by PAUL STREET
The Big Business-backed Harris earned a reputation as a friend of the police and an agent of racially disparate mass incarceration.
“It’s an old game in American politics: Democrats posing as populists and progressives when they are owned by the nation’s imperial ruling class.”
Within just moments after Democratic Party presidential nominee Joe Biden announced Kamala Harris as his running mate, the Trump campaign and the American right-wing propaganda machine began portraying the California senator as a “far-left radical ” of the “Marxist ” variety.
There’s nothing wrong with being a Leftist (I am one), but the charge (I might say compliment) is ludicrous and undeserved. Harris has long been firmly lodged on the right wing of the Democratic Party, which Richard Nixon’s former strategist Kevin Phillips accurately described as “history’s second most enthusiastic capitalist party.”
After thirteen years as a deputy district attorney in Oakland and San Francisco, California, Harris unseated San Francisco’s actually left and progressive District Attorney Terence Hallinan in 2003. Running as the business candidate of “law and order,” Harris out-fundraised Hallinan by two to one, bringing in so much money from the Bay Area corporate establishment that the San Francisco Ethics Commission slapped her with a record fine for breaking campaign finance laws.
As both a Bay Area prosecutor (1990-2003) and California Attorney General (2003-2016), the Big Business-backed Harris earned a reputation as a friend of the police and an agent of racially disparate mass incarceration. She boasted of her high felony conviction rates, achieved with significant violations of defendant rights. She was hardly the “progressive prosecutor” she claimed to have been when announcing her presidential candidacy in 2019.
“Harris has long been firmly lodged on the right wing of the Democratic Party.”
As attorney-general, Harris defended California’s massive prison system against U.S. Supreme Court rulings that slammed its vicious overcrowding and mistreatment of prisoners as “cruel and unusual punishment.” She waged a campaign to end federal court supervision of California’s prisons. She consistently resisted calls for criminal justice reform. She advocated the fining and incarceration of the parents of truant children. She defended convictions obtained through false confessions and tried to overturn a lower court ruling that outlawed California’s death penalty. She even resisted a court order to release low-risk inmates by arguing that it could cost California an important source of cheap labor to be used risking their lives to fight wildfires for $2 a day.
Anyone who thinks “Copmala” Harris was a criminal justice “progressive” should watch a short Ted-style talk she gave on behalf of racist mass incarceration at the Chicago Ideas Conference in 2015. One really must take in her derisive voice and body language as she launched into a scornful attack on reformers’ supposedly naïve call to move taxpayer money from mass imprisonment to education:
“We all have these posters [sarcastic posture] in our closet [pained look on face] that is attached to a stick [stands up straight, mock-serious] that we sometimes will cart out when we’re talking about criminal justice…and we run around with these signs [disdainful face].. ‘Build More Schools, Less Jails, Build More Schools, Less Jails,’ [all said in a whiny child’s voice]. And we walk around everywhere, ‘Build More Schools.’ We protest [mocking face, hand pretending to hold up a poster] …’Put money into education, not prisons!’ [loud mocking squeaky voice]. There’s a FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM with that approach in my opinion. And it’s this: …you have not addressed the reason I have three padlocks on my front door.”
“She advocated the fining and incarceration of the parents of truant children.”
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