Why Did Biden Pick Kamala? Follow the Money
How much did it cost to buy Biden's VP Spot? $3.5 million.
WHY BIDEN PICKED HARRIS, AS
EVERYONE KNEW HE WOULD:
1.)
Like Biden, she is totally amoral.
2.)
Like Biden she is a servant of big banksters
and demonstrated that no bankster criminal should ever be prosecuted.
3.)
Like sociopath Barack Obama, Harris knows how
to perform like a populist while still serving the rich, Wall Street and big
banksters.
4.)
Like Obama-Biden, Harris advocates amnesty
and open borders to keep wages depressed, build the massive LA RAZA Mexican
welfare state to assure Wall Street of never ending generations of ‘cheap’
labor.
5.)
Harris is nothing more than a clone of Barack
Obama; a sociopath lawyer.
“She proved her political worth to big business
in her 2003 campaign for San Francisco district attorney. Harris ran as a
law-and-order candidate, backed by the police unions and big business.”
“Establishing close ties to the older,
established wealth of San Francisco, anchored in banking, oil and real estate,
Harris followed in the footsteps of two other prominent and wealthy San
Francisco Democrats—Dianne Feinstein, first mayor, then US senator, and Nancy
Pelosi, congresswoman and now speaker of the House.”
“If anything, the opposite has been the case. Harris has
frequently traded on her status as the first black woman to be district
attorney, the first black woman to be state attorney general, the second black
woman to hold a US Senate seat, etc., as a political screen to cover the
right-wing policies she advocates and the social class that she defends: the
corporate elite of multi-millionaires and billionaires.”
Biden picks former law-and-order prosecutor
Kamala Harris to be his Democratic running mate
12 August 2020
Former Vice
President Joe Biden announced Tuesday afternoon that he had selected Senator
Kamala Harris as his running mate in the 2020 presidential election. The
decision, entirely predictable and widely expected, confirms the right-wing
political orientation of the Democratic presidential ticket.
Biden has a
48-year political career in which he has been identified primarily with
intensified police repression at home and the ferocious defense of the
interests of American imperialism abroad. The 77-year-old candidate will now
have a 55-year-old running mate with her own right-wing credentials: as a
law-and-order prosecutor and attorney general in California, and, since coming
to Washington in 2016, an advocate and defender of the military-intelligence
apparatus.
Biden’s
statement came on social media less than a week before the opening of the
Democratic National Convention, which will nominate the Biden-Harris ticket to
face Trump and the Republicans in the November election. He tweeted that Harris
was “a fearless fighter for the little guy.”
The truth
is that during her 26 years as a prosecutor—first in Alameda County (Oakland),
then San Francisco, then for California as a whole—Harris was putting “the
little guy” in jail, while she cultivated relationships with the wealthy San
Francisco elite (including the Getty oil billionaires), who became her
principal political backers.
Neither
Harris nor Biden is associated with any popular social movement or linked to
the advocacy of any significant social or political reform. They have carried
out their entire political careers under conditions where the Democratic Party
has been moving steadily, and ever more rapidly, to the right.
For 36 years
Biden was a senator from Delaware, the state where American corporations go to
escape regulations, taxes and government oversight. The tiny state has fewer
than one million people, but more than one million corporations are
headquartered there, thanks to a political environment that guarantees low
taxes and look-the-other-way enforcement.
Biden
entered the Senate in 1972 and was always associated with right-wing,
pro-corporate politics, rising to become chairman of the Judiciary Committee,
then chairman or ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee. He was
chosen by Barack Obama to be his running mate in 2008 for precisely that
reason: to reassure Wall Street and the Democratic establishment, in the midst
of a global financial crisis, that there would be nothing radical about an
Obama presidency.
Harris, a
generation younger, made her career in the Bay Area, dominated by the
Democratic Party politically, during the time when vast fortunes were being
made in Silicon Valley. She proved her political worth to big business in
her 2003 campaign for San Francisco district attorney. Harris ran as a
law-and-order candidate, backed by the police unions and big business, and
defeated the “left” incumbent, Terence Hallinan, who had close ties to the
Stalinist-led trade unions and the sizeable radical milieu.
Establishing
close ties to the older, established wealth of San Francisco, anchored in
banking, oil and real estate, Harris followed in the footsteps of two other
prominent and wealthy San Francisco Democrats—Dianne Feinstein, first mayor,
then US senator, and Nancy Pelosi, congresswoman and now speaker of the House. After six years as San
Francisco DA, Harris was the consensus choice of the Democratic Party
establishment to succeed Jerry Brown as state attorney general in 2010, and
then to take the open US Senate seat in 2016.
Democratic
Party officials and their media acolytes have hailed the “historic” character
of the selection of Harris, the first African-American woman on a major party
ticket. This chorus of praise includes Bernie Sanders, who declared that Harris
“will make history.” But despite the hosannas from the advocates of identity
politics, her ethnicity and gender provide no assurance about the “progressive”
character of her politics.
If
anything, the opposite has been the case. Harris has frequently traded on her
status as the first black woman to be district attorney, the first black woman
to be state attorney general, the second black woman to hold a US Senate seat,
etc., as a political screen to cover the right-wing policies she advocates and
the social class that she defends: the corporate elite of multi-millionaires
and billionaires.
She has now
joined this class herself, thanks in part to her marriage to millionaire
entertainment industry lawyer Douglas Emhoff. The couple had an adjusted gross
income of $1.88 million in 2018, putting them in the top 0.1 percent of
American society.
Objectively
speaking, there is little to distinguish Harris, with only four years in the US
Senate, from other potential alternatives for the vice presidency. She is not
notably more qualified than dozens of other senators, governors or
representatives. But in the eyes of the advocates of identity politics, in and
out of the corporate media, Harris’s mediocrity and right-wing politics count for
nothing compared to her skin color and gender.
BLOG EDITOR: THE GIG IS DEM POLS STAGE
THEMSELVES AND PERFORM ACTS OF ‘POPULISM’ WHILE SERVING THE BANKSTERS AND RICH!
In her
unbounded opportunism and ruthless pursuit of her own career and economic
interests, Harris personifies both the social psychology and class basis of
identity politics. It is the politics of privileged layers of the upper-middle
class, including but not limited to minorities, that use race, gender and
sexual orientation to conceal the fundamental class divisions in capitalist
society, channel social opposition behind the Democratic Party, and carve out a
greater share of the wealth of the top one percent for themselves. It is
organically hostile to the interests of the working class.
Identity
politics was the key to Biden’s own campaign for the presidential nomination,
which he based on the mobilization of support from the Congressional Black
Caucus and African-American businessmen and Democratic Party operatives,
trading on his role as Obama’s vice president. Prior to the Obama
administration, he had no significant connection to civil rights struggles and
won no significant black support in either of his own presidential campaigns,
in 1988 and 2008.
With the
emergence of Bernie Sanders as the leading candidate for the nomination, with
victories in New Hampshire and Nevada and a tie in Iowa, the Democratic Party
establishment launched an all-out drive to block the self-proclaimed
“democratic socialist” and deliver the nomination to its choice, the former
vice president.
The critical
turning point in February 2020 came with the fulsome support of Representative
James Clyburn, the political boss of the Democratic Party in South Carolina and
the third-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, as majority whip.
Biden had been badly beaten in the first three primaries, but won by a landslide
in South Carolina, thanks to a large African-American turnout.
Besides
Clyburn’s support, Biden was assisted by the withdrawal of Kamala Harris, who
folded up her own presidential campaign in December 2019, and Cory Booker, who
dropped out a month later, insuring that there would be no African-American
candidate to draw away votes from Biden in South Carolina.
Within days,
two more Democratic rivals, Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg, threw their
support to Biden, allowing him to sweep the Super Tuesday primaries and become
the virtually unchallenged frontrunner. Soon afterwards, Harris endorsed Biden
and began campaigning aggressively for him in states like Michigan.
BLOG EDITOR: THE GIG IS DEM POLS STAGE
THEMSELVES AND PERFORM ACTS OF ‘POPULISM’ WHILE SERVING THE BANKSTERS AND RICH!
Those
celebrating the elevation of a black woman to the presidential ticket seem to
forget that only 12 years ago an African-American man, Barack Obama, was
elected to the presidency. Despite the claims that the first black president
would be a transformational figure, Obama proved to be a thoroughly reactionary
defender of Wall Street and the CIA. He bailed out the banks and the stock
exchange, forced auto workers to take wage cuts, continued the wars of George
W. Bush and added new ones, including Libya, Syria and Yemen.
The
disappointment and disillusionment in Obama’s empty promises of “hope” and
“change” found expression in the shift of significant sections of the working
class, white and black, away from the Democratic Party, leading first to the
Republican takeover of Congress—the House in 2010, the Senate in 2014—and then
the election of Trump in 2016.
One element
in Biden’s decision to choose Harris as his running mate is the need to provide
some stimulus, even as poor as this, to black voter turnout in cities like
Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland and Philadelphia, where the 2020 election could
well be won or lost.
Biden is
also seeking to demonstrate to his real constituency, the American ruling
elite, that he will represent a steadier hand than the erratic and impulsive
Trump. If the selection of Kamala Harris is the conventional, safe and
predictable choice, that only underscores his pledge to be a conventional, safe
and predictable defender of the interests of corporate America, in contrast to
Trump, who is increasingly regarded in the ruling class as a destabilizing
factor who provokes mass opposition through his incendiary, authoritarian and
racist tirades.
It is
significant that on the eve of the selection of Harris, and the week before the
Democratic National Convention, the New York Times ran a
major report on the growing support for Biden on the stock exchange,
while Politico followed with an account of how Biden has won
the lion’s share of campaign contributions from Wall Street bankers.
The ignominious fall of Kamala Harris
5 December 2019
On Tuesday,
US Senator Kamala Harris terminated her 2020 presidential campaign, becoming
the highest-profile candidate to withdraw from the race so far. Harris’
ignominious end—less than 11 months after launching her campaign with great
fanfare, and before the primaries have even begun—demonstrates the mounting
inability of identity politics to mask a right-wing political record and
program.
While
attempting to strike a middle ground between the conservative Biden and the
“progressive” Sanders and Warren, Harris ended up vacillating repeatedly and
never successfully convinced working-class voters that she had anything to
offer. In particular, her backpedaling after claiming to oppose private health
care exposed her thoroughly corporatist outlook. Having ascended the
political ladder and married a millionaire lawyer, Harris’s income placed her
in the top 0.1 percent of society, rendering her occasional “left” populism a
transparent fraud.
First
announcing her campaign on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Harris repeatedly
invoked her identity as an African-American woman to try to cover over her reactionary political history, first
as city prosecutor in Oakland and San Francisco, then attorney general of
California, and finally as US senator since 2016.
While in California, Harris was a strict “law and order”
advocate. She sent countless working-class residents to lengthy prison terms,
sponsored a law to send parents to jail when their kids were truant, and
defended the rampant overcrowding of the state’s prisons even after the US
Supreme Court declared this a form of “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Upon her
election as US senator, Harris was quickly elevated into the leadership of the
Democratic Party. Appointed to the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2017, she
became one of the most fervent promoters of the anti-Russia campaign,
spearheaded by sections of the Democratic Party and intelligence agencies as
part of an effort to reorient foreign policy back towards confrontation with
Russia. Harris was an early advocate for Trump’s impeachment, not due to any of
his real crimes against immigrants and the working class, but due to bogus
allegations of ties to the Russian state.
BLOG EDITOR: IT WAS SEC. OF STATE HILLARY
CLINTON WHO SUCKED OFF $165 MILLION IN RUSSIAN BRIBES ALL OF WHICH ENDED UP IN
THE PHONY CLINTON FOUNDATION FAMILY SLUSH FUND.
Harris was
expected to run for president well ahead of her announcement and had been among
the top five prospective candidates since at least December 2018. After
announcing, she gradually rose in the polls, reaching her peak after the first
Democratic debate on June 27 at which she verbally sparred with former Vice
President Joe Biden, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. Following
that debate, she reached 15.2 percent in national polls, briefly placing her in
second overall.
While
Harris’s standing in the polls gradually began declining, a key turning point
came at the second Democratic debate,
when Harris’s reactionary record as attorney general was attacked by Tulsi
Gabbard. After that debate, Harris sank below 10 percent in the polls and
continued to fall, ultimately slipping to barely 3 percent.
Beyond
her fall in the polls, the immediate reasons for Harris ending her campaign
appear to be a collapse in her campaign finances and fundraising, and a desire
to best position herself to be selected as a vice presidential running mate. In a public
statement, Harris stated bluntly, “My campaign for president simply doesn’t
have the financial resources we need to continue.”
Since the
latest release of campaign finance data on September 30, multiple reports have
surfaced indicating that the Harris campaign became increasingly cash-strapped,
prompting the layoff of dozens of staffers in late October at her Baltimore
headquarters. An aide to Harris confirmed with the New York Times Wednesday
that the campaign would have had to go into debt in order to continue
functioning.
While
Sanders and Warren have been able to secure over $40 million and $30 million
respectively in small donations of less than $200, Harris only raised roughly
$14 million in small donations by September 30. Further, wealthy donors were
more inclined to donate to Biden and Buttigieg, with the former publicly
launching a super PAC at the end of October after stating he was opposed to
super PACs. While Harris could have gone this route and openly appealed to
the financial aristocracy, she evidently felt this was politically unviable.
BLOG EDITOR: AS ATTORNEY GENERAL OF CA, HARRIS
PROTECTED OBAMA-BIDEN’S CRIMINAL BANKSTERS AND MADE SURE NOT ONE WAS CRIMINALLY
PROSECUTED. WELLS FARGO, PROBABLY THE BIGGEST CRIMINAL BANK IN U.S. HISTORY
THANKED HARRIS WITH BIG BACKEND BRIBES AS THANKS. GOOGLE IT!
By then, according to one estimation, she was spending
$1.41 for every dollar she raised.
In her
resignation letter, Harris also wrote, “I’m not a billionaire. I can’t fund my
own campaign. And as the campaign has gone on, it’s become harder and harder to
raise the money we need to compete.” The reference to a “billionaire” candidate
includes Trump, who has publicly raised over $165 million since the 2016
election, as well as Democratic candidates Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg.
Bloomberg
entered the race on November 24 after purchasing $37 million in a television ad
blitz, a greater sum than Harris had raised in her entire campaign. In the days
prior to her campaign termination, Bloomberg surpassed Harris in polling,
placing her in sixth place overall for the first time.
Concurrent
with Harris, Steve Bullock, Joe Sestak and Wayne Messam have recently withdrawn
from the Democratic race. There have already been complaints that the next
Democratic debate, set for December 19 in Los Angeles, will have no candidates
“of color,” given Harris’s withdrawal and the likelihood that Cory Booker,
Julian Castro, Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard have not yet qualified.
The
leadership of the Democratic Party will undoubtedly work to ensure that either
Harris, Booker, Castro or another minority candidate is selected as the running
mate to add diversity to the ticket.
However,
despite the efforts to entrench race and gender in American politics, the
demise of Harris’s presidential bid highlights the inability of identity
politics to gain a significant foothold within the working class. For the vast
majority of the population, Harris’s constant invocations of her identity did
little to convince them that she was in any way a progressive candidate. Rather,
she was recognized as a pro-corporate Democrat, the stock-in-trade of the party
as a whole.
The
decades-long shift to the right of the Democratic Party culminated in the Obama
administration, which oversaw the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor to
the rich in US history, deported more immigrants than any previous
administration, and became the first to remain perpetually at war. Harris,
along with all the other Democratic Party candidates, defends this record of
war, austerity and xenophobia that paved the way for the election of Trump in
2016.
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