SOCIOPATH AND ETHICALLY DEPRAVED LAWYER KAMALA HARRIS AND HER COPS - There is a reason why neo-fascist cop unions have been so generous to her!

 

THE GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY’S real agenda: stage themselves as ‘populist’ but serve billionaires, banksters and a borderless nation.

This post focuses on KAMALA HARRIS, one more sociopath lawyer.

“You have someone saying all the right things now, but when she had the opportunity to do something about police accountability, she was either not visible, or when she was, she was on the wrong side.” (Mr. Campos backed Mr. Sanders’s presidential bid.)

Kamala Harris was sworn in as San Francisco’s district attorney in January 2004. Memos show Ms. Harris didn’t act to adopt a policy for disclosing past misconduct by law-enforcement.

“At every stage she carried out her work as expected, sending ordinary people to jail, blocking exculpatory evidence, defending unconstitutional practices and preventing prosecution of the wealthy.

In 2014 she appealed the ruling of a federal judge in On the issue of police violence she has consistently sided with police, notably arguing “the left has to get over its bias against law enforcement.” In 2015 she opposed a bill that would require her office to investigate police shootings. She further opposed calls for statewide standards on the use of body cameras by police.

Wasn’t Kamala Harris the one who put tons of blacks into jail for excessive sentences when she was a prosecutor in California?

Harris sees that, which is why she's jumping at the chance.  Ever since her days as Willie Brown's mistress, sleeping her way to the top in politics, she's known a good opportunity when she's seen one. 

WATCH: Kamala Squirms When Asked About Her Previous Stance on Law Enforcement

Beth Baumann

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) has labeled herself as a tough-on-crime, "progressive prosecutor," despite multiple left-wing news organizations concluding otherwise. She made herself out to be pro-law enforcement, a law and order kind of Democrat. It was something that backfired during her failed presidential election. Now that Democrats have decided lawlessness and chaos is their MO, she's having to backpedal and work overtime to cover up that image she tried so hard to portray.

That stance came back to bite her in the butt on Sunday when CNN's Dana Bash asked her, point blank, whether or not she's flip-flopped on the public safety issue. 

"Because this is where you come from, law enforcement, and you know, 'top cop' is where you come from, I want to ask about something that you wrote in a 2009 book, which is: 'If we took a show of hands of those who would like to see more police officers on the streets, mine would shoot up.' And then in June of this year you said to the New York Times, 'It is status quo thinking to believe that putting more police on the streets creates more safety. That's wrong.'" Bash read. "So, my question for you now, in retrospect, looking at your time as DA and Attorney General of California, through the lens of 2020, did you help contribute to what you describe as a 'status quo thinking,' that more police equals more safety?"

Harris became visibly uncomfortable at the question. After all, it wasn't that long ago that she claimed to be the DA who would prosecute crimes (and even went so far as to lock up a high number of African Americans for truancy-related issues). 

"I'm very clear that we've got to, in America, reimagine how we are accomplishing public safety and what I believe now and what I believe then remains true and consistent, which is, if you look at the communities that have no or very little police presence, as compared to those who have a high degree of police presence, you will see stark differences," the vice presidential nominee replied.

According to Harris, the biggest differences in areas where less law enforcement is present has to do with resources. 

"What you will see is well-funded public schools, higher rates of home ownership, small businesses that have access to capital," she said. "You'll see families who have jobs where they don't have to worry about getting to the end of the month and feeding their children."

She said investing in communities is the way to have safe communities, although she failed to explain what exactly that means and looks like. Of course, Harris also failed to answer Bash's follow-up question: would her hand still shoot up in favor of more of a police presence? 

"I would say now, which is what I would say then, which is if a woman is raped, a child is molested, or one human being murders another human being, that there will be a police officer that responds to that case and that there will be accountability and consequence," she said matter-of-factly. 

It's hard to know what Harris thinks or believes. She flip-flops so much. Her "tried and trued" stance seems to be whatever the popular opinion of the day is.

Democratic vice presidential nominee Sen. Kamala Harris says while she is not in full possession of the facts in the Jacob Blake shooting, based on what she has seen, she believes charges "should be considered in a very serious way and that there should be accountability." pic.twitter.com/HqQ88zgPcN

— State of the Union (@CNNSotu) September 6, 2020Kamala Harris

Didn’t Act for 5 Years on Policy to Help Ensure Fair Trials

https://www.wsj.com/articles/kamala-harriss-balancing-act-demands-of-law-enforcement-and-reformers-11560194725

Memos show the Democratic presidential candidate, advised in 2005 to adopt progressive policy as San Francisco district attorney, delayed before backtracking amid setback

 

Kamala Harris was sworn in as San Francisco’s district attorney in January 2004. Memos show Ms. Harris didn’t act to adopt a policy for disclosing past misconduct by law-enforcement.

PHOTO: GEORGE NIKITIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

SAN FRANCISCO—Five years before a major scandal on her watch as San Francisco district attorney, Kamala Harris confronted a choice that pitted two of her most important constituencies against each other.

Aides to Ms. Harris in 2005 recommended adopting a policy popular among progressive criminal-justice reformers to disclose past misconduct by law enforcement in order to help ensure defendants received a fair trial. At the same time, police unions, who were already critical of the novice politician, opposed such a move as invasive and unnecessary.

Ms. Harris, now a U.S. senator from California and candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, didn’t enact the policy at the time. That ended up backfiring years later in 2010, when her office’s lack of what’s known as a “Brady policy” was central in a scandal in which around 1,000 criminal cases were dismissed and a judge criticized Ms. Harris for violating defendants’ rights. She backtracked and enacted a policy in the aftermath.

In response to questions for this article, Ms. Harris released a statement. “It took too long to implement, but I am proud we implemented a Brady policy in the D.A.’s office that was later called ‘a model for other jurisdictions’ ” by the California Supreme Court, the statement said.

Her decision not to follow the suggestions of her staff—whose detailed preparations to enact a Brady policy haven’t been previously reported—sheds new light on a 15-year political career that, people who have worked with Ms. Harris say, has been marked by attempts to satisfy a liberal base’s demands that she be a “progressive prosecutor” while also securing backing from police officers.

Until recently, support from politically powerful police unions was critical for any candidate seeking office as a prosecutor in California, particularly those like Ms. Harris who have advocated for changes in the system, said Brian Brokaw, who managed her successful campaigns for state attorney general in 2010 and 2014.

‘Top Cop’ Kamala Harris’s Record of Policing the Police

As a senator and a contender to be Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s running mate, Kamala Harris has spoken out on issues of police misconduct, although she has struggled to reconcile her calls for reform with her record as a prosecutor.Credit...Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

By Danny Hakim, Stephanie Saul and Richard A. Oppel Jr.

 

During this summer of tear gas and turmoil, Kamala Harris has not been quiet.

On “The View,” the California senator spoke about “reimagining how we do public safety in America.”

On the Senate floor, she sparred with Rand Paul after the Kentucky Republican blocked a bill to make lynching a federal crime, and she is among the Democrats sponsoring policing legislation that would ban choke holds, racial profiling and no-knock warrants.

On Twitter, she expressed frustration that police officers who killed a Black Kentucky woman, Breonna Taylor, during a drug raid gone wrong, “still have not been charged.”

As a leading contender to be Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s running mate in the final days before his decision, Ms. Harris has emerged as a strong voice on issues of police misconduct that seem certain to be central to the campaign. Yet in her own, unsuccessful presidential run, she struggled to reconcile her calls for reform with her record on these same issues during a long career in law enforcement.

Indeed, an examination of that record shows how Ms. Harris was far more reticent in another time of ferment a half-decade ago.

Since becoming California’s attorney general in 2011, she had largely avoided intervening in cases involving killings by the police. Protesters in Oakland distributed fliers saying: “Tell California Attorney General Kamala Harris to prosecute killer cops! It’s her job!”

Then, amid the national outrage stoked by the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., came pleas for her to investigate a series of police shootings in San Francisco, where she had previously been district attorney. She did not step in. Except in extraordinary circumstances, she said, it was not her job.

Still, her approach was subtly shifting. During the inaugural address for her second term as attorney general, Ms. Harris said the nation’s police forces faced a “crisis of confidence.” And by the end of her tenure in 2016, she had proposed a modest expansion of her office’s powers to investigate police misconduct, begun reviews of two municipal police departments and backed a Justice Department investigation in San Francisco.

Critics saw her taking baby steps when bold reform was needed — a microcosm of a career in which she developed a reputation for taking cautious, incremental action on criminal justice and, more often than not, yielding to the status quo.

 

The daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father who met in Berkeley in the social protest movement of the 1960s, Ms. Harris has said she went into law enforcement to change the system from the inside. Yet as district attorney and then attorney general — and the first Black woman to hold those jobs — she found herself constantly negotiating a middle ground between two powerful forces: the police and the left in one of the most liberal states in America.

Ms. Harris declined to be interviewed for this article. But over the years, she has proudly labeled herself both a “top cop” and a “progressive prosecutor.”

In her 2009 book, “Smart on Crime,” she wrote that “if we take a show of hands of those who would like to see more police officers on the street, mine would shoot up,” adding that “virtually all law-abiding citizens feel safer when they see officers walking a beat.”

Earlier this summer, in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, she told The New York Times that “it is status-quo thinking to believe that putting more police on the streets creates more safety. That’s wrong. It’s just wrong.”

All of which poses a question: Is Ms. Harris essentially a political pragmatist, or has she in fact changed? And is she the woman to lead a police-reform effort from the White House?

An Officer’s Death

Ms. Harris was elected San Francisco district attorney in 2003, defeating her former boss, Terence Hallinan. He was seen as one of the nation’s most progressive district attorneys, unafraid to confront the police, once even indicting the city’s police chief, albeit briefly.

Mr. Hallinan also had a low conviction rate, and Ms. Harris viewed his office as dysfunctional. The police union endorsed her in a runoff.

But in April 2004, barely three months into the job, Ms. Harris found herself at odds with the police after a gang member gunned down an officer named Isaac Espinoza.

 

During her campaign, Ms. Harris had opposed the death penalty, in part, as being discriminatory toward people of color, and she did not seek it for Officer Espinoza’s killer. Rank-and-file officers were infuriated. Heather Fong, the new police chief, called it an affront to those who “risk their lives for the sake of the public’s safety.”

Then, at the funeral, Ms. Harris was blindsided when Senator Dianne Feinstein called for the death penalty.

The blowback “totally traumatized her,” said Peter Keane, a former member of the Police Commission, which oversees the city’s Police Department. Throughout her tenure, he said, Ms. Harris had “traditional prosecution, pro-police, instincts. She has always tried not to be a target of the police.”

In 2007, she stayed quiet as police unions opposed legislation granting public access to disciplinary hearings. Gloria Romero, the former State Senate majority leader, who authored the bill, said many San Franciscans publicly supported the move, but not Ms. Harris.

“There could not have been a more profound wall of silence,” said Ms. Romero, a Bernie Sanders supporter who has been critical of the Democratic establishment. “It’s easy to call yourself progressive today, but I mean, come on, it’s easy to reinvent yourself.”

Police use of force had been a contentious issue in San Francisco long before Ms. Harris took office. From 2001 to 2004, The San Francisco Chronicle reported, there were more complaints about use of force in the city than in San Diego, Seattle, Oakland and San Jose combined. Ms. Harris pursued few on-duty cases of force-related misconduct, though that was not unusual at the time.

Most district attorneys prosecuted officers in “only the rare case,” said Louise Renne, who as San Francisco city attorney once employed Ms. Harris. She and other supporters of Ms. Harris said it was unfair to criticize her through the prism of today.

“At that time, Kamala was a very progressive D.A., and some of the criticisms now are a bit of revisionist history,” Ms. Renne said.

Timothy P. Silard, Ms. Harris’s former chief of policy and one of a number of current and former aides who spoke on her behalf, said Ms. Harris experienced hostility in the department from the beginning. He recalled commanders and homicide detectives who refused to speak to her or look her in the eye during meetings in which she demanded they solve more murders in poor neighborhoods. Instead, they addressed white men — her subordinates.

“Did she set out as a professional prosecutor to anger the cops?” he asked. “No. Why would she do that? But did she shy away from doing bold things and important things because it was something the police department or police union didn’t like? Never.”

From 2002 to 2005, Black people made up less than eight percent of the city’s population but accounted for more than 40 percent of police arrests. Mr. Silard and Paul Henderson, who was Ms. Harris’s chief of administration and now directs a city agency that investigates complaints about the police, said Ms. Harris told her staff not to prosecute arrests based on racial profiling.

“We regularly received calls from officers saying: ‘We can’t believe that you’re discharging this case. This was a good case.’ Well, no, it wasn’t,” Mr. Henderson recalled.

Ms. Harris also created a “re-entry” program called “Back on Track” that aimed to keep young low-level offenders out of jail if they went to school and kept a job.

As police chief of East Palo Alto, Ronald Davis studied the program. “Re-entry was not a prevailing thought in law enforcement,” he said. “She said this is a unique opportunity to reduce recidivism.”

But some say she did not do enough.

“We never thought we had an ally in the district attorney,” said David Campos, who was a supervisor and police commissioner while Ms. Harris was district attorney and is now chairman of the San Francisco Democratic Party. “You have someone saying all the right things now, but when she had the opportunity to do something about police accountability, she was either not visible, or when she was, she was on the wrong side.” (Mr. Campos backed Mr. Sanders’s presidential bid.)

In 2010, Ms. Harris’s office was caught up in a scandal over a police crime-lab technician who had been skimming drugs and had a past conviction for domestic violence. A judge found that her office had failed to disclose the information to defense lawyers, as required. The judge also faulted her office for not having procedures for producing exculpatory information on police witnesses.

 

Ms. Harris has said that she learned of the crime-lab problems only when they became public, and has acknowledged that her office was too slow in putting a policy in place. Her aides had earlier been working toward a written policy, but Mr. Silard said he believed it had been delayed amid negotiations among several agencies. “The implication that she buried it is ridiculous,” he said, adding that she had initiated the review.

Gary Delagnes, then head of the police union, has a slightly different recollection. “She never pushed hard for it, and we were obviously happy about that,” he said. In the end, hundreds of cases related to the scandal were dismissed, and Ms. Harris’s aides rushed to institute a policy.

Mr. Delagnes, who had a reputation as a strident defender of police officers, said that while many officers never forgave Ms. Harris for the Espinoza decision, he could not recall any other major actions the union strongly opposed. He called her the city’s most “pro-public safety D.A.” of the last 20 years.

He sees her current statements as “an extremely hard left turn.”

“She is Jekyll and Hyde from what she was in 2004,” he said. “That is not the Kamala Harris that I knew.”

‘We Weren’t Absent’

Calls to review police misconduct grew after Ms. Harris took office as attorney general in January 2011, in a state with a historically high rate of police shootings.

Anaheim’s mayor at the time, Tom Tait, remembers the crisis confronting his city in July 2012 after an unarmed 25-year-old, Manuel Diaz, was fatally shot in the back by the police. A day later, hundreds of protesters descended on City Hall, forcing its evacuation.

“It was tense,” Mr. Tait said. He called Ms. Harris’s office, asking her to conduct an outside investigation. Ms. Harris phoned him two days later to say she would not intervene, he said.

That same year, she demurred when asked to review the fatal police shooting of Mario Romero, 23, outside his home in Vallejo.

“We went to Kamala Harris’s office in Sacramento three times; we were turned away every time,” said Cyndi Mitchell, Mr. Romero’s sister. “They never said they wouldn’t get involved. It wasn’t really a no, but it wasn’t a yes.”

California law gives the attorney general broad authority over law enforcement matters. But aides to Ms. Harris said that in these and other cases, she hewed to the state Justice Department’s hands-off policy, not interceding in officer-involved shootings unless the local district attorney had a conflict of interest or there was “obvious abuse of prosecutorial discretion.”

Brian Nelson, a top aide to Ms. Harris while she was attorney general, said she was reluctant to big-foot district attorneys, having been one herself.

“The idea there was going to be some far-off figure that was going to be more responsive to the community didn’t seem right to her,” Mr. Nelson said.

 

On Aug. 11, 2014, two days after Michael Brown was killed in Missouri, police officers in Los Angeles fatally shot Ezell Ford, an unarmed 25-year-old Black man with a history of mental illness, sparking a wave of demonstrations. Ms. Harris deferred to Jackie Lacey, the city’s first Black district attorney, who ultimately brought no charges.

Ms. Harris began her second term as attorney general the next year by outlining steps to make policing fairer and more transparent, saying “we must acknowledge that too many have felt the sting of injustice.” Still, she hesitated, refusing to endorse AB-86, a bill opposed by police unions that would have required her office to appoint special prosecutors to examine deadly police shootings.

In San Francisco, the police killed 18 people during Ms. Harris’s six years as attorney general. But if there was a single flash point, it was the shooting of 26-year-old Mario Woods in December 2015. Widely circulated cellphone videos showed officers surrounding Mr. Woods — disturbed, strung out on methamphetamines and armed with a steak knife. Five officers fired 46 rounds, hitting him with 21.

A series of rallies followed, and an 18-day hunger strike by five men who came to be known as the Frisco Five. Many believed that Ms. Harris would take action, as her predecessor, Jerry Brown, had done in 2009, when he obtained a court order placing the police department in Maywood under his oversight after widespread misconduct.

In a letter to Ms. Harris, Jeff Adachi, then San Francisco’s public defender, urged her to exert her authority in the Woods case and several other shootings. “An investigation,” he said, “would settle the pressing question of whether the racism evidenced in these incidents is endemic.”

Ultimately, it was the Justice Department that intervened, led by Mr. Davis, the former East Palo Alto police chief, who had become director of the agency’s office of community-oriented policing services. Mr. Davis said his work was bolstered by warnings from Ms. Harris that she would investigate the San Francisco police if necessary.

“We weren’t absent,” said Venus Johnson, a former associate attorney general who advised Ms. Harris on criminal justice issues, adding that there were frequent discussions with San Francisco officials. “We weren’t putting our heads in the sand. We were actively involved.” (The city later adopted some recommendations from a 68-page Justice Department report that found disproportionate use of force against people of color. In 2018, the district attorney said he would not bring criminal charges in the Woods case, though he called the shooting unnecessary and disturbing.)

In 2016, former Representative Loretta Sanchez, then vying with Ms. Harris for a Senate seat, made a campaign issue of police shootings, particularly her opponent’s refusal to support AB-86. That year, Ms. Harris offered a compromise to the bill that would expand her office’s authority to review police misconduct, but only if sought by district attorneys or police chiefs. California lawmakers are still considering the idea.

And after the election, a month before her Senate swearing-in, Ms. Harris began investigations of both of the Kern County Sheriff’s Office and the Bakersfield Police Department, where officers had been involved in multiple deadly shootings.

“Obviously she recognized Black communities were being policed poorly,” said Mr. Nelson, her former aide. “That was always in the background of all of our conversations.”

‘A Different Yardstick’

In her measured way, Ms. Harris pursued a variety of other criminal justice reforms.

After the Supreme Court ordered California to reduce prison crowding, Mr. Nelson said, Ms. Harris saw a “seminal reform opportunity.” She created a division in her office to help counties devise alternatives to incarceration.

But a few years later, her office would come under fire when it argued against releasing too many eligible parolees, contending that it would reduce the state’s prison labor force. Ms. Harris repudiated the move after it became public, saying she had not been aware.

She also began requiring body cameras at the California Department of Justice, the first state agency to adopt them. But she did not support legislation mandating them for the police, warning against “one-size-fits-all” regulation. The bill failed.

One of her most lauded initiatives was OpenJustice, a database that provided public access to crime statistics collected by the state. That included data about the use of force, and won the support of some police groups as well as activists.

“That was very useful to us,” said Melina Abdullah, an African studies professor at California State University, Los Angeles, and co-founder of the Los Angeles branch of Black Lives Matter. “As a Black woman who also went to Howard University, who is also from Oakland, she gives me a symbolic sense of pride.”

But overall, she had mixed feelings about Ms. Harris, saying that her policies were “not transformative enough” and that “she could have played a much stronger role.”

Chivona Newsome, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter in New York City, also has misgivings.

 

“I’m not 100 percent sold, but we have to look at evolution,” she said, adding that she was encouraged after Ms. Harris expressed support for redirecting some police funding. But, she said, “That ‘top cop’ thing has just stuck — she built such a strong brand on it as an A.G., as the D.A. — and it’s hard for people to erase that in their memories.”

Ms. Harris is not alone in toiling inside the system. In Los Angeles, Ms. Lacey has been criticized by Black Lives Matter activists, who see her as too pro-police. Several of them, including Dr. Abdullah, protested on her porch earlier this year, prompting her husband to brandish a gun.

“You are very much aware that your fellow African-Americans expect a lot from you,” Ms. Lacey said in an interview. “I know Senator Harris and I both want to do the absolute best job we can in these roles. But I do think there’s a different yardstick for us.”

She and Ms. Harris have known each other for years. But as she tacks left, Ms. Harris has endorsed Ms. Lacey’s opponent in her re-election bid, George Gascón. (Mr. Gascon succeeded Ms. Harris as San Francisco district attorney but moved south to challenge Ms. Lacey.) “They probably are aligned in many of their progressive values,” Ms. Lacey said. “I don’t take it personally.”

Ms. Harris, for her part, is trying to advance some of the protest movement’s aims from the Senate.

“The decision I made was, ‘I’m going to try and go inside the system, where I don’t have to ask permission to change what needs to be changed,’” she said earlier this year, adding that protesters had helped bring pressure from the outside.

As for her own career, she said, “I know we were able to make a change, but it certainly was not enough.”

 

Wasn’t Kamala Harris the one who put tons of blacks into jail for excessive sentences when she was a prosecutor in California?

Shhhhh. Don’t tell anyone until she gets the Vice Presidential nomination.

Harris sees that, which is why she's jumping at the chance.  Ever since her days as Willie Brown's mistress, sleeping her way to the top in politics, she's known a good opportunity when she's seen one. 

She's not #HeelsUpHarris, as Twitter's great kahuna, James Woods, nicknamed her, for nothing.

Problem one, for Joe, at least: She's phony, and it's not just her phony Twitter followers.

Harris, recall, is the one who tried to pander to black voters and guilt-minded whites to the effect that she, in all her Berkeley, California and Canadian upbringing, had suffered through her upbringing in the midst of some kind of Klan country.  Her yearbook photos from her high school showed otherwise.

Being half east Indian, she's not typically black, though she'd have you think she was.  Here's how she acquired that "credential":

Kamala Harris wanted to go to a black school. That’s what black folks called Howard University in the early 1980s when Harris was a teenager considering her future.

Harris, she would say later, was seeking an experience wholly different from what she had long known. She’d attended majority-white schools her entire life — from elementary school in Berkeley, Calif., to high school in Montreal. Her parents’ professional lives and their personal story were bound up in majority-white institutions. Her father, an economist from Jamaica, was teaching at Stanford University. Her mother, a cancer researcher from India, had done her graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley, where the couple had met and fallen in love. And Harris’s younger sister would eventually enroll at Stanford.

And here's what she did thereafter, according to Politico's Michael Kruse:

Her rise, however, was propelled in and by a very different milieu. In this less explored piece of her past, Harris used as a launching pad the tightly knit world of San Francisco high society, navigating early on this rarefied world of influence and opulence, charming and partying with movers and shakers — ably cultivating relationships with VIPs who would become friends and also backers and donors of every one of her political campaigns, tapping into deep pockets and becoming a popular figure in a small world dominated by a handful of powerful families. This stratum of San Francisco remains a profoundly important part of her network — including not just powerful Democratic donors but an ambassador appointed by President Donald Trump who ran in the same circles.

Harris, now 54, often has talked about the importance of having "a seat at the table," of being an insider instead of an outsider. And she learned that skill in this crowded, incestuous, famously challenging political proving ground, where she worked to score spots at the some of the city's most sought-after tables. In the mid- to late '90s and into the aughts, the correspondents who kept tabs on the comings and goings of the area's A-listers noted where Harris was and what she was doing and who she was with. As she advanced professionally, jumping from Alameda County to posts in the offices of the district and city attorneys across the Bay, she was a trustee, too, of the museum of modern art and active in causes concerning AIDS and the prevention of domestic abuse, and out and about at fashion shows and cocktail parties and galas and get-togethers at the most modish boutiques. She was, in the breezy, buzzy parlance of these kinds of columns, one of the "Pretty Thangs." She was a "rising star." She was "rather perfect." And she mingled with "spiffy and powerful friends" who were her contemporaries as well as their even more influential mothers and fathers. All this was fun, but it wasn't unserious. It was seeing and being seen with a purpose, society activity with political utility.

After that, she became "cop Kamala" as the lefties say, or a pretty dirty prosecutor, both in San Francisco and as California's attorney general.  She always put the needs of the Democratic establishment above the people she said she was "helping."  Here's something from an item I wrote about earlier:

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.

She shook down some banks in the name of 'the people' and then went and used the money for something else. No wonder she's always been popular with the Democratic one-party blue-state establishment. I have a full blog on that here.

And being part of that establishment, she protected that establishment - such as a sex harrasser, Larry Wallace, who happened to be a top aide during her stint as California attorney general, and whose transgressions forced the state to shell out more than a million dollars in compensation to his victims while he was on the job.

Harris claimed she didn't know a thing about it. Establishment, see, protects its own. So much for #MeToo.

Here's another corrupt little manuever - she managed to obtain a Los Angeles Police Department Praetorian guard that followed her wherever she went across the state. Police for me, but not for thee. Not her first corruption rodeo.

How exactly is that kind of establishment record - sucking up to the rich, protecting Democratic operatives, using all matter of executive privilege, etc., going to win over Bernie Sanders supporters? If Joe Biden picks Harris, he can write them off, these are their hot-button issues.

Worse still is her record as a criminal prosecutor, the Tulsi Gabbard takedowns described - the very takedowns that sank Harris's presidential bid before she even got to the primaries. In Tulsi's words:

There are too many examples to cite but she put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana.

She blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so. She kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California, and she fought to keep a cash bail system in place that impacts poor people in the worst kind of way.

In an era of protests against police brutality in one-party blue cities, particularly from Black Lives Matter supporters, putting Harris on the ticket with Biden makes about as much sense as Republicans putting Mitt Romney at the top of the 2012 ticket in an age when Americans wanted to get rid of Obamacare. Romney, recall, launched his own version of the government takeover prior to President Obama's legacy program.

As a Republican, perhaps this is all good opposition research fodder for President Trump or Vice President Pence to hurl thunderbolts at in the upcoming presidential election. Maybe we should snicker. 

But it just goes to show how hard up the Democrats are for untainted candidates who can manage some kind of connection to normal people. If Kamala Harris is the best Joe Biden has got, it's not happening.

With a great deal of rhetoric accompanied by a political stunt, the Democratic congressional leadership on Monday released its “Justice in Policing 2020” bill.

Prior to the press conference to present the measure, more than 20 Democratic lawmakers, all wearing African kente cloths, knelt in the Capitol’s Emancipation Hall for eight minutes and 46 seconds, the amount of time fired Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kept his knee on the neck of George Floyd, killing the 46-year-old African American worker.

The group of Democrats included House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, Congressional Black Caucus Chairwoman Karen Bass and senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris.

At the press conference, Bass, Pelosi, Schumer and other sponsors of the bill repeatedly cited the nationwide mass demonstrations against the murder of Floyd and touted their bill as a “transformational” and “bold” attack on police violence and systemic racism. 

But their statements and the token character 

of the reforms included in the bill make clear 

that the measure is nothing of the kind.

Rather, it is a political maneuver designed to 

provide cover for Democratic governors and 

mayors who have overseen brutal police 

attacks on protesters, not to mention the pro-

police record of the Obama administration.

 

 It is also aimed at containing and dissipating social protests by workers and youth against not only racism and the fascistic Trump administration, but also the social inequality, repression and poverty that are embedded in the capitalist system and magnified by the coronavirus pandemic.

The Democrats are well aware that even their collection of mild reforms has no chance of being passed by the Republican-controlled Senate or signed into law by President Trump. Just minutes after the Democrats’ press conference, Trump, who later met behind closed doors with law enforcement officials, tweeted: “This year has seen the lowest crime numbers in our Country’s recorded history, and now the Radical Left Democrats want to Defund and Abandon our Police. Sorry, I want LAW & ORDER!”

The major provisions of the bill include:

* Changes in the wording of statutes dealing with police abuse that somewhat lower the legal threshold for obtaining a conviction. The bill alters the federal standard for criminal police behavior from “willfully” violating the constitutional rights of a victim to doing so “knowingly or with reckless disregard.”

It also changes the standard for determining whether the use of force is justified from whether it is “reasonable” to whether it is “necessary.”

* It somewhat limits, but does not eliminate, the application of “qualified immunity” to police offenders. For the past 15 years, the Supreme Court has interpreted the “qualified immunity” doctrine, which applies to public officials pursuing their official duties, to vacate civil suits and throw out criminal cases against police who break the law or use unwarranted force.

Legal researchers Amir H. Ali and Emily Clark argued in 2019 that “qualified immunity permits law enforcement and other government officials to violate people’s constitutional rights with virtual impunity.” The Obama administration repeatedly intervened in Supreme Court cases to uphold the blanket use of “qualified immunity” to shield cops from civil suits or criminal prosecution.

* The bill limits, but does not eliminate, the transfer of military equipment to the police. Obama continued the practice of militarizing police departments with billions of dollars worth of military-grade weapons, armored vehicles, attack helicopters, drones and other tactical weapons.

* The bill creates a national register of police misconduct.

* It bans chokeholds.

* It establishes a grant program allowing—but not requiring—state attorneys general to create an independent process to investigate misconduct or excessive force.

* It requires body cameras for federal uniformed police officers and dashboard cameras for marked federal police vehicles. These federal forces comprise only a small fraction of the 687,000 full-time law enforcement officers in the US. The bill also mandates that state and local agencies use federal funds to “ensure” the use of body and dashboard cameras.

* The bill bans racial profiling.

* It grants subpoena powers to the civil rights division of the Justice Department for “pattern and practice” investigations of police departments.

* It makes lynching a federal hate crime.

At the press conference, Bass, who represents parts of South Los Angeles, went out of her way to profess her support for the police. “I am certain that police officers, professionals who risk their lives every day, are deeply concerned about their profession and do not want to work in an environment that requires their silence when they know a fellow officer is abusing the public,” she said.

She went on to present police officers as the unwitting victims of poor training and policing practices and a lack of “transparency.”

Pelosi called the bill a “transformational” and “structural change,” ran through its main provisions, and concluded by saying, “Police brutality is a heartbreaking reflection of an entrenched system of racial injustice in America.” She called the bill a “first step,” promising “more to come.”

New York Senator Schumer, known as the senator from Wall Street, referred nervously to the massive demonstrations that have continued in New York City and in cities and towns across the US for nearly two weeks, noting in particular their multi-racial and multi-ethnic diversity.

He then proceeded to define the issue of police violence exclusively in racial terms, saying, “The poison of racism affects more than just our criminal justice system. It runs much deeper than that. There are racial disparities in housing and health care, education, the economy, jobs, income and wealth and COVID has only placed a magnifying glass on them.”

This is a continuation of the narrative that has been employed by the ruling class, and particularly that faction represented by the Democratic Party, for more than 50 years, ever since the massive urban rebellions of the 1960s. Beginning with the Kerner Commission Report of 1968, there has been a concerted effort to portray the essential social category in America as race, rather than class.

 

BLOG EDITOR: THE DEMOCRAT PARTY RELIED ON THE BLACK SLAVE CLASS UNTIL IT BECAME APPARENT THAT THE INVADING ANCHOR BABY BREEDERS WOULD MAKE A BETTER CLASS OF SLAVES. 

ASK YOURSELF WHAT BARACK OBAMA EVER DID FOR BLACK AMERICA AS HE SABOTAGED HOMELAND SECURITY TO FLOOD AMERICAN WITH DEM VOTING 'CHEAP' LABOR MEXICANS.

This was designed from the outset to divert attention from the class exploitation upon which capitalism is based and within which racism serves as a weapon to divide the working class. All of the African-American lawmakers at the Democrats’ press conference are wealthy beneficiaries of policies that have elevated a thin layer of blacks into the upper-middle class and the bourgeoisie, while leaving black workers, and the working class as a whole, in far worse circumstances than in the 1960s.

A reporter asked if the sponsors of the “Justice in Policing Act” supported calls for “defunding” the police that have been embraced by some local Democratic officials, who have generally defined it as diverting a small portion of the police budget to social services. Bass had previously made clear she did not support such calls and the campaign of Joe Biden released a statement Monday disavowing the demand.

Responding to the question, Pelosi said, “We want to work with our police departments. There are many who take pride in their work, and we want to be able to make sure the focus is on them.” She went on to warn against getting “into these questions that may come by the small minds of some.”

Harris assumed office as attorney general of California in 2011, but her record remained deeply conservative. Her campaign site brags about her record of criminal justice reform and defense of homeowners from foreclosures, but that is far from the case.

And being part of that establishment, she protected that establishment - such as a sex harrasser, Larry Wallace, who happened to be a top aide during her stint as California attorney general, and whose transgressions forced the state to shell out more than a million dollars in compensation to his victims while he was on the job.

Harris claimed she didn't know a thing about it. Establishment, see, protects its own. So much for #MeToo.

Here's another corrupt little manuever - she managed to obtain a Los Angeles Police Department Praetorian guard that followed her wherever she went across the state. Police for me, but not for thee. Not her first corruption rodeo.