Posted on January
22, 2019 by Yves
Smith
Kamala Harris’ presidential
campaign has barely made its official start, and she’s continuing to show her
unfitness for the job. Martin Luther King would be rolling in his grave if he
were to learn that a former big city and then state prosecutor, with no known
history of protesting but an anti-minorities rap sheet that includes
criminalizing truancy, enthusiastically prosecuting drug-related activity, and
pushed to keep nonviolent “second-strike” convicts in prison to assure
California a continued supply of cheap labor, was misusing his name to try to
burnish her sorry record.
If you missed them, these
reviews of Harris’ record as a prosecutor should disabuse you of the notion
that she’s a friend of the downtrodden:
Kamala Harris Was Not a ‘Progressive Prosecutor’ Lara
Bazelon, New York Times
A Problem for Kamala Harris: Can a Prosecutor Become President
in the Age of Black Lives Matter?Intercept
The Two Faces of Kamala Harris Jacobin
Readers may recall that last
week, we addressed one Harris Big Lie about her record, that she was a big
defender of abused homeowners by virtue of having gotten a less terrible deal
than 48 other states in the 2012 National Mortgage Settlement, which we’ve
regularly described as a “get out of liability almost free card” for the big
mortgage servicers. Her lack of a commitment to homeowners, and her pliancy to
big money interests, was confirmed by her failure to investigate One West Bank,
ignoring a 2013 memo from attorneys in her office flagging the appearance of
“widespread misconduct.” Her complacency was rewarded via One West’s former
CEO, Steve Mnuchin, making Harris the recipient of his lone donation to a
Democratic party Senate candidate.
Needless to say, if Harris had
prosecuted Mnuchin, it’s hard to imagine he’d be Treasury Secretary now.
Harris’ book, The Truths We
Hold, published earlier this month to help grease campaign skids, shows Harris
applying lots of porcine maquillage to her record. It doesn’t work
very well. As Teodrose Fikre writes in Black Agenda Report on one of the more
measured reviews, by Hannah Giorgis in the Atlantic:
Kamala Harris’s memoir reads
nothing like her actual record of locking up the poor and giving impunity to
the rich…
Checking off identity boxes
and getting jiggy with it is not enough, we must demand more from politicians
than soundbites and feigned indignation. Instead of addressing income
inequalities and systematic imbalances that are the sources of most social
ills, Harris tries to hide behind anecdotes and outlier stories in an attempt
to minimize the disproportionate impact her decisions had on the poor and
working class. After making a name for herself by aggressively locking up
Californians and enhancing the inmate supply for the prison-industrial complex,
she is now attempting an image makeover by using social justice and diversity
hustles as launching pads….
Harris’s take every prisoner
temperament was nowhere to be found when the time came for her to take on
robber barons. She famously chose to look the other way when she had the chance
to prosecute Steve Mnuchin and make an example of unscrupulous bankers.Her
“progressive prosecution” reserved progress for the rich and doled out
draconian measures for the poor and marginalized. It is worth repeating,
Harris’s administration effectively argued for slave labor in order to enrich
penal plantations.
Kamala Harris is no activist,
she is Hillary Clinton in a black face.This is precisely the reason why the
corporate donor class are licking their chops and pushing Harris as a viable
presidential candidate. She has proven her loyalty to Wall Street; when push
comes to shove, CEOs know that they have an ally in Kamala. What Harris is
banking on is an electorate that is so deranged by Trump’s puerility that we
don’t inspect her positions and just accept her optics and rhetoric as a
suitable alternative to the incumbent president.
The one bit of good news is
that Harris’ campaign is so hopelessly tone deaf and narcissistic that Harris
will do herself in as a serious contender in no time fast on current
trajectories. A reader sent a copy of the “Day 1” fundraiser, which if done
properly, should set the tone for the campaign.
What do we learn from this
sorry missive? That Harris apparently regards herself as such an Oprah-level
celebrity that her mere presence is enough to get citizens to want to vote for
her. However, she can’t resist remind us of her top 10% bona fides, that she is
able to find a “healthy snack” in Penn Station vending machines. God forbid we
catch a Ruler of the Free World wannabe enjoying some potato chips. Might be
mistaken for Trump!
Another
revealing-in-not-a-good-way bit is the last photo, of Harris supposedly getting
down to “hard work”. As you can see from the image, “hard work” is standing up
while staff applauds. It’s bad enough to see this sort of thing at CalPERS; we
need to keep that pathology from going national.
So Harris presents absolutely
nothing in the way of policy stances. Apparently the reasons to want her as
President is that she’s photogenic by the not-too-high standards of politics
and she gets bonus points for not being a white man.
And this sorry e-mail really
is representative of her campaign pitch. Her site is every bit as narcissistic
as the fundraising appeal. It admittedly has a centrist dog-whistle in the form
of a
long-ish bio which is an attempt to position Harris on policy while
punting on taking any positions. But otherwise, it’s long on pretty pix and
thin on much else.
It’s stating the obvious that
Harris is yet another variant on the Obama formula: take an attractive,
well-educated, mixed-race centrist and encourage the press and public to
project that their “minority” background means that they’ll be staunch
defenders of the downtrodden.
But the public isn’t so easily
fooled. 9 million foreclosures, many of which could have been prevented,
bailouts for banksters, a two-tier recovery with smug elites preaching “Let
them eat training” to people stuck outside big cities or too old to be
employable, and sky-high Obamacare deductibles mean a lot of voters are not
going to fall for idpol packaging as easily a second time. Plus Obama had so
little in the way of a political track record that it was easy for him to be a
shape-shifter; he made his stint as a community organizer go a long way. Even
now, hardly anyone knows that Obama, along with his wife Michelle and Valerie
Jarret, as
described by Robert Fitch, built their early career success by lending an
appearance of legitimacy to moving black South Chicago further south on behalf
of local real estate and finance interests.
Further complicating the
foolhardy effort to cast Harris in the Obama mold is that she’s got way too
much political baggage to fool all that many people as to what she is really
about.
So it’s telling that
self-absorbed Harris campaign imagery clashes with her slogan, “For the
people”. Even more so than for most politicians, Harris’ team has to stick with
the surface because that’s all they have to sell
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