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<p><span>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)</span></p>
<p><span>(Een parelketting dragende smeris!)<br>
</span></p>
<p><span><br>
</span></p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 12-08-2020 07:32, R.O. wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:aed0e254-1195-f2d7-3c6a-7c112d196867@ziggo.nl">Who is
Democratic Senator Kamala Harris?
<br>
By Dan Conway
<br>
12 August 2020
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
Indicating the consensus behind the Biden-Harris ticket, both
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders quickly endorsed her selection.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
***
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.”
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.”
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.”
<br>
A career prosecutor
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.”
<br>
<br>
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<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.”
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.”
<br>
<br>
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.”
<br>
Adopting the persona of a “progressive”
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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).
<br>
<br>
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.”
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
This would in no way change the fact that a Harris administration
would be as reactionary as Trump and Obama before her.
<br>
_______________________________________________
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</blockquote>
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