Last week, Joe Biden, presumed Democratic Party presidential nominee, announced that he was picking Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate. The other presidential campaigns reacted.
Libertarian Party presidential candidate Jo Jorgensen issued the following statement:
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden,
who has stressed that he wanted to pick a running mate who is
“simpatico” with his own views, has chosen former prosecutor Sen. Kamala
Harris. By choosing her, Biden, who was the architect of the 1994 crime
bill, has “doubled down on his penchant for using the law against
people who commit nonviolent, victimless crimes,” said Dr. Jo Jorgensen,
the Libertarian candidate for president.
During
her tenure as attorney general for California, Kamala Harris oversaw
the incarceration of over 1,500 people convicted of cannabis violations.
“What
Kamala Harris did in the courtroom would put her in good company with
the most brutal police on the streets,” said Jorgensen. “She is guilty
of prosecutorial brutality, the silent partner of police brutality.”
“Compare
a typical episode of police brutality–getting slapped around and thrown
in jail for a night–with being thrown in prison for ten years,” said
Jorgensen. “That’s the kind of prosecutorial brutality for which Kamala
Harris is notorious.”
In
1998, Daniel Larson was wrongfully charged and convicted of possession
of a knife. After ten years in prison, the Innocence Project took his
case and got him exonerated. Kamala Harris fought his release every step
of the way. To add insult to injury, her office put the kibosh on
Larson’s suit to get compensation for wrongful incarceration.
Harris
also liked using her power as a D.A. to threaten parents whose kids
were absent from school. From 2004-2011, she sent a letter to every San
Francisco parent of public-school students, threatening to prosecute
them for truancy under a law that punishes the parents if their child is
more than 30 minutes late for school, 20 times.
“Kamala
Harris’s idea of helping kids who don’t show up for public school is to
threaten their parents with a $2,500 fine or jail time,” said
Jorgensen.
“The president
sets the tone for law enforcement in our country, and the vice-president
is next in line,” said Jorgensen. “If we want to put an end to police
brutality, the last thing we need is a champion of prosecutorial
brutality one heartbeat away from the White House.
Green Party presidential candidate Howie Hawkins offered:
Former Vice President Joe Biden’s
selection of Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate shows Biden
doubling down on his long history of excessive law enforcement and
support for the war on drugs.
In a year of national uprising
against police violence, Kamala Harris who spent 25 years in law
enforcement is an ironic selection. Her campaign for president ended
quickly as she dropped out of the race two months before the Iowa Caucus
and three days before the filing deadline to be on the ballot in her
home state of California, where she was behind in the polls. Part of her
decline was caused by voter dismay at her reversal on Medicare For All,
when she flip-flopped to a policy that subsidized private health insurance and misleadingly continued to call it Medicare for All.
While Joe Biden was the principal legislative architect
of the drug war and mass incarceration from his time on the Senate
Judiciary Committee, Harris’s record as a prosecutor and Attorney
General was as a foot soldier in the drug war and mass incarceration. As
the San Francisco District Attorney drug-related prosecutions
increased from 56 percent in 2003 to 74 percent in 2006. In 2019, she
admitted smoking marijuana in college but while Attorney General of
California from 2011-2017, Harris sent at least 1,560 people to prison
over marijuana-related offenses. In 2014, a week after the New York
Times called for legal marijuana, Harris laughed when asked if she
supported it. Now, she supports ending federal laws against marijuana, a
position not held by Biden.
While Biden sponsored mandatory
sentencing, Harris defended one of the worst mandatory sentencing laws
in the US, California’s ‘three strikes law’ that also applied to “minor”
felonies. She campaigned against a voter initiative that would have
reformed this to require serious or violent felonies for life sentences.
Harris did not take a position on two ballot initiatives in 2012 and
2014 that would have reduced punishment for low-level crimes and given
judges more flexibility at sentencing. Both initiatives passed without
her support.
After the killing of Michael Brown in
Ferguson, MO, police accountability was on the agenda in the California
legislature. Harris refused to take a position on racial profiling by police.
As Attorney General she refused to investigate highly questionable
police shootings in Los Angeles 2014 and in San Francisco in 2015.
The Socialist and Equality Party's presidential candidate Joseph Kishore wrote a column:
With the selection of Kamala Harris to be the running mate of Joe
Biden, the framework of the 2020 elections has been set. As was to be
expected, the Democrats have chosen the most right-wing candidates to
run the most right-wing campaign possible.
There is a certain inevitability to the choice of Harris. In July of last year, the World Socialist Web Site—based
on a survey of who would be the worst, most reactionary and at the same
time most suitable choice for second spot on the Democratic Party
ticket—predicted
that Harris would most likely be named the vice presidential candidate
if she failed to win the nomination. She had all the ruthlessness,
narcissism and careerism requisite for the job, plus the ethnic
background to suit the Democrats’ obsession with racial and gender
identity.
Kamala Harris is a dyed-in-the wool political reactionary.
This year has seen mass demonstrations throughout the country in
response to the police murder of George Floyd. As a direct result of the
policies of the ruling class, nearly 170,000 people have died to date
in the coronavirus pandemic, with the daily death toll now at more than
1,000. There is growing anger in workplaces over the homicidal
back-to-work campaign and broad opposition among teachers to the efforts
to reopen the schools. Tens of millions of people are unemployed, and
they have been cut off from federal benefits and face being evicted from
their homes.
In the midst of this monumental political, economic and social
crisis, and against the backdrop of so much suffering, the American
people are to be offered the “choice” between the fascistic Trump, the
conman from New York, and a Democratic Party ticket headed by a
corporate shill from Delaware and an ex-prosecutor from California. This
says everything about the degraded state of American politics.
Following the announcement by Biden on Tuesday, the media leapt into
action with its nauseating effusion of state propaganda. The selection
of Harris has been universally proclaimed to be “historic,” a watershed
moment.
In terms of her politics, there is clearly nothing “historic” about
Harris. As district attorney in San Francisco (2004-2011), attorney
general in California (2011-2017), and, finally, US senator (2017 to the
present), Harris has compiled a track record of backing the police,
locking up workers and immigrants, covering up for the banks and
supporting militarism and war.
Wall Street is certainly happy with the choice. “A VP pick that big
business can back,” ran a headline on the inside pages of the New York Times.
As for the military, its main concern is what will happen if the aging
Biden doesn’t make it through a full term. Since the beginning of the
Trump administration, opposition from the Democratic Party has been
focused on issues of foreign policy. Harris, who has no other agenda
than her own self-promotion, will be silly putty in the hands of the
military-intelligence apparatus.
The “historic” character of the Harris nomination is premised
entirely on her race and gender. She would be the “first
African-American vice president,” the “first Asian-American vice
president” and the “first female vice president.” She already is the
“first Black woman on the national ticket of the Democrats or
Republicans.” Everything is about the symbolism involved in the choice
of Harris, with not a word about the program of a Democratic Party
administration.
As if any of this makes a bit of difference for workers, whatever
their race, gender or ethnicity. As if, moreover, the world has not
already had the example of Obama, not to mention Clarence Thomas,
Condoleezza Rice, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton and many others.
The selection of Harris exposes the utterly reactionary character of
politics that bases itself on race, gender and other forms of
identity—anything but class. In response to the eruption of protests
against police violence, the Democrats did everything they could to
obscure the class issues, promote racial divisions and propagate the lie
that the violence of the police is an expression of the oppression of
“black America” by “white America.” The outcome of this racialist
campaign is the selection as their vice-presidential candidate of a
right-wing ex-prosecutor who once covered up evidence to keep an
innocent man on death row and worked to tear immigrant children from
their parents.
Those invested in the racialist campaign have jumped on the bandwagon
to declare the selection of Harris “historic.” Ibram Kendi, author of How to Be An Antiracist and one of the chief inspirers of the New York Times’
1619 Project, wrote on Twitter that “the Democrats now have a
presidential ticket that reflects the American people better than the
GOP ticket and every presidential ticket in US history.”
According to Kendi, politicians “reflect” the American people not
because of the socioeconomic forces they represent, but solely by their
racial and ethnic background and their gender. Interests are determined
by race. This is not progressive politics, but right-wing and racialist
politics, which shares much in common with the fascistic politics of
Donald Trump.
Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King wrote that he was “incredibly
proud to see a brilliant Black woman, and HBCU [historically black
colleges and universities] grad, chosen as a vice presidential nominee.”
This was, he added, the stuff “dreams are made of.”
Commenters on Twitter quickly pointed to the contrast between this
statement and his declaration in November 2018 that he would never
support Biden or Harris because “they both helped build & advance
mass incarceration.”
Political principles have never been a strong suit of Democratic
Party hacks. They look forward to positions within the Biden
administration and other opportunities that will reap financial rewards.
Then there is Bernie Sanders. In the Democratic Party primaries,
Sanders won widespread support for his attacks on social inequality and
his calls for a “political revolution” against the establishment. On
this basis, he emerged as the main contender against Biden for the
Democratic Party nomination. In the end, however, the “Sanders wing” of
the Democratic Party got nothing.
This has not, however, stopped Sanders from praising the outcome.
Sanders tweeted that Harris “will make history as our next vice
president.”
Since packing in his campaign in mid-March, Sanders has assumed his
assigned role as principal cheerleader for the Biden campaign, along
with Elizabeth Warren, et. al. The more that social anger grows, and the
more the Democrats are exposed, the more determined is his support for
the Democratic Party.
What an exposure of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Jacobin
magazine and other political agents of the Democratic Party who claimed
that Sanders was the path to the transformation of American politics
and even the realization of socialism! They make fools of themselves
every election. They will tag along with the Democratic Party in one
form or another, no doubt accompanied by talk about how they are
building a “progressive movement” inside that party of American
imperialism, along with other varieties of political fraud. Every four
years, the same play is performed.
There is something incredibly degrading and shameful about the whole
process, testifying to the intellectual and cultural collapse of
American politics.
Certain conclusions must be drawn from this experience, not only
about Sanders, but about an entire type of pragmatic politics that hopes
for easy answers to the crisis confronting the working class without a
direct challenge to capitalism and its state apparatus.
The politics of the working class must begin with a serious
theoretical understanding, rooted in a Marxist and class analysis. The
Democratic Party is a party of Wall Street and the military-intelligence
apparatus. The politics of race and gender identity, which it
relentlessly promotes, gives expression to the interests of layers of
the upper-middle class, which employ this right-wing ideology in their
fight for positions of power and privilege in the state, academia and
corporate boardrooms. The pseudo-left, including the DSA and associated
organizations, represent this social layer.
All of this is directed against the working class and the development
of a genuine movement for socialism. Objective conditions, however,
have created the conditions for a powerful eruption of class struggle,
in the United States and internationally. The coronavirus pandemic, as
the Socialist Equality Party has explained,
is a “trigger event in world history that is accelerating the already
far-advanced economic, social, and political crisis of the world
capitalist system.”
Nothing progressive will emerge except through the intervention—the
interference—of the working class. The Socialist Equality Party and our
election campaign are oriented to the development of a socialist
leadership in the working class. Our campaign is the only campaign that
raises critical questions of perspective, exposing the reactionary
promoters of racial conflict and the cheerleaders of Sanders’ “political
revolution.”
The SEP is spearheading the organization of workers against the
homicidal policy of the ruling elite, in opposition to all factions of
the ruling class, on the basis of a revolutionary program to put an end
to inequality, war, dictatorship and the capitalist system. This is the
way forward.
To support our election campaign and join the SEP, visit socialism2020.org.
Joseph Kishore—SEP candidate for US president
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