Kamala Harris. Credit: Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times.
Joe Biden’s selection of U.S. Senator Kamala
Harris as his vice-presidential running mate, was lauded by an editorial
opinion in the British Guardian as “a safe and historic appointment”. But a
cursory examination reveals Harris to be the archetype of what the contemporary
U.S. politician has become: One who works ceaselessly for the ‘Donor Class’ and
who thus is beholden to powerful lobbies. This has informed her record as a prosecutor
and legislator who is committed to the perpetuation of America as a ‘Carceral
State’. She is also a servant of the National Security State, which means that
she will maintain the bi-partisan arrangement which has ensured that America
has remained committed to the militarism which has characterised its foreign
policy since the ending of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War.
The selection
by Democratic Party Presidential Candidate Joe Biden of U.S. Senator Kamala
Harris as his running mate for the forthcoming elections is striking on several
accounts. As what is often termed as a ‘Woman of Colour’, Harris’s selection
certainly deviates from the typical presidential candidate as being a person
who is both male and White Anglo-Saxon. Nonetheless, there is much about her
which remains typical of the calibre of candidates for either the presidency or
vice-presidency. Many candidates like her have typically been selected from the
pool of serving U.S. Senators. They are creatures of one of the major political
parties and must have performed some sort of public service. Yet, in Harris’s
case there are two noteworthy issues that mark her out as a flawed candidate.
Firstly, her
abilities as both a politician and a public servant are rather questionable.
And secondly, she represents many of the negative attributes of the modern
political operator in either of the parties that represent the duopoly of
American politics.
There is much
to perplex over her selection by Biden. Harris was a big loser in the
Democratic Party Primaries during which her poll-ratings were so low that she
was forced to suspend her campaign before formally withdrawing. Her conduct on
the hustings marked her as a poor campaigner, and her performance during the
televised debates revealed her to be a poor debater.
During the
debates, Tulsi Gabbard, a Congressional representative from the State of
Hawaii, took Harris to task over her record as a District Attorney in the city
of San Francisco. Harris, Gabbard reminded, had put hundreds of marijuana smokers
in jail, and later when asked about whether she had ever smoked the substance
had responded with a smirky giggle. It speaks of Harris’s grotesque sense of
entitlement and rancid hypocrisy to boast about imprisoning people while boldly
admitting that she had committed the same crime.
And she
shamelessly -and awkwardly- once used this in projecting herself in the context
of the identity politics that is so prevalent today. Harris once gave a speech
at a forum at which she boasted of having smoked marijuana while alluding to
her part-Jamaican origins. But to his credit, her father, the parent of
Jamaican parentage, rebuked her for feeding into the stereotype of Jamaicans as
freewheeling, ganga-smoking outlaws.
He issued a statement
saying the following:
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 anyway, jokingly or not, with the fraudulent stereotype of
the pot-smoking joy-seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics.
That attempt at gaining an
imaginary street cred was mirrored by her painfully contrived assertion that
she had been a fan of the Rap Music icons 2Pac and Snoop Doggie before they
became famous; implying that she got high while listening to their music during
her college years.
Her competence, as well as
her integrity, as a public prosecutor was compromised when, as Gabbard revealed
during the debate, Harris was found to have been prepared to conceal
exculpatory evidence in relation to an innocent prisoner on death row until a
court order forced her to reveal the information.
One reason why Joe Biden
selected Harris is presumably because he feels that her tough stance on crime
will render her immune to attacks by the Republican Party which traditionally
finds fault in many Democratic Party candidates as liberal progressives who are
‘soft’ on crime. But while Harris, resolutely proud of her record, insists on
describing herself as a progressive, her goals in this area have been anything
but progressive. There is an ineluctable contradiction between her posture as a
progressive and her record as a prosecutor. This is borne out of her policy of
using prisoners -some of them beyond their sentences- as cheap labour. In
defiance of a court order, she failed to release ‘Minimum Custody Inmates’,
that is, persons who have committed minor crimes on parole. When challenged in
court, state lawyers under her control argued that releasing these sorts of
prisoners would deny the State of California an important pool of labour. When
this line of argument was brought to the attention of the public, Harris
claimed that she had no knowledge of the policy.
A crucial defect in
Harris’s attempt to portray herself as a progressive who is nonetheless ‘tough
on crime’ can be garnered from the fact that her policies have impacted on the
poor and the marginalised, and not the well-off. For instance, her policy of
prosecuting the parents of children who were truant meant that parents who did
not have the financial resources to pay the fines levied on them were sent to
jail, a factor which then impacted on the very issue sought to be addressed:
the absence of parental direction in the life of the affected children.
Harris’s self-promoted zeal
at prosecuting transgressors did not apparently extend to Wall Street and its
banks. For instance, she declined to prosecute OneWest Bank for foreclosure
violations in 2013. OneWest was the bank for which Steve Mnuchin, the present
Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, served as CEO from 2009 to 2015.
Harris’s deeds thus expose
her for what she is: the member of a privileged class who irrespective of their
professed ideologies and party affiliations serve the monied interests of an
oligarch-controlled political system.
It explains Harris’s penal
policies geared towards using prisoners as a cheap form of state labour, and
her stances on imprisoning those who smoke contraband drugs, as well as those
parents who could not pay fines for truant children. A high prison population
is good for the business interests that benefit from the nation’s Prison
Industrial Complex.
Her failure to prosecute
Mnuchin’s bank is consistent with the attitude of the political class that they
cannot bite the sources that fund their campaigns and feather their nest eggs.
For in America, banks who bring the nation to near economic collapse through
their greed and avarice are “too big to fail” and receive bailouts, while the
lives of ordinary people who suffer from foreclosure, unemployment and
bankruptcy do, it would appear, count for little even to those who label
themselves as progressive.
Harris is simply the latest
of a litany of politicians who are foisted on the American public because of
their pliability to the interests of those who run the major political parties,
in this case the Democratic Party. The decision to choose Harris clearly has
more to do with her as someone who is capable of being controlled rather than
her competence as an administrator and her ability as a political campaigner.
The suspicion that she has
emerged because of the calculations on the part of the power brokers in the
Democratic Party is an irresistible one. So resolute are they in the quest for
maintaining control that they clearly do not mind losing to Donald Trump by
offering as a presidential candidate a man whose faculties are clearly in sharp
decline, and a woman who is a proven vote-loser within her own political party.
The objective of these higher ups in control of the Democratic Party machinery
thus would appear to be to ensure that the left-wing or genuinely progressive
segment of their party does not displace this control. After all, a defeat by
Donald Trump in November will not remove their access to the funding from the
oligarchs who sponsor the party whether it controls the White House or not.
A similar scenario holds
true for the Republican Party.
The question then is when,
if ever, will the insouciant American masses wake up to the fact that they need
to remake their political and economic system by removing those mechanisms
which enable monied groups to control their political leaders. Their attention
for the most part is taken up by the false ideological divide in the duopoly
ruling them and the manufactured culture wars which keep them divided along
racial and social lines.
To sum up, Kamala Harris
typifies the politician of the era who is short on principle, and who is
lacking in the ideas required to energise and unite Americans at a period in
time when the country is increasingly divided and its global prestige and
economic power is in noticeable decline.
Harris, like others
including Joe Biden, has nothing new to offer.
She has demonstrated none
of the intellectual resources required to project any foundational philosophies
upon which her political beliefs are based. On the contrary, she is
chameleon-like and has changed her position on so many issues that the only
conclusion that a reasonable observer can reach is to describe her as a
political opportunist. For in accepting Biden’s offer to be his running mate,
Harris is evidently willing to set aside her strongly worded campaign
accusation of Biden as a racist whose anti-bussing rhetoric during the Civil
Rights era impacted on her as a schoolgirl, just as she is willing to bury her
belief in the veracity of the women who came forward with allegations of sexual
misconduct against Biden.
Harris is clearly a
‘company man’, that is, a person dedicated to carrying out the policies
dictated to her by those who control the Democratic Party and the financial
interests who facilitate such control.
Indeed, Harris’s record so
far as the criminal justice system is concerned, only demonstrates her servitude to the sort of
interests which ensures that a nation which composes less than 5% of the
world’s population houses just under 25% of the world’s prisoners. Further, the
foreign policy views which she expressed during the Democratic Primary debates
indicate that she would be a willing servant of the National Security state and
the endless wars it has promulgated and sustained for over two decades.
In sum, Kamala Harris’s
candidature is nothing short of a disaster for her party, as well as her
country which at this moment in history is desperately in need of a higher
calibre of political leaders.
© Adeyinka Makinde (2020).
Adeyinka Makinde is a
writer based in London, England.
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