Tag: 2020 elections

California’s tough-on-crime past haunts Kamala Harris

The laws strengthening criminal penalties drove a surge in the state’s prison population over 30 years, beginning in the 1970s. Under both Republicans and Democrats — including Kamala Harris, who became a prosecutor in 1990 — a tough-on-crime political culture flourished in California, and African Americans were hit hardest: Their incarceration rate remains more than five times their share of California’s population.

The crackdown on crime swept most of the country, but California stood out as one of the most aggressive states. Only recently has it begun shedding its lock-’em-up mind-set.

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Kamala Harris: Law-and-order with a dose of identity politics

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.

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THE UNITED STATE’S DEATH MARCH

The ruling elites, who first built a mafia economy and then built a mafia state, will continue under Biden, as they did under Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, to wantonly pillage and loot. The militarized police will not stop their lethal rampages in poor neighborhoods. The endless wars will not end. The bloated military budget will not be reduced. The world’s largest prison population will remain a stain upon the country. The manufacturing jobs shipped overseas will not return and the social inequality will grow. The for-profit health care system will gouge the public and price millions more out of the health care system. 

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US Intelligence: If Trump Wins Russia Did It, If Biden Wins It Was China And Iran

What this completely unsubstantiated narrative means, of course, is that no matter who wins in November America’s opaque government agencies will have already primed the nation for more dangerous escalations against countries which have resisted being absorbed into the blob of the US-centralized empire. If Trump wins we can expect his administration to continue its escalations against Russia in retaliation for its 2020 “election interference”, and if Biden wins we can expect his cabinet of Obama administration holdovers to ramp up escalations against China in the same way while Joe mumbles to himself off to the side as his brain turns to chowder.

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