OBAMA AND HIS BANKSTERS:
And it all got much, much worse after 2008,
when the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not
aggressively rein in Wall Street as Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the
status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a staggering white-collar crime
spree. RYAN COOPER
The Rise of Wall Street Thievery
How corporations and
their apologists blew up the New Deal order and pillaged the middle class.
by Ryan Cooper
America has long had a
suspicious streak toward business, from the Populists and trustbusters to
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. It’s a tendency that has increased over
the last few decades. In 1973, 36 percent of respondents told Gallup they had
only “some” confidence in big business, while 20 percent had “very little.” But
in 2019, those numbers were 41 and 32 percent—near the highs registered during
the financial crisis.
Clearly, something has
happened to make us sour on the American corporation. What was once a stable
source of long-term employment and at least a modicum of paternalistic benefits
has become an unstable, predatory engine of inequality. Exactly what went
wrong is well documented in Nicholas Lemann’s excellent new book, Transaction
Man. The title is a reference to The Organization Man, an
influential 1956 book on the corporate culture and management of that era.
Lemann, a New Yorker staff writer and Columbia journalism
professor (as well as a Washington Monthly contributing
editor), details the development of the “Organization” style through the career
of Adolf Berle, a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brain trust. Berle argued
convincingly that despite most of the nation’s capital being represented by the
biggest 200 or so corporations, the ostensible owners of these firms—that is,
their shareholders—had little to no influence on their daily operations.
Control resided instead with corporate managers and executives.
Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the
Decline of the American Dream
by Nicholas Lemann
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp.
Berle
was alarmed by the wealth of these mega-corporations and the political power it
generated, but also believed that bigness was a necessary concomitant of
economic progress. He thus argued that corporations should be tamed, not broken
up. The key was to harness the corporate monstrosities, putting them to work on
behalf of the citizenry.
Berle
exerted major influence on the New Deal political economy, but he did not get
his way every time. He was a fervent supporter of the National Industrial
Recovery Act, an effort to directly control corporate prices and production,
which mostly flopped before it was declared unconstitutional. Felix
Frankfurter, an FDR adviser and a disciple of the great anti-monopolist Louis
Brandeis, used that opportunity to build significant Brandeisian elements into
New Deal structures. The New Deal social contract thus ended up being a
somewhat incoherent mash-up of Brandeis’s and Berle’s ideas. On the one hand,
antitrust did get a major focus; on the other, corporations were expected to
play a major role delivering basic public goods like health insurance and
pensions.
Lemann
then turns to his major subject, the rise and fall of the Transaction Man. The
New Deal order inspired furious resistance from the start. Conservative
businessmen and ideologues argued for a return to 1920s policies and provided
major funding for a new ideological project spearheaded by economists like
Milton Friedman, who famously wrote an article titled “The Social
Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” Lemann focuses on a
lesser-known economist named Michael Jensen, whose 1976 article “Theory of the
Firm,” he writes, “prepared the ground for blowing up that [New Deal] social
order.”
Jensen
and his colleagues embodied that particular brand of jaw-droppingly stupid that
only intelligent people can achieve. Only a few decades removed from a crisis
of unregulated capitalism that had sparked the worst war in history and nearly
destroyed the United States, they argued that all the careful New Deal
regulations that had prevented financial crises for decades and underpinned the
greatest economic boom in U.S. history should be burned to the ground. They
were outraged by the lack of control shareholders had over the firms they
supposedly owned, and argued for greater market discipline to remove this
“principal-agent problem”—econ-speak for businesses spending too much on
irrelevant luxuries like worker pay and investment instead of dividends and
share buybacks. When that argument unleashed hell, they doubled down: “To
Jensen the answer was clear: make the market for corporate control even more
active, powerful, and all-encompassing,” Lemann writes.
The
best part of the book is the connection Lemann draws between Washington
policymaking and the on-the-ground effects of those decisions. There was much
to criticize about the New Deal social contract—especially its relative
blindness to racism—but it underpinned a functioning society that delivered a tolerable
level of inequality and a decent standard of living to a critical mass of
citizens. Lemann tells this story through the lens of a thriving close-knit
neighborhood called Chicago Lawn. Despite how much of its culture “was
intensely provincial and based on personal, family, and ethnic ties,” he
writes, Chicago Lawn “worked because it was connected to the big organizations
that dominated American culture.” In other words, it was a functioning
democratic political economy.
Then
came the 1980s. Lemann paints a visceral picture of what it was like at street
level as Wall Street buccaneers were freed from the chains of regulation and
proceeded to tear up the New Deal social contract. Cities hemorrhaged
population and tax revenue as their factories were shipped overseas. Whole
businesses were eviscerated or even destroyed by huge debt loads from hostile
takeovers. Jobs vanished by the hundreds of thousands.
And
it all got much, much worse after 2008, when the schemes collapsed and, as
Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not aggressively rein in Wall Street as
Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the status quo ante even when it meant
ignoring a staggering white-collar crime spree. Neighborhoods drowned
under waves of foreclosures and crime as far-off financial derivatives
imploded. Car dealerships that had sheltered under the General Motors umbrella
for decades were abruptly cut loose. Bewildered Chicago Lawn residents
desperately mobilized to defend themselves, but with little success. “What they
were struggling against was a set of conditions that had been made by faraway
government officials—not one that had sprung up naturally,” Lemann writes.
Toward the end of the
book, however, Lemann starts to run out of steam. He investigates a possible
rising “Network Man” in the form of top Silicon Valley executives, who have
largely maintained control over their companies instead of serving as a sort of
esophagus for disgorging their companies’ bank accounts into the Wall Street
maw. But they turn out to be, at bottom, the same combination of blinkered
and predatory as the Transaction Men. Google and Facebook, for instance, have
grown over the last few years by devouring virtually the entire online ad
market, strangling the journalism industry as a result. And they directly
employ far too few people to serve as the kind of broad social anchor that the
car industry once did.
In
his final chapter, Lemann argues for a return to “pluralism,” a “messy,
contentious system that can’t be subordinated to one conception of the common
good. It refuses to designate good guys and bad guys. It distributes, rather
than concentrates, economic and political power.”
This
is a peculiar conclusion for someone who has just finished Lemann’s book, which
is full to bursting with profoundly bad people—men and women
who knowingly harmed their fellow citizens by the millions for their own
private profit. In his day, Roosevelt was not shy about lambasting rich people
who “had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere
appendage to their own affairs,” as he put it in a 1936 speech in which he also
declared, “We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous
as government by organized mob.”
If
concentrated economic power is a bad thing, then the corporate form is simply a
poor basis for a truly strong and equal society. Placing it as one of the
social foundation stones makes its workers dependent on the unreliable goodwill
and business acumen of management on the one hand and the broader marketplace
on the other. All it takes is a few ruthless Transaction Men to undermine the
entire corporate social model by outcompeting the more generous businesses. And
even at the high tide of the New Deal, far too many people were left out,
especially African Americans.
Lemann
writes that in the 1940s the United States “chose not to become a full-dress
welfare state on the European model.” But there is actually great variation
among the European welfare states. States like Germany and Switzerland went
much farther on the corporatist road than the U.S. ever did, but they do
considerably worse on metrics like inequality, poverty, and political
polarization than the Nordic social democracies, the real welfare kings.
Conversely,
for how threadbare it is, the U.S. welfare state still delivers a great deal of
vital income to the American people. The analyst Matt Bruenig recently
calculated that American welfare eliminates two-thirds of the “poverty gap,”
which is how far families are below the poverty line before government
transfers are factored in. (This happens mainly through Social Security.)
Imagine how much worse this country would be without those programs! And though
it proved rather easy for Wall Street pirates to torch the New Deal corporatist
social model without many people noticing, attempts to cut welfare are
typically very obvious, and hence unpopular.
Still,
Lemann’s book is more than worth the price of admission for the perceptive
history and excellent writing. It’s a splendid and beautifully written
illustration of the tremendous importance public policy has for the daily lives
of ordinary people.
Ryan Cooper
Ryan Cooper is a
national correspondent at the Week. His work has appeared in the Washington
Post, the New Republic, and the Nation. He was an editor at the Washington
Monthly from 2012 to 2014.
Fact Check: Big Banks that Kamala Harris ‘Took on’ Now Support Her
2020 Democratic National Convention / YouTube
Volume 90%
17
2:53
CLAIM:
Former Labor Secretary Hilda Solis suggested that because Sen. Kamala Harris
(D-CA) “took on” the big banks as attorney general of California, she will
stand up to them as vice president.
VERDICT: While Harris was among 49 state attorney generals
who secured a $25 billion settlement from big banks, many
executives from those banks now support her as Democrat nominee Joe Biden’s
vice presidential choice.
“When millions of families lost their homes, my friend in
California, Sen. Kamala Harris, took on the big banks and won,” Solis said in
reference to the case which involved Bank of America, Wells Fargo,
JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Ally Bank.
BLOG EDITOR: AS
ATTORNEY GENERAL OF CALIFORNIA, KAMALA HARRIS REFUSED TO CRIMINAL PROSECUTE ANY
OF HER GENEROUS BANKSTERS DESPITE THAT FACT THAT CA WAS GROUND ZERO FOR BANKSTER-CAUSED
MORTGAGE MELTDOWN AND FORECLOSURE!
A number of executives on Wall Street
with links to Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and Bank of America now support Harris
in her effort with Biden to defeat Trump.
As Breitbart News reported recently, Wells Fargo Vice
Chairman for Public Affairs Bill Daley, who served as Obama’s chief of staff
from 2011 to 2012, called a Harris a “reasonable, rational person who has
worked in the system.”
Citigroup executive Ray McGuire called Harris
a “great choice” for vice president. During the Democrat presidential primary,
Harris raked in campaign donations from executives and employees with Bank of
America.
In These Times reported the donations at the time:
Then there’s California Sen. Kamala Harris, who received a
total of $44,947 from these 12 firms. Harris, who was once branded
a “bankster’s worst nightmare,” and has touted her prosecutorial
record against banks as evidence of her progressive credibility,
received donations from five executives of these firms. They include Blackstone
managing director Tia Breakley, Morgan Stanley’s new head of international wealth management
Colbert Narcisse, Bank of America senior vice president for diversity
and inclusion Alex Rhodes, and Goldman Sachs vice president
of financial crime compliance Margaret Cullum. [Emphasis added]
Harris’s most enthusiastic source of support among these
firms, however, is Wells Fargo, from whose employees she received a total
of $16,713 — the most funding from the bank out of any other candidate
examined. The donors span multiple tiers of the bank’s hierarchy, from
bankers and consultants, to a regional director and a manager, to executives
like National Head of Cards and Retail Services Beverly Anderson, both of
whom gave the maximum individual donation of $2,800 to Harris. [Emphasis
added]
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on
Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
KAMALA HARRIS, LIKE SENILE JOE, HAVE A DOCUMENTED HISTORY OF SERVING
CRIMINAL BANKSTERS AND THE RICH.
All of this is, if we
can be permitted to use Biden’s catchphrase, “malarkey.” Harris has already
proven herself as a trusted servant of the interests of the rich and powerful
at the expense of the working class. The Wall Street Journal wrote
last week that Wall Street financers had breathed a “sigh of relief” at Biden’s
pick of Harris. Industry publication American Banker noted
that her steadiest stream of campaign funding has come from financial industry
professionals and their most trusted law firms.
The Democrats hope that the endless celebration of the
trite, empty symbolism of Harris’ candidacy will serve as a repeat of Barack
Obama’s run for president in 2008, deploying identity politics to cover over
the right-wing content of her record and that of the Democratic Party. This is
the logic of the reactionary politics of racial, ethnic and gender identity,
promoted incessantly by the pseudo-left opponents of Marxism.
The nomination of Kamala Harris and the
right-wing logic of identity politics
20 August 2020
The Democratic Party concluded the third night of its
convention on Wednesday, culminating in the official nomination of California
Senator Kamala Harris as the vice-presidential candidate of Joe Biden.
Wednesday’s proceedings were in line with the inane and
insipid character of the event as a whole. Various reactionaries and
multi-millionaires, from Hillary Clinton to Nancy Pelosi, declared the urgent
need to elect Biden, the corrupt corporate shill from Delaware recast as a
living saint, to right all wrongs and restore America to the path of prosperity
and righteousness.
No actual program was advanced to deal with the massive
social and economic catastrophe produced by the coronavirus pandemic and the
bipartisan response of the ruling class to it. Everything was reduced to the
fictionalized narrative of the life of Biden and his comrade in arms, Kamala
Harris.
The selection of Harris was presented as a “historic”
moment in American politics. This appraisal was based entirely on the fact that
Harris is the first African American and Indian American woman selected by the
world’s oldest political party to run for vice president. There were the
inevitable proclamations that young girls throughout the country will conclude
from this fact that they too can someday be vice president of the United States
of America.
All of this is, if we
can be permitted to use Biden’s catchphrase, “malarkey.” Harris has already
proven herself as a trusted servant of the interests of the rich and powerful
at the expense of the working class. The Wall Street Journal wrote
last week that Wall Street financers had breathed a “sigh of relief” at Biden’s
pick of Harris. Industry publication American Banker noted
that her steadiest stream of campaign funding has come from financial industry
professionals and their most trusted law firms.
Just before she ended her bid for the presidency in
December 2019, Harris’ campaign boasted the most billionaire backers, including
oil fortune heir Gordon Getty and vulture capitalist Dean Metropoulos.
As San Francisco District Attorney from 2004 to 2011,
Harris pursued an agenda that included the implementation of a law to fine and
jail the parents of truant students for up to a year. As California’s attorney
general from 2011 to 2017, she warned parents across the state that they would
face “the full force and consequences of the law” if their children missed out
on too many days of school.
BLOG EDITOR: KAMAL HARRIS IS AN ADVOCATE FOR
BIDEN’S AMNESTY FOR MORE CHEAP LABOR. SHE APPEARS TO LIKE TO EXPLOIT SLAVE
LABOR!
During her tenure, Harris also oversaw California’s
resistance to a Supreme Court order that it release prisoners from the state’s
overcrowded prisons. Her attorneys (“for the people,” as Harris put it last
night) argued in court that releasing too many prisoners would deplete the
cheap labor pool of inmates who fight the state’s notorious wildfires for less
than $2 a day.
Serving as the junior senator from California since 2017,
Harris sits on the committees overseeing the federal budget, the judiciary, homeland
security and the intelligence agencies.
Through her position on the Intelligence Committee, Harris
has been privy to the most sensitive information about American imperialism’s
criminal operations all over the world. In this role, she has backed the
Democrats’ anti-Russia campaign aimed at pressuring the Trump administration
into taking a more hostile posture towards Moscow.
BLOG EDITOR: JULIAN ASSANGE IS UNPOPULAR WITH CORRUPT DEM
POLS. ASSANGE EXPOSED THE OBAMA-BIDEN AGENDA OF SURRENDERING U.S. BORDERS TO
NARCOMEX AND CHARACTERIZED HILLARY CLINTON AS A ‘SADISTIC SOCIOPATH’, NOT
SOMETHING HILLARY HAS MUCH DEFENSE ON.
She also supports the persecution of WikiLeaks and its
founder Julian Assange, who faces 175 years in a US prison for exposing
American military war crimes, declaring that the organization had done
“considerable harm” to the US.
BLOG EDITOR: KAMALA HARRIS SENATE COLLEAGUE DIANNE
FEINSTEIN IS THE BIGGEST WAR PROFITEER IN U.S. HISTORY. HER HUSBAND, RICHARD
BLUM, HAS HANDED OUT GENEROUS ‘CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS’ TO VIRTUALLY THE ENTIRE
DEM POLS CLASS SO THEY KEEP THEIR MOUTHS SHUT ABOUT FEINSTEIN-BLUM’S STAGGERING
SELF-SERVING CORRUPTION.
While feinting to the left as a proponent of cutting the
Pentagon’s $750 billion-plus annual budget, in July Harris voted against a
proposal by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders that would have cut funding by a
meager 10 percent, saying she supported the idea but that any cuts to the
military should be done “strategically.”
Harris represents the Democratic Party, a party of Wall
Street billionaires, the intelligence agencies and the military. Her nomination
Wednesday came just one day after the Democrats paraded a number of Republicans
who endorsed Biden, including Colin Powell—the first African American chairman
of the joint chiefs of staff and a chief architect of the 2003 war in Iraq—and
the widow of the notorious warmonger, Senator John McCain.
Harris’ closing remarks at the convention last night were
preceded by those of Obama, of which we will have more to say later. Suffice it
to say that Obama, the first African American to be nominated by the Democrats
and win the presidency, proceeded to bail out the banks, continue the wars of
George W. Bush, implement a policy of drone murder, and deport more immigrants
than any of his predecessors.
It was the right-wing policies of the Obama administration
that paved the way for the ascension of Trump to the presidency.
The Democrats hope that the endless celebration of the
trite, empty symbolism of Harris’ candidacy will serve as a repeat of Barack
Obama’s run for president in 2008, deploying identity politics to cover over
the right-wing content of her record and that of the Democratic Party. This is
the logic of the reactionary politics of racial, ethnic and gender identity,
promoted incessantly by the pseudo-left opponents of Marxism.
However, the elevation of an increasing number of women,
African Americans and other ethnic minorities into positions of power, from
city councils, to mayoral offices, police departments and the presidency
itself, has done nothing to advance the interests of the working class. In fact, over the last
four decades wealth inequality has grown most rapidly within racial groups, as
a small layer of the population has been elevated into positions of power and
privilege while conditions for those of all races and genders in the bottom 90
percent have deteriorated.
In addition to
Obama, the likes of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, national security advisors
Condoleezza Rice and Susan Rice, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—and,
one might add, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and German Chancellor
Angela Merkel—have shown that women and racial minorities can pursue the
interests of the financial oligarchy as ruthlessly as any other representative
of the ruling class.
There is something fitting in the selection of Harris to
co-lead the Democrats’ ticket. The response of the Democrats to the mass
multi-racial and multi-ethnic protests against police violence that erupted
earlier this year was to divert them into the politics of racial division,
using the reactionary and false claim that what was involved was a conflict
between “white America” and “black America,” rather than a conflict between the
working class and capitalism. This effort now culminates in the selection of
the former “top cop” of California as the Democrats’ vice presidential
candidate.
This is aimed at blocking the emergence of a powerful,
united movement of the working class. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the
criminal indifference of the entire ruling elite to the lives of the working
class. As was shown with the near unanimous passage of the trillion-dollar
CARES Act bailout, their concern is for their stock portfolios and corporate
profits at the expense of more than 175,000 people who have now died and the
more than 5.5 million who have been infected by coronavirus.
The fight to advance the interests of the working class
will have to be waged through the methods of class struggle, in opposition to
the Democrats and Republicans and the capitalist system which they defend.
Kamala’s Lies
Duplicity aside, perhaps the only
details of Harris’s speech more cringeworthy than her insincerity was her
inability to tell the truth about virtually anything.
By David Keltz
Last
week when Joe Biden officially announced Kamala Harris as his running mate on
August 12th, 2020, Harris made what amounted to one of the most dishonest
speeches by a vice-presidential candidate in recent memory. “This is a
moment of real consequence for America. Everything we care about, our economy,
our health, our children, the kind of country we live in, it’s all on the
line,” she said. Harris, who appears to have been honing her acting
skills during the pandemic, unleashed a bevy of emotions during her remarks, as
she went from “cheerful,” to “empathetic,” to “nostalgic,” to “indignant,” and
finally back to “cheerful,” all in a matter of seconds. In a desperate attempt to
portray herself as humanizing, relatable, and down to earth, she instead
reminded us all why the robotic Hillary Clinton was seen as untrustworthy and
was immensely unpopular. Duplicity aside, perhaps the only details of
Harris’s speech more cringeworthy than her insincerity was her inability to
tell the truth about virtually anything.
Harris
heavily criticized President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus,
blaming him for the death toll, the economic contraction, the high unemployment
rate, the closure of schools, homelessness, hunger, and poverty. “The
case against Donald Trump and Mike Pence is open and shut. Just look where
they’ve gotten us, more than 16 million out of work, millions of kids who
cannot go back to school, a crisis of poverty, of homelessness afflicting
black, brown, and indigenous people the most, a crisis of hunger afflicting one
in five mothers who have children that are hungry and tragically, more than
165,000 lives that have been cut short, many with loved ones who never got the
chance to say goodbye.”
Aside
from the fact that Trump has been a huge advocate
for the reopening of schools, Harris did not mention that seven of the top ten states with the most COVID
deaths are run by Democrats, including New York, which has more deaths than
Texas, Florida, Georgia, and Arizona combined. Not only was NY
the hardest hit state in the U.S., but it has far more
deaths per million, when compared to any other country, at 1,692. By
comparison, the country with the next highest death toll per million residents
is Peru, at only 796. Harris also did not bother to explain how Trump was
responsible for the 32,920 deaths in New York state, considering that it
was Governor Andrew Cuomo who chose to allow seniors who tested positive for
the virus to return to nursing homes, resulting in thousands of avoidable
deaths. The state’s death toll for nursing home residents is listed as 6,600, but the official number
is likely significantly higher. The AP reported that the real number may
be as high as 11,000, with some estimates
indicating that it could be closer to 14,000, considering that 21,000 nursing beds are currently
vacant,
compared to just 13,000 from one year ago.
In
addition to ramping up testing, and sending thousands of ventilators to the
state of NY, Trump allocated 350 million dollars to the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers for construction of alternate care facilities in NY,
including sending the USNS Comfort ship, and turning the
Javits Center into a military field hospital. For what it’s worth, Cuomo
praised Trump back in April at the time when his state was in desperate need of
the president’s help saying, “He has
delivered for New York. He has." Harris did not bother to ask Cuomo or
Mayor Bill De Blasio why they chose not to efficiently use the resources that
the federal government provided them with. None of those facts fit into
Harris’s narrative, so instead she moved ahead and blamed Trump for an economy that is
recovering quicker
than many economists predicted.
Harris
also bizarrely compared COVID-19 to Ebola. “It didn’t have to be this
way. Six years ago, in fact, we had a different health crisis, it was called
Ebola. We all remember that pandemic, but you know what happened then? Barack
Obama and Joe Biden did their job.” As of this writing the coronavirus has
killed 775,000 people
worldwide,
and 21,927,114 people have tested
positive for
the virus. Ebola, by comparison, killed 11,310 people
worldwide, while only 28,616 people tested positive for it. To put in
perspective, nearly as many people have tested positive for the coronavirus as
the total number of people residing in Sri Lanka, a country that has the
world's 58th largest
population at just over 21 million. Meanwhile, roughly the same number of
people that can attend a football game at Princeton Stadium (27,800), tested positive for
Ebola.
The
Democratic vice-presidential candidate also professed her supposed patriotism
and love for the country by calling the U.S. a country that is rooted in
institutional racism. She praised the “Black Lives Matter Movement,”
while failing to condemn violent protests, the rioting, the looting, the
burning of businesses, churches, and courthouses, and the destruction of
property that has swept across major cities including: Portland, Seattle,
Minnesota, Chicago, New York City, Washington, D.C. and many other places.
“We’re experiencing a moral reckoning with racism and systemic injustice that
has brought a new coalition of conscience to the streets of our country,
demanding change,” she said. The beneficiaries from this “moral reckoning,”
or non-social distancing exercise that has made our streets much less safe was
not something Harris was willing to explore.
Harris
also claimed that she, along with Joe Biden, would bring the jobs back, “We’ll
create millions of jobs and fight climate change through a clean energy
revolution, bring back critical supply chains so the future is made in
America, build on the affordable care act.” Harris and Biden somehow plan
on increasing employment while raising taxes
by more than three trillion dollars, including increasing the marginal,
federal, and payroll tax rates, and eliminating thousands of jobs in the energy
sector if the “Green New Deal,” is implemented. Harris spoke of
implementing many of the things that Trump not only talked about, but already
succeeded in accomplishing before the Chinese virus struck the world. All
of these outright lies might explain why Harris was forced to drop out of the
presidential race last December, after running her campaign into
insolvency coupled with her anemic poll numbers. Not to worry, the
mainstream media continues to tell us Harris is not only a moderate, but much
more exciting, and invigorating the second time around. She is none of
those things, but one constant remains: she is as dishonest as ever.
Image: PD, Cali National Guard
KAMALA HARRIS, LIKE SENILE JOE, HAVE A DOCUMENTED HISTORY OF SERVING
CRIMINAL BANKSTERS AND THE RICH.
All of this is, if we
can be permitted to use Biden’s catchphrase, “malarkey.” Harris has already
proven herself as a trusted servant of the interests of the rich and powerful
at the expense of the working class. The Wall Street Journal wrote
last week that Wall Street financers had breathed a “sigh of relief” at Biden’s
pick of Harris. Industry publication American Banker noted
that her steadiest stream of campaign funding has come from financial industry
professionals and their most trusted law firms.
The Democrats hope that the endless celebration of the
trite, empty symbolism of Harris’ candidacy will serve as a repeat of Barack
Obama’s run for president in 2008, deploying identity politics to cover over
the right-wing content of her record and that of the Democratic Party. This is
the logic of the reactionary politics of racial, ethnic and gender identity,
promoted incessantly by the pseudo-left opponents of Marxism.
The nomination of Kamala Harris and the
right-wing logic of identity politics
20 August 2020
The Democratic Party concluded the third night of its
convention on Wednesday, culminating in the official nomination of California
Senator Kamala Harris as the vice-presidential candidate of Joe Biden.
Wednesday’s proceedings were in line with the inane and
insipid character of the event as a whole. Various reactionaries and
multi-millionaires, from Hillary Clinton to Nancy Pelosi, declared the urgent
need to elect Biden, the corrupt corporate shill from Delaware recast as a
living saint, to right all wrongs and restore America to the path of prosperity
and righteousness.
No actual program was advanced to deal with the massive
social and economic catastrophe produced by the coronavirus pandemic and the
bipartisan response of the ruling class to it. Everything was reduced to the
fictionalized narrative of the life of Biden and his comrade in arms, Kamala
Harris.
The selection of Harris was presented as a “historic”
moment in American politics. This appraisal was based entirely on the fact that
Harris is the first African American and Indian American woman selected by the
world’s oldest political party to run for vice president. There were the
inevitable proclamations that young girls throughout the country will conclude
from this fact that they too can someday be vice president of the United States
of America.
All of this is, if we
can be permitted to use Biden’s catchphrase, “malarkey.” Harris has already
proven herself as a trusted servant of the interests of the rich and powerful
at the expense of the working class. The Wall Street Journal wrote
last week that Wall Street financers had breathed a “sigh of relief” at Biden’s
pick of Harris. Industry publication American Banker noted
that her steadiest stream of campaign funding has come from financial industry
professionals and their most trusted law firms.
Just before she ended her bid for the presidency in
December 2019, Harris’ campaign boasted the most billionaire backers, including
oil fortune heir Gordon Getty and vulture capitalist Dean Metropoulos.
As San Francisco District Attorney from 2004 to 2011,
Harris pursued an agenda that included the implementation of a law to fine and
jail the parents of truant students for up to a year. As California’s attorney
general from 2011 to 2017, she warned parents across the state that they would
face “the full force and consequences of the law” if their children missed out
on too many days of school.
BLOG EDITOR: KAMAL HARRIS IS AN ADVOCATE FOR
BIDEN’S AMNESTY FOR MORE CHEAP LABOR. SHE APPEARS TO LIKE TO EXPLOIT SLAVE
LABOR!
During her tenure, Harris also oversaw California’s
resistance to a Supreme Court order that it release prisoners from the state’s
overcrowded prisons. Her attorneys (“for the people,” as Harris put it last
night) argued in court that releasing too many prisoners would deplete the
cheap labor pool of inmates who fight the state’s notorious wildfires for less
than $2 a day.
Serving as the junior senator from California since 2017,
Harris sits on the committees overseeing the federal budget, the judiciary, homeland
security and the intelligence agencies.
Through her position on the Intelligence Committee, Harris
has been privy to the most sensitive information about American imperialism’s
criminal operations all over the world. In this role, she has backed the
Democrats’ anti-Russia campaign aimed at pressuring the Trump administration
into taking a more hostile posture towards Moscow.
BLOG EDITOR: JULIAN ASSANGE IS UNPOPULAR WITH CORRUPT DEM
POLS. ASSANGE EXPOSED THE OBAMA-BIDEN AGENDA OF SURRENDERING U.S. BORDERS TO
NARCOMEX AND CHARACTERIZED HILLARY CLINTON AS A ‘SADISTIC SOCIOPATH’, NOT
SOMETHING HILLARY HAS MUCH DEFENSE ON.
She also supports the persecution of WikiLeaks and its
founder Julian Assange, who faces 175 years in a US prison for exposing
American military war crimes, declaring that the organization had done
“considerable harm” to the US.
BLOG EDITOR: KAMALA HARRIS SENATE COLLEAGUE DIANNE
FEINSTEIN IS THE BIGGEST WAR PROFITEER IN U.S. HISTORY. HER HUSBAND, RICHARD
BLUM, HAS HANDED OUT GENEROUS ‘CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS’ TO VIRTUALLY THE ENTIRE
DEM POLS CLASS SO THEY KEEP THEIR MOUTHS SHUT ABOUT FEINSTEIN-BLUM’S STAGGERING
SELF-SERVING CORRUPTION.
While feinting to the left as a proponent of cutting the
Pentagon’s $750 billion-plus annual budget, in July Harris voted against a
proposal by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders that would have cut funding by a
meager 10 percent, saying she supported the idea but that any cuts to the
military should be done “strategically.”
Harris represents the Democratic Party, a party of Wall
Street billionaires, the intelligence agencies and the military. Her nomination
Wednesday came just one day after the Democrats paraded a number of Republicans
who endorsed Biden, including Colin Powell—the first African American chairman
of the joint chiefs of staff and a chief architect of the 2003 war in Iraq—and
the widow of the notorious warmonger, Senator John McCain.
Harris’ closing remarks at the convention last night were
preceded by those of Obama, of which we will have more to say later. Suffice it
to say that Obama, the first African American to be nominated by the Democrats
and win the presidency, proceeded to bail out the banks, continue the wars of
George W. Bush, implement a policy of drone murder, and deport more immigrants
than any of his predecessors.
It was the right-wing policies of the Obama administration
that paved the way for the ascension of Trump to the presidency.
The Democrats hope that the endless celebration of the
trite, empty symbolism of Harris’ candidacy will serve as a repeat of Barack
Obama’s run for president in 2008, deploying identity politics to cover over
the right-wing content of her record and that of the Democratic Party. This is
the logic of the reactionary politics of racial, ethnic and gender identity,
promoted incessantly by the pseudo-left opponents of Marxism.
However, the elevation of an increasing number of women,
African Americans and other ethnic minorities into positions of power, from
city councils, to mayoral offices, police departments and the presidency
itself, has done nothing to advance the interests of the working class. In fact, over the last
four decades wealth inequality has grown most rapidly within racial groups, as
a small layer of the population has been elevated into positions of power and
privilege while conditions for those of all races and genders in the bottom 90
percent have deteriorated.
In addition to
Obama, the likes of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, national security advisors
Condoleezza Rice and Susan Rice, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—and,
one might add, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and German Chancellor
Angela Merkel—have shown that women and racial minorities can pursue the
interests of the financial oligarchy as ruthlessly as any other representative
of the ruling class.
There is something fitting in the selection of Harris to
co-lead the Democrats’ ticket. The response of the Democrats to the mass
multi-racial and multi-ethnic protests against police violence that erupted
earlier this year was to divert them into the politics of racial division,
using the reactionary and false claim that what was involved was a conflict
between “white America” and “black America,” rather than a conflict between the
working class and capitalism. This effort now culminates in the selection of
the former “top cop” of California as the Democrats’ vice presidential
candidate.
This is aimed at blocking the emergence of a powerful,
united movement of the working class. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the
criminal indifference of the entire ruling elite to the lives of the working
class. As was shown with the near unanimous passage of the trillion-dollar
CARES Act bailout, their concern is for their stock portfolios and corporate
profits at the expense of more than 175,000 people who have now died and the
more than 5.5 million who have been infected by coronavirus.
The fight to advance the interests of the working class
will have to be waged through the methods of class struggle, in opposition to
the Democrats and Republicans and the capitalist system which they defend.
Kamala’s Lies
Duplicity aside, perhaps the only
details of Harris’s speech more cringeworthy than her insincerity was her
inability to tell the truth about virtually anything.
By David Keltz
Last
week when Joe Biden officially announced Kamala Harris as his running mate on
August 12th, 2020, Harris made what amounted to one of the most dishonest
speeches by a vice-presidential candidate in recent memory. “This is a
moment of real consequence for America. Everything we care about, our economy,
our health, our children, the kind of country we live in, it’s all on the
line,” she said. Harris, who appears to have been honing her acting
skills during the pandemic, unleashed a bevy of emotions during her remarks, as
she went from “cheerful,” to “empathetic,” to “nostalgic,” to “indignant,” and
finally back to “cheerful,” all in a matter of seconds. In a desperate attempt to
portray herself as humanizing, relatable, and down to earth, she instead
reminded us all why the robotic Hillary Clinton was seen as untrustworthy and
was immensely unpopular. Duplicity aside, perhaps the only details of
Harris’s speech more cringeworthy than her insincerity was her inability to
tell the truth about virtually anything.
Harris
heavily criticized President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus,
blaming him for the death toll, the economic contraction, the high unemployment
rate, the closure of schools, homelessness, hunger, and poverty. “The
case against Donald Trump and Mike Pence is open and shut. Just look where
they’ve gotten us, more than 16 million out of work, millions of kids who
cannot go back to school, a crisis of poverty, of homelessness afflicting
black, brown, and indigenous people the most, a crisis of hunger afflicting one
in five mothers who have children that are hungry and tragically, more than
165,000 lives that have been cut short, many with loved ones who never got the
chance to say goodbye.”
Aside
from the fact that Trump has been a huge advocate
for the reopening of schools, Harris did not mention that seven of the top ten states with the most COVID
deaths are run by Democrats, including New York, which has more deaths than
Texas, Florida, Georgia, and Arizona combined. Not only was NY
the hardest hit state in the U.S., but it has far more
deaths per million, when compared to any other country, at 1,692. By
comparison, the country with the next highest death toll per million residents
is Peru, at only 796. Harris also did not bother to explain how Trump was
responsible for the 32,920 deaths in New York state, considering that it
was Governor Andrew Cuomo who chose to allow seniors who tested positive for
the virus to return to nursing homes, resulting in thousands of avoidable
deaths. The state’s death toll for nursing home residents is listed as 6,600, but the official number
is likely significantly higher. The AP reported that the real number may
be as high as 11,000, with some estimates
indicating that it could be closer to 14,000, considering that 21,000 nursing beds are currently
vacant,
compared to just 13,000 from one year ago.
In
addition to ramping up testing, and sending thousands of ventilators to the
state of NY, Trump allocated 350 million dollars to the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers for construction of alternate care facilities in NY,
including sending the USNS Comfort ship, and turning the
Javits Center into a military field hospital. For what it’s worth, Cuomo
praised Trump back in April at the time when his state was in desperate need of
the president’s help saying, “He has
delivered for New York. He has." Harris did not bother to ask Cuomo or
Mayor Bill De Blasio why they chose not to efficiently use the resources that
the federal government provided them with. None of those facts fit into
Harris’s narrative, so instead she moved ahead and blamed Trump for an economy that is
recovering quicker
than many economists predicted.
Harris
also bizarrely compared COVID-19 to Ebola. “It didn’t have to be this
way. Six years ago, in fact, we had a different health crisis, it was called
Ebola. We all remember that pandemic, but you know what happened then? Barack
Obama and Joe Biden did their job.” As of this writing the coronavirus has
killed 775,000 people
worldwide,
and 21,927,114 people have tested
positive for
the virus. Ebola, by comparison, killed 11,310 people
worldwide, while only 28,616 people tested positive for it. To put in
perspective, nearly as many people have tested positive for the coronavirus as
the total number of people residing in Sri Lanka, a country that has the
world's 58th largest
population at just over 21 million. Meanwhile, roughly the same number of
people that can attend a football game at Princeton Stadium (27,800), tested positive for
Ebola.
The
Democratic vice-presidential candidate also professed her supposed patriotism
and love for the country by calling the U.S. a country that is rooted in
institutional racism. She praised the “Black Lives Matter Movement,”
while failing to condemn violent protests, the rioting, the looting, the
burning of businesses, churches, and courthouses, and the destruction of
property that has swept across major cities including: Portland, Seattle,
Minnesota, Chicago, New York City, Washington, D.C. and many other places.
“We’re experiencing a moral reckoning with racism and systemic injustice that
has brought a new coalition of conscience to the streets of our country,
demanding change,” she said. The beneficiaries from this “moral reckoning,”
or non-social distancing exercise that has made our streets much less safe was
not something Harris was willing to explore.
Harris
also claimed that she, along with Joe Biden, would bring the jobs back, “We’ll
create millions of jobs and fight climate change through a clean energy
revolution, bring back critical supply chains so the future is made in
America, build on the affordable care act.” Harris and Biden somehow plan
on increasing employment while raising taxes
by more than three trillion dollars, including increasing the marginal,
federal, and payroll tax rates, and eliminating thousands of jobs in the energy
sector if the “Green New Deal,” is implemented. Harris spoke of
implementing many of the things that Trump not only talked about, but already
succeeded in accomplishing before the Chinese virus struck the world. All
of these outright lies might explain why Harris was forced to drop out of the
presidential race last December, after running her campaign into
insolvency coupled with her anemic poll numbers. Not to worry, the
mainstream media continues to tell us Harris is not only a moderate, but much
more exciting, and invigorating the second time around. She is none of
those things, but one constant remains: she is as dishonest as ever.
Image: PD, Cali National Guard
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