Harris Expectedly Chosen as Biden’s VP and Wall Street is Relieved

By: Sammy Quarrato

Her record is nowhere near as progressive as she wants you to believe. Credit: inquirer.com

Former Vice President Joe Biden had long awaited to finally reveal his pick for Vice President of the United States, Senator Kamala Harris. This is the first time that a woman of color has been chosen for a major political party ticket.

Both of her parents are immigrants, her mother being Indian and her father being Jamacian. It’s suffice to say that it shows that America has become more diverse and tolerant of minorities compared to before.

However, this does not shield Harris from her atrocious record as Attorney General of San Francisco, Attorney General of California, and Senator for California.

She portrays herself as a ‘Progressive Prosecutor’ but her record says otherwise.

The Senator was against state-wide body cameras on police officers in the state of California, despite studies showing that officers are less likely to commit misconduct on-duty while they have them on.

Harris was for the majority of her career for the War on Drugs, having only recently been for the legalization of Marijuana.

She laughed at the idea of legal marijuana when her Republican opponent in her re-election bid for Attorney General was for it, despite admitting in the Breakfast Club that she did smoke marijauana before.

She also advocated for California’s Three Strike Laws which made it where if you were convicted of any felonies, including minor ones such as the possession of any illegal drugs which included marijuana, you could be sent to prison for 25 years to a lifetime.

This is due to the fact that private prisons lobbied politicians on the regular because they profited off of their prisons being as full as possible and conducted them like businesses.

Her office as Attorney General also argued to keep non-violent offenders beyond their sentences due to them wanting these people to be used as cheap labor.

She also blocked evidence that could have saved a potentially innocent man from death row until the courts forced her office to do so (he’s still on death row today).

She fought to increase cash bail in California which disproportionately affected poor communities. She also fought for civil asset forfeiture which means that an officer has the legal authority to take away any of your property such as cars and money before being charged of any crime.

And just to put this in perspective, ‘Legal Robbery by Cop’ occurs more often than the general Robbery.

Senator Harris also advocated criminalizing truancy where a parent could go to prison up to a year if their child was not attending school, no matter the circumstances.

One of her worst parts if not the worst part of her record as Attorney General was when during The Great Recession and Subprime Mortgage Crisis, the head of OneWest Bank Steve Mnuchin was illegally foreclosing on thousands of people early.

Many of those people were elderly, and one of those people was an 86 year old woman who he foreclosed on for 63 cents.

This was occurring in California and Harris’ office even advised her to prosecute him, which she refused to do.

If that name looks familiar, that’s because it is. He’s a known Goldman Sachs Lackey and is now the Secretary of the Treasury under President Trump. 

This is the same man who argued that higher unemployment benefits during an economic recession would make people ‘lazy’ despite a Yale study showing that higher unemployment benefits didn’t affect how long it took people to search for a job.

The reason why she didn’t prosecute him at the time was because he was a big donor to Democrats until he transitioned to giving campaign contributions to Republicans.

Although the only Democratic candidate he donated to in 2016 was Harris for Senate. Harris has also recently been wishy-washy on things that could be highlighted as positives such as her going alongside Medicare for All and now with Biden saying that they should only expand the Affordable Care Act in the next 10 years.

She also voted against the 10% military budget cut that was recently up for a vote. The Senator obviously has the typical positives (or negatives depending on how you see it) you get from a Democrat and some things that are better such as being for amnesty for DACA Recipients, against TPP (Which Biden was for), pro-choice, etc.

However, even with the positives alongside her being unquestionably better than Trump, it is a mistake to call her a friend to the left.

Especially when Wall Street sighs in relief from the VP pick, she’s the type of Democrat that drags the party down, a corporate neo-liberal.