Was skimming through this CNBC article from a couple weeks ago about Biden donors expressing hostility at Kamala Harris as possible running mate. The only interesting thing in the article is the photo of Biden's notes from a July 28 event, which shows Harris's name plus bullet points:



Otherwise, the list of alternatives pushed by these anonymous donors is pretty lame, including the risible choices of Susan Rice and Val Demings. Demings is almost unknown outside of Florida, and her legislative record is minuscule; her general profile is Kamala Lite: police-friendly, but not notorious enough to matter on such short notice. Rice might be some kind of sociopath, but a reason for the campaign to avoid her is she'd be intimately linked to Hillary Clinton's state department years and the slave markets in eastern Libya. Harris has somehow more appeal among traditional Repub voters than Biden, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, and Repubs is probably Biden's special target demo. And no one on the list is as recognizable as Harris. The donors' central concerns were that 1) she'd been mean to Biden, and that 2) she's just in it to advance her own future presidency. I can't even make sense of the second point, other than that they’re selfishly anticipating Harris turning on them when Biden steps aside or dies. Every running mate's main ambition is the presidency. And Biden, of all people, doesn't give a fuck, since he's promised to only serve one term. (He made the same promise in 2015, peddling another brown face & Obama favorite, Deval Patrick, as running mate. The guy just wants this one last validation, you see.)

On the meanness, the donors miss something or are being disingenuous. Because one advantage of the unholy pact is now the charge of complicity (his and hers) in the country's broken criminal justice systems has an interesting pivot: Harris can act as reformed cop, and steer the conversation away from his 1994 crime bill. She may be useful in other areas. She's the one who famously criticized his busing stance & affection for fellow racist statesmen, so now that they're buddies, Americans can look to her to keep his latent racism in check... or something. Her age, gender, and melanin count balance out his perceived deficiencies in those areas. Unlike him, she can speak coherent sentences, and - when she's prepared - they can sound formidable (not so much when improvising, or when zeroing in on a plausible worldview, but still: better than him). Her grilling of AG and Supreme Court appointees - the latter on charges of sexual misconduct - which launched her presidential bid, can somehow offset his abysmal showing at the Anita Hill hearings. (I wonder if anyone will ask her about that - I don't know if anyone has lately.)

Trump Land's response to the Harris pick is schizophrenic and clownish - but probably calculated. They don't seem to be using the crime stuff as a direct weapon, but mainly as proof of "phoniness". They somehow think framing her mea culpas as capitulation to the "radical left" is a better strategy - possibly a wooing of weary white evangelicals and white suburbanites spooked by the sight of angry brown marchers, and by the sound of them making serious demands. They'd struggle to wield the crime stuff as a weapon anyway, not because Trump himself calls for fascistic, racist police retaliation against protesters, and a revival of the federal death penalty; but because criminal justice reform isn't a GOP talking point in national elections. Nevertheless, criminal justice reform is the flavor of the decade, and even Trump is a passenger on that train (First Step Act). Conservative governors and congresspersons have been co-sponsoring or enacting laws to reduce prison populations and sentencing guidelines since the Obama era. States shape their own policies, but the example is set at the federal level. The impact on federal prisons (and civilians caught up in the federal system) is small - but its ripple effect in the state systems isn't.

Funny thing about federal guidelines: the laws require the Justice Department to comply. That language always amuses me. If you are a Jeff Sessions or a William Barr, maybe you just dun wanna. Trump only picked Barr for his ideas about executive privilege (to replace Sessions, who he'd assumed would protect him, but who instead made way for Mueller... Barr has proven he's no Sessions). But Attorneys General are cops, and they'll usually resist change that favors civilians, because that's what cops do. Barr is no exception. In 1992, as Bush 41's AG, he issued "24 Recommendations to Strengthen Criminal Justice" which called for prison expansion and harsher sentencing. It was based on a DOJ internal working paper which was subsequently published under the title "The Case for More Incarceration". Both men are fossils.

Changes within the system come from above. Change to the system comes from below. People gradually got fed up with Jim Crow era policing, and obvious 13th amendment slave labor loopholes, and increasingly took to the streets. The current streak of protests is at least as old as Rodney King's assault. Many white suburban Clinton-Reagan "moderates" might be nonplussed by the richest country in the world having the largest prison population in the world (both in raw number and per capita) and by how brown it is. But the brutalization and dehumanization of brown persons has not been a primary concern for them, as they keep voting racist and complicit sheriffs, judges, governors, presidents, and attorneys general into office. When a Biden-Clinton bill designed to intensify racist judicial practices carried over from the Reagan-Bush era is signed into law, it is with the blessing of a whole mess of white suburban "moderates". And that's just 2 years after the LA race riots, and 2 years after William Barr's Klannish policy piece. See if those dots don't connect.

Kamala Harris's career borrowed liberally from this tradition:

- Resisted federal orders to release prisoners, on grounds it would drain the state's supply of slave labor. (2014)
- Impeded at least 5 wrongly convicted civilians from claiming damages,* and sometimes kept them waiting months longer for their release. Read the legal opinions on the Jose Diaz case and the additional injuries he had to put up with. (2012)
---- (*This piece is especially rich, considering the Bloomberg writers' boss did the same thing against the Exonerated Five.)
- Truancy jailing.
- Supported a 2014 bill allowing police to seize & sell civil property without filing charges, after opposing a 2011 bill that would place restrictions on that practice, which of course leads to state-sanctioned police robbery of civilians.
- Ran to the right of a Republican opponent on a 3 strikes law that would put people away for decades or permanently for minor subsequent offences. (2010)
- When a federal court ruled California's death penalty unconstitutional, she released this statement claiming that the ruling "undermines important protections that our courts provide to defendants". (2014)

This 2019 NYT opinion piece by a law professor details other cases and categories, including covering for corrupt prosecutors, lab technicians and cops, hiding evidence, keeping likely innocent people imprisoned despite admonishments from judges, etc. I don't feel like detailing all of them, it's nauseating. But Kevin Cooper deserves a spotlight. I've been following his case for a few years. The following is a summary, or you can read the superbly-designed NYT piece linked below it:

One Test Could Exonerate Him. Why Won't California Do It? by Nicholas Kristof, New York Times (2018).



Judge William H. Fletcher's dissenting opinion (PDF).
Report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (PDF)
Petition by Norman Hile & lawfirm (PDF)

Kamala Harris refused to allow new DNA testing. The morning after Kristof's article was published online, when she was now a senator and removed from the decision-making, she wrote that she felt "awful" and that she hoped Governor Brown would permit the testing. Perhaps she'd grown a conscience just in time for a presidential year.

Judge William Fletcher's 114-page dissent (linked above) with its unreserved language ("The State of California may be about to execute an innocent man") is unusual. What's more unusual is that he talks about Kevin Cooper whenever he can, and he does it as a sitting judge. Below, you can find a video and transcript of his lecture, presented at New York University in 2013.

Judge Fletcher is a white man. Cooper's lawyer, volunteering for the past 16 years after retiring from his firm, is white. J. Patrick O'Connor (video interview below), working to expose government corruption and the racism of the voters who enable it, is white. They're doing the work from inside the system, while the streets do the work from under it. Skin color - or paying lip-service to it - is an obnoxiously stupid shibboleth of the new "moderates". And it's a poor substitute for character, as Kamala Harris found out on her tour of HBCU's in early 2019, when she tried unsuccessfully to rally brown co-eds to her cause. They saw through the bullshit.
"Kamala Was a Cop. Black People Knew It First."

We're not going to forget.

----------------------------------------------------------

Yabbut at least the Dems went with someone who the Republicans can't brand a socialist!

Note: "One Test Could Exonerate Him. Why Won't California Do It?" is actually a tag line, and the Kristof piece is called "Was Kevin Cooper Framed For Murder?"

There are other places to read it, but I recommend the original NYT location because the layout is so impressive & conducive to following the story.

I'd also like to plug the Atlantic story on Demings (linked above) as a local intro into just how & when the American conversation about criminal justice reform evolved. It ebbs and flows; the 20-year period between the early 90s and the late 00s represents the upswing in the pendulum when politicians had decided the winning flavor was "tough on crime". I think it's difficult for people to correctly identify cause and effect here, even decades later; it's going to take another few decades for this generation to sober up. Otoh it's equally difficult for politicians themselves to figure it out. They do what they think will win votes, and that's as far as they can see. It takes a historian's or sociologist's detached view to notice long term trends, and even political movements that the constituent politicians themselves don't really understand (except the elite ones).

All of this is separate from the issue of corruption, of course - in government, in police supervision, etc. But most of the people drawn to such careers are scumbags anyway, so corruption is a permanent ingredient.

Ah, but the water feels nice tho...

"Why Does the DNC Speaker Lineup List More Republicans Than Latinos?" (Rolling Stone)

The Rev. Dr. William Barber, leader of the Moral Mondays campaign in North Carolina, says he doesn’t object to the inclusion of Republicans in the convention, but to the former Ohio governor in particular. “Kasich has been a voter suppressionist,” Barber says. “He has pushed policies that hurt poor white people, poor black people, poor brown people, lower-income people, going all the way back to the failed welfare-reform legislation that scholar after scholar says devastated people in the poor community and castigated them and demonized them.”

“He said on CNN that he was assured that this ticket would not go too ‘far left,’ and for him, evidently, ‘far left’ is voting rights. ‘Far left’ is caring for the least-of-thee. ‘Far left’ is living wages.

Kasich on voter suppression
Kasich on abortion rights
Kasich on labor rights

Well, well... New Jersey putting New York to shame around ballot access. Hard to guess NY is 25% more Dem than NJ by voter registration, per capita. Funny little place, NJ.

(source: WaPo)

This is the correct "leftist" perspective. Trickle-up electioneering. Progressive candidates are already infesting state legislatures (her point @ 5:00 is about New York state, where there's currently an insurgence). Policy change generally happens from the bottom-up. People like Sarsour try to persuade disaffected (mostly poor) people to at least vote for lower-office candidates, even if they've been turned off to the top. In places like New York, which will choose Biden over Trump regardless, this makes a ton of difference.

This (plus Koch money) is how the grassroots "tea party" took over state legislatures across the country, beginning in 2010. People running for high office only care about where the money is - at the time, Obama had all the money. He wasn't spending it on down-ticket candidates. H.Clinton, when it was her turn, was poised to do the same (Brazile: "Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC").

Sarsour is a street-level organizer. Nomiki is DNC insider, having served on at least one DNC committee during the 2016-2017 restructuring period. (Funny enough, the same restructuring which Donna Brazile complained was too democratic... while expressing dismay at the concentration of power within the DNC. Amazing lack of self-awareness.)

Nancy doesn't want Joe to debate The Donald. She says it's because she doesn't want to "legitimize" Trump, Lol, he's the fucking president, he's legit whether you want to believe it or not. No, she doesn't want Joe to debate because Trumpy will make him look like a senile fool.

Biden's been hit or miss... When it's highly scripted & he's been prepped (and possibly stimmed) he does alright enough. It's still likely he's worried about "gaffes", or sounding anemic & slurry even if without major lapses. But it's just as likely he wants to keep avoiding taking certain stances which would alienate voters. Trump doesn't mind alienating voters - in fact it's an integral part of his strategy. It's generally a winning strategy. Gotta offend at least a third of the population.

I’m not sure just being the president makes him legit. Before Trump I would probably have been more inclined to think so, but this guy is the biggest fake I’ve ever seen in my life. Some rift in the wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff has delivered him to this point, but the guy is underhand and duplicitous through and through. When confronted with the truth he just continues to assert the same lies until enough people cave in.

I would only debate Trump on the condition that an independent fact checking organization be present. Otherwise, what the fuck is the point? The man is a congenital liar. Every word out of the man's mouth is a lie. The man lies for no reason, even when there's no benefit to it. He lied about his father's place of birth, for fuck's sake.


ETA:

And by the way, how the hell would Trump make Biden look like a senile old fool? Firstly, Biden can accomplish that all by himself. He doesn't need Trump's help for that. Secondly, the only person more senile and foolish than Biden is Trump. We're talking about the idiot who thinks bleach is medicine for fuck's sake.

laklak wrote:Nancy doesn't want Joe to debate The Donald. She says it's because she doesn't want to "legitimize" Trump, Lol, he's the fucking president, he's legit whether you want to believe it or not. No, she doesn't want Joe to debate because Trumpy will make him look like a senile fool.

Yes, well, in so far as winning 56.5% of the Electoral College with 2,868,686 fewer votes than the loser is legitimate in the formal sense, then yes, Trump is legitimately the president.

Seabass wrote:And by the way, how the hell would Trump make Biden look like a senile old fool? Firstly, Biden can accomplish that all by himself. He doesn't need Trump's help for that. Secondly, the only person more senile and foolish than Biden is Trump. We're talking about the idiot who thinks bleach is medicine for fuck's sake.

For one of them it's a liability, for the other an asset. The part of his base he actively tries to keep engaged is precisely the bleach-drinkers.

Hermit wrote:
Yes, well, in so far as winning 56.5% of the Electoral College with 2,868,686 fewer votes than the loser is legitimate in the formal sense, then yes, Trump is legitimately the president.

It be what it be.

laklak wrote:

Hermit wrote:
Yes, well, in so far as winning 56.5% of the Electoral College with 2,868,686 fewer votes than the loser is legitimate in the formal sense, then yes, Trump is legitimately the president.

It be what it be.

Meaning what? It can't be changed? 27 constitutional amendments show otherwise. Without them you'd still have slavery, but no freedom of speech. No right to bear arms, and you could be forced to provide lodging for soldiers. You'd have no right for a speedy trial and women could not vote. If it were not for the 21st amendment the 18th would have made it difficult for you to get your hands on alcohol the quality of which you could be sure of. And so on, and so forth.

I don't know about you, but if there are to be popular elections it would be ever so nice if the outcome were proportional to the number of votes candidates attract.

This is a confederacy with lipstick on. Only migration & population growth in crucial states will induce that kind of change. I'm betting on Texas tipping the balance, and that it's going to take at least 50 years.

Anyway, laklak is clearly thinking in present tense. He's a very focused kinda guy.

Added: Meantime, there're a few more tangible goals, like partial allocation of electoral votes in each state. The masses can be made to embrace that, and each state has its own motivations for doing so. Lots of points of attack there, rhetorically - and even moneyed special interests are shifty enough to get behind that. Let's imagine Texas being carved up on election day. That would a sweet thing to behold.

Second-most likely, maybe, is tiered voting. Lots of delicious potential for muddying outcomes there, which makes the job of moneyed interests much much harder (and shifts power to the masses).

Next level would be campaign finance reform, instituted by the parties themselves. That requires a hyper-informed electorate, so it's probably never going to happen. We'll demolish the Electoral College before it happens... but it could be used as a club to bully states into doing just that.

Hermit wrote:
I don't know about you, but if there are to be popular elections it would be ever so nice if the outcome were proportional to the number of votes candidates attract.

Nope, I don't want to be ruled by ignorant coastal city proles so lets keep the College. And the Senate, and all the other undemocratic institutions we have. They're there for a reason, and they're working just fine as they are.

laklak wrote:

Hermit wrote:
I don't know about you, but if there are to be popular elections it would be ever so nice if the outcome were proportional to the number of votes candidates attract.

Nope, I don't want to be ruled by ignorant coastal city proles so lets keep the College. And the Senate, and all the other undemocratic institutions we have. They're there for a reason, and they're working just fine as they are.

The Electoral College gave you Trump, you lucky devil, you. And with almost three million fewer voters than Shillary. What a catastrophe she would have been, compared to be governed by the stable genius, eh?