YOU CAN’T SEPARATE THE DEMOCRAT PARTY FROM THEIR PLUNDERING
BANKSTERS!
More stiffing the little guy from haughty Kamala Harris
By Monica Showalter
As we've said more than once , Kamala Harris has an
authenticity problem.
This
characterization, from Thomas Lifson last month, pretty well sums her
up every time a Kamala Harris story comes to light :
Kamala Harris is scary in her pathological
ambition, moral flexibility, comfort with deception, and sheer ruthlessness.
So
here's a new one, from California watcher Susan Crabtree at RealClearPolitics , reporting Harris's
soapboxing at the second presidential debate:
“So in my background as attorney general of
California, I took on the big banks who preyed on the homeowners, many of whom
lost their homes and will never be able to buy another,” Harris said in late
July during the second round of Democratic debates in Detroit.
Here's
what really happened :
In fact, she and several other state attorneys
general were instrumental in negotiating a $25 billion national settlement with
five of the top U.S. mortgage lenders to provide debt relief and other
financial services to struggling homeowners. But in 2012, just months after
Harris secured those funds along with the other state AGs, then-California Gov.
Jerry Brown diverted $331 million from California’s portion of the settlement
to pay off state budget shortfalls incurred before the housing crisis.
Although Harris initially spoke out against
Brown’s diversion of the funds, she remained silent on a subsequent court battle
that began in 2014 – even after she left the attorney general’s office and for
the last year and a half while serving as senator and during her presidential
bid this year.
Which
is pretty outrageous. Harris shook down some banks in the name of "the people"
and then like a crooked lawyer, didn't give the "winnings" to the
clients. Whoever got wronged in this mortgage-lending mess didn't see a penny
of the won cash. It all just went to other Democrat priorities within the one-party
state.
Sound
like the kind of lawyer you'd want to have if you got stiffed in some bank
deal? Whatever this is, it's not the doing of the consumer advocate she's
now painting herself to be.
Any
more than she's the prison-rights advocate she claims to be - she threw
thousands of them in jail for petty offenses during her time as State Attorney
General, kept people in jail beyond their sentences in order to retain them to
fight fires, and refused to disavow false testimony from prosecutorial
misconduct that would have freed prisoners. She's never been about the little
guy.
The
mortgage-payout story shows two distasteful things about Harris.
One,
she plays the old California political machine game (it probably happens in
other crooked one-party states, too) of amassing a vast pot of money for one
purpose, a virtue-signaling purpose, a purpose that press releases can be
released on, and political campaign speeches can be made ... and then spending
the same pile of cash on something thing else, something far less
salable to the voters, something that will cover up spending mismanagement or
fatten pensions. In California, this game is gotten away with all the time. Gas
tax is approved by voters to improve roads ... and ends up bankrolling
bureaucrat and administrative hiring sprees. Federal stimulus money is shoveled
into the state for shovel-ready bridges and road improvements --- and goes
to cover municipal budget holes brought on by mismanagement. Voters approve
bond measures in the name of hiring teachers and getting more school
supplies for kids in education -- and it goes to educrat pensions and union
siphon-offs. Harris is comfortable operating that way in taking on the big
banks, shaking them down -- and just letting the money head elsewhere.
Two,
she's still the teacher's pet of Democrats, the sidling, sucking-up,
get-along-to-go-along, slept-her-way-to-the-top errand girl the more powerful
Democrats like. Crabtree reports that Harris first protested the diversion of
the funds, and then went silent. Why would she do that? Obviouly, she heard
from more powerful Democrats, the kind who could make or break her career.
An Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-style boat-rocker she was not. The money was won,
the cash was collected, the whole thing went to the government instead of
the little guys, and she went along.
Which
pretty well tells us what kind of leader she would be if heaven forbid she
should win the presidency. In winning the money and then allowing it to be
diverted, she failed the little guys she now says she was serving. And with
that, she shows she's never been about serving the people,
she's about obeying the greater interests of the Democratic political
machine. No
wonder she's so popular in those circles - she's been kowtowing to
these rich and powerful since the dawn of her career. For voters, the real
message, as she vows to take over their health care, hand out reparations to
black people, and offer free stuff for votes is clear: That
the cash she promises isn't going to get anywhere near the little
guys. Not even the illegal immigrants she's promising free health care for
can believe her.
“One, Biden has cut ties
with President Obama and no longer expects to get that prized, coveted
endorsement from him. He's been sucking up for months for it, and all
signs point instead to Obama tilting toward Kamala Harris. The
fact that Obama failed to endorse Biden at this point, after all those
years of faithful service, was quite a slap in the face for loyal old Joe,
who stood at Obama's side no matter what he did.”
In reality,
as David Dayen detailed at The Intercept , the settlement was at bottom yet another bank giveaway — on
top of the TARP bailout and Tim Geithner's backdoor subsidy of banks through a
fake homeowner assistance program. As Dayen writes, "more families lost
their homes as a result of transactions facilitated by the national mortgage
settlement than those who got a sustainable loan modification to save
them." Nearly half of the dollar value of Harris' settlement was for debt
that could not be legally recovered in the first place. She also declined to prosecute OneWest , run by now-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin from 2009-2015,
after her own prosecutors said they discovered over a thousand violations of
foreclosure law committed by the bank. (OneWest donated $6,500 to
Harris' attorney general campaign in 2011, and Mnuchin himself donated $2,000
to her Senate campaign in 2016.)
The problem with
Harris instead is her tendency to say what is popular in front of progressive
audiences while defaulting to the political status quo when it comes time to
make tough decisions. It would have taken real courage to stand up to the Obama
administration in 2012 when it was pushing states hard to sweep the robosigning
scandal — which involved flagrant document fraud on an industrial scale — under
the rug. But Harris was the top law enforcement official in the largest state
in the country. She certainly could have gotten far better terms than she did. RYAN
COOPER
Obama Doctor: Biden
‘Looked Frail’ when Confronted by Harris at Debate
SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images
27 Jul 201925
2:14
A former
doctor for President Barack Obama claimed that Joe Biden, the Democrat
frontrunner, “looked frail” when confronted by Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) over
his record on civil rights at the first Democrat presidential debate last
month.
Dr. David
Scheiner, who served as Obama’s personal physician for more than 20 years prior
to his election to the presidency, told the Washington Examine r on Friday that after having watched
the debate, he was worried about the 76-year-old former vice president’s state
of health.
The longtime
Obama physician even drew comparison between Biden’s faculties and those of
former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who appeared weak, frail, and confused
while testifying in front of the House Judiciary Committee this week.
“Harris started attacking him and he
looked frail to me,” Scheiner said. “I sort of got the feeling he wasn’t
very strong. It was similar to the feeling I got when Republicans started
attacking Mueller so fiercely.”
Biden, who
if elected would be the oldest president ever inaugurated, is generally
perceived to have done poorly at the first debate. In particular, the former
vice president struggled to defend himself in the face of a fiery rebuke from Harris over his
recent praise for segregationists and long
held opposition against busing to integrate
public schools.
Instead of
presenting an adequate rebuttal to Harris’s critiques, Biden attempted to
dismiss her outright by claiming she had mischaracterized his record. He then
proceeded to muddle his position on busing and inaccurately claim he
never offered praise for racists, before conceding
the argument by saying “my time’s up, I’m sorry.”
The poor
performance renewed existing concerns about the former vice
president’s capabilities as a candidate, and not just from
opponents. After the debate, Biden’s team was reportedly “ freaking out ” about the way he handled the
encounter with Harris. Federal Election Commission filings show his aides took
the incident seriously enough to have hired a speech coach, best known for his work
with President Bill Clinton, one day after the debate.
Joe Biden admits it: Obama stiffed the deplorables
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/07/joe_biden_admits_it_obama_stiffed_the_deplorables.html
By Monica Showalter
It's getting
weird out there in these dog days of the Democratic presidential nomination
race ahead of the Big One in 2020.
Departing from
his nonstop praise for President Obama, former vice president Joe
Biden came up with this doozy in his interview with the New York
Times. Here's the money quotes picked out by Breitbart:
Former Vice President Joe Biden admitted "a lot of people
were left behind" during his and President Barack Obama's tenure in the
White House.
Biden, who has pitched himself as the only Democrat capable of
winning back the white working class in 2020, made the admission when being
interviewed for a profile in The New York Times that was published on
Tuesday.
"A lot of people were left behind," the
frontrunner said when discussing the Obama administration's efforts to combat
the recession. "In areas where people were hard hit, I don't think we
paid enough attention to their plight."
So some
kind of reality has dawned on him. He's noticed the Obama-era meth
addicts and hollowed out cities, made that way by the Obama "you didn't
build that" agenda, but not quite enough to recognize that a
large portion of Trump voters were actually well educated.
None of this
makes Biden look like someone you'd like to elect president.
Three
possibilities are there for what is going on.
One, Biden
has cut ties with President Obama and no longer expects to get that prized,
coveted endorsement from him. He's been sucking up for months for
it, and all signs point instead to Obama tilting toward Kamala
Harris. The fact that Obama failed to endorse Biden at this
point, after all those years of faithful service, was quite a slap in the
face for loyal old Joe, who stood at Obama's side no matter what he did. These Biden remarks suggest
that maybe he's realized this and is distancing himself, even as the Breitbart
report noted that he tried to soften the blame. Nope, blame is
blame, even with sugarcoating.
Two, Biden is
trying to draw negative attention to Obama...to deflect from all the
stuff he didn't bother to do. According to Breitbart :
Despite the confession, Biden stopped short of laying the
culpability on Obama. Instead, he claimed the president and others were
preoccupied by more pressing issues during their eight years in office.
"Everything landed on the president's desk but locusts,"
Biden said in describing the early days of the administration. He added
that Obama was so busy he "didn't have time to breathe."
The former vice president attributed the "lack of
messaging" and Obama's reluctance to "promote his successes."
Obama was
busy? Where the heck was Joe, then? Vice presidents are
supposed to be there to do all the work the president can't do, such as go to
funerals. Biden declaring Obama busy only raises the question about
what Biden was doing. Was he doing anything at all — other than
meddling in the internal affairs of Ukraine in the name of business
deals? Biden, like Obama, had his priorities — and helping
deplorables wasn't one of them. So now he's trying to pin the whole
thing on Obama.
Third, it may
just signal that Biden doesn't have a strategy at all, just bits and pieces and
parts and particles, and he likes the sound of his voice to
interviewers. He's popping off and doing gaffes. He
doesn't recognize that what he's saying is damaging to him because of what it
reveals. What could it reveal? That he's bitter at Obama,
that he was a lazy, shiftless, do-nothing vice president, that he doesn't know
what he's talking about. What a picture of incompetence.
There aren't
any other scenarios. Biden's remarks on this, after years of
effusive praise of the Obama years, is some kind of truth coming
out. Truth is not going to help old Joe.
Joe Biden admits it: Obama stiffed the deplorables
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/07/joe_biden_admits_it_obama_stiffed_the_deplorables.html
By Monica
Showalter
It's getting weird out there in these dog days of the
Democratic presidential nomination race ahead of the Big One in 2020.
Departing from his nonstop praise for President Obama, former
vice president Joe Biden came up with this doozy in
his interview with the New York Times. Here's the money quotes
picked out by Breitbart:
Former
Vice President Joe Biden admitted "a lot of people were left behind"
during his and President Barack Obama's tenure in the White House.
Biden,
who has pitched himself as the only Democrat capable of winning back the white
working class in 2020, made the admission when being interviewed for a profile
in The New York Times that was published on Tuesday.
"A
lot of people were left behind," the frontrunner said when
discussing the Obama administration's efforts to combat the recession.
"In areas where people were hard hit, I don't think we paid enough
attention to their plight."
So some kind of reality has dawned on him. He's
noticed the Obama-era meth addicts and hollowed out cities, made that way by
the Obama "you didn't build that" agenda, but not quite enough
to recognize that a large portion of Trump voters were actually well
educated.
None of this makes Biden look like someone you'd like to
elect president.
Three possibilities are there for what is going on.
One, Biden has cut ties with President Obama and no longer
expects to get that prized, coveted endorsement from him. He's been
sucking up for months for it, and all signs point instead to Obama tilting
toward Kamala Harris. The fact that Obama failed to endorse
Biden at this point, after all those years of faithful service, was
quite a slap in the face for loyal old Joe, who stood at Obama's side no matter
what he did. These Biden remarks suggest that maybe he's
realized this and is distancing himself, even as the Breitbart report noted
that he tried to soften the blame. Nope, blame is blame, even with
sugarcoating.
Two, Biden is trying to draw negative attention
to Obama...to deflect from all the stuff he didn't bother to
do. According to Breitbart :
Despite
the confession, Biden stopped short of laying the culpability on Obama.
Instead, he claimed the president and others were preoccupied by more pressing
issues during their eight years in office.
"Everything
landed on the president's desk but locusts," Biden said in
describing the early days of the administration. He added that Obama was
so busy he "didn't have time to breathe."
The
former vice president attributed the "lack of messaging" and Obama's
reluctance to "promote his successes."
Obama was busy? Where the heck was Joe,
then? Vice presidents are supposed to be there to do all the work
the president can't do, such as go to funerals. Biden declaring
Obama busy only raises the question about what Biden was doing. Was
he doing anything at all — other than meddling in the internal affairs of
Ukraine in the name of business deals? Biden, like Obama, had
his priorities — and helping deplorables wasn't one of them. So now
he's trying to pin the whole thing on Obama.
Third, it may just signal that Biden doesn't have a strategy
at all, just bits and pieces and parts and particles, and he likes the sound of
his voice to interviewers. He's popping off and doing
gaffes. He doesn't recognize that what he's saying is damaging to
him because of what it reveals. What could it reveal? That
he's bitter at Obama, that he was a lazy, shiftless, do-nothing vice president,
that he doesn't know what he's talking about. What a picture of
incompetence.
There aren't any other scenarios. Biden's remarks
on this, after years of effusive praise of the Obama years, is some kind of
truth coming out. Truth is not going to help old Joe.
Image
credit: Obama Library , public domain.
Hat tip:
Roger Luchs.
Democrats Allow Communists to Infiltrate Their
Party Across the Nation
https://globalistbarackobama.blogspot.com/2019/06/obamas-lackey-judge-blakey-hands-obomb.html
“Obama’s new home in
Washington has been described as the “nerve center” of the
anti-Trump opposition. Former attorney general Eric Holder has said
that Obama is “ready to roll” and has aligned himself with the
“resistance.” Former high-level Obama campaign staffers now work with a
variety of groups organizing direct action against
Trump’s initiatives. “Resistance School,” for example, features
lectures by former campaign executive Sara El-Amine, author of the Obama Organizing.”
*
“Professor Paul Kengor has
extensively researched the Chicago communists whose progeny include David
Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and Barack Hussein Obama. Add the openly
Marxist, pro-communist Ayers, and you have many of the key players who put
Obama into power.”
*
We are all victims of the Obama cabal’s collusion with Russia –
President Trump’s voters and all Americans who believe in our free and fair
election process.
Meanwhile,
Citigroup has promoted mass immigration as a necessary component to growing the
American economy in terms of increasing GDP.
THE
RISE TO POWER OF BANKSTER-OWNED BARACK OBAMA
'Incompetent'
and 'liar' among most frequently used words to describe the president: Pew
Research Center
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2013/06/pew-american-people-legals-see-obama-as.html
The larger fear is that Obama might
be just another corporatist, punking voters much as the Republicans do when
they claim to be all for the common guy.
Joe Biden Admits ‘A Lot
of People Were Left Behind’ During the Obama Years
23 Jul 2019
2:55
Former Vice President Joe Biden admitted “a
lot of people were left behind” during his and President Barack Obama’s tenure
in the White House.
Biden, who has pitched himself as the only Democrat capable of
winning back the white working class in 2020, made the admission when being
interviewed for a profile in The New
York Times that was published on Tuesday.
“A lot of people were left behind,” the frontrunner said when discussing the Obama
administration’s efforts to combat the recession. “In areas where people
were hard hit, I don’t think we paid enough attention to their plight.”
Despite the confession, Biden stopped short of laying the
culpability on Obama. Instead, he claimed the president and others were
preoccupied by more pressing issues during their eight years in office.
“Everything landed on the president’s desk but locusts,” Biden
said in describing the early days of the administration. He added that
Obama was so busy he “didn’t have time to breathe.”
The former vice president attributed the “lack of messaging” and
Obama’s reluctance to “promote his successes.”
“He told me that he had encouraged Obama to promote his
successes more — to “explain to people how we got where we were now and why it
happened” — but that Obama was resistant. “The president said: ‘Joe, I’m not
taking a victory lap. We have so much more work to do,’ ” Biden recalled.”
According to Bide, those failures helped lead to the rise and
eventual election of President Donald Trump. In 2016, voters without a
college degree backed Trump over
former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by a margin of 52 percent to 44
percent. The share was significantly larger among non-college educated whites
who broke for Trump by the largest margin since 1980—67 percent to 28 percent.
Although the numbers of such voters are decreasing nationally, non-college
educated whites are still a sizable population in Pennsylvania, Iowa,
Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio—states that put Trump over the top in the
electoral college.
Exit polling showed that
most of these voters, many of whom identify as conservative Democrats, were
inspired to join Trump’s movement because of his nationalist views on trade and
economics. Many especially felt left behind by the Democrats’ embrace of
globalization under President Bill Clinton and the “new economy” during Obama’s
tenure.
Biden’s admission about having failed the white working class is
surprising, considering he not only embraced the same policies as both Obama
and Trump, but has spent considerable time positioning himself as Obama’s
rightful heir.
Just last month, after a disappointing performance in the first
Democrat presidential debate, Biden invoked Obama’s
legacy during an address in front of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/Push Coalition.
“My president gets much too little credit for all that he did,
he was one of the great presidents of the United States of America and I’m
tired of hearing about what he didn’t do,” Biden told the audience.
///////
Willie Brown's Ex-Girlfriend Opposes School Choice
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/07/willie_browns_exgirlfriend_opposes_school_choice.html
By Daniel John
Sobieski
The
well-rehearsed attack by Sen. Kamala Harris on Joe Biden that destroyed
his candidacy during the clown-car Democratic presidential debates should
have come as no surprise to those who have watched her rise to political
prominence. Never mind its relevance or accuracy -- for Harris the ends
have always justified the means.
We saw
during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh that
Kamala Harris is an ambitious politician with a chain-saw-prosecutorial style
designed to bludgeon her targets with attacks and arguments that are more
bluster than brilliant. She revealed herself
to be a political opportunist who, as Sen. Cory Booker’s “Spartacus moment”
fizzled, knows an “Elmer Gantry moment” when she sees one. As Jonathan
S. Tobin noted in National Review :
She first earned notoriety in the Senate last year by
demonstrating open incivility bordering on bullying when she interrogated
Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the national-intelligence chiefs. Bullying
witnesses and cutting them off before they have a chance to answer is her modus
operandi during hearings…
The same qualities were on display during her questioning of
Kavanaugh. But while, like the other Democrats, she never succeeding in
outsmarting the judge, she was the only one to momentarily flummox him by
bringing up the Mueller investigation.
She started with an impossibly general and specious query about
whether he had ever discussed the Mueller probe with “anyone.”…by asserting,
even by implication, that Kavanaugh might somehow be part of the
Russia-collusion discussion, Harris gave liberal Democrats exactly the kind of
red meat they crave.
Along with her snide and disrespectful prosecutorial tone, that
made her the winner of the first day of the Kavanaugh primary.
But Harris
did more than badger, mislead, and imply in her attempt to slander Kavanaugh.
Harris circulated a deceptively edited video designed to further her narrative
that, far from being an originalist that would apply the law fairly on any
case, including those involving abortion, Kavanaugh was an active participant
in the campaign to repeal Roe V.
Wade . As Ashe
Schow noted in the Daily Wire :
Harris’ Twitter account put out a clip that appeared to show
Kavanaugh referring to birth control blanketly as “abortion-inducing drugs.”
This is clearly deceptive, as it’s obvious this was not the
beginning of one of Kavanaugh’s answers. Kavanaugh’s full sentence, which would
have only required one or two extra seconds had Harris’ team started at the
beginning, made it clear he was summarizing what a party in a Supreme Court
case said.
Kavanaugh said, "In that
case, they said filling out the form would make them complicit
in the provision of the abortion-inducing drugs that they were, as a religious
matter, objected to." (Emphasis added.)
Harris was
willing to, uh, falsify evidence to slander Kavanaugh and push the false
narrative that Kavanaugh was just another pro-lifer waging a war on women.
As she
tweeted :
Kavanaugh chooses his words very carefully, and this is a dog
whistle for going after birth control. He was nominated for the purpose of
taking away a woman’s constitutionally protected right to make her own health
care decisions. Make no mistake - this is about punishing women.
Make no
mistake -- her abuse of Kavanaugh and Biden is about advancing the career of
Kamala Harris. While portraying herself as a victim of segregation Biden
supported, she neglected to point out her vehement opposition to school
vouchers and school choice, things that would really free minorities from being
trapped in failing schools and give a real and equal shot at getting a quality
education. She’s all for busing children from and to the schools the government
chooses, but not letting parents send their kids to the schools they choose.
Harris in 2017 joined fellow Senate Democrats in a 24-hour floor session trying
to sink the nomination of pro-school choice nomine Betsy DeVos to be Education
Secretary. As Joy Resmovits reported
in the Los Angeles Times :
Harris' remarks came amid a 24-hour marathon session that
Democrats mounted to debate DeVos' nomination on the Senate floor -- a
last-ditch effort to secure the one additional Republican vote needed to
torpedo her confirmation.
DeVos, a Republican fundraiser from Michigan, former state party
chair and school choice activist, has faced intense opposition since her
confirmation hearing in January -- the most of any of President Trump's Cabinet
picks. DeVos spent her career advancing school vouchers, which would allow
students to use public dollars to attend private schools, both secular and
religious.
It would
seem it is Kamala Harris who continues to stand in the schoolhouse door. During
a visit with DeVos to Saint Andrew Catholic School in Orlando Florida in 2017,
President Trump rightly called education “the civil rights issue of our time”.
As the
New York Post reported :
Trump’s visit capped off a week in which he addressed the nation
in a Joint Session of Congress, pledging to fix the education system in
America, invoking civil rights and claiming it could be fixed using school
choice -- using public funds to enroll students in alternative charter schools
and private schools as traditional public schools.
“We want millions more to have the same chance to achieve the
great success that you’re achieving,” said Trump during his visit to St. Andrew
Catholic School in Orlando, which receives a state funded benefit to operate as
a religious school.
“St. Andrew’s Catholic School represents one of the many parochial
schools dedicated to the education of some of our nation’s most disadvantaged
children, but they’re becoming just the opposite very rapidly through education
and with the help of the school choice programs,” Trump said in very brief
remarks…
“As I’ve often said -- in my address to Congress and just about
anyplace else I can speak -- education is the civil rights issue of our time.
And it’s why I’ve asked Congress to support a school choice bill,’ he said.
Don’t ask
Kamala Harris who, while thanking school busing for helping to launch her
career, owes much more for her advancement for her association with former
Democratic Speaker of the California Assembly Willie Brown. As the
Washington Examiner noted :
Kamala Harris’ first significant political role was an appointment
by her powerful then-boyfriend Willie Brown, three decades her senior, to a
California medical board that has been criticized as a landing spot for
patronage jobs and kickbacks.
Then 30, Harris was dating 60-year-old Willie Brown, at the time
the Democratic speaker of the California State Assembly, when he placed her on
the California Medical Assistance Commission in 1994. The position paid over
$70,000 per year, $120,700 in current money, and Harris served on the board
until 1998.
The medical commission met twice a month, and Harris, a United
States senator for California since 2017 and now a 2020 Democratic presidential
candidate, missed about 20% of the meetings each year, according to commission
records obtained by the Washington
Examiner .
Harris, now 54, and Brown, now 85, started dating in the spring of
1994, showing up arm-in-arm at numerous high-profile functions, including
Brown’s lavish parties and celebrity galas. He has been separated but not
divorced from his wife Blanche Vitero since the 1980s and has maintained a
string of girlfriends over the years.
Maybe,
Kamala Harris, it’s not what you know but who you know.
Daniel John
Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s
Business Daily, Human
Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.
Kamala Harris stood up to big
banks, with mixed results for consumers in crisis
Sharon Bernstein
7 MIN READ
·
·
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Reuters) - In her presidential pitch to
voters, U.S. Senator Kamala Harris touts as a signature accomplishment the $20
billion relief settlement she secured as California attorney general for
homeowners hit hard by the foreclosure crisis.
FILE PHOTO: U.S. Senator Kamala
Harris speaks to members of the American Federation of Teachers in Detroit,
Michigan, U.S. May 6, 2019. REUTERS/Rebecca Cook/File Photo
Consumer advocates praise Harris for demanding more money from
the banks and for backing stronger protections for homeowners. But thousands of
people still lost their homes after not getting the help they needed, advocates
say.
The settlement’s uneven results leave Harris, one of more than
20 Democrats seeking the party’s nomination to run against President Donald
Trump in 2020, vulnerable to skepticism from voters dismayed by how it played
out and attacks from competitors for not being tougher on banks.
“If you’re running against Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren,
you have to be anti-bank,” said Steven Maviglio, a California Democratic
strategist who has advised two assembly speakers and a governor. “That would
possibly give them fodder if she catches fire.”
Warren and Sanders, who serve with Harris in the Senate, have
led the charge among progressives calling for aggressive regulation and
oversight of financial institutions. Warren has proposed making it easier to
jail executives whose companies commit wrongdoing.
Just two years into her first term as a senator, Harris, 54,
relies heavily on the campaign trail on her experience as an elected prosecutor
in California, including six years as attorney general in the aftermath of the
mortgage crisis.
In 2011, she famously walked away from the table when attorneys
general from other states were negotiating a settlement with the big banks that
would require them to help consumers harmed by foreclosure and predatory
lending practices.
Her bold move led to tough negotiations that more than
quadrupled the money promised to help Californians reduce the amount they owed
on their mortgages. A few years later, Harris also championed a Homeowners Bill
of Rights in California that helped protect consumers in the wake of the
crisis.
“Senator Harris fought hard on behalf of California homeowners,
and she secured the largest settlement of any attorney general in America,”
said Ian Sams, her campaign spokesman. “It was a big risk to press the banks
even further for a larger settlement, but she had the conviction to do it and
the toughness to win that fight.”
But consumer advocates who worked with California homeowners
during the mortgage crisis say the most vulnerable – limited English speakers,
the disabled, widows and minorities - had the least luck obtaining relief.
“What we heard repeatedly was people who should be getting loan
modifications weren’t getting them,” said Kevin Stein, deputy director of the
California Reinvestment Coalition, an association of about 300 nonprofit
consumer finance groups.
The state did not track individual consumers who applied for or
received help under the settlement, or gather information on ethnicity, income
or other circumstances. However, repeated detailed surveys of California
Reinvestment Coalition’s member organizations during the financial crisis
showed the difficulty credit counselors had obtaining help for their clients.
The surveys, seen by Reuters, highlight in particular the trouble faced by
disadvantaged groups.
About 150,000 homeowners received relief under the mortgage
settlement in California, according to a 2013 report by then-law professor
Katie Porter, who served as Harris’ monitor over the settlement proceeds.
Porter was elected as a Democratic congresswoman last year.
Advocates also say the state did not do enough to prosecute
banking executives for predatory practices.
“It is absolutely reprehensible that you can get thrown in jail
for stealing a box of Kleenex at the 7-11, but if you steal from people at a
multi-million dollar scale, nothing happens to you,” said Maeve Elise Brown,
executive director of Housing and Economic Rights Advocates, a legal assistance
group in Oakland.
LIMITED RELIEF
Sams said Harris brought numerous mortgage fraud cases,
including several against middlemen who profited from predatory loans. State
records show the attorney general’s mortgage fraud strike force filed 41 cases
during her tenure.
Of the roughly $18 billion offered to consumers to reduce what
they owed on loans, about $9.2 billion was used to forgive money lost when
people sold their homes for less than they owed, known as a short sale. Another
$4.7 billion was used to forgive some or all of the money owed on second mortgages.
Putting nearly $14 billion toward short sales and second
mortgages allowed the banks to use settlement money to reimburse themselves for
money they might have lost anyway, said Bruce Marks, founder of the
Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, a national nonprofit home
ownership and advocacy organization that was active in California during the
crisis.
Families still lost their homes under short sales. But Harris’
campaign said those sales helped thousands of homeowners who otherwise would
have faced foreclosure, a painful process that would have ruined their credit.
Harris’ efforts won praise from Warren, who in 2015 called the
then-Senate candidate “fearless” in taking on the big banks.
Marks said Harris stepped back once the big settlement was
negotiated, however, and failed to aggressively police the way the money was
used.
“That would give me pause supporting her,” Marks said.
California real estate economist Christopher Thornberg, an
expert on the financial crisis, credits Harris with bringing needed reforms to
the state’s mortgage and foreclosure systems.
But she politicized a complicated problem, he said. And because
the state did not keep track of individual consumers and what happened to them,
there is no way to know how well her solutions really worked.
“It was very impressive politically,” said Thornberg, director
of the University of California, Riverside, Center for Economic Forecasting and
Development. “But we don’t really know ultimately if she moved the needle.”
Kamala Harris
Fails to Explain Why She Didn’t Prosecute Steven Mnuchin’s Bank
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FORMER
CALIFORNIA ATTORNEY General Kamala Harris on Wednesday vaguely acknowledged The
Intercept’s report about her declining to prosecute Steven Mnuchin’s OneWest
Bank for foreclosure violations in 2013, but offered no explanation.
“It’s a
decision my office made,” she said, in response to questions from The Hill
shortly after being sworn in as California’s newest U.S. senator.
“We went
and we followed the facts and the evidence, and it’s a decision my office
made,” Harris said. “We pursued it just like any other case. We go and we take
a case wherever the facts lead us.”
Mnuchin is
Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Treasury Department, and served as CEO of
OneWest from 2009 to 2015. In an internal memo published on Tuesday by The
Intercept, prosecutors at the California attorney general’s office said they
had found over a thousand violations of foreclosure laws by his bank during
that time, and predicted that further investigation would uncover many
thousands more.
But the
investigation into what the memo called “widespread misconduct” was closed
after Harris’s office declined to file a civil enforcement action against the
bank.
Harris’s
statement on Tuesday doesn’t explain how involved she was with the decision to
not prosecute, or why the decision was made. She also would not say whether the
revelations would disqualify Mnuchin for the position of treasury secretary.
“The hearings will reveal if it’s disqualifying or not, but certainly he has a
history that should be critically examined, as do all of the nominees,” Harris
told The Hill. She added that she would review the background and history of
all Trump cabinet nominees.
Senate
Democrats have vowed to put up a fight over Mnuchin — even creating a website
inviting homeowners to list their complaints against OneWest. And yet not one
senator has commented publicly on the leaked memo, which received media
coverage in Politico, Bloomberg, the New York Post, CBS News, Vanity Fair, CNN,
CNBC, and other outlets.
The
Intercept has reached out to half a dozen Senate Democratic offices, including
those of Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and leading Mnuchin critics Bernie
Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, receiving no response.
Sen. Tammy
Baldwin, D-Wisc., retweeted the story, as did the Twitter account of the
Democratic National Committee. But another DNC tweet just hours later hinted at
the bind Democrats are in when it comes to using the information against
Mnuchin. That tweet praised Harris’s swearing-in. Her decision not to prosecute
may make her new colleagues wary of pursuing it.
Progressive
groups have not been so reluctant. Three groups — the Rootstrikers project at
Demand Progress, the Center for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up Campaign, and the
California Reinvestment Coalition – have called for a delay of Mnuchin’s
confirmation hearing until he publicly discloses all settlements and lawsuits
OneWest has faced from its foreclosure-related activities, responds fully to
all questions submitted by members of the Senate Finance Committee, and
publicly discloses his role in obstructing the California attorney general
investigation, or any others.
The
California Reinvestment Coalition followed that up on Thursday by asking
OneWest to release the obstructed evidence, which involved loan files held by a
third party then known as Lender Processing Services (it’s now called Black
Knight Financial Services). “That’s something the Senate Finance Committee
should ask him for, prior to scheduling their hearing with him,” said Paulina
Gonzalez, executive director of the California Reinvestment Coalition.
Mnuchin
has already declined to answer a detailed list of questions from Finance
Committee member Sherrod Brown, which Brown sent before the release of the
leaked memo.
After The
Intercept story was published, Mnuchin spokesperson Barney Keller called it
“meritless,” and highlighted OneWest’s completion of a foreclosure review with
the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (which involved completely
separate issues from the California inquiry) and what he claimed was OneWest’s
issuance of over 100,000 loan modifications to borrowers.
“Memos
like this belong in the garbage, not the news,” Keller said.
Meanwhile,
the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, an organizing group
that made headlines in 2010 by protesting on Mnuchin’s front lawn over
OneWest’s foreclosure practices, expressed disbelief that he could now become
treasury secretary. “My family lived first hand the fraud and unethical
behavior under his leadership when I was told to default before they could help
me, and (was) instead pushed into foreclosure,” said Peggy Mears, a OneWest
victim.
ACCE plans
to ask incoming California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to take up the prosecution
of OneWest based on the newly released evidence. And the group vowed to fight
the Mnuchin nomination. “No one who oversaw the defrauding of thousands of
homeowners should be allowed to serve watch over our country’s money,” Mears
said.
By David
Dayen
Kamala Harris’s Socialist Ties
Part 1: Red diaper baby
Trevor Loudon
CONTRIBUTOR
Democratic
presidential primary front-runner Sen. Kamala
Harris (D-Calif.) recently told reporters at a campaign stop in New Hampshire that
she is “not a democratic socialist.”
The
next question should have been obvious: “Well, then, what kind of socialist are
you?”
Harris
has been surrounded by socialists and communists her entire life—beginning with
her staunchly Marxist father . Harris
is the older child of two 1960s Berkeley radicals: Shyamala Gopalan, a cancer
researcher from the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India, and Donald J.
Harris, an economist from Jamaica.
Gopalan
and Donald Harris were very active during the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War
protests of the era, often taking baby Kamala to protests in a stroller,
according to a recent article in San Jose daily newspaper The Mercury News on the Harris family.
The
couple separated after Donald Harris took a professorship at
the University of Madison–Wisconsin. Gopalan filed for divorce in 1971 and
won custody of her two daughters in 1973.
Kamala
and her younger sister, Maya—now her presidential
campaign chair—regularly visited their father during school holidays.
In
1972, Donald Harris left the University of Madison–Wisconsin to begin a
visiting professorship of economics at Stanford University.
On
Nov. 3, 1976, an article published in the Stanford Daily newspaper claimed that
more than 250 students were clamoring for more Marxist perspectives.
Shortly
thereafter, a letter was published in the Stanford
Daily on Nov. 12, 1976, signed by the Stanford branch of the Union
for Radical Political Economics (URPE), with signatures from members Bill
Dittenhofer, Ari Cohen, Eric Berg, David O’Connor, Arthur Slepian, Sandy
Thompson, and Tracy Mott:
“The program in Marxian economics would be much weaker than it is
today if had it not been for massive student efforts in the form of petitions,
open meetings …
“[It] was only after a divisive one and a one-half year struggle
that the opposing elements in the department gave into student pressure and
conceded to ‘the appointment of Prof. Donald Harris. Thus the presence of
Marxian economists here simply indicates the success of the student struggle. …
The recent addition of course offerings in Marxian economics is again a direct
result of student pressure, not departmental benevolence.”
After
an 18-month campaign by the union, Harris was offered and accepted a
permanent professorship.
The URPE
(which last year celebrated its 50th anniversary) began in 1968 as a
spinoff of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). URPE has
overlapped considerably with America’s largest Marxist organization, the
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), since its founding in 1982. One of
professor Donald Harris’s Stanford supporters and URPE letter
signatories, Mott , is now a professor at the University of Denver, where he works
with local DSA activists.
During
the summer and fall of 2006, the DSA’s Political Action Committee helped
DSA activists around the country host house parties to raise funds that
helped Bernie Sanders become the “sole socialist in the U.S. Senate.”
According
to DSA magazine Democratic Left : “ Boulder,
Colorado, guests braved a downpour to attend the party at the home
of Leslie Lomas and hear a talk about giving money by economics
professor and socialist Tracy Mott.”
According
to The Mercury News : “ Several of his former
students said it wasn’t accurate to describe him [Donald Harris] as Marxist,
although ‘he might have been a lot more sympathetic to Marx than a lot of other
economists were at the time,’ said Tracy Mott.”
Mott
was being disingenuous. Several Stanford Daily articles at the time described
Donald Harris as “Marxist,” and Mott and his friends made it very clear that
Harris was hired specifically for his radical ideology.
Donald
Harris wrote papers such as “The Black Ghetto as Colony: A Theoretical
Critique” (1972) and “Capitalist Exploitation and Black Labor: Some Conceptual
Issues” (1978).
Harris’s
Marxism was never questioned or denied at any stage of his career.
URPE
also was very close to the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), once the
largest and most influential of the far-left think tanks in Washington. Since
its founding in 1963, the IPS has consistently followed a pro-Marxist line on
foreign policy, defense, and economic issues.
To
put its policy recommendations into action, the IPS “built networks of contacts
among congressional legislators and their staffs, academics, government
officials, and the national media,” according to the book “The War Called
Peace: The Soviet Peace Offensive.”
The
IPS also was on very close terms with representatives of communist Cuba and the
former Soviet Union.
In
1978, in an article in National Review, Brian Crozier, director of the
London-based Institute for the Study of Conflict, described IPS as the “perfect
intellectual front for Soviet activities which would be resisted if they were
to originate openly from the KGB.”
In
the 1988 book “Winning America: Ideas and Leadership for the 1990s,” edited by
IPS leaders Marcus Raskin and Chester Hartman, the IPS and DSA affiliate Sean
Gervasi recommended a slate of radical colleagues as potential appointees in a
hoped-for new Democratic administration after the 1988 election.
Gervasi’s
wish list including the following:
•
Barry Bluestone—SDS founder, DSA affiliate, URPE member. Served as a member of
the senior policy staff of former Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.).
•
Gar Alperovitz—IPS, DSA, Brookings Institute.
•
Robert Browne—SDS, IPS.
•
Jeff Faux—DSA affiliate. Faux has worked as an economist with the U.S. Office
of Economic Opportunity and the U.S. Departments of State, Commerce, and Labor.
• Carol
O’Cleireacain —DSA member, Brookings Institute. In 2014, she became Detroit
deputy mayor for economic policy, planning, and strategy.
•
Howard Wachtel—IPS, URPE member.
• Art MacEwan —URPE
member, DSA affiliate.
And,
of course, Donald Harris, Marxist professor and Kamala Harris’s father.
Republican
George H.W. Bush won the 1988 election, so professor Harris stayed on at
Stanford until his retirement.
Ironically,
Kamala Harris’s most formidable opponent in the Democratic primary so far is
Bernie Sanders, a favorite of professor Harris’s old URPE and DSA colleagues.
When
Sanders drops out of a very crowded Democratic primary, will his supporters
cross over to support Kamala Harris?
I
believe they will. In fact, I believe it has already been decided.
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker,
and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched
radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on
mainstream politics.
Before his first day in office Barack Obama had sucked in more bribes
from banksters than any president in history.
During the economic meltdown caused by Obama’s crony banksters,
and Obama’s first two years in office, banks made more money than eight years
under pro-bankster administration of George Bush.
Both of Obama’s Attorney Generals, Eric Holder and Loretta
Lynch, were chosen by the banks because they were from law firms that had long
protected big banks from their victims.
“This was
not because of difficulties in securing indictments or convictions. On the contrary,
Attorney General Eric Holder told a Senate committee in March of 2013 that the
Obama administration chose not to prosecute the big banks or their CEOs because
to do so might “have a negative impact on the national economy.”
Joe Biden, the walking moron, was selected by Obama also because
of his ties and servitude to big banks!
OBOMB'S CRONY BANKSTERS DESTROYED MORE
THAN A
TRILLION DOLLARS IN AMERICAN HOME
VALUES AND NOW
THEY'RE COMING BACK FOR MORE WITH THE BANKSTES' RENT BOY BIDEN!
Decades of decaying capitalism have led to this
accelerating divide.
While the rich accumulate wealth with no
restriction, workers’ wages
and benefits have been under increasing attack.
In 1979, 90 percent of
the population took in 70 percent of the nation’s
income. But, by 2017,
that fell to only 61 percent.
Pollak: Barack Obama
Wrote the Playbook on Political Division
22 Jul 2019721
4:13
Left-wing pundits have accused President
Donald Trump of using his tweets last weekend to launch a divisive re-election
campaign.
David Axelrod, former adviser to President Barack Obama, tweeted : “With his
deliberate, racist outburst, @realDonaldTrump wants to raise the profile of his
targets, drive Dems to defend them and make them emblematic of the entire
party. It’s a cold, hard strategy.”
That is debatable — but if so, Axelrod should know; Obama did it
first.
By 2011, Obama knew that re-election would be difficult. The Tea
Party had just led the Republicans to a historic victory in the 2010 midterm
elections, winning the House and nearly taking the Senate. The economy was only
growing sluggishly, and Obama’s stimulus had failed to keep unemployment below
eight percent, as projected. Moreover, the passage of Obamacare had provoked a
backlash against Obama’s state-centered model of American society.
Facing a similar situation in the mid-1990s, President Bill
Clinton had “triangulated,” moving back toward the middle, frustrating the GOP
by taking up their issues, such as welfare reform.
But Obama rejected that approach. Having watched his icon,
Chicago mayor Harold Washington, settle for an
incremental approach when faced with opposition in the 1980s, only to die of a
sudden heart attack before fulfilling his potential, Obama chose the path of
hard-left policy — and divide-and-rule politics.
The first hint of his strategy emerged during the debt ceiling
negotiations in the summer of August 2011. As Bob Woodward recounted in his book
about the crisis, The Price of Politics ,
then-Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) had wanted to reach a “grand
bargain” with the president on long-term spending cuts. But Obama blew up that
agreement by demanding $400 billion in new taxes, to his aides’ surprise. Obama
wanted an opponent, not a deal. (Last week, Boehner told Breitbart News Tonight that
Obama’s decision was his worst disappointment in 35 years of politics.)
In the fall of 2011, a new left-wing movement, Occupy Wall
Street, was launched. A mix of communists, anarchists, and digital pranksters,
the Occupy movement cast American society as a struggle between the “99
percent” and the “one percent.”
Obama and then-House Minority
Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)
embraced the movement — and failed to distance themselves from it even as
it collapsed into
violence, sexual assault, and confrontations with police.
Instead, Obama picked up on Occupy’s themes and used them to
shape his campaign.
In December 2011, Obama gave a speech at
Osawatomie, Kansas — a place steeped in radical
symbolism — at which he doubled down on his left-wing policies. He focused on
the issue of economic inequality, and attacked the idea that the free market
could lift the middle class to prosperity. “This isn’t about class warfare.
This is about the nation’s welfare,” he insisted.
Then, in the spring of 2012, Obama made a controversial play on
race. When a black teen, Trayvon Martin, was killed in Florida during a scuffle
with neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman, Al Sharprton — who was
serving as an informal adviser to Obama at the time — made the local crime story
into a national racial controversy. Obama, following Sharpton’s lead, weighed
in: “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” Obama said at the time.
Poll numbers suggest that race
relations, which had been improving, dropped precipitously after that. But to
Obama, it was worth it: the campaign needed to find a way to motivate minority
voters. (Vice President Joe Biden did his part, telling black voters
that GOP nominee Mitt Romney was “gonna put y’all in chains.”)
Trump is pushing a non-racial, nationalist message. But if he
actually wanted to divide America for political gain, he could learn from the
master.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior
Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and
Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard. He is a winner of the
2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author
of How Trump Won: The Inside
Story of a Revolution , which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter
at @joelpollak .
Biden defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but
begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.
America Created Just 20,000 Jobs in February...and
those all went to foreign born
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/03/mo-brooks-billionaires-want-america.html
Exclusive–Mo Brooks: ‘Masters of the
Universe’ Want More Immigration to ‘Decrease Incomes of Americans’
Consequently, the pumping of ultra-cheap money
into the financial system, fueling speculation and parasitism, together
with ever-widening social inequality, is not a temporary measure but
must be made permanent.
The declining living standards of the
working class are feeding directly into the retail apocalypse and
mass layoffs of retail workers will only exacerbate the issue.
Workers’ wages have seen little to no
growth in the last four decades, and any economic growth experienced
since 2008 has gone to
Biden defended the wealthy in his speech
to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.
“US household net worth sees biggest fall
since crisis”
*
“Trump Touts Legal Immigration System for
‘Our Corporations’ at Expense of
American Workers “– JOHN BINDER
Trump’s shift from a wage-boosting legal immigration system to
one that benefits corporations and their shareholders coincides with recent big
business lobby influence over his White House, at the behest of advisers Jared
Kushner and Brooke Rollins.
*
“Trump Abandons ‘America First’ Reforms: ‘We
Need’ More Immigration to Grow Business Profits” JOHN BINDER
Biden defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but
begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.
Despite a booming economy, many U.S. households are still just
holding on
"One of the premier institutions of big business, JP
Morgan Chase, issued an internal report on the eve of the
10th anniversary of the 2008 crash, which warned that
another “great liquidity crisis” was possible, and that a
government bailout on the scale of that effected by Bush and Obama
will produce social unrest, “in light of the potential impact
of central bank actions in driving inequality between
asset owners and labor."
“Our entire crony capitalist system,
Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par
with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great country is
raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan THEAMERICAN THINKER.com
“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible
government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the
people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance
between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the
statesmanship of today.” THEODORE
ROOSEVELT
Jim Carrey: America
‘Doomed’ If We Don’t Regulate Capitalism "
The American phenomenon of record stock values fueling an ever greater
concentration of wealth at the very top of society, while the economy is
starved of productive investment, the social infrastructure crumbles, and
working class living standards are driven down by entrenched
unemployment, wage-cutting and government austerity policies, is part of
a broader global process."
The father of US Treasury
Secretary
Steven Mnuchin just completed the most
expensive purchase of a living artist’s work in
US history, spending over $91 million on a
three-foot-tall metallic sculpture. Ken Griffin,
the founder of hedge fund Citadel,
recently dropped $238 million on a
penthouse in New York City, the most
expensive US home ever purchased. And
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man,
has invested $42 million in a 10,000-year
clock.
Decades of decaying capitalism have led
to this accelerating divide. While the rich accumulate wealth with no
restriction, workers’ wages and benefits have been under increasing attack. In
1979, 90 percent of the population took in 70 percent of the nation’s income. But,
by 2017, that fell to only 61 percent.
"This is how they will destroy
America from within. The leftist billionaires who
orchestrate these plans are wealthy. Those tasked with representing
us in Congress will never be exposed to the cost of the invasion of
millions of migrants. They have nothing but contempt
for those of us who must endure the consequences of our communities
being intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and
human traffickers. These people have no intention
of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have
contempt for us." PATRICIA McCARTHY
In 2014 the Russell Sage Foundation
found that between 2003 and 2013, the median household net worth of those
in the United States fell from $87,992 to $56,335—a drop of 36 percent. While
the rich also saw their wealth drop during the recession, they are more than
making that money back.
Between 2009 and 2012, 95 percent of all
the income gains in the US went to the top 1 percent. This is the most
distorted post-recession income gain on record.
Additionally,
Koch spokespeople at the donors’ conference said the network has its
sights set on pushing amnesty for millions of illegal aliens this year.
Biden defended the wealthy in his
speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.
Obama's Wall Street
cabinet
6 April 2009
A series of articles
published over the weekend, based on financial disclosure reports released by
the Obama administration last Friday concerning top White House officials,
documents the extent to which the administration, in both its personnel and
policies, is a political instrument of Wall Street.
Policies that are
extraordinarily favorable to the financial elite that were put in place over
the past month by the Obama administration have fed a surge in share values on
Wall Street. These include the scheme to use hundreds of billions of dollars in
public funds to pay hedge funds to buy up the banks’ toxic assets at inflated
prices, the Auto Task Force’s rejection of the recovery plans of Chrysler and
General Motors and its demand for even more brutal layoffs, wage cuts and
attacks on workers’ health benefits and pensions, and the decision by the
Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to weaken “mark-to-market” accounting
rules and permit banks to inflate the value of their toxic assets.
At the same time, Obama
has campaigned against restrictions on bonuses paid to executives at insurance
giant American International Group (AIG) and other bailed-out firms, and repeatedly
assured Wall Street that he will slash social spending, including Medicare,
Medicaid and Social Security.
The new financial
disclosures reveal that top Obama advisors directly involved in setting these
policies have received millions from Wall Street firms, including those that
have received huge taxpayer bailouts.
The case of Lawrence
Summers, director of the National Economic Council and Obama’s top economic
adviser, highlights the politically incestuous character of relations between
the Obama administration and the American financial elite.
Last year, Summers
pocketed $5 million as a managing director of D.E. Shaw, one of the biggest
hedge funds in the world, and another $2.7 million for speeches delivered to
Wall Street firms that have received government bailout money. This includes
$45,000 from Citigroup and $67,500 each from JPMorgan Chase and the
now-liquidated Lehman Brothers.
For a speech to Goldman
Sachs executives, Summers walked away with $135,000. This is substantially more
than double the earnings for an entire year of high-seniority auto workers, who
have been pilloried by the Obama administration and the media for their
supposedly exorbitant and “unsustainable” wages.
Alluding diplomatically
to the flagrant conflict of interest revealed by these disclosures, the New
York Times noted on Saturday: “Mr. Summers, the director of the National
Economic Council, wields important influence over Mr. Obama’s policy decisions
for the troubled financial industry, including firms from which he recently
received payments.”
Summers was a leading
advocate of banking deregulation. As treasury secretary in the second Clinton
administration, he oversaw the lifting of basic financial regulations dating
from the 1930s. The Times article notes that among his current responsibilities
is deciding “whether—and how—to tighten regulation of hedge funds.”
Summers is not an
exception. He is rather typical of the Wall Street insiders who
comprise a cabinet and White House team that is filled with multi-millionaires,
presided over by a president who parlayed his own political career into a
multi-million-dollar fortune.
Michael Froman, deputy
national security adviser for international economic affairs, worked for
Citigroup and received more than $7.4 million from the bank from January of
2008 until he entered the Obama administration this year. This included a $2.25
million year-end bonus handed him this past January, within weeks of his
joining the Obama administration.
Citigroup has thus far
been the beneficiary of $45 billion in cash and over $300 billion in government
guarantees of its bad debts.
David Axelrod, the Obama
campaign’s top strategist and now senior adviser to the president, was paid
$1.55 million last year from two consulting firms he controls. He has agreed to
buyouts that will garner him another $3 million over the next five years. His
disclosure claims personal assets of between $7 and $10 million.
Obama’s deputy national
security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, was paid $3.9 million by a Washington law
firm whose major clients include Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and the private
equity firm Apollo Management.
Louis Caldera, director
of the White House Military Office, made $227,155 last year from IndyMac
Bancorp, the California bank that heavily promoted subprime mortgages. It
collapsed last summer and was placed under federal receivership.
The presence of
multi-millionaire Wall Street insiders extends to second- and third-tier
positions in the Obama administration as well. David Stevens, who has been tapped
by Obama to head the Federal Housing Administration, is the president and chief
operating officer of Long and Foster Cos., a real estate brokerage firm. From
1999 to 2005, Stevens served as a top executive for Freddie Mac, the
federally-backed mortgage lending giant that was bailed out and seized by
federal regulators in September.
Neal Wolin, Obama’s
selection for deputy counsel to the president for economic policy, is a top
executive at the insurance giant Hartford Financial Services, where his salary
was $4.5 million.
Obama’s Auto Task Force
has as its top advisers two investment bankers with a long resume in corporate
downsizing and asset-stripping.
It is not new for
leading figures from finance to be named to high posts in a US administration.
However, there has traditionally been an effort to demonstrate a degree of
independence from Wall Street in the selection of cabinet officials and
high-ranking presidential aides, often through the appointment of figures from
academia or the public sector. In previous decades, moreover, representatives
of the corporate elite were more likely to come from industry than from
finance.
In the Obama
administration such considerations have largely been abandoned.
This will not come as a
surprise to those who critically followed Obama’s election campaign. While he
postured before the electorate as a critic of the war in Iraq and a
quasi-populist force for “change,” he was from the first heavily dependent on
the financial and political backing of powerful financiers in Chicago. Banks,
hedge funds and other financial firms lavishly backed his presidential bid,
giving him considerably more than they gave to his Republican opponent, Senator
John McCain.
Friday’s financial
disclosures further expose the bankruptcy of American democracy. Elections have
no real effect on government policy, which is determined by the interests of
the financial aristocracy that dominates both political parties. The working
class can fight for its own interests—for jobs, decent living standards, health
care, education, housing and an end to war.
“Records show that four
out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants
- Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and
Citigroup ($358,054).”
Biden Lays Out
Globalist Vision to Counter Trump’s America First Agenda: ‘I Respect No
Borders’
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
11 Jul 20194,419
6:14
Former Vice President Joe Biden laid out an extensive foreign policy
vision meant to counter President Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda during
a speech in New York City on Thursday.
Biden, who
has been criticized by
former Obama administration colleagues for being on the “wrong” side of most
international issues, began his remarks by noting that American policies at
home and abroad are “deeply” intertwined.
“In 2019,
foreign policy is domestic policy, in my view, and domestic policy is foreign
policy. They’re deeply connected,” the 76-year-old Democrat frontrunner said.
“A deeply connected set of choices we make about how to advance the American
way of life and our vision for the future.”
Arguing that
Trump’s “Twitter tantrums” and “embrace of dictators” had ruined America’s
standing in the eyes of other nations, Biden said his first actions as
president would focus on strengthening democracy. To that end, Biden said his
administration would remake the U.S. education system, expand the Voting Rights
Act, reform the criminal justice system, and implement more transparent
campaign finance laws.
“We have to
prove to the world the United States is prepared to lead, not just by the
example of our power but by the power of our example,” he said.
Biden
further pledged to improve America’s moral leadership by relaxing immigration
and asylum laws, protecting illegal aliens already in the country, and
reversing policies that prevent tax dollars from going to abortion providers
overseas .
“The
challenge of following this disastrous presidency will not be just to restore
the reputation of our credibility,” Biden said. “It will be to enact a
forward-looking foreign policy for the world as we find it today and as we
anticipate it will be tomorrow and years to come.”
The
centerpiece of that “forward-looking global” agenda, according to the former vice
president, would be renewed cooperation with other nations to tackle “dangers”
like climate change, nuclear proliferation, cyber warfare, and terrorism.
“American
security, prosperity, and our way of life requires the strongest possible
network of partners and alliances working alongside one another,” Biden said.
“Donald Trump’s brand of ‘America First’ has too often led to America alone.”
If elected,
Biden promised to organize and host a “global summit for democracy” to renew
“the spirit and shared purpose of the nations of the free world.” The
summit’s goal would be to push countries to fight corruption, advance human
rights, and fight back against authoritarianism, nationalism, and ill-liberal
tendencies.
“We have to
be honest about our friends that are falling short and forge a common agenda to
address the greatest threats to our shared values,” Biden said, before
outlining the private sector’s role.
“We’ll
challenge the private sector, including the tech companies and social media
giants, to make their own commitments,” he said. “I believe they have a duty to
make sure their algorithm and platforms are not misused to sew division here at
home or empower their surveillance states to be able to facility their
oppression and censorship in China or elsewhere.”
Despite the
lofty promises, the majority of Biden’s speech was dedicated to repudiating
Trump’s “America First Agenda,” which emphasizes national sovereignty and the
American worker over global interests.
“The world
is not organized itself,” the former vice president said. “If we do not shape
the norms and institutions that govern relations among nations, rest assured
that some nation will step into the vacuum, or no one will, and chaos will
prevail.”
In order to
have a foreign policy that placed the “America back at the head of the table
working” with allies and other nations, Biden urged the country to recognize
that working in tandem across national boundaries was unavoidable.
“Let me be
clear, working cooperatively with other nations to share our values and goals
doesn’t make America as it seems to imply in this administration, suckers,” he
said. “It makes us more secure. Enables us to be more successful… No country,
even one as powerful as ours, can go alone in the challenge of the 21st
century.
“I respect
no borders and cannot be contained by any walls,” Biden added, taking a shot at
Trump’s efforts to reassert control over the U.S.-Mexico border.
With that in
mind, the former vice president committed to leading “an effort to reimagine”
America’s global priorities. At the top of his list was preventing nuclear
proliferation, which Biden hoped to accomplish by rejoining the Iran
Nuclear Deal and extending the New START
Treaty between the U.S. and Russia. Both are Obama-era
initiatives widely interpreted to have been negotiated to the detriment of U.S.
interests.
The Iran
Deal, which Trump abandoned soon after taking office, would have removed sanctions
and given the country millions in financial relief in exchange for little
oversight on their commitment to shutter their nuclear arsenal. Likewise, the
New START Treaty, which is still in effect until 2021, has been criticized by
Trump for allowing Russia to violate its parameters.
Apart from
reentering the nuclear deal, Biden signaled he would further take pressure off
Iran by ending U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s war in
Yemen. The conflict has been brewing since 2014, when Houthi rebels,
backed by Iran, attempted to overthrow the Yemeni government. Saudi Arabia,
seeking to counter Iran’s influence in the Middle East, interceded to defend
Yemen through aerial bombardment.
Although the bombing likely staved off the collapse of the Yemeni government,
it has been blamed for civilian causalities. There is also debate in Congress
as to whether America’s support for the Saudis requires military authorization.
The former
vice president also lambasted one of Trump’s major political accomplishments in
opening communication with North Korea. Even though Biden initially
criticized Trump for having fallen “in love with a murderous dictator in North
Korea,” he nevertheless suggested his administration would do a better job of
convincing the country to denuclearize by teaming up with China.
“I will
empower our negotiators to jumpstart a sustained coordinated campaign with our
allies and others including China to advance our shared objective,” he said.
“It is a shared objective.”
The one
issue Biden appeared to agree with Trump on was scaling down America’s
involvement in the Middle East.
“It’s long
past time we end the forever wars which have cost us untold blood and treasure,”
the former vice president said. “I have long-argued that we should bring home
the vast majority of our combat troops from the wars in Afghanistan and the
Middle East and narrowly focus on our mission to deal with Al-Qaeda and ISIS in
the region.”
Biden,
however, failed to mention that he had championed both the Iraq and Afghanistan
wars, even applauding President George W. Bush in 2002 for having chosen a
“course of moderation and deliberation.”
Kamala
Harris Takes Her Shot
No
other matchup would be as riveting—or as revealing—as Harris versus Trump. But
first she has to get through the primaries.
Sasha Arutyunova
·
ELIZABETH WEIL
· MAY
2019 ISSUE
· POLITICS
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So here’s the plan :
Kamala is going to walk up to Rodney Scott’s Whole Hog BBQ from
the left. At 12:50 p.m., Rodney Scott will greet her. She’ll enter through the
side door and order at the second register, from the woman in the red shirt.
Kamala, Scott, and Maya Harris—that’s Kamala’s sister and campaign chair—will
sit and eat. Kamala will then exit through the front door and walk around back
to look at the smoker. She’ll reenter through the front, cross the dining room,
and exit through the side door to take reporters’ questions.
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Rodney Scott’s Whole Hog, on the corner of King and Grove Streets
in Charleston, South Carolina, is perfect—the kind of fast-casual, deeply
American spot almost any voter can get behind: local pit master anointed by
Anthony Bourdain, outdoor seating under tasteful white Christmas lights, wooden
tables with wrought-iron legs, red stools. In the hour leading up to Kamala’s
arrival, men walking and biking slowly down Grove Street give way to police
cars, followed by unmarked cars. At T minus 10, the campaign’s 23-year-old
South Carolina communications director, Jerusalem Demsas, asks, “Can we get
Rodney out here?” She places Scott, handsome and regionally beloved, on his
mark to the left of the door. After Demsas leaves, Scott mutters, “People with
warrants must be running off the block.”
It’s all happening before you can even see her, so thick and
aggressive is the press: the 20-plus reporters with TV cameras, boom mics,
lenses larger than some dogs. Kamala shakes Scott’s hand; touches his arm;
smiles her big, open, I-am-so-happy-to-be-with-you-right-now smile. She’s
shorter, even in heels, than one expects. But she’s magnetic, authoritative,
warm—leaning in, nodding, gesturing with both hands, moving those hands from a
voter’s biceps or shoulder to a position of deep appreciation over her heart.
Kamala wends through the scrum of press, makes her way to the
counter, and finds the woman in the red shirt, who happens to be Scott’s wife.
Kamala greets her with a two-handed clasp (a simple shake would come across as too
formal and masculine). Then, right there, a decision needs to be made on the
fly: What is Kamala going to order?
Kamala Harris—the Democratic presidential hopeful and 54-year-old
junior senator from California—is a prosecutor by training. She knows well that
any misstep, anything you say or do, can and will be held against you. Her
fundamental, almost constitutional, understanding of this has made her
cautious, at times enragingly so.
Harris’s demographic identity has always been radical. She was San
Francisco’s first female district attorney, first black district attorney,
first Asian American district attorney. She was then California’s first female
attorney general, first black attorney general, first Asian American attorney
general. She was the second black woman, ever, to win a seat in the United
States Senate. But in office, she’s avoided saying or doing much that could be
held against her. As attorney general, she declined to support two ballot
measures to end the death penalty. She declined to support making drug
possession a misdemeanor. She declined to support legalizing pot. She declined
to support a ballot measure reforming California’s brutal three-strikes law.
The point is: She had power. She kept most of it in reserve. More important
than fixing the broken criminal-justice system, it seemed, was protecting her
status as a rising star. She had earned that reputation by the time the first
major profile of her was written: San
Francisco Magazine , 2007. The article also described her as
“maddeningly elusive.”
Growing up at
protests, Harris writes, she’d seen the
mechanics of fighting for “justice from the outside.” She
wanted insider power, establishment power.
It takes Harris a minute, but she decides on a pulled-pork
sandwich, with corn bread and collard greens, and a banana pudding to split
with Maya. They sit and eat, ignoring the two dozen recording devices in their
faces, talking about Scott’s vinegar-based BBQ sauce and his recipe for banana
pudding—good territory for Harris, as she’s a serious cook. Nearby, there are a
few appalled customers, including a family that has driven 40 minutes to
celebrate the father’s birthday and has no idea what’s happening, no idea even
who Harris is, and would just like this rugby squad of reporters to move aside
long enough for their son to refill his drink. But for the most part, the
patrons are dazzled by Harris, whose star quality drew 20,000 people to her
kickoff rally in Oakland. The dynamism she displayed there made the event feel
like a cause, or a concert—Kamalapalooza—and gave her campaign significant
momentum. (Laurene Powell Jobs, the president of Emerson Collective, which is
the majority owner of The Atlantic , has provided financial support
to the Harris campaign.)
After 15 minutes, right on schedule, Harris sets down her napkin
and walks around back. She takes some photos near the smoker with Scott’s
family and looks deeply into the eyes of his adorable 10-year-old son. She
tells him she’s giving a speech later and she’d like him to let her know what
he thinks of it. Then she walks back through the restaurant and exits, as
planned, through the side door so she can gaggle with the press. (NB: Gaggle is
now a verb in American politics, meaning “to answer questions shouted at you by
a group of reporters.”)
Here, again, Harris is graciously, militarily on point. All good
politicians stick to a script, but Harris speaks like a woman who knows that
facts are ammunition. Everything you say can and will be used against
you . Just this week she’s been in the weeds, so to speak, with Reefergate , a kerfuffle
that arose when Harris was asked on the Breakfast Club radio
show what music she’d listened to when she smoked pot in college and she said
Tupac and Snoop Dogg. Social media erupted with gotchas, as those artists
didn’t release songs until after she’d graduated.
Harris’s spokesperson said that she’d been answering a different
question, about the music she listens to now, but even so The New York
Times , The View , MSNBC, and Fox & Friends all
picked up the story. Harris’s own father, who is Jamaican, flamed her on Jamaica
Global Online for insinuating that she supported legalized pot because she
was Jamaican: “My dear departed grandmothers … as well as my deceased parents,
must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation
and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with
the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker.” The uproar caused the
former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau to flip out on Pod Save America :
“Donald Trump is president … We cannot be talking about this fucking shit again
with the Democratic candidates.”
Harris on the trail in South Carolina. Once a stiff and guarded
campaigner, she’s learned how to radiate warmth. (Phyllis B. Dooney)
But Harris, today, gaggling, is in top form: We don’t need a
tragedy to enact commonsense gun reform. This economy is not working for working
people. Every American needs a path to success. We need to speak truth. If
Harris’s campaign has a mantra, that’s it: truth truth truth truth
truth . She delivers her talking points while dressed, as she always is, in
her uniform of dark suit, pearls, black heels. I know—you think I shouldn’t be
writing about her clothes. But the clothes themselves are a smart, cautious
play, one that Hillary Clinton, frankly, could have benefited from. If you wear
the same outfit every single day, pretty soon the haters will run out of snarky
things to say about your appearance and move on.
Jemele
Hill: Kamala Harris’s blackness isn’t up for debate
Among Harris’s core traits, arguably her Shakespearean-tragedy
trait, the one so central to her character that it has the potential to lift
her to the highest post in the land but could also take her down, is her
discipline. It is what has allowed her to play the long game, to protect her
future. It has also infuriated constituents over the years who wanted Harris to
take a stand and fight for them today , not when she reached a
higher office. Yet Harris, on the trail, seems bolder than she has in the past.
She’s declared that she’s for reparations, for the Green New Deal, for
decriminalizing sex work and legalizing pot. She comes across as a woman who is
cashing in her chips, taking all the political and social capital she was
safeguarding for all those years and putting it on the table, declaring that
her moment is now. She’s a black female prosecutor; we have a racist,
misogynist, possibly criminal president. All of that caretaking of her
political future—what was it for if not this?
By harris’s side, on the road, is not her husband, Doug
Emhoff, a Los Angeles lawyer she married in 2014, but her sister, Maya, who was
a top policy adviser for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and,
before that, the vice president for democracy, rights, and justice at the Ford
Foundation and the executive director of the ACLU of Northern California. When
the world is following you with boom mics and long knives, Maya told me, “it’s
good to know there are people with you 100 percent. Ride or die. Not going
anywhere.”
Harris’s parents, Shyamala Gopalan and Donald Harris, met in
Berkeley, California, in the early 1960s, in the civil-rights movement. They’d
both come to the United States to study at UC Berkeley: Shyamala, at age 19,
from a Brahman family in India, to pursue a doctorate in endocrinology and
nutrition; Donald, from Jamaica, for a doctorate in economics. As with almost
everything else in her life, Harris has a set of stock stories she tells about
her upbringing, all of which are laid out in her heavily
vetted, surprise-free memoir , The Truths We Hold ,
which was released two weeks before she announced her candidacy. (The big vulnerable
reveal in it is that Harris had to take the bar exam twice.) As a girl, she
loved the outdoors; her father yelled at her, “Run, Kamala! As fast as you can.
Run!” Her mother sang along to Aretha Franklin; her dad played Thelonious Monk.
They divorced when Harris was 7. Before that, the family attended protests
together. At one, Harris, a toddler, started fussing. Her mother bent down and
asked, “What do you want?”
Harris said, “Fweedom!”
Shyamala, the daughter of a diplomat father and a mother who educated
fellow Indian women about birth control through a bullhorn, was barely 5 feet
tall, and formidable. She was supposed to return to India for an arranged
marriage. She refused. “She had literally no patience for mediocrity,” Maya
said. Her outlook was: “Be your best. If you’re going to do something, be the
best. Work hard, the whole way .” En route to becoming a prominent
breast-cancer researcher, she raised her girls primarily as a single mother.
She took Harris with her to her lab when necessary and directed her to wash
test tubes. She covered the kitchen in their small apartment with waxed paper
and made lollipops and other candy. If she bought gifts, she set up a game in
the style of Let’s Make a Deal . What do you want—Door No. 1 (the
bedroom) or Door No. 2 (the kitchen)? Inside, the girls would find a blue bike
with tasseled handlebars or an Easy-Bake Oven. In Harris’s telling, Shyamala
didn’t coddle. If her children came home from school with a problem, she would
ask, “Well, what did you do?,” in order to push them to solve it themselves.
She raised her daughters in the black community, taking them to Berkeley’s
black cultural center, Rainbow Sign, where Maya Angelou read poetry and Nina
Simone sang. In 1971, when Harris was 7, Shirley Chisholm dropped by. She was
exploring a bid for president.
When I asked Maya about her relationship with her sister, Kamala
raised her eyebrows and cocked her head, like, This had better be good .
“Well, she’s a big sister and …” Maya paused and turned to Harris. “Are you
going to qualify that?”
Harris, laughing, declined. So Maya continued: “She was protective …
Maybe just a liiiiiiiittle bossy.” If there was a problem in
the schoolyard, Harris would assess the situation and make sure Maya was okay.
The two organized a children’s protest to overturn a no-playing policy in their
apartment building’s empty courtyard. Do I even need to say it? They won.
When Harris was in middle school, Shyamala took a post at McGill
University and moved with her daughters to Montreal. Harris attended high
school there. At Howard University, in Washington, D.C., she chaired the
economics society, argued on the debate team, and pledged the AKA sorority, the
first black sorority in the country, whose alumnae show up at Harris’s campaign
events in force, dressed in AKA pale pink and green, a squadron of extra aunts.
At UC Hastings College of the Law, in San Francisco, Harris “found her
calling,” as she writes in her memoir, and decided to become a prosecutor.
This was not an easy sell for her parents. Shyamala believed, as
Harris writes, that America had “a deep and dark history of people using the
power of the prosecutor as an instrument of injustice.” Among Shyamala’s
closest friends was Mary Lewis, a professor and public intellectual who helped
lead the black-consciousness movement in the Bay Area. Donald Harris,
meanwhile, had become an economics professor at Stanford University, the first
black man in his department and one of about 10 black faculty members total. He
was a left-leaning iconoclast who wrote and taught about uneven economic
development around the world, particularly across racial lines, long before
many Americans had ever heard the phrase income inequality .
Colleagues found his progressivism threatening—he was called “too charismatic,
a pied piper leading students away from neoclassical economics,” in The
Stanford Daily .
Yet growing up at protests, Harris writes, she’d seen the
mechanics of fighting for “justice from the outside.” That dynamic did not
appeal to her. She wanted insider power, establishment power. “When activists
came marching and banging on doors,” Harris writes, “I wanted to be on the
other side to let them in.” Shyamala interrogated this logic. As Harris says,
both in her book and in speeches, “I had to defend my choice as one would a
thesis.”
It was the choice of a woman who likes control. Even sitting with
Maya, post-barbecue, in a corridor of a black church in South Carolina before a
town hall—when Harris is laughing and slightly slouched in her chair, seemingly
relaxed—she’s a woman who maintains a tight grip on the narrative. No detail is
too small.
When Harris was
district attorney, if staffers tried to leave for the
evening before she thought they should, she shouted, “Well, I
guess justice has been done! Everybody’s going home.”
“I stay with her a lot when I’m in D.C.,” Maya says, trying to
tell me a story about how Harris likes to take care of people. (I experienced
this myself. I showed up that day with a cough, and Harris instantly offered me
cough drops and green tea.)
Harris corrects Maya, quietly but firmly: “Always.”
“Always … almost always,” Maya says. “Okay, mostly.”
Harris stands her ground: “Always.”
Maya—a Stanford Law School grad and one of the youngest people
ever appointed dean of a law school—drops the point.
Harris will talk about cooking, specifically and in great detail,
if you ask her. She’ll even get out her iPad and show you the recipes she’s
marked from The New York Times ’ cooking section, which she reads in
the campaign van, after events, to relax. Chicken
Cacciatore With Mushrooms, Tomatoes, and Wine —what’s oppo
research going to do with that? I can tell you that her go-to dinner is roast
chicken and that she’s cooked almost every recipe in Alice Waters’s The
Art of Simple Food . In the kitchen, she’s a fundamentalist. “Salt, olive
oil, a lemon, garlic, pepper, some good mustard—you can do almost anything with
those ingredients.”
But turn the discussion to this moment in her life, to taking her
shot—how she’s going to both protect this opportunity and go all out; where the
line is between being too cautious and too open—and the specificity disappears.
First she pivots away from caution. “I wouldn’t say cautious as much as smart.
We have to be smart. We have to be strategic.” (This is a favorite move. For
more than a decade Harris has talked about being “smart” on crime rather than
“tough” or “soft.”) Then she turns to truth. “We have to speak truths, and in
speaking those truths, some people are surprised that I’m actually saying that
on a stage … So we have to push it.”
Lord knows we are all desperate for a president who values truth.
But that wasn’t what I was getting at. There are a great many truths in the
world. I wanted to know which ones were on her mind. Where is she going to be
bold? Where does she feel she needs to hold back?
Read: How
Kamala Harris is running against 2020 democrats
“I guess a lot of how I decide [what to] talk about is based on
what people tell me they want to discuss,” Harris says. “Not so much what they
want to discuss as what are the concerns for them.” This is going nowhere.
“Certainly I do think in specifics. And when I’m in a smaller group where
there’s more latitude to have a real conversation …”
I have limited time. I drop the question and move on, which of
course was Harris’s goal.
Harris at her law-school graduation in 1989, with her mother,
Shyamala Gopalan (center ) and her
first-grade teacher, Frances Wilson. (Courtesy of Kamala Harris)
It is truly a shame that Shyamala Gopalan isn’t here for this—her
two daughters together, Kamala running for president of the United States.
She died 10 years ago. She had colon cancer, and when the end was
near, Harris visited her in the hospital while running for attorney general.
“She was starting to tune things out. She’d stopped watching the news and
reading the paper, which was so unlike her, and she was tired. She was sleeping
a lot. And I was with her in the hospital. I was sitting next to her—here’s the
bed,” Harris says, motioning to her side, “and she was turned that way. We were
just spending time together. And she said, looking away, with her eyes closed,
I’m sure: ‘What’s going on with the campaign?’
“I said, ‘Well, Mommy, they said they’re gonna kick my ass.’ My
mother leaned over and looked at me and had the biggest smile. Just the biggest
smile on her face.”
Harris laughs. I ask what the smile meant. She says, “Bring it on.
Good luck to them.”
America—at least the blue parts— came to see
Harris as its potential savior in June 2017, when she
questioned then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions about
the Russia investigation. Sessions sat at a desk before the Senate Intelligence
Committee, his mouth pursed in a boyish smirk, his white hair looking as though
his mother had combed it for him, Harris regal on the dais above. Here was a
man thinking he was going to get away with something, as he nearly always had.
Then, in view of the world and this very smart black woman 18 years his junior,
he began to realize he was not.
Harris, detailed notes in hand, had no patience for his “I do not
recall”s and his long-winded responses to run out the clock. She just calmly
and repeatedly demanded an answer to her question: “Did you have any
communication with any Russian businessmen or any Russian nationals?” Her
mental clarity was terrifying.
Sessions broke down after three and a half minutes. “I’m not able
to be rushed this fast!,” he said. “It makes me nervous.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, in
September 2018, cemented many Americans’ belief that Harris was the woman to go
after Trump. “Have you discussed [Special Counsel Robert] Mueller or his
investigation with anyone at Kasowitz Benson Torres, the law firm founded by
Marc Kasowitz, President Trump’s personal lawyer?”
Harris—who, like any good prosecutor, knows not to pose a question
to which she doesn’t already have the answer— asked this
nearly verbatim six times, shining a hot and unflattering spotlight on
Kavanaugh , who responded, in order, as capillaries appeared to burst all
over his face:
1. “Ah …”
2. “I’m not remembering, but if you have something …”
3. “Kasowitz? Benson? …”
4. “Is there a person you’re talking about?”
5. “I’m not remembering, but I’m happy to be refreshed or if you want to tell
me who you’re thinking of …”
6. “Do I know anyone who works at that firm? I might know … I would like to
know the person you’re thinking of.”
Harris then said, “I think you’re thinking of someone and you
don’t want to tell us.” Finally Senator Mike Lee of Utah raised an objection
and stalled her line of questioning.
Historically, the prosecutor’s office has been a hard place to run
from on the left. You will never really be the progressive. By definition, you
are defending the state. On the stump, Harris reframes her prosecutorial role:
“My whole life, I’ve only had one client: the people,” which sounds nice coming
from the mouth of a public servant. What voter is not for that? Yet when Harris
entered a courtroom stating that she was there to argue “for the people,” she
was not the voice of the underdog. She was the voice of enforcement, the voice
of the law.
As California attorney general, Harris referred to herself as the
state’s “top cop.” (Sasha Arutyunova)
Jeff Adachi, the city’s longtime elected public defender (who died
of an apparent heart attack at age 59 not long after I interviewed him for this
article), met Harris when she was a first-year law student at Hastings. “Did
she always have the charm and ambition she’s known for today? Yeah,” he told
me. Adachi was “a little surprised,” he said, when Harris aligned herself “with
law enforcement and wanting to put people behind bars,” because “we had
probably talked about politics before and she was always seen as more of a
liberal progressive.” But there were very few prosecutors of color at the time,
and very few women, and, Adachi said, the prosecutor path was “seen as a
stepping stone to do something bigger or greater.”
When Harris ran for district attorney, in 2003, she challenged
Terence Hallinan, her former boss, from the right. He was entangled in Fajitagate , a
preposterous scandal that involved three off-duty police officers beating up
two residents and then demanding their takeout fajitas. The public saw the
department as an unprofessional and incompetent bunch of good ol’ boys.
(Hallinan had a low conviction rate, and he did not help his reputation when he
handed members of the Fajitagate grand jury a blank indictment form and asked
them to fill in the names of the officers they thought should be charged.)
Harris enlisted her mother to stuff envelopes and brought an
ironing board to neighborhood campaign stops, to use as a portable table.
She wasn’t a natural. She felt awkward talking about herself with strangers.
She’d had a
much-discussed relationship with future San Francisco Mayor
Willie Brown, who was 31 years older and estranged from his wife. Brown was a
local kingmaker. Still, Harris did not assume that he would anoint her. During
the campaign, her longtime mentee Lateefah Simon took a BART train into the Mission
early one weekday. “It’s, like, 7:30 in the morning—legit,” she told me. “I’m
coming up the escalator and I see Kamala Harris, by herself, in a suit at 16th
and Mission.” The intersection then smelled like feces and was filled with drug
dealers. Simon looked at Harris like, Are you stupid? What are you
doing here, dressed like that, when people are still high from the night
before?
“I’m trying to win this race!” Harris told her.
“She had on pearls!,” Simon said.
Once in office, Harris got straight to work cleaning up Hallinan’s
mess. She painted the office walls, which no one had done in years. She
replaced the jam-prone copy machine. If staffers tried to leave for the evening
before Harris thought they should, she shouted, “Well, I guess justice has been
done! Everybody’s going home.”
She endured one major scandal, over a rogue tech in her crime lab.
The tech stole cocaine and mishandled evidence, which was bad enough. But then
Harris, likely thinking she could address the issue quietly, failed to follow
procedure and inform the defense lawyers in the cases involved. One thousand
cases had to be thrown out.
Nevertheless, in her first three years as DA, San Francisco’s
conviction rate rose from 52 to 67 percent. She even created a new category of
crime— truancy —and punished
parents who failed to send their children to school. Then, as now, no one
contested the link between high-school graduation and a person’s future in a
well-paying job as opposed to jail. Harris still talks about this. She stirs
outrage at America’s collective failure to invest in the education of other
people’s children, often citing the statistic that nearly 80 percent of all
prisoners are high-school dropouts or GED recipients. But is arresting a mother
whose life is so frayed that she can’t get her child to school the best way to
set that child on the path to success? Many, particularly in the black
community, answered no. They still do. “Identity politics is stupid,” says
Phoenix Calida, a co-host of The Black Podcast , “if you’re not
going to enact identity policy.”
Harris ran against the death penalty, and, in what was arguably
the first and last truly controversial decision she’s made in her political
career, she stuck to her position and did not seek capital punishment when a
San Francisco cop was killed in the line of duty several months into her
tenure. The pressure to reverse her campaign promise was intense. Senator
Dianne Feinstein, who’d served as San Francisco’s mayor from 1978 to 1988,
chastised Harris for not doing so at the slain
officer’s funeral .
Still, Harris kept her promise—and paid for it. No police union
endorsed her for 10 years. One plausible read of her political history suggests
that this experience, less than a year into elected office, taught her to fear
and avoid taking a stand.
“It doesn’t matter if
you’re black or not if your policies are not for
black people. And her policies are not supportive of black families,” Tanya
Faison, of Sacramento’s Black Lives Matter chapter, says.
Harris calls herself a progressive prosecutor, which she’s not,
though she did lift up individual lives. She started one of the first prisoner
reentry programs in the country, Back on Track. It helped young, first-time
drug offenders find jobs and services and earn high-school degrees. But Back on
Track served only 300 people; Harris never took the program to scale. She also
mentored young women, among them Lateefah Simon, who went from being a
high-school dropout to becoming a MacArthur genius-grant winner in 10 years,
which has got to be a record.
Simon now runs the Akonadi Foundation, in Oakland, dedicated to
eliminating structural racism. The two met when Simon was 22 years old, with a
4-year-old daughter. At the time, Harris was running a child-exploitation task
force; Simon showed up at a meeting to advocate for young women who’d been
trafficked by pimps and then charged with prostitution instead of being treated
as victims of rape. Harris listened to Simon, recognized her intelligence, and
took her potential seriously. “I was like, Who is this woman? No
one listens to us,” Simon told me. “People hate us. We’re garbage, in policy
and in public.”
Harris helped Simon raise money and throw events for her
organization. She insisted that Simon enroll in college, and when Simon said
that was impossible—she was already working and raising a daughter alone—Harris
talked about Maya, who’d had a daughter herself at age 17 and then graduated
from UC Berkeley and Stanford Law School. The powerful, polished black woman
who believed that Simon could be a powerful, polished black woman too blew
Simon’s mind: “This was before Olivia Pope!” But Harris’s role as DA took some
getting used to. “Why would you want to do that?” Simon asked. “I so deeply
knew what was happening with girls in the system, and the DA was our nemesis.
The DA and the pimp, right? The DA and the pimp.”
Harris’s race for California attorney general was extremely
tight—so tight that her opponent, Steve Cooley, gave a victory speech on
Election Night, which he had to retract the next day. She campaigned as a
progressive, figuring, perhaps, that many people think they support
criminal-justice reform more than they actually do. “They like these talking
points and these platitudes,” Phoenix Calida says. Let’s be smart on
crime . “But her tough-on-crime policies—nobody’s really gonna complain,
because they feel safe.”
Harris’s record in that office is marked more by what she didn’t
do than what she did. She did not support a ballot initiative reforming
California’s three-strikes law, which incarcerated people for life for petty
crimes (an interesting family moment, because Maya, while working at the ACLU
of Northern California, had championed a proposition to take three strikes
down). She did not join the fight against solitary confinement. She did not
support two state ballot propositions to end the death penalty (and when a
federal court in California struck down the death penalty as unconstitutional,
she appealed the decision). She did not support legalizing pot. She did not
advocate for reopening several high-profile cases, including a capital one
widely suspected to have resulted in a wrongful conviction. She did not
prosecute Steven Mnuchin, the CEO of OneWest Bank and Trump’s pick for Treasury
secretary, for more than 1,000 foreclosure violations. She did not take an
aggressive stance on officer-involved shootings—most notably, she did not
endorse a bill requiring independent investigations of them and declined to use
the power of the office to investigate the killing of Mario Woods, who was shot
26 times by five police officers in 2015.
Harris has since taken strong progressive positions. But some of
her constituents still feel burned. “California has had the most police
killings, and we haven’t had any officers ever charged,” Tanya Faison, the lead
organizer for Sacramento’s Black Lives Matter chapter, told me. “That was on
her watch.” Sure, “it would be beautiful to have a black woman as the
president,” Faison continued. But “it doesn’t matter if you’re black or not if
your policies are not for black people. And her policies are not supportive of
black families.”
To be fair, while in office, Harris did institute implicit-bias
training for police officers. She did test a large backlog of rape kits. And
she did negotiate well with the nation’s five largest mortgage firms in the
aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis. She walked away from an offer of $4
billion of debt relief for California homeowners and called Jamie Dimon, the
chairman of JPMorgan Chase. She told him his side needed to come up with more
money, much more. She ended up with $20 billion.
She won her Senate seat on the night Trump was elected. By then
Harris was walking the line she’s on now: using “fearless” as a campaign slogan
despite letting fear stop her from taking positions. Trump has been a
productive foil for her, highlighting the value of her legal training, casting
her discipline as flattering and calm rather than pinched and nervous.
In Washington, she hasn’t done much—let’s be honest, who in the
Senate has in recent years? She introduced a few bills: one, with Kentucky
Republican Rand Paul, to study reforming
the cash-bail system ; another, with 13 Democratic colleagues, to begin
addressing the high mortality rates black women face in childbirth. She also
introduced, with fellow Democratic presidential candidate Cory Booker and
Republican Tim Scott, a bill to make lynching a hate crime. This last one was
classic Harris: tough on crime, seemingly progressive, entirely risk-free. It
passed the Senate unanimously.
By 4:30 p.m., 1,000 people had packed into the gym
of Charleston’s Royal Missionary Baptist Church, where the scoreboard read 2020
and AKA sorority sisters rolled in wearing full pink-and-green dress uniform.
They are not even a little ambivalent about their candidate. She’s theirs; they
love her. Who among us hasn’t been scarred by an early humiliation and
retreated from hard decisions? They asked where the reserved AKA section was.
Backstage, Harris chatted her way through the photo line, a
mainstay of the contemporary American political campaign: local officials and
other VIPs get what is basically a school photo with the candidate—in this
case, next to a state flag, backed by a royal-blue drape. She has an amazing
ability to focus on the person right in front of her, even as a large and
impatient crowd claps and shouts “KA-MA-LA” for her to come onstage.
“I ate with Rodney Scott today, so I’m happy,” Harris announced to
cheers when she finally appeared. Microphone in hand, she slipped into a subtle
southern accent. “We have to restore in our country truth and justice, truth
and justice,” she said. The crowd, right there with her, called out: “Amen!”
“That’s right!”
This Charleston event was a 1/20th-scale model of Harris’s
campaign-kickoff rally in Oakland . There, Harris had clapped along with
her 20,000 supporters as she made her way to the podium. Just the sight of a
strong female candidate who was not Clinton came as a relief. Many Democrats
remain traumatized by 2016, the matchup of a deliberate and dutiful woman,
straining to mop up all messes, against an impetuous, state-trashing bully. But
in dropping her guard a little, Harris has been trending away from Clinton and
toward Michelle Obama—adopting a persona that’s less programmed, hipper, and
more relaxed, all of which is more likable. Of course, we care intensely about
likability, especially in our female candidates, so perhaps shucking the
appearance of restraint is a prudent A-student decision as well.
Among the many lines Harris offers on the
stump is: I intend to win this. You don’t quite expect to hear a
woman say that.
Harris’s campaign is shorter on specifics than Clinton’s was
(perhaps, again, in reaction to Clinton). It’s shorter on specifics than some
of her fellow 2020 candidates’ campaigns, though she did lay out, in her
Oakland speech, a basic platform, designed to appeal to a liberal base, not
attract independents: Medicare for all; universal pre-K and debt-free college;
a $500-a-month tax cut for low-income families; women’s reproductive rights; a
path to citizenship for immigrants.
Then, at minute 32 of the speech, in a moment that managed to be
both subtle and shocking, Harris addressed the thing almost nobody wants to say
but everybody who is close to Harris thinks about: her personal risk. “As
Robert Kennedy many years ago said, ‘Only those who dare to fail greatly can
ever achieve greatly.’ He also said, ‘I do not lightly dismiss the dangers and
the difficulties of challenging an incumbent president, but these are not ordinary
times, and this is not an ordinary election.’ ”
That line passed, and Harris moved on to pablum like “Let’s
remember: In this fight we have the power of the people.” But Harris is a
target. She knows it. Reports of hate crimes increased 17
percent during Trump’s first year in office. In late February, a Coast Guard
officer was accused of plotting to kill Harris , along with
19 others, including journalists, activists, and Democratic politicians. The
very fact of her campaign, Harris standing out there every day before crowds of
thousands, presenting herself to the American people—some of whom will merely
dissect her record; others of whom will see her female body and her brown skin,
and want her dead—is bold and brave. “Through her career it’s been a very
serious thing,” Harris’s close friend and adviser Debbie Mesloh told me. “She
and I talked about it [regarding] Obama … The first day he had Secret Service.
The first time I saw him in a bulletproof vest.” Even at the relatively small
book talk Harris gave at the cozy Wilshire Ebell Theatre, in Los Angeles, a
security guard stood behind her, not even off in the wings, visible to the
audience the whole time.
After Harris finished speaking in Oakland, her family joined her
onstage: her husband, Doug, who is white; her sister, Maya; Maya’s husband,
Tony West, who is black (and currently the chief legal officer at Uber,
formerly the third lawyer from the top in Obama’s Justice Department); Maya’s
daughter, Meena; Meena’s partner and children. The family is beautiful and the
family looks like the future—and not the future in which white nationalists
win.
Alumnae of the AKA sorority, which Harris pledged at Howard
University, turn out to her campaign events in pink-and-green dress uniform.
(Phyllis B. Dooney)
It’s hard not to be ambivalent about a cautious
person, particularly a person who has been working for you but holding back,
saving for the future. In truth, it’s hard not to feel ambivalent about all the
candidates. There are so many contenders, more of them popping up like
white-haired crocuses every day. One is too old. (Well, two are too old.) One’s
too mean to her staff. One said she was Native American and she’s not. One
Instagrammed his trip to the dentist. So many Americans have conflicting
desires for this election. They want a transformative leader who will push this
country forward. They want a rescue, a captain to steady our faltering ship of
state and restore the rule of law. Most of all, they want a winner—whoever that
is, just tell them, they’ll vote that way. They want a sure thing. They need a
sure thing. And then they feel scared and frustrated by all the options,
because that’s not how the system works.
Among the many lines Harris offers on the stump is: I
intend to win this . You don’t quite expect to hear a woman say that. But
Harris has become very good at tapping into the emotions of a crowd of
Democrats and delivering what they want to hear. The 2020 Democratic National
Convention is 15 months off, though. Over the next year, the campaign is sure
to get ugly—Trump hasn’t even given Harris a nickname yet. I asked her whether
she thought that, as a black woman, she had an extra-narrow lane of acceptable
behavior to maneuver in. “I don’t think so,” she said. Then she downgraded that
sentiment. “I hope not.”
Has the United States dealt with its own racism and misogyny
enough to elect a black woman president? There’s little rational basis for
saying yes. But there was little rational basis for believing that a man named
Barack Hussein Obama could win the White House either, let alone a huckster
named Donald Trump.
That Friday night, on the 110-mile ride from Charleston to
Columbia, South Carolina, Harris read recipes online. She flagged one for
salted-caramel cookies and emailed it to Lily Adams, her communications
director, who happens to be former Texas Governor Ann Richards’s granddaughter.
(Adams later laughed and said, with genuine affection, “When do you think I’m
going to bake these? I’m going to New Hampshire with you on Monday.”)
In the morning Harris, Maya, and Adams, and the whole rugby team
of journalists, met up on Columbia’s Lady Street—yes, Lady Street—for some
retail politics. First stop was Styled by Naida, a vintage-clothing store run
by Naida Rutherford, who grew up in the foster-care system and was homeless
before she steadied herself economically by hosting stylish garage sales. It
was another ideal campaign stop: Rutherford, the success story, helped Harris
pick out a hat and a black belt. Then, as Maya paid for the items, Harris
noticed a brightly colored sequined coat, a chessboard of turquoise, purple,
yellow, green, and sky blue. The jacket was just about the furthest fashion
choice imaginable from Harris’s standard dark blazer. Still, Rutherford, a good
saleswoman, encouraged Harris, a good candidate, to try it on, and Harris did.
She looked in the mirror, the horde of journalists to her back. “This really
would be perfect for the Pride parade,” she said.
A nice, unguarded human moment. The jacket was way too big, and
she’ll almost certainly never wear it anywhere but the parade. But you’d have
to be a monster—and a tone-deaf politician—not to want to support Rutherford.
Harris bought the coat.
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That afternoon, Harris held another town hall, this time at
Columbia’s Brookland Baptist Church, and sitting in her car in the church
parking lot, waiting for the doors to open, was 77-year-old Gladys Carter.
Carter had fought in the civil-rights movement. She was heartbroken and
horrified by the turn her country had taken with Trump’s election, and she
admired how Harris had handled Kavanaugh. But she had questions about criminal
justice. “Some African Americans in my circle of friends have expressed concern
about her actually imprisoning a lot of our people, more so than she did the
others,” Carter said. “They say they have to really think hard before they’re
able to trust her. She’s got to prove that she’s willing to come out and do
some things differently.” At the same time, Carter felt that Americans have
deeper, even more pressing problems—namely, our dangerous, lying president.
Maybe a tough female prosecutor is our best hope. “This country has been
controlled by white males for how many years? The way things are right now—they
screwed it up.”
Harris made it home for dinner with her husband that evening. She
slept in her own bed, in her own house, where she likes to relax by curling up on
the couch in her sweatpants and reading more recipes. But by that night, social
media had pounced on her brief moment of spontaneity, making fun of her
sequined jacket, her amazing technicolor coat, harping on how stupid and
frivolous it is for a woman to be trying on clothes on the presidential
campaign trail.
It’s not easy out there. You can’t expect much forgiveness on Lady
Street. Yet Harris, as ever, is playing the long game. She often repeats her
most succinct one-line pitch to prospective voters: “We’re going to need
somebody who knows how to prosecute the case against this president.”
She packed a bag for New Hampshire: all dark suits.
Kamala Harris Set To Raise
Money With Former Wells Fargo Executive
The lobbying
executive defended the bank during the fake accounts scandal. When Harris was
California attorney general, she sued the bank for privacy violations.
By Kevin Robillard
·
·
·
·
·
A former Wells Fargo executive who
defended the bank during its massive fake accounts scandal is hosting a
fundraiser for Democratic California Sen. Kamala Harris ’ presidential
campaign on Saturday, according to an invitation obtained by HuffPost.
The former executive, Miguel Bustos, worked from 2013 to 2017 as
Wells Fargo’s senior vice president of government and community relations,
where he oversaw lobbying and community outreach efforts in six western
states: California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Montana and Utah.
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Bustos is hosting a fundraiser for Harris on Saturday night in San
Francisco, timed to coincide with the city’s Pride Weekend celebrations and one
day before the crucial second-quarter fundraising deadline.
The minimum donation for an attendee is $500, while “supporters”
need to contribute $1,000 and “sponsors” who get a photo with Harris need to
contribute the federal maximum donation of $2,800.
The fundraiser lends ammunition to progressives, many aligned with
the rival presidential campaigns of Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie
Sanders (I-Vt.), who are skeptical of Harris’ willingness to take on Wall
Street and the financial industry.
In a statement, Harris spokesman Ian Sams defended the candidate’s
record.
“She literally investigated Wells Fargo as Attorney General and
won an $8.5 million settlement for Californians, and she’s the only major
candidate in this race who’s actually prosecuted banks for screwing people
over,” Sams said. “Her record of real action to take on bad corporate actors on
behalf of consumers shows exactly who she would fight for as president.”
Sams is referring to an $8.5 million settlement that Harris and
five district attorneys in the state reached with the bank in March 2016. The
bank had violated state privacy laws by failing to “timely and adequately”
disclose it was recording phone calls with members of the public. (The
fine is equivalent to about .2% of Wells Fargo’s profit during the quarter the
settlement was announced.)
ASSOCIATED PRESS California Sen. Kamala Harris sued
Wells Fargo when she was the state’s attorney general. Now, she’s raising money
with one of its former executives.
But progressive critics have typically focused on Harris’ role
in a more high-profile settlement: the national mortgage settlement that
Harris, the Obama administration and other state attorneys general reached with
Wells Fargo and the four other largest banks in America in 2012. Progressives
have long said the $25 billion agreement didn’t go nearly far enough to punish
the banks and help homeowners trapped by the foreclosure crisis in the wake of
the Great Recession. No bank executive involved in the foreclosure fraud went
to prison.
Wells Fargo’s highest-profile recent scandal was the fake accounts
debacle. From 2009 to 2015, the company opened up more than 3.5 million fake
bank and credit card accounts, leading nearly 200,000 customers to pay
unnecessary fees. Warren aggressively investigated the bank, and the scandal
led to the resignation of then-CEO John Stumpf, along nearly $3 billion in
fines and settlement costs.
During the scandal, Bustos defended the bank when the city council
of Vallejo, California, considered moving its accounts away from Wells Fargo.
While Bustos admitted the bank had “made mistakes,” he also pleaded with the
city council to stick with it.
“The one thing I learned in life is that no one is perfect, no
one,” he said, according to a September 2017 article in the Vallejo
Times-Herald . “But one thing I learned is that you have forgiveness and you
have redemption. What we are asking is, you know what, work with us to be a
better bank.”
The city council eventually voted to cut ties with Wells
Fargo.
Bustos’ LinkedIn profile says he is now the senior director of the
center for social justice at GlideSF, a prominent progressive church in San
Francisco.
Harris’ presidential campaign, meanwhile, has received more than
$16,000 from Wells Fargo employees, according to FEC records – including
maxed-out donations from the company’s former chief compliance officer and an
executive who oversaw the company’s credit card business. Harris also received
$2,300 from Brenda Wright, a Wells Fargo executive whose position on San
Francisco’s pension board sparked protests in 2013.
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Kamala Harris' sincerity problem
Ryan Cooper
Illustrated | Spencer Platt/Getty Images, Ethan Miller/Getty
Images, tampatra/iStock, Tatomm/iStock
The Democratic presidential
primary is pretty clearly a four-way race at this point. As per the Real Clear Politics poll average , Joe Biden is still out in front
with 27 percent, with Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris tied for second with 14
percent, and Elizabeth Warren only a point behind them. The other 2,000
candidates are all down in the low single digits or lower.
Not long ago Harris was only
doing half as well. Clearly she was the major beneficiary of the recent
debates, especially her forceful confrontation with Biden over school
desegregation. But afterwards, she backtracked on
the issue, saying that in cases where school segregation is not the result of
discriminatory laws, "any tool that is in the toolbox should be considered
by a school district."
That is directly at odds with her
debate statement that the "federal government must step in" when
schools refuse to desegregate. It's not the first time Harris has given reason
to believe her answers to thorny questions are less than sincere.
The Harris campaign seems to be
trying to thread this needle by arguing that mandatory integration was
necessary back in the bad old days of Jim Crow, but not today. "Federally
mandated busing was essential in the '60s/'70s to force the integration of
schools," Harris spokesman Ian Sams said in a statement , but
today "we need a comprehensive approach[.]" Harris has not released a
formal desegregation program of her own, though she says she supports the Fudge-Murphy plan which would provide $120
million in grants for voluntary integration.
But this historical distinction
doesn't hold up, because segregation is not much better today than it was in
the 1950s. Indeed, it has gotten considerably
worse over the last few decades , as whites have moved out of
cities and schools which got out from under court desegregation orders rapidly
re-segregated themselves. White Americans generally loathe integration,
whether they're liberal or
conservative — even those without school-age children, because wealthy white
parents buying into "good" (read: white) school districts increases
neighborhood property values, and thus integration might reduce them.
All this is why the Sanders
campaign has a considerably more aggressive desegregation
plan than Fudge-Murphy. In addition to more subsidies, he would
bring back desegregation orders and end the ban on federal funding for busing,
in addition to other measures. Warren and former Housing and Urban Development
Secretary Julián Castro, on the other hand, would indirectly
address the problem by overhauling housing subsidies and
regulations, allowing more low-income people to live in wealthier neighborhoods.
(As my colleague Jeff
Spross argues , ending the funding of schools by local property taxes
altogether would be better still.)
But that isn't the only Harris
backtrack from the debates. When moderators asked which candidates would get
rid of private insurance in favor of Medicare-for-all, Harris raised her hand,
only to clarify
afterwards that "private insurance would certainly exist for
supplemental coverage." She did the same herky-jerky move during
and after a CNN town hall a few months ago.
Now, private insurance would
probably exist in some small form under Medicare-for-all, but the vast bulk of
private coverage would certainly be eradicated, if only because the Medicare
coverage would be so much better. Canada, for instance, has a rump private
insurance sector mainly because its Medicare system does not cover most vision,
dental, or prescription drugs (which the Sanders bill would include).
Insofar as Harris is trying to reassure private insurance companies or their
customers, she is either not being straight about her favored policy, or she
doesn't actually favor it.
Most disturbing of all, Harris
has not been straight about her record as California's attorney general. She
has boasted a great deal about her role in the national mortgage settlement of
2012, in which banks paid money to avoid mass prosecutions over the robosigning
scandal.
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In reality, as David Dayen detailed at The Intercept , the
settlement was at bottom yet another bank giveaway — on top of the TARP bailout
and Tim Geithner's backdoor subsidy of banks through a fake homeowner
assistance program. As Dayen writes, "more families lost their homes as a
result of transactions facilitated by the national mortgage settlement than
those who got a sustainable loan modification to save them." Nearly half
of the dollar value of Harris' settlement was for debt that could not be
legally recovered in the first place. She also declined
to prosecute OneWest , run by now-Treasury Secretary
Steven Mnuchin from 2009-2015, after her own prosecutors said they discovered
over a thousand violations of foreclosure law committed by the bank.
(OneWest donated $6,500
to Harris' attorney general campaign in 2011, and Mnuchin himself donated
$2,000 to her Senate campaign in 2016.)
Back in the 2004 election, Republicans
made great hay out of John Kerry's supposed flip-flopping. And to be clear,
there is nothing wrong with changing one's mind when new evidence comes to
light.
The problem with Harris instead
is her tendency to say what is popular in front of progressive audiences while
defaulting to the political status quo when it comes time to make tough
decisions. It would have taken real courage to stand up to the Obama
administration in 2012 when it was pushing states hard to sweep the robosigning
scandal — which involved flagrant document fraud on an industrial scale — under
the rug. But Harris was the top law enforcement official in the largest state
in the country. She certainly could have gotten far better terms than she did.
Even attempting to fix the many crises
afflicting the United States — from hideous inequality, to climate change, to
structural racism, to a broken foreign policy — is going to take some steely
resolve, not just talking a big game. So far Harris' is not promising on this
front.
Barack Obama: A Lifelong Story of Russian
Collusion
TREVOR LOUDON
CONTRIBUTOR
Commentary
Several U.S. presidents have genuinely colluded with Russia or the former Soviet Union, but none more so the 44th president of
the United States, Barack
Obama . It’s no exaggeration to say that Obama
owes his entire career to Russian collusion .
In March 2012, President Obama made his famous “off mic” remarks to
then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev: “This is my last election. After my
election, I have more flexibility.” Medvedev replied, “I understand. I transmit
this information to Vladimir.”
Was this some innocent remark, or was it just as it seems: a friend
passing a message to a friend?
Obama has surrounded himself with pro-Moscow “friends” all his life. Why
should he desert his friends just because he was president of the United
States?
Just after Obama’s election to the presidency on Nov. 15, 2008, Sam
Webb, then-chairman of the still pro-Moscow Communist Party USA, told his party comrades : “The
left can and should advance its own views and disagree with the Obama
administration without being disagreeable. Its tone should be respectful. We
are speaking to a friend.”
A lifelong friend.
Frank Marshall Davis
The young Obama, when he was 10 or 11 years old, was introduced to
the Hawaii-based poet Frank
Marshall Davis by his maternal grandfather. Obama
maintained a relationship with the septuagenarian Davis until he left Hawaii
for Occidental College in Los Angeles at the age of 18.
Davis had joined the Communist Party USA in Chicago by 1943, at the
latest. He was militantly pro-Soviet, writing poems in praise of both Stalin
and the Red Army.
In 1948, Davis and his communist wife moved to Hawaii. According to Davis’s autobiography, he was
recommended to the Hawaiian comrades by secret Communist Party USA
members Paul Robeson and Harry Bridges of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union.
Before going underground in 1950, the Hawaiian Communist Party was one
of the most dynamic in the United States at the time. The mainland put huge
resources into the Hawaiian Communist Party because the Soviets wanted the U.S.
military presence on the islands shut down. The Hawaiian communists were
charged with agitating against the U.S. military bases at every opportunity.
FBI documents refer to information that Davis “was observed photographing
large sections of the [Hawaii] coastline with a camera containing a telescopic
lens.” The FBI information states: “Informant stated that DAVIS spent much of
his time in this activity. He said this was the third different occasion DAVIS
had been observed photographing shorelines and beachfronts. Informant advised
that it did not appear he was photographing any particular objects.”
The FBI clearly suspected military espionage. Davis was placed on the
“Security Index,” which meant he was marked for immediate arrest should war
break out between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Alice Palmer
Long-serving Illinois state Sen. Alice Palmer provided Obama’s entrée into electoral politics. Obama was
Palmer’s chief of staff when she ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1994, then
he took over her state Senate seat in 1996.
Palmer was a pro-Soviet propagandist.
In 1983, Palmer traveled to Czechoslovakia to the Soviet-controlled
World Peace Council’s Prague Assembly. At the time, she served on the executive
board of the Communist Party USA-dominated U.S. Peace Council.
In 1985, Palmer was part of a delegation of 16 African-American
journalists to the Soviet Union, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia. Palmer
represented her own Chicago-based “Black Press Institute,” which was
essentially a vehicle for disseminating Soviet propaganda to America’s black
population.
The trip was organized by Don Rojas , then executive of the International Organization of Journalists (IOJ),
in conjunction with the Black Press Institute, the National Alliance of Black
Journalists, and the National Newspaper Publishers Association—the United
States’ largest organization of owners of black newspapers.
American-educated Rojas was the former press secretary to Grenada’s late
communist leader, Maurice Bishop.
Palmer told the Communist Party USA’s People’s Daily World:
“The trip was extraordinary because we were able to sit down with our counterparts
and with the seats of power in three major capitals—Prague, Berlin and Moscow.
We visited with foreign ministers, we talked with the editors of the major
newspapers in these three cities. …
“It was a very unusual trip because we were given access. … Every effort
was made to give us as much as we asked for. … We came back feeling that we
could speak very well about the interest of the socialist countries in
promoting peace.”
In March 1986, Palmer covered the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
(CPSU) Congress in Moscow for the Black Press Institute.
In June 1986, the People’s Daily World published a Black Press Institute
article by Palmer on the CPSU conference, entitled “An Afro-American Journalist
in the USSR.” The article praised Soviet “central planning” and included such
statements as:
“We Americans can be misled by the major media. We’re being told the
Soviets are striving to achieve a comparatively low standard of living compared
with ours, but actually they have reached a basic stability in meeting their
needs and are now planning to double their production.”
Palmer was elected IOJ vice president for North America at the
organization’s 10th Congress, held from Oct. 20–23, 1986, in Prague. She also
traveled to the Soviet Union and Bulgaria during the same trip. Palmer’s duties
were to include coordinating the activities of IOJ chapters in the United
States, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean.
The IOJ was a Soviet front operation based in Prague, until its
expulsion by the Czech government in 1995.
David Axelrod
A longtime friend of Obama, David Axelrod , led Obama’s 2008 and 2012 election campaigns and served as a senior
adviser to the president.
In the 1940s, Axelrod’s mother, Myril Axelrod , wrote for the left-leaning New York magazine “PM.” Though not
officially a communist publication, several Communist Party USA members worked
on the paper.
PM’s Washington correspondent, I.F. Stone , was later identified as a Communist Party USA member and a Soviet
intelligence agent.
One of PM’s writers, Earl Conrad, also wrote for the leftist magazine
Negro Story, as did Obama’s mentor, Frank Marshall Davis.
While studying in Chicago, Axelrod was mentored by longtime Chicago
journalist and activist David Canter .
Canter spent his childhood in the Soviet Union where his father, Harry
Canter, former secretary of the Boston Communist Party, translated Lenin’s
works from Russian into English. This work earned Harry Canter an audience with
Stalin in 1932. After World War II, Harry Canter settled his family in Chicago,
where he took over a radical paper called the Chicago Star—for sale because its
owner, Frank Marshall Davis, was moving to Hawaii.
David Canter joined the Communist Party USA and would later become an
associate of Obama.
By 1960, David Canter had teamed up with well-known Chicago Communist
Party USA member LeRoy Wolins . The duo owned a company
called Translation World Publishers, which specialized in publications from and
about the Soviet Union. The company soon attracted the attention of the House
Un-American Activities Committee, which suspected Canter and Wolins of being
conduits for Soviet propaganda.
In a report prepared by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in
May and July 1962, entitled “Communist Outlets for the Distribution of Soviet
Propaganda in the United States,” David Canter was heavily quizzed about
payments his company received from the Soviet Union.
After the U.S. government demanded that Translation World Publishers
register as the agent of a foreign power, Canter de-registered the company.
The committee went on to find that:
“Translation World Publishers was an outlet for the distribution of
Soviet propaganda … this publishing house was subsidized by Soviet funds and
was created by known Communists to serve the propaganda interests of the
U.S.S.R.”
In 1963/64, the Soviet Union actively tried to undermine Republican
presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, in favor of Democrat Lyndon Johnson.
In their 1989 book, “The KGB Against the Main Enemy—How the Soviet
Intelligence Service Operates Against the United States,” the United States’
premier communist researcher, Herbert Romerstein, and former KGB officer
Stanislav Levchenko examined Soviet attempts to blacken Goldwater’s name and
other Soviet campaigns of the time:
“The false charge that Goldwater was a racist was only one of the smear
campaigns used against his candidacy by the Soviets and their surrogates. The
American Communists covertly assisted in this ‘active measures’ campaign.
“A 1963 booklet claimed that Goldwater was conspiring with the John
Birch Society to organize a ‘putsch,’ or violent insurrection, to take over the
United States in 1964. The booklet, ‘Birch Putsch Plans for 1964,’ contained no
address for the publisher, Domino Publications. The author used the not-very
imaginative pseudonym, ‘John Smith, as told to Stanhope T. McReady.’ There was
nothing to tie this publication to the communists until an ad for the book
appeared in the pro-communist National Guardian for April 25, 1963, listing the
publisher as ‘Domino Publications, Suite 900, 22 West Madison Street, Chicago,
Illinois.’
“This was in fact the address of Translation World Publishers, which was
registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act as an agent of the Soviet
Union. The co-owners, LeRoy Wolins and David S. Canter, were identified by the
House Committee on Un-American Activities as members of the Communist Party
USA.”
Axelrod’s mentor was a Soviet-funded professional “black propagandist.”
Axelrod used similar smear tactics to help Obama win a U.S. Senate seat in 2006
and the presidency in 2008 and 2012.
Valerie Jarrett
The “other half of Obama’s brain,” Valerie Jarrett was a longtime Obama family friend and the president’s closest
adviser through his entire eight years in the White House.
FBI documents show that Jarrett’s
maternal grandfather, Chicago businessman and Housing Authority Chairman Robert Taylor , was “in contact” with alleged Soviet spy Alfred Stern “on a number of occasions.” At one point, the pair were actually
in business together. Under investigation by the FBI, Stern fled the country in
the late 1950s through Mexico to the Soviet Union before settling in
Czechoslovakia.
Jarrett’s father, James Bowman , was also accused of associating with Stern.
FBI files also reveal, “Bowman was also a member of a Communist-sympathizing
group called the Association of Internes and Medical Students,” according to Judicial Watch.
Another document in the files was a note from J. Edgar Hoover to FBI
officials in Denver instructing them to investigate “James Edward Bowman” for
his connections to other suspects.
The Judicial Watch report explained, “According to Bowman’s government
file, the Association of Internes and Medical Students is an organization that
‘has long been a faithful follower of the Communist Party line’ and engages in
un-American activities. Bowman was born in Washington, D.C., and had deep ties
to Chicago, where he often collaborated with fellow Communists.”
Jarrett’s father-in-law, prominent Chicago journalist Vernon Jarrett , was a leader of the Communist Party USA youth wing, American Youth for
Democracy, in 1946.
In early 1948, the communist-controlled Packinghouse Workers went on
strike in Chicago. Vernon Jarrett served on the publicity committee of the
communist-run “Citizens’ Committee to Aid Packing-House Workers,” alongside
none other than fellow journalist and comrade Frank Marshall Davis.
Vernon Jarrett was also a fan of Obama. He watched his career from its
early stages and became an influential supporter.
In 1992, Obama worked for the ACORN offshoot Project Vote to register
black voters in aid of the Senate campaign of Carol Moseley Braun , who also had strong Communist Party USA ties.
Obama helped Moseley Braun win her Senate seat, then took it over
himself in 2004, backed by the same communist/socialist alliance that had
backed Moseley Braun.
Commenting on the 1992 race, Vernon Jarrett wrote in the Chicago
Sun-Times on Aug. 11, 1992:
“Good news! Good news! Project Vote, a collectivity of 10 church-based
community organizations dedicated to black voter registration, is off and
running. Project Vote is increasing its rolls at a 7,000-per-week clip. … If
Project Vote is to reach its goal of registering 150,000 out of an estimated
400,000 unregistered blacks statewide, ‘it must average 10,000 rather than
7,000 every week,’ says Barack Obama, the program’s executive director.”
Council for a Livable
World
Established in 1962 by former Hungarian communist sympathizer and
alleged Soviet spy Leo Szilard , the
Washington-based Council
for a Livable World (CLW) has done huge damage to the
U.S. military—all to the benefit of Moscow.
The CLW’s modus operandi is to fund leftist senators and
congressmembers, then lobby them hard for defense cuts and disadvantageous arms
reduction treaties with the Soviet Union/Russia.
The CLW claims to have had an early influence on both Obama and his vice
president, Joe Biden.
“Council for a Liveable World has a history of helping to elect new
candidates who can make a difference in the Senate, such as a little-known
state senator from Illinois named Barack Obama and a 29-year-old Joe Biden in
his first statewide contest,” the CLW wrote in 2012.
The CLW helped fund Obama’s 2004 U.S. Senate race. Obama has also been
pictured (circa mid-1990s) alongside longtime CLW leader Massachusetts-based
socialist Jerome Grossman .
CLW Executive Director John Isaacs wrote in Grossman’s eulogy: “Now, as
an aside, we have a dictum at Council for a Livable World. If we support a
candidate in his or her first major political contest, he or she will always
remember who was with them at the beginning. That has been true with such
political figures—(he says modestly)—as President Barack Obama and Vice
President Joseph Biden.”
In October 2007, the CLW praised Sen. Obama “for his pledge to pursue
a world without nuclear weapons and to improve U.S.–Russian relations.”
At a speech at DePaul University, Obama stated : “Here’s what I’ll say as president:
America seeks a world in which there are no nuclear weapons. … We’ll work with
Russia to take U.S. and Russian ballistic missiles off hair-trigger alert, and
to dramatically reduce the stockpiles of our nuclear weapons and material.”
As the Soviet Union/Russia has cheated on every single arms-reduction
treaty with the United States, Obama was effectively proposing unilateral U.S.
disarmament.
Former Sen. Gary Hart, then chairman of the CLW, applauded Obama’s
pledge.
“By placing the issue of the elimination of nuclear arsenals at the
center of his foreign policy, Sen. Barack Obama has performed a great public
service and deserves attention and respect from all those who see this issue as
crucial to our times and who have been watching and waiting for strong
leadership and courage,” Hart said in a statement.
In June 2013, President Obama used a speech in Berlin to outline plans for
further reductions in the U.S. nuclear arsenal “if Russia agrees to pare back
its weapons at the same time.”
According to the New York
Times:
“Resuming a drive toward disarmament that he had largely shunted aside
over the past two years, Mr. Obama will propose trimming the number of
strategic warheads that each of the two big nuclear powers still maintains by
up to a third, taking them below the 1,550 permitted in the treaty he signed
with Russia in his first term, a senior administration official said. That
would leave each country with just over 1,000 weapons.
“Mr. Obama will also declare that he will work with NATO allies to develop
proposals for major cuts in tactical nuclear weapons, which are not covered by
the existing treaty. Russia, which has far more tactical nuclear weapons
deployed than the United States and Europe do, has firmly resisted such cuts.
There are fears that its tactical weapons are in parts of Russia where they
risk being seized by terrorist groups.
“Mr. Obama will also announce that he will host a final nuclear security
summit meeting in the United States just before he leaves office. …
“’The most important thing he could do is lay out the broad agenda for
the next three and a half years,’ said John Isaacs, executive director of the
Council for a Livable World, an advocacy group.
“In addition to further reductions, Mr. Isaacs said, there are several
policy changes Mr. Obama could take that would move the country further away
from cold war-style national security. He said the president could take nuclear
weapons off high alert and change nuclear doctrine to say that the only purpose
of such weapons would be as a deterrent.”
Under the Obama administration, while America disarmed, Moscow pulled
well ahead of the United States in virtually every realm of nuclear and
conventional weaponry.
The situation has gotten so bad that President Donald Trump had to unilaterally
withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (which Russia has
continually cheated on) in order to give the U.S. military some chance of
catching up to Moscow.
How Many Russian Agents Do
You Know?
Most Americans don’t personally know any Russian agents. Most Americans
aren’t surrounded by friends and advisers who know Russian agents.
Obama has been surrounded by pro-Moscow communists and probable Soviet
agents his entire life. Several of his political enablers also have Soviet/Russian
connections.
How unlucky can one guy get?
Obama’s economic, social, and military policies damaged the United
States in a myriad of ways. Many of his military and foreign policies also
directly or indirectly benefited Moscow.
Despite a lifetime of radical associations, Obama never had to undergo
any form of a security background check to serve in the Illinois State Senate,
U.S. Senate, or the White House. It’s highly unlikely he could have passed a
security check to drive a school bus, let alone serve as the leader of the Free
World.
Imagine what a two-year, multimillion-dollar, taxpayer-funded
investigation into Obama’s Russian ties might uncover.
If Obama was a fully recruited agent of Moscow, tasked with giving
Russia a significant military advantage over the United States, and
economically weakening and socially dividing the nation, how would he have
conducted his presidency (or his post-presidency) any differently?
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New
Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and
terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.
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