Widening income inequality and a growing number of U.S. billionaires is supercharging the political debate around wealth taxes, at both the national and local level. Democratic lawmakers and candidates, including some from the party’s energized democratic socialist wing, are promising to impose new levies on the über-wealthy should they win control of Congress, citing both fiscal and moral imperatives. Many blue states and cities are exploring similar measures, even as critics warn of high-income residents fleeing to lower-tax red states.

A key test will come this fall in California, where voters will decide whether to impose a one-time 5% tax on the state’s billionaires. The Golden State has a history of pioneering policy ideas via ballot initiatives.

Supporters say the ballot measure, sponsored by a healthcare workers union, would generate needed funds to cover rising healthcare costs for low-income people. Critics – including Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom – say it could decimate the state’s tax base by driving wealthy people away. Opposition groups, funded in large part by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, have spent over $100 million to try to defeat the initiative. They are backing two counterinitiatives that would undercut the billionaire tax and that will also appear on this November’s ballot.

“What happens in California is going to determine the course of what happens in this country on this issue,” said California Rep. Ro Khanna, who supports the billionaire tax, on a call with reporters last month. “This fight is defining, for what type of Democratic Party we’re going to be.”

Taxing the rich has long been a familiar refrain among Democrats. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has been calling for wealth taxes for decades, and President Joe Biden proposed a billionaire tax in 2024. With the top 1% holding nearly one-third of household wealth in the United States, efforts to impose new levies on high-net-worth individuals have been gaining traction.

In Washington state, which historically has not had an income tax, legislators this spring passed a 9.9% tax on incomes over $1 million. Opponents there are mobilizing behind a referendum to repeal the measure, which appears headed for the November ballot. Maine’s governor this spring signed into law a new income tax surcharge on incomes exceeding $1 million, and legislatures in Minnesota and Rhode Island have passed similar measures.

In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani won a historic victory last fall with a campaign that promised to impose new taxes on the wealthy while making life more affordable for ordinary New Yorkers. While New York legislators have not moved ahead on Mr. Mamdani’s biggest tax proposals, in May they passed a tax on second homes worth more than $1 million.

Paramount has made repeated entreaties to Bonta to strike a deal that would allow its merger with Warner Bros. to close.

The studio proposed a firm commitment, via a consent decree, to produce 30 films annually, with a 45-day theatrical release window and a 90-day streaming window, alongside promises to keep both Paramount and Warner Bros. lots open in California, the people said.

Privately, Ellison and other Paramount executives have expressed frustration at Bonta’s refusal to engage, and have pointed to the commitments around content spending — some $30 billion annually — and employment that would flow into California. Already, the region has faced a production exodus to other states — even to Canada — with thousands of entertainment jobs lost in recent years. Ellison and his executives have said that the combined Warner Bros.-Paramount would create jobs in California, helping to stymie that outflow.

But Paramount believes Bonta’s office has rebuffed its overtures, creating what one Ellison adviser said is an “inhospitable” environment for Paramount to operate in. If Bonta sues, the adviser said, the state’s hostility would push the company over the edge.

Bonta’s office did not respond to a request for comment. Last month, he told MSNOW that there were “red flags in the air everywhere,” and that he was “concerned about job loss and prices being increased.”

In a statement, Paramount said, “We continue to engage constructively with the remaining few regulators around the world still considering the merger, including State Attorneys General, and are prepared to address any legitimate antitrust issues.” It added: “We are confident this transaction raises no such concerns, as demonstrated by the dozens of antitrust authorities around the world that have carefully reviewed the transaction.”

Val Verde is a place with few strangers.

Forty miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles, the tiny foothill community of 3,000 has one main road, spotty cell service and a lone local market.

Yet nobody could remember ever seeing the man in a cowboy hat before 2024, when he was spotted talking to residents about lawsuits against the local dump.

At the time, the neighboring Chiquita Canyon landfill had never smelled worse. For more than a year, an uncontrolled fire had burned in the bowels of the dump, broiling old garbage and sending nauseating fumes into nearby homes.

Oshea Orchid, a local lawyer, filed the first class-action lawsuit in 2023 against the operators of the county’s second-largest landfill, alleging the fumes were sickening her neighbors, causing headaches and heart palpitations.

For months, she said, she’d been the only lawyer taking on the cases. But as she passed the town’s market Feb. 4, 2024, she spotted the cowboy promising lawsuits to patrons, according to a complaint Orchid later filed with the State Bar of California.

The man, she said in the complaint, told her he was hired by Downtown LA Law Group, a firm under criminal investigation by L.A. County’s district attorney over claims that some of its clients made up stories of sexual abuse in juvenile halls in order to sue.

“He admitted he was an actor and that the DTLA Law Group had paid him $5,000 to drive from Las Vegas, put him up in a hotel, given him Western attire and directed him to pretend to be a local cowboy to solicit residents of Val Verde in front of the Fast Stop,” Orchid recounted in the April 2026 complaint. “Before agreeing to leave, he gave us the chaps he didn’t know how to use.”

The brown leather chaps, Orchid said, are still stuffed in her office.

Attorney Oshea Orchid holds up a pair of chaps she says were handed to her by a man recruiting people to join lawsuits over the Chiquita Canyon landfill. Orchid filed a state bar complaint that said the man was hired by Downtown LA Law Group.

(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)

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California bans non-attorneys from directly soliciting or procuring clients to sign up for lawsuits. The practice, known as capping, was outlawed over concerns it allows law firms to exploit victims in pursuit of hefty payouts.

A spokesperson for DTLA said the man had been hired solely to ask “local businesses for permission to display educational fliers,” and accused Orchid of filing the complaint to tarnish lawyers vying for the same pool of clients.

This “is not a story about our firm’s marketing,” the spokesperson said, but rather “a story about a competing law firm attempting to use the press and the State Bar to eliminate competition in the same litigation.”

Now, Orchid and other attorneys on the Chiquita Canyon case worry about the future of some of the most significant environmental justice litigation in Southern California.

Downtown LA Law Group, headquartered in the Arts District, is facing several investigations following allegations of illegal solicitation.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

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DTLA has signed up roughly 1,300 of the 10,000 people who have filed claims over the landfill.

The firm is currently facing a state bar probe and a criminal investigation by L.A. County’s district attorney following Times reporting last fall that found nine clients of the firm who said they were paid to sue the county, ultimately becoming part of a $4-billion sex abuse settlement. Four of the clients said they fabricated their claims, which the firm later withdrew.

Orchid, 43, said the point of starting the landfill litigation was to shutter the dump and squeeze out enough money from the owners for her sick neighbors to move out of town. DTLA, she argues, has now put these life-changing payouts at risk.

Attorneys for the owners of the landfill, which stopped accepting trash last year, claimed this spring in the litigation that the lawsuits may be tainted by fraud. The firm said in a statement to The Times that it remains “deeply concerned.”

“Credible allegations suggest that this case has been infected with lawyer misconduct or even criminal activity that has caused the filing of fraudulent claims,” Paul Chan, an attorney representing the landfill owners, wrote in an April 24 motion.

Andrew Morrow, one of DTLA’s lead attorneys for both the sex abuse and landfill cases, insisted in a May 8 court filing that there was no improper solicitation, arguing the claims were built on a “foundation of speculation, innuendo, and a patchwork of sensational allegations and headlines.”

These allegations in the firm’s sex abuse cases, he said, “are wholly unrelated to the present litigation.”

The court ruled that the allegations against DTLA did not warrant a separate discovery process for the firm’s clients.

After meeting the self-professed cowboy outside the market, Orchid said she invited him to a boozy meal at a nearby pub. He introduced himself as Raymond Henderson, a commercial actor gathering cases for DTLA.

“I buy him a few margaritas and I’m like, tell me all about it,” recounts Orchid.

Henderson told The Times that Orchid accurately described his gig with DTLA, which he says earned him a few thousand dollars. But, he said, his cowboy attire was no costume. The 72-year-old actor said he spent his upbringing around horses in rural Alabama and knew his way around a pair of chaps. He said he has given away several sets over the years, though he didn’t recall handing that particular pair to Orchid.

Henderson said attorneys at DTLA never told him that soliciting clients for the firm was against the law. Henderson sent several texts to a partner at DTLA about picking up checks for his work in Val Verde, according to messages reviewed by The Times.

Raymond Henderson says he was hired by Downtown LA Law Group to find clients in Val Verde who wanted to sue over the nearby Chiquita Canyon landfill.

(Mikayla Whitmore / For The Times)

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“I do what we call ‘chasing,’” Henderson said in an interview from his Las Vegas home. “They just tell you what they want.”

A firm spokesperson denied soliciting clients and said it was Orchid who had tried to use Henderson to illegally gather plaintiffs in the landfill cases. The firm said Henderson signed a declaration two years ago that accused Orchid of asking him to get “cases for her in the community.”

“He refused. She then asked him to lie and say he was being paid for cases,” the firm said in a statement. “She told him these cases were her ‘territory’ that no other firm had a right to market there, and that she would use her ‘clout’ to generate complaints against any firm that took her landfill cases. That is exactly what has followed.”

The firm declined to share Henderson’s declaration, citing a confidentiality agreement. Henderson did not respond to an inquiry about the February 2024 declaration.

Orchid said she had liked Henderson. He was chatty and upbeat, and she told him she would try to find him work, potentially as an assistant at her law firm. But that job, which never materialized, was not going to be as a recruiter, she said.

For the longest time, the residents of Val Verde could not find a lawyer willing to fight the landfill enveloping their neighborhood in clouds of stench.

Cher Arabalo, a former Denver sheriff captain, said she moved to the town in 2022 and promptly regretted it.

“Like a sour milk base or something, mixed with porta potty with a little chemical on top of it,” she said, describing the aroma.

Cher Arabalo said nobody warned her about the acrid stench from the Chiquita Canyon landfill when she moved to Val Verde in 2022. She later joined litigation against the landfill owners.

(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)

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Neighbors hosted pancake breakfasts and spaghetti nights to raise money for lawyers. The amounts were measly. They tried to get a firm affiliated with environmental crusader Erin Brockovich interested. No luck.

Then Orchid moved to town, lured by a sprawling ranch for her four horses. Before long, she said, she got persistent headaches, which she blamed on fumes from the dump three miles away.

After word spread that a local attorney was starting a class action, residents said they were besieged by out-of-town lawyers competing aggressively for their business.

On Dec. 29, 2023, a resident emailed Orchid about a group of recruiters at the market who were handing out fliers for DTLA.

“They were asking for a signature on a ‘petition’ but I think it was actually to sign with this firm for a class action lawsuit,” wrote Rosalie Alaniz. “He was using the terms ‘class action’ and ‘petition’ interchangeably. So, yes it was definitely sketchy.”

Residents of Val Verde say they’ve been bombarded by Instagram ads looking for plaintiffs for the landfill cases.

(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)

Two days later, on New Year’s Eve, Orchid made her own trip to the market and found a group of men who said they were paid hourly to collect “petitions for the lawsuit” on behalf of DTLA, according to a video she took of the encounter. The “petition,” a portion of which flashes briefly on screen, appears to be a DTLA fee agreement entitling the firm to at least 40% of any future payout.

Sereen Banna, a former DTLA paralegal who sued the firm in December, previously told The Times that landfill clients had reported getting gift cards in exchange for signing a petition. Those names, she said, later appeared on retainer agreements, even though clients insisted they never agreed to a lawsuit.

Morrow, the DTLA attorney, acknowledged allegations that clients had signed up accidentally in his May 8 motion, but said it was “impossible to imagine someone who is still unwittingly in the case at this stage because they believed a retainer agreement was a petition.”

Every client who wanted to drop the firm, DTLA said in a statement, was free to do so.

On Jan. 25, 2024, Henderson ventured into Val Verde to help the firm get in on the Chiquita Canyon action, according to text messages reviewed by The Times.

“The smell ??” Salar Hendizadeh, a partner at DTLA, texted Henderon as he ventured into the foothills. “How bad ?”

“Really bad,” Henderson replied.

“Wow,” Hendizadeh texted.

“Packem
Rackem
Stackem”

Three weeks later, Henderson sent a picture of a group of elderly residents huddled in a circle.

“Get em for me,” Hendizadeh replied.

“all of them”

“Need it”

Over the next month, Henderson would text Hendizadeh the names and phone numbers of more than 40 prospective clients, according to text messages between the two.

Hendizadeh left the firm in October 2025. The State Bar has since charged him, along with the remaining partners at DTLA, over separate allegations that they signed up clients in states where they had no license to practice. The firm has denied all wrongdoing.

Henderson said he started working for DTLA after picking up Hendizadeh in an Uber at LAX around 2018. He said he would listen to the police scanner for car crashes and then rush to the scene to recruit accident victims who would hire DTLA to sue the driver.

Orchid poses for a portrait at her ranch in Val Verde. A partner at Sethi Orchid Miner, Orchid sued the operators of the county’s second-largest landfill, alleging the dump was sickening the community.

(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)

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If the crash involved an Uber or Lyft, which are required to have top-of-the-line insurance policies, Henderson said he got about $5,000 per client. He got more, he said, if the client’s bones were broken.

The discussions around price-per-plaintiff, he said, were always furtive.

“If I asked him verbally, he’d write it on a piece of paper,” he said of Hendizadeh. “I thought it was just a lawyer thing.”

When it became clear L.A. County was poised to shell out billions on victims who’d experienced sexual abuse in juvenile halls, Henderson said Hendizadeh wrote “500” on a slip of paper in his office. So Henderson said he started looking for people in destitute neighborhoods where “people [have] been going to jail all their life.”

Hendizadeh said in a statement that Henderson’s claims were “demonstrably untrue,” and that the firm has “independently investigated his claims and is confident it has acted in full compliance of all applicable ethical and legal standards.”

Henderson said he only realized the solicitation he’d been asked to do might be frowned upon after Orchid told him as much at their meal.

A DTLA Law Group hat inside the home of Raymond Henderson in Las Vegas on May 22.

(Mikayla Whitmore / For The Times)

“I met another attorney up. There was telling me that what I was doing was unethical,” Henderson texted Hendizadeh after meeting Orchid on Feb. 4, 2024.

“Don’t talk to them,” Hendizadeh responded. “Marketing and community education is 100 percent good.”

Henderson said he had no issue speaking publicly about the work he’d been hired to do.

“I’m talking to anybody,” Henderson said. “I mean, it’s not McDonald’s. You can’t have it your way over here.”

The lawsuit recruiters came to their town bearing gifts, several residents told The Times.

Jorge Real, a 53-year-old house painter, said he was given $10 for each person he convinced to sign up.

Roberto Talamantez, who spends many afternoons drinking beers in the empty plot next to the market, said he got about $25 and a cellphone from a law firm recruiter to sign a petition. So did everyone else he knows, he said.

“Like he was giving potato chips,” said Talamantez, whose suit was filed by DTLA on March 6, 2024. “We’re poor. If someone offers you $20 … and they barbecue for you and they’re buying you beers, why not?”

Roberto Talamantez said he got about $25 and a cellphone in exchange for giving a lawsuit recruiter his name outside of the only market in town.

(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)

Some residents said they were unclear about what they were being asked to sign up for.

“One got kind of upset, like, ‘Why won’t you sign? You’re going to make money’ … They were really pushing me,” said Salvador Yoguez, a retired farmworker. “They kept following me all the way to the car — ‘look at this, look at that.’ I kept telling them, ‘I don’t know anything about this.’ I had been drinking.”

Like many in the working-class community, Yoguez speaks only Spanish and said he didn’t understand why the group of young guys wanted his name and ID as he made a beer run at the market. His wife, Delia Yoguez, who drove him there, said she, too, gave her name to the men.

Sereen Banna, a former DTLA paralegal, said she reported unethical solicitation in the firm’s landfill cases to her boss. The firm has denied any wrongdoing.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

DTLA filed lawsuits for the couple on March 4 and March 18, 2024, alleging the odors were causing them to “remain inside their homes” and “embarrassment and reluctance” to invite any guests over.

Both told The Times they were unaware they had a lawsuit with DTLA and believed they had only signed up with Orchid, a friend of their daughter. DTLA said every client provided an ID card, proof they were in the zone affected by the landfill, and signed a “clearly labeled contingency fee agreement” before a case was filed.

This spring, DTLA announced plans to get out of the landfill litigation, passing on most of its caseload to Carpenter & Zuckerman, a Beverly Hills-based personal injury law firm.

Carpenter & Zuckerman is taking on a growing role in environmental litigation in the region. The morning after the evacuations due to a leaking chemical tank in Garden Grove, firm representatives were stationed outside an evacuation center, taking contact information and handing out fast food and coffee, according to two volunteers working at the Red Cross stand next door. The next day, the firm would claim to file the first lawsuit against the owners of the leaking chemical tank.

Some Val Verde residents who unwittingly signed up with DTLA said they were confused why Carpenter & Zuckerman was insistently calling them, trying to get them to sign a new agreement.

“Beginning in or around March 6, 2026, I have been called numerous times,” Delia Yoguez wrote in a signed declaration from June 23, which Orchid says she took as part of a bar complaint. “The lady told me that I had signed paperwork with them and that I could not back out.”

The new agreement entitles lawyers to 45% of the settlement, which will be split evenly between the two firms. “In short, Client is getting two law firms for the price of one,” it explains.

A November 2016 aerial view of the Chiquita Canyon landfill in northern Los Angeles County.

(Los Angeles Times)

On May 25, Val Verde’s civic association sent Carpenter & Zuckerman a cease and desist letter, citing reports that attorneys had been “misleading, coercive, and exploitative” and “had repeatedly contacted, pressured, harassed, and misled residents into signing retainer agreements.”

“Targeting vulnerable residents, particularly non-English-speaking individuals, is especially concerning and entirely inappropriate,” the letter stated.

Carpenter & Zuckerman said in a statement to The Times that it “independently evaluates every matter and client on an individual basis and represents only those clients who desire to pursue their claims and whose cases meet the firm’s standards.” The firm denied engaging in “high-pressure tactics” and said it remains committed to “ethical advocacy and ensuring that individuals who wish to pursue their claims are not left without representation due to circumstances involving prior counsel.”

Some locals say the renewed jockeying for clients is the latest distraction from the fight over the toxins they believe are polluting their home.

“We’re just trying to survive this,” said longtime resident Abigail DeSesa. “And it’s like the Val Verde ‘Hunger Games.’”