2020 – The Year of Bad Decisions
Can Biden do something right?
No Stimulus, No Peace. Is that the Plan?
Summer's here and the time is right for fighting in the street –The Rolling Stones
Are the Republicans really so stupid that they will leave more than 30 million people without any income? Or, are they playing a game of chicken, waiting for violence to break out across the country so that Trump can act like a strong man, dictator, and send in the troops; and once more to be greeted as the hero by grateful voters.
Meanwhile, the Democrats … With friends like this, you don’t need enemies. They seem content to sit around waiting for the whole thing to go up in smoke.
While the Dems play a blame game, the Republicans may be playing a far more dangerous game. By the way, Joe Biden, and the cast of characters, who took the stage for the Democratic Debates all seem content to take a low profile since that dog and pony show has run its course.
What ever happened to people stepping forward as leaders, instead of as politicians?
——————————————————————
Let’s pick a Vice President
The New York Times, July 31, said the choice is coming down to Karen Bass or Susan Rice. In other words, we are being teased with having a progressive Black woman and Left Coaster from L.A., Karen Bass, or a neo-conservative warmonger and Clinton crony, Susan Rice.
NYT may be playing us, or may be getting played. It has happened before that when an appointment like this is made, other candidates will get touted as a sure thing, when they’re not. This ploy makes their constituents feel that their interests are being considered even though someone else is ultimately picked.
————————-Who will become Acting President?
That someone else unfortunately may be Kamala Harris. What’s wrong with Harris? Only that she has spent a number of years as a prosecutor putting Black people in jail. Her family background includes her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, who is an MD, originally from from Chennai, India, her father is Donald Harris, a retired economic professor from Stanford, who seems to be more progressive than his daughter. He is from Jamaica where, he says, a great-grandfather was a slave owner, Hamilton Brown. However, the website, Snopes.com says that is not proven. Harris self-identifies as Black. Her parents divorced when Kamala was seven years old. Her mother moved to Montreal, Canada, along with Kamala and her sister Maya. Kamala graduated from high school in Montreal.
While it shouldn’t matter what Harris’ great-great-great grandfather did with his life, this being America, it would probably be dragged into the election campaign by Trump supporters. More red meat for them would be casting doubt on whether Harris’ father and mother were U.S. citizens. Trump, himself, had fun with trying to prove that Obama was ineligible for the Presidency because he was not born in this country. The fact that he had a birth certificate from Hawaii made no difference to Trump. In any case, what should matter is what Kamala Harris, herself, has done in this lifetime. Therein lies the problem.
There is no debate that Harris’ political career was launched with her getting choice appointments to important state boards. The appointments were bestowed upon her by then Speaker of the California Assembly, Willie Brown, who was apparently having an affair with Harris. Later, Brown became Mayor of San Francisco and bankrolled her campaign for San Francisco District Attorney against perhaps the most progressive DA in the country, Terrance Hallinan. The Hallinan family was well known in left wing circles. Hallinan’s father, Vincent had run for President in 1952 on the left-wing Progressive Party ticket.
In 2004, Harris won by dramatically outspending Hallinan and by campaigning as the “Law and Order” candidate. Brown raised so much money that the Harris campaign exceeded the campaign spending limits and was fined more than $30,000. She had been recruited by Hallinan, but turned on him, perhaps with the urging of Willie Brown, who was repopulating city government with his loyalists.
In 2008, Harris ran for California Attorney General against Republican Steve Cooley. The election was a cliffhanger that wasn’t decided until provisional ballots were counted 22 days later. Her record as Attorney General is summarized in the YouTube video below.
The Democrats should know better than to run a former prosecutor for VP this year. Prosecutors are those people who put alleged criminals behind bars, most often alleged Black and Latino criminals. It was said that Biden had previously decided on Amy Klobuchar for his running mate. Unfortunately for her, she had been a former prosecutor in, of all places, Minneapolis. Before moving on to the U.S. Senate, she had once been the County Attorney who declined to prosecute Officer Derek Chauvin on an earlier charge of police misconduct. He went on to murder George Floyd in broad daylight in a particularly cruel manner. When word got out about her not prosecuting Chauvin, Klobuchar took herself out of the running for VP, saying that Biden should pick a woman of color. Why hasn’t Biden committed to pick a woman of color? Perhaps the big VP surprise awaiting us is Hillary Clinton!
The other prosecutor running for President was, of course, Kamala Harris. That is until the second Democratic debate when her campaign for the nomination was utterly destroyed by Tulsi Gabbard, who enumerated some of her crimes against African Americans. Although Harris was the only person of Indian ancestry running for the nomination, she was behind Gabbard, who is Samoan, but is a professed Hindu, in fund-raising from that politically-aware ethnic group. Harris showed little aptitude for winning over her own ethnic group, or her home state of California.
It took only a couple of minutes for Gabbard to dismantle any hopes Harris had of becoming the Democratic nominee. Her short litany of Harris’ misdeeds sound like an incantation. Harris seems to shrink before the national TV audience. When it was over, Harris had no response to any of the allegations of what she had done to poor people and people of color. In subsequent contact with the media, Harris still had no response or refutation. Instead, she insisted on attacking Gabbard’s effrontery in meeting with Syrian President Bashar Assad, and to belittle her standing in the polls (before Harris gave up her campaign, she was polling lower than Gabbard.)
As we all know, the allegations against Harris, no matter who made them, needed to be answered. Harris’ reaction of attacking the messenger, and not addressing the message, simply demonstrated that the charges were likely true.
Of course, the final decision for a Vice Presidential candidate will not be made by Biden. He only needs to acquiesce. Biden’s campaign was faltering due to his lackluster performance compared to Bernie Sanders, and the numerous other wannabes. It was only the intervention of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and former President Obama, who applied sufficient arm-twisting to compel the other candidates to drop out of campaign, in unison, that saved Joe’s campaign and made him the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party.
If Biden wins the election, he will probably be a titular President who lets others do the actual work of running the government. This is bad news for the rest of us since he will be surrounded by neo-liberals in his Cabinet, Wall Street and in Congress, and by warmongers in the military, National Security Council and Secret Police.
Will his election stifle the pace of protest? Hardly anyone picketed Obama, even though he was given the well-deserved title, Deporter-in-Chief, by immigration activists. But perhaps there is enough ferment these days that thousands will stay in the streets. If not we’ll just be biden our time for the next four years.
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
You can catch up on back issues at our news site, The Left Coast.
If you want more articles like this, please support The Left Coast news site with a sustainer of $5/mo, or $35 for the entire year. With your support, we can help build the new media, and pay other progressive writers for their labor.
Please leave a comment on this or any other article. It’s just below this note, and next to the heart.