[D66] Who is Kamala Harris?

[R.O.]

Kamala Harris, then California Attorney General, poses for a photo with 
U.S. border patrol agents at the U.S.-Mexico border fence in 2011 
(Photo: Office of the Attorney General of California)

(Een parelketting dragende smeris!)


On 12-08-2020 07:32, R.O. wrote:
> Who is Democratic Senator Kamala Harris?
> By Dan Conway
> 12 August 2020
>
> Joseph Biden’s selection of the first-term Senator and former state 
> Attorney General from California Kamala Harris as his running mate 
> comes as no surprise and solidifies the Democratic Party 
> establishment’s right-wing ticket for the 2020 presidential elections.
>
> As was the case in her bid for the Democratic Party nomination earlier 
> this year, Harris’s mixed ethnicity—her father is Jamaican and her 
> mother is Tamil—was a significant factor in the calculations behind 
> her selection by Biden. In the remaining three months before election 
> day on November 3, the Democrats are clearly doubling down on race and 
> gender identity politics.
>
> Indicating the consensus behind the Biden-Harris ticket, both Hillary 
> Clinton and Bernie Sanders quickly endorsed her selection.
>
> In the political profile of Harris below, published in July 2019 when 
> she was one of the leading candidates for the Democratic presidential 
> nomination, the World Socialist Web Site summed up her career as a 
> representative of the US criminal justice system and a reliable 
> defender of corporate and intelligence state interests.
>
> ***
>
> Among the two dozen candidates now running for the 2020 Democratic 
> presidential nomination, California senator Kamala Harris has 
> regularly polled among the top five contenders for the party’s 
> nomination since announcing her candidacy last January.
>
> Both the corporate media and the Democratic Party establishment hailed 
> her performance in the June 26-27 debate in Miami, when she attacked 
> former Vice President Joe Biden over his comments about busing and 
> working with segregationist Democrats in the Senate. She has moved up 
> in both the polls and fundraising since then, hitting first place in a 
> poll of California voters this week for the first time.
>
> With two of her four main rivals being white men in their mid-70s, the 
> 54-year-old Harris, given her gender and mixed Jamaican and south 
> Indian ancestry, is a likely selection for vice president even if she 
> fails to win the nomination, considering the Democratic Party’s 
> embrace of the politics of gender and racial identity.
>
> Harris, like the rest of the Democratic field, is trying to posture as 
> a progressive alternative to Trump, while, in her case, seeking to 
> split the difference between Biden, the “moderate” frontrunner, and 
> his two main challengers from the “left” wing of the party, Bernie 
> Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Harris has tried to have it both ways, 
> combining the “electability” argument of Biden with the suggestion 
> that, as a former prosecutor, she would aggressively challenge Trump.
>
> At the heart of Harris’s candidacy—as far as her credentials with the 
> ruling class are concerned—is her record as a ruthless operative in 
> the fields of criminal justice and national security. She was district 
> attorney in San Francisco for six years, then California state 
> attorney-general for the same length of time, before winning a Senate 
> seat in 2016.
>
> Senate Democratic leaders promoted Harris from the start, giving her 
> plum committee assignments, including Budget, Homeland Security and 
> Judiciary, where she was heavily publicized for her role in the 
> questioning of Supreme Court nominee, now justice, Brett Kavanaugh.
>
> Most revealing was her appointment to the Intelligence Committee in 
> 2017—the only newly elected Democrat to be given such a critical 
> position, and an indication that, as far as the Democratic Party 
> establishment and the military-intelligence apparatus were concerned, 
> Harris is a “safe pair of hands.”
>
> Harris has repaid this confidence by acting as the point woman, among 
> the Democratic presidential candidates, for the bogus anti-Russian 
> campaign, demanding Trump’s impeachment, not for his flagrant 
> violations of the US Constitution or his persecution of immigrants, 
> but based on the McCarthyite smear that he is a stooge of Moscow.
>
> Speaking at the California Democratic Party’s convention in early 
> June, Harris said, “Let’s talk about this so-called commander in 
> chief. He parrots Russia’s lies over the word of American intelligence 
> and law enforcement leaders. He denies that Russia interfered in the 
> election of the president of the United States. We need to begin 
> impeachment proceedings and we need a new commander in chief.”
>
> She continued along these lines in the June 27 Democratic debate, when 
> she repeatedly attacked Trump on foreign policy, declaring, on North 
> Korea, that Trump “embraces Kim Jong-un, a dictator, for the sake of a 
> photo op,” adding that “he takes the word of the Russian president 
> over the word of the American intelligence community when it comes to 
> a threat to our democracy and our elections.” In a post-debate 
> interview on MSNBC, Harris attacked Trump for taking “the word of a 
> Saudi prince over the word of the American intelligence community” on 
> the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
>
> For Harris, as for the Democratic Party as a whole, there is no 
> greater breach of political norms than failing to take “the word of 
> the American intelligence community.”
> A career prosecutor
>
> Harris began her political career in 1990 as a deputy district 
> attorney for Alameda County, which includes the city of Oakland, 
> before crossing the bay to a similar position in San Francisco in 
> 1998. She quickly made high-level connections, moving in elite social 
> circles, where she cultivated patrons like oil heiress Vanessa Getty. 
> She briefly dated then California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, who 
> became mayor of San Francisco and promoted her political career and 
> financial interests.
>
> By the time Harris decided to challenge incumbent San Francisco 
> District Attorney Terence Hallinan in 2004, she was able to outraise 
> him by two-to-one and spent so much money on the campaign that the San 
> Francisco Ethics Commission imposed a record fine for violating the 
> city’s campaign finance law. Hallinan, a former defense lawyer with 
> close ties to Bay Area radical circles—his father had been the 1952 
> presidential candidate of the Progressive Party—was opposed by the 
> business establishment, the police unions, and the San Francisco 
> Chronicle, whose editorial on the contest was headlined: “Harris, for 
> law and order.”
>
> I want to receive this newsletter. I agree that any information 
> submitted to this form will be processed in accordance with the 
> privacy policy and may be combined with other information.
>
> Six years later, Harris was the consensus Democratic Party choice for 
> the position of state attorney general being vacated by Jerry Brown, 
> who was the Democratic candidate for governor. She ran with backing of 
> her local congresswoman, Nancy Pelosi, and both Democratic senators, 
> Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer.
>
> As both a city prosecutor and as the top law enforcement official in 
> the largest US state, Harris made a name for herself as a strict “law 
> and order” advocate. As San Francisco District Attorney, she prided 
> herself on the high conviction rates obtained oftentimes heedless of 
> ethical legal practice. Felony conviction rates rose from 52 percent 
> in 2003 to 67 percent in 2006 under her leadership.
>
> This increase in convictions, however, was often due to clear 
> misconduct on the part of Harris and her office. In 2012, Superior 
> Court Judge Ann-Christine Massulo ruled that Harris’s office violated 
> defendants’ rights by withholding damaging information about a corrupt 
> police crime lab technician who had stolen drugs and falsified reports.
>
> As state attorney-general, Harris took on the high-profile defense of 
> the state prison system against court rulings condemning overcrowding 
> and mistreatment of prisoners as unconstitutional “cruel and unusual 
> punishment.” She sought to end federal court supervision of the 
> prisons, later defending her aggressive advocacy with the cynical 
> statement that as the principal legal representative of the state 
> government, “I have a client, and I don’t get to choose my client.”
>
> In 2015, Harris attempted to overturn a lower court ruling declaring 
> the state’s death penalty laws cruel and inhumane. Once again Harris 
> claimed that she was simply defending her client, the state of 
> California which didn’t necessarily reflect her own views on the subject.
>
> When the US Supreme Court in Brown v. Plata in 2014 declared the 
> state’s prisons so overcrowded that they constituted cruel and unusual 
> punishment, Harris fought the ruling. Prisoners were stacked in 
> three-person bunkbeds and were falling ill and dying for lack of 
> medical care. The state of California was subsequently ordered to 
> reduce its prison population by 40,000 inmates. Harris actually argued 
> that if California released inmates too soon, the state would lose an 
> important source of labor, citing its reliance on untrained prison 
> inmates risking their lives fighting wildfires for $2 a day.
>
> In 2015, Harris defended convictions obtained by county prosecutors 
> after the latter had inserted false confessions into interrogation 
> transcripts. Harris asserted at the time that perjury was not 
> sufficient to demonstrate prosecutorial misconduct.
>
> The vindictive, anti-democratic character of Harris’s tenure as 
> attorney general was not limited to the courtroom either. In 2010, 
> Harris sponsored a law, later signed by Governor Arnold 
> Schwarzenegger, which sought to improve schools by jailing parents of 
> truant children and subjecting them to fines of up to $2,000. Even 
> though the law explicitly made jail time a probable outcome for 
> parents of truant children, Harris claimed in a CNN interview last May 
> that sending parents to jail was an “unintended consequence” of the law.
>
> Harris used her powers as a prosecutor to conduct vicious attacks on 
> the poor and working class while doing her utmost to shield police and 
> politicians from punishment. This stands in marked contrast to what 
> her campaign claims was her record of virtually untarnished 
> progressivism while in office. In her book, The Truths We Hold, issued 
> to help launch her campaign, Harris mixes typical sentimental 
> boilerplate with overt falsifications of her political record. She 
> describes herself as a “progressive prosecutor.” Moreover, she claims 
> she “used the powers of the office with a sense of fairness, 
> perspective and experience.”
>
> Many who’ve followed her career as prosecutor have had a different 
> perspective, however. Lara Bazelon, former director of the Loyola Law 
> School Project for the Innocent in Los Angeles, wrote in a New York 
> Times op-ed, “Time after time, when progressives urged her to embrace 
> criminal justice reforms as a district attorney and then the state’s 
> attorney general, Ms. Harris opposed them or stayed silent.” Donald 
> Specter, executive director of the Prison Law Office, stated in a 
> Daily Beast interview, “As far as I know, she did very little if 
> anything to improve the criminal justice system when she was attorney 
> general.”
> Adopting the persona of a “progressive”
>
> Harris launched her presidential campaign with the slogan “Kamala 
> Harris for the people,” a reference to the statement of identification 
> made by district attorneys and other prosecutors when they appear in 
> court. In fits and starts, she adopted positions on a variety of 
> economic and social issues which can be portrayed as vaguely 
> “progressive,” although on closer examination they usually amount to 
> nothing. On the few occasions where she has, perhaps inadvertently, 
> voiced a “left” sentiment, she invariably qualifies it or takes it 
> back the next day.
>
> Thus she embraced the call of Bernie Sanders for “Medicare for all,” 
> but has twice reversed herself on the question of ending private 
> health insurance in favor of a federally financed system, an 
> indication that she really has no intention of implementing such a plan.
>
> Harris also sponsored, along with fellow presidential candidate 
> Elizabeth Warren, a Senate bill known as the Climate Risk Disclosure 
> Act which would use “market forces to speed up the transition from 
> fossil fuels to cleaner energy.” The bill was based on the claims of 
> former Vice President Al Gore and other Democratic Party leaders that 
> environmental clean-up and “green energy” can be promoted as 
> profit-making enterprises.
>
> This bankrupt proposal issues no penalties for polluting companies. It 
> requires them to do nothing to curb pollution aside from listing the 
> amount of greenhouse gases they emit, what fossil fuels they use and 
> how their asset valuations will be affected if they were to reduce 
> carbon emissions in line with the Paris climate accords.
>
> On immigration, Harris has also promised to protect DACA recipients 
> from deportation and publicly opposed Trump’s border wall with Mexico. 
> She tacitly supported the recent Senate passage of $4.6 billion for 
> Trump’s network of concentration camps for immigrants along the 
> US-Mexico border. Like the other Senate Democrats running for 
> president, she was absent for the vote. The bill was approved by a 
> bipartisan 84-8 margin.
>
> Other legislative proposals were crafted with an eye to their 
> political popularity among Democratic primary voters, to give Harris a 
> more liberal image than her actual record in California or Washington. 
> She supported federal legalization of recreational marijuana and 
> increases in public defender pay to the levels of their state 
> prosecutor counterparts. After the wave of teacher strikes, Harris 
> called for a $13,500-a-year pay increase for every schoolteacher in 
> the US.
>
> She has also called for increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 per 
> hour, which, in addition to leaving minimum wage workers still 
> severely impoverished, would make many of these workers ineligible for 
> public assistance programs such as food stamps, housing subsidies and 
> Medicaid.
>
> In part, Harris’s comparative lack of skill at populist posturing is 
> rooted in her own life circumstances. She earned six-figure incomes 
> for decades and is now a millionaire many times over. According to her 
> tax returns, released in April, she and her husband, wealthy lawyer 
> Douglas Emhoff, had an adjusted gross income of $1,884,319 in 2018, 
> putting them comfortably in the top 0.1 percent. The bulk of this came 
> from Emhoff’s entertainment law practice, while Harris made $157,352 
> in Senate salary and $320,125 in net profits from her campaign memoir.
>
> While Harris has been half-hearted and inconsistent in her attempts at 
> social demagogy—not the natural bent of someone who spent most of her 
> career putting people in jail or defending police atrocities against 
> the working class—she has shown somewhat more energy in embracing 
> identity politics, which she has previously invoked as the “first 
> black and female” DA of San Francisco, the “first black and female” 
> attorney general of California, and currently as the only black and 
> female US senator.
>
> Harris jumped on the #MeToo bandwagon, being among the first to call 
> for the resignation of Minnesota Senator Al Franken over accusations 
> of sexual misconduct. These demands were made in spite of the fact 
> that none of the allegations had been proven and even if they had, 
> none would have risen even to the level of a misdemeanor criminal charge.
>
> Harris introduced a bill known as the Maternal CARE ACT to address 
> racial disparities in the care of expectant black mothers which have 
> led to pregnancy-related deaths happening at a rate of 3.3 times more 
> than white mothers. The bill was introduced after a May 10 report 
> released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
>
> The CDC report largely recommends a more scientific approach to the 
> issue, including greater access to prenatal programs and other 
> services for expectant mothers, temporary housing programs, better 
> adoption of sepsis, hemorrhage, and transfusion protocols among 
> medical personnel, etc. Harris’s Maternal CARE Act, on the other hand, 
> roots the problem in race and particularly in what she alleges to be 
> the conscious and widespread bias of health care practitioners. The 
> bill would earmark $150 million to identify high risk pregnancies in 
> order to “provide new mothers with the culturally competent care and 
> resources they need.”
>
> At this point in the campaign, it can be said that Harris, more so 
> than any other candidate, has taken up the reactionary mantle of 
> identity politics. In that sense, she has taken her cue from the 2016 
> campaign of Hillary Clinton. The senator’s younger sister, Maya 
> Harris, was a senior policy adviser to Clinton’s 2016 campaign and 
> currently works as chairwoman for the Harris 2020 campaign.
>
> The younger Harris also works as a political analyst for MSNBC and is 
> married to Tony West, general counsel for Uber and former United 
> States Associate Attorney General in the Obama administration. Maya 
> Harris also edited drafts of Stanford University law professor 
> Michelle Alexander’s 2010 book, The New Jim Crow. The work, which 
> spent a significant amount of time on the New York Times bestseller 
> list, argued that a new racial caste system existed in the United 
> States, largely enforced by the actions of poor whites, which far 
> outweighed any and all considerations of class as a significant social 
> division.
>
> There can be no doubt that if Harris were to succeed in her 
> presidential run, the bourgeois media would subject the public to a 
> constant propaganda barrage, celebrating the transformative character 
> of the first female president and the first black female president at 
> that. Harris, who is of Jamaican and Indian descent, is only the third 
> woman of African descent to run for the office.
>
> This would in no way change the fact that a Harris administration 
> would be as reactionary as Trump and Obama before her.
> _______________________________________________
> D66 mailing list
> D66 at tuxtown.net
> http://www.tuxtown.net/mailman/listinfo/d66
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.tuxtown.net/pipermail/d66/attachments/20200812/8854b9f7/attachment-0001.html>