Joe Biden Has Found His Neoliberal Match in Kamala Harris
Posted by Collectivist
"Well, it has finally happened. After months and weeks of wrangling, sniping, bowing, and scraping, and several missed deadlines, Joe Biden has finally chosen his running mate: former career prosecutor and California senator Kamala Harris.
"We may well look back on the path it took to get here as a preview of what’s to come should Biden win. This year’s VP-selection process was particularly chaotic, with different, opposing factions — from Biden insiders to progressiveactivists to Democratic officials to groups of major donors — jostling for influence and nudging, even threatening, Biden to make their preferred choice.
Eager contenders would rise to the top, meet privately with Biden, appear on TV with him, fundraise desperately for his campaign, then suddenly fall out of favor. Sometimes he would cruelly dash their hopes live on TV; sometimes they would sink under a hail of leaks meant to undermine them. Through this shambolic process, Biden ultimately blew at least three of his own self-imposed deadlines.
This was far from unique to the VP search. Biden has long had a reputation for lacking discipline and being indecisive, something he carried over to the current campaign, nearly sabotaging himself before he began with a late start that saw him miss out on top hires. Even the Times can barely find the euphemisms to garnish these flaws, referring to his “nonlinear decision-making processes” and “habit of extending deadlines in a way that leaves some Democrats anxious and annoyed.”
To wit, Biden ran a campaign that can generously be described as leisurely, and his eventual comeback and primary victory owed almost entirely to a coalition of centrist media and Democrats working and self-sacrificing to drag him over the line in spite of himself. While we can’t yet know for sure if this process will also characterize Biden’s presidency, we’ve seen how the jockeying among different factional interests in the party has now produced the choice of Harris for his running mate.
Indeed, one of the reasons it was hard to imagine anyone else but Harris ending up on the ticket is that she so snugly embodies the modern Democratic Party — which also means almost everything you’re about to hear about her has little to do with who she actually is.
Far from the “progressive prosecutor” Harris has been masquerading as since angling for a 2020 run, her record bears no resemblance to figures who might actually fit that description, like Larry Krasner or Keith Ellison. Even in a party that embraced Biden- and Clinton-style tough-on-crime policies, Harris stands out for her cruelty: she fought to keep innocent people in jail, blocked payouts to the wrongfully convicted, argued for keeping non-violent offenders in jail as a source of cheap labor, withheld evidence that could have freed numerous prisoners, tried to dismiss a suit to end solitary confinement in California, and denied gender reassignment surgery to trans inmates. A recent report detailed how Harris risked being held in contempt of court for resisting a court order to release non-violent prisoners, which one law professor compared to Southern resistance to 1950s desegregation orders.
Harris loves to laugh. Watching Harris cackling like a cartoon villain about prosecuting parents of truant schoolkids is one of the more bone-chilling things you’re likely to see in politics. Other things Harris found funny? The idea of building schools rather than prisons, and the concept of legalizing pot. Five years later she laughed again, this time while running for president and fondly recalling her pot-smoking days, as she mugged for a younger audience. Extra hilarious was the fact that her office had convicted nearly 2,000 people for marijuana offenses while she was San Francisco’s district attorney.
Harris’s callousness toward the poor and powerless has been matched only by her sympathy for the rich and powerful. Most notoriously, Harris overruled her own office’s recommendation to prosecute the predatory bank of current Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin, who later donated to her Senate campaign, then allegedly tried to cover up her inaction.
Despite California’s status as the epicenter of foreclosure scams, Harris’s Mortgage Fraud Strike Force prosecuted fewer cases of foreclosure consultant fraud than many county DAs. Rather than use her office to constrain the growth of tech monopolies, emails recently obtained by the Huffington Post show she courted them, receiving significant financial backing from Silicon Valley in return.
It’s recently been declared out of bounds to refer to her ambition, but the fact is that Harris, like Biden, Obama, and, sadly, the majority of politicians, has been driven above all by concern for her own career prospects. . ."
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/08/joe-biden-kamala-harris-vice-president-neoliberalism?fbclid=IwAR1kYDO3yN3eL1j0F4IK3m2gXMyADJQOFSM1pLSrqpaQqRTlfjmMnV6-JYg
Comments
Post a Comment