Kamala Harris is “tough on crime” when supporting the New Jim Crow, prison labor, police/prosecutorial misconduct, the War on Drugs, and the death penalty. And she’s an innovator, when it comes to jailing parents of truant children, disproportionately poor POC.
And let’s not forget that she “fought to uphold… wrongfully secured convictions.”
Stay incarcerated, you wrongfully convicted poor people! We need more prisoners to fight fires and serve as corporate America’s captive workforce for pennies an hour!
But in 2008, CA’s ambitious Attorney General, Ms. Harris, had a “Get Out of Jail Free” card for Trump’s future Secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin — a Wall Street executive guilty of several thousand crimes, per Harris’s own investigators.
But Mnuchin was also a major donor to her campaign — $$$ !!!
So, she shut down the Mnuchin investigation, even as her investigators were telling her that they expected to find evidence of “many thousands more” crimes committed by the Wall Street executive — thereby putting herself on the national political career path and Mnuchin on the path to becoming a Cabinet Secretary!
(Crime pays! At least, for the elite.)
Today, Wall Street adores Harris, as do Clinton’s donors, who’ve clearly decided to anoint her as their candidate in 2020. And with the DNC making it even easier to rig the primary this time around (after the 2016 farce), she probably will be the Democratic Party’s nominee.
A losing bet, for sure.
And here’s why: The best way to win elections is to excite your base. Already, it’s clear that Harris turns off the Democratic Party’s base — just as Clinton did in 2016.
After years of “centrist” Democrat betrayals, POC largely failed to come out for Sec. Clinton in 2016 — giving Trump the edge he needed. Today, African-Americans are the most vocal demographic arguing against Harris’s nomination… just because she laughs and laughs when asked about incarcerating poor people, disproportionately people of color.
(Wait, I get it… No, sorry, I still don’t. What’s so funny about jailing poor people because they can’t keep their kids in school? …Senator?)
Predictably enough, Harris’s critics are already being called “misogynists” — despite the fact that most of us prefer HI-Dem, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, an actual progressive… and a woman.
(I guess the Democrats really want another four years of Trump in the White House.)
From Briahna Joy Gray’s excellent article:
“She’s running for president as a progressive, but as attorney general of California, she criminalized truancy — making it a crime for kids to be late for school and dragging into the criminal justice system even more disproportionately low-income, predominantly black and Latino families. She’s overlooked the misconduct of her prosecutors and fought to uphold their wrongfully secured convictions. She defended California’s choice to deny gender reassignment surgery to a transgender inmate, and in 2014, she appealed a federal judge’s holding that the death penalty was unconstitutional.
“The list goes on and on. But in some ways, the details don’t matter. The problem isn’t that Harris was an especially bad prosecutor. She made positive contributions as well, encouraging education and re-entry programs for ex-offenders, for instance. The problem, more precisely, is that she was ever a prosecutor at all.
“To become a prosecutor is to make a choice to align oneself with a powerful and fundamentally biased system. As Paul Butler, former prosecutor and author of ‘Chokehold: Policing Black Men,’ told The Guardian, ‘as a lawyer who went to law school with a goal of helping black people and using my legal skills to make things better, the realization that the law itself was a mechanism to keep African-American people down was frightening.’”
(Not to Kamala Harris it wasn’t. Keeping African-American people down simply looked like a good career path to her. That, and sparing the top criminals of the 1%.)