Since earlier this year, The Simpsons hit 800 episodes. It's the longest-running sitcom in American TV history.

Will Jarvis: Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily.

James Talarico: I think the mistake that people in my party have made is that they confuse the separation of church and state with a separation of faith and politics. We want a politics that is spiritually rooted. Rooted in something deeper than partisanship.

Will Jarvis: A conversation with James Talarico, the Texas Senate candidate who's trying to become the first Democrat to win statewide office there in decades. You can find that in the New York Times app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Will Jarvis. We'll be back tomorrow.