THE HILL
"Chris Cuomo apologizes for Kamala Harris tweet"
Michael Burke
24 JANUARY 2019
CNN anchor Chris Cuomo apologized Thursday for a since-deleted tweet in which he appeared to suggest that Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) needs to prove that she was born in the U.S.
Cuomo said during an appearance on ABC's "The View" that he "screwed up" and that the tweet, which he sent Tuesday, was misinterpreted.
"And hopefully there will be no games where the issue keeps changing for righty accusers...and...the legit info abt Harris comes out to deal with the allegation ASAP."
"The longer there is no proof either way, the deeper the effect," Cuomo's original tweet read.
The tweet drew swift criticism on Twitter, with some saying that Cuomo was giving weight to the false claim that Harris — who was born in Oakland, Calif. — is not eligible to run for president because her parents are immigrants.
Cuomo said during his interview on "The View" that his tweet was intended to make the point that Harris shouldn't have to defend herself against those accusations.
He added that he made his point "poorly."
"You don't get to disparage people this way because of their race, because you don't like what they represent," he said.
"And what I'm saying is before we go through this again, if you have an accusation, put up or shut up."
"Kamala Harris shouldn't have to go through this."
"That was my point."
"I made it poorly."
Cuomo also apologized for the remark in a subsequent series of tweets Tuesday, saying that the original tweet "was taken literally the opposite way that I intended it."
Harris announced this week that she will seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2020.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ ... P17#page=2
KAMALA HARRIS
Re: KAMALA HARRIS
Vox.com
"Analysis: Kamala Harris’s controversial record on criminal justice, explained"
German Lopez
26 JANUARY 2019
Is Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) a progressive hero — or a relic of a “tough on crime” era going back to the 1990s and 2000s?
The answer to that question could determine the fate of her presidential campaign, which she announced on Monday.
A generation after Democrats embraced “tough on crime” policies that swelled prison populations, progressive activists are pushing to make the criminal justice system less punitive and racist — and polls show a majority of Democrats support such efforts.
Harris argues that her views align with the new progressive movement.
But her record in California, where she was a prosecutor, district attorney, and state attorney general before representing the state in the US Senate, is likely to come in for harsh scrutiny and debate in the coming months.
Harris argues that she’s fought to reverse incarceration, scale back the war on drugs, and address racial disparities in the criminal justice system.
But as her star has risen nationally — she’s had several viral moments questioning President Donald Trump’s nominees in the Senate — those more familiar with her criminal justice record, particularly on the left, have increasingly voiced their skepticism.
“In her career, Ms. Harris did not barter or trade to get the support of more conservative law-and-order types; she gave it all away,” wrote Lara Bazelon, a law professor and former director for the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent in Los Angeles, in a recent New York Times op-ed.
Harris’s supporters argue that these criticisms sell her short, missing the times she was ahead of the country and her party on criminal justice issues — such as when she implemented prison diversion programs as district attorney and a “first of its kind” racial bias training for police officers.
“Kamala Harris has spent her career fighting for reforms in the criminal justice system and pushing the envelope to keep everyone safer by bringing fairness and accountability,” Lily Adams, a spokesperson for Harris, told me.
A close examination of Harris’s record shows it’s filled with contradictions.
She pushed for programs that helped people find jobs instead of putting them in prison, but also fought to keep people in prison even after they were proved innocent.
She refused to pursue the death penalty against a man who killed a police officer, but also defended California’s death penalty system in court.
She implemented training programs to address police officers’ racial biases, but also resisted calls to get her office to investigate certain police shootings.
But what seem like contradictions may reflect a balancing act.
Harris’s parents worked on civil rights causes, and she came from a background well aware of the excesses of the criminal justice system — but in office, she had to play the role of a prosecutor and California’s lawyer.
She started in an era when “tough on crime” politics were popular across party lines — but she rose to national prominence as criminal justice reform started to take off nationally.
She had an eye on higher political office as support for criminal justice reform became de rigueur for Democrats — but she still had to work as California’s top law enforcement official.
Her race and gender likely made this balancing act even tougher.
In the US, studies have found that more than 90 percent of elected prosecutors are white and more than 80 percent are male.
As a black woman, Harris stood out — inviting scrutiny and skepticism, especially by people who may hold racist stereotypes about how black people view law enforcement or sexist views about whether women are “tough” enough for the job.
Still, the result is the same: As she became more nationally visible, Harris was less known as a progressive prosecutor, as she’d been earlier in her career, and more a reform-lite or even anti-reform attorney general.
Now critics have labeled her a “cop” — a sellout for a broken criminal justice system.
In the 2020 elections, she faces a balancing act again: managing constituencies on the left that will push for more radical reforms, particularly in the Democratic primary, and more centrist voters who may like some of her “tougher” roots as a prosecutor and attorney general, especially in the general election.
On the first day of her campaign, Harris partially addressed the concerns, taking “full responsibility” for some of the actions that her office took but offering few details about why Democratic voters should expect different from President Harris.
How she continues responding to these criticisms could determine how far her campaign goes.
Harris as a “progressive prosecutor”
From the beginning of Harris’s career in the criminal justice system, she said she saw herself as a progressive working within a system she wanted to change — “at the table where the decisions are made,” she told the New York Times Magazine in 2016.
She started out working at prosecutors’ offices in the late 1980s and early 1990s, then became San Francisco’s district attorney, the top prosecutor for the city, in 2004.
In 2011, she became California’s attorney general, the top law enforcement official in the state.
She held that position until 2017, when she became a US senator for California.
In her new memoir, The Truths We Hold, Harris described how she saw her role: “The job of a progressive prosecutor is to look out for the overlooked, to speak up for those whose voices aren’t being heard, to see and address the causes of crime, not just their consequences, and to shine a light on the inequality and unfairness that lead to injustice."
"It is to recognize that not everyone needs punishment, that what many need, quite plainly, is help.”
It reflects a view embraced by many progressives in the criminal justice reform movement: that the US puts far too many people — particularly people of color — in prison, typically for way too long, and without doing enough to fight the “root causes” of crime.
Parts of Harris’s record match that rhetoric.
In 2004, as district attorney of San Francisco, she refused to seek the death penalty against a man convicted of shooting police officer Isaac Espinoza.
She faced opposition from fellow Democrats; Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) called for the death penalty at the officer’s funeral.
But Harris didn’t budge — an act of principle that cost her key political allies (as she received almost no support from police groups during her first run for attorney general in 2010).
Harris also pushed for more systemic reforms.
Her most successful program as district attorney, “Back on Track,” allowed first-time drug offenders, including drug dealers, to get a high school diploma and a job instead of prison time.
Adams, Harris’s spokesperson, noted that the program started in 2005, “when most prosecutors were using a ‘tough on crime’ approach.”
The climate at the time was far less open to progressive criminal justice policy.
The year before, presidential candidate John Kerry had run, in part, on hiring more cops, adopting a “zero tolerance” approach to gangs, and “cracking down on drug trafficking.”
Crime wasn’t a major issue in the 2004 presidential election, but Kerry’s platform was the legacy of the 1980s and ’90s, when Republicans and Democrats — including President Bill Clinton — competed to see who could be “tough on crime.”
“When she became district attorney, no one was talking about progressive prosecutors,” Tim Silard, who worked under Harris at the San Francisco district attorney’s office, told me.
“She was absolutely an outlier within the California District Attorneys Association, [and] got some pushback and criticism from there.”
In one instance — her handling of California’s “three strikes” law — Harris was arguably ahead of the time.
Under the law, someone who committed a third felony could go to prison for 25 years to life, even if the third felony was a nonviolent crime.
But Harris required that the San Francisco district attorney’s office only charge for a third strike if the felony was a serious or violent crime.
California voters in 2004, the year that Harris took office, rejected a ballot initiative to implement a similar reform statewide — though the ballot proposal had some problems, leading to Harris’s own opposition.
It wasn’t until 2012 that voters approved the change.
“There’s been incredibly rapid change in public opinion, in attention to criminal justice,” Silard said, citing his decades-long experience in the criminal justice system and current experience as president of the reform-minded Rosenberg Foundation.
“Bringing a reverse lens to that is not fair, and also doesn’t recognize folks who were courageous at that time.”
As she geared up to run for California attorney general in 2010, Harris positioned herself as a criminal justice reformer, focusing on improving support for people leaving prison, and published a book in 2009, Smart on Crime, on criminal justice reform.
By this point, Harris wasn’t so much ahead of her time as she was in step with it.
Criminal justice reform had spread nationally: Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, effectively reducing penalties for crack cocaine.
States, facing budget constraints from housing so many prisoners, started to roll back punishments for nonviolent crimes — even in conservative states like Texas and South Carolina.
And books like 2010’s The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander drew attention, particularly among white progressives, to a criminal justice system plagued by vast racial disparities.
(Harris’s 2009 book, by contrast, was “largely colorblind” and “mentions racial bias in policing just twice,” Molly Hensley-Clancy noted at BuzzFeed.)
The progressive prosecutor has also in recent years become much more common, exemplified by Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Kim Foxx in Cook County (Chicago), and several others.
That changing context is part of why many of Harris’s next moves, as California attorney general, disappointed some progressives and criminal justice reformers, including some of her former supporters.
Harris’s troubling record as attorney general
Based on Harris’s record, supporters easily could have expected her to come into the California Department of Justice as attorney general and really shake things up.
But that didn’t happen: Her office’s handling of over-incarceration, the death penalty, and wrongly incarcerated people were among the several issues in which Harris by and large maintained the status quo.
She implemented some reforms: She expanded her “Back on Track” program to other parts of the state.
After Black Lives Matter took off, she introduced and expanded what her office described as “first-of-its-kind training” to address racial bias as well as procedural justice — earning praise from local newspapers.
She made the California Department of Justice the first statewide agency to require body cameras.
And she launched OpenJustice, a platform that, among other data, allows the public to track reported killings by police officers.
But Harris also allowed many parts of the Justice Department to essentially operate as they long had, which at times led to what many now see as major injustices.
In many cases, this led to her office making decisions that Harris, under scrutiny, tried to distance herself from.
For example, Harris’s office fought to release fewer prisoners, even after the US Supreme Court found that overcrowding in California prisons was so bad that it amounted to unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment.
At one point, her lawyers argued that the state couldn’t release some prisoners because it would deplete its pool for prison labor — but Harris quickly clarified that she was not aware her office was going with that argument until it was reported by media.
Or consider Harris’s handling of appeals for release by innocent people in prison.
In one case, her office argued against Daniel Larsen, who was proven innocent by the Innocence Project, because, Harris’s office claimed, he filed his petition for release far too late after a legal deadline.
The court disagreed, allowing Larsen’s release in 2014.
(In the New York Times, Bazelon lists several more such cases.)
Harris’s supporters argue that Harris likely wasn’t closely involved in these cases because Justice Department policy didn’t require state lawyers to seek approval from the attorney general.
As Harris said at a campaign event, “There are cases … where there were folks that made a decision in my office and they had not consulted me, and I wish they had.”
But Harris could have changed department policy and become more hands-on in pushing reform, if she was willing to risk a potential backlash from the people under her.
Then there’s the death penalty.
Harris remains personally opposed to the death penalty, and earlier in her career, she’d been willing to incur political backlash by refusing to seek it in 2004.
But as attorney general, she told voters she would enforce capital punishment.
And she did: In 2014, she appealed a judge’s decision that deemed California’s death penalty system unconstitutional.
Harris didn’t have to do this.
In another case, she declined to defend Proposition 8, which prohibited same-sex marriage.
But in office, she seemed to avoid antagonizing the rank and file — which opposition to the death penalty and other “tough on crime” policies could do.
She often described herself as one of them, calling herself California’s “top cop” and writing in her 2009 book that liberals need to move beyond “biases against law enforcement.”
Harris also overlooked and defended law enforcement officials accused of misconduct.
In one such case, a state prosecutor, Robert Murray, falsified a confession, using it to threaten the defendant with life in prison.
After a court threw out the indictment, Harris’s office appealed it, dismissing the misconduct because it did not involve physical violence.
Harris also resisted some attempts to hold police accountable for shootings, including a bill that would have required the attorney general’s office to investigate killings by police and efforts to create statewide standards for police-worn body cameras.
She also defied calls to have her office quickly investigate certain police shootings in California.
“There’s lots of resistance [to reform], both within your own ranks and then from the cops and their allies,” Silard told me.
And acting differently in these situations could have upset the rank and file — after Harris narrowly won her election in 2010 by less than 1 percentage point, without the support of most law enforcement groups.
But her inaction angered activists.
“How many more people need to die before she steps in?” an activist and former supporter, Phelicia Jones, told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2016, regarding police shootings.
Jones went on, directing her comments to Harris: “We don’t even know that you care."
"You have turned your back on the people who got you to where you are.”
In the Senate, Harris has championed criminal justice reform
Since her Senate campaign in 2016, Harris has tried to avoid the faulty parts of her record, and instead emphasized the reforms she’s supported and implemented over the years.
She has adopted sweeping rhetoric about the criminal justice system, arguing that it needs to be systemically changed.
Her presidential campaign website characterizes her as “for the people,” “speaking truth, demanding justice,” and “fighting to fix our broken criminal justice system.”
Consider one of Harris’s common lines: She’s described her support for criminal justice reform as pushing for a better return on investment, pointing out that US prisons see recidivism rates as high as 70 percent or more.
As Harris told the New York Times Magazine in 2016, “If we were talking about any other system where you have a failure rate of about 70 percent, the investors would say, at the very least, do a wholesale reconstruction, if not shut it down.”
This is strong rhetoric — which suggests that Harris’s ultimate aim isn’t to merely tinker with the criminal justice system, but to seriously transform it.
This aligns Harris far more with where Democrats are today, as Black Lives Matter, ACLU types, and criminal justice reformers push the party to the left on this issue.
In the Senate, Harris has consistently backed reforms, although her leadership role on these issues hasn’t been as extensive as that of some other senators.
She introduced a bail reform bill with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) that would encourage states to reform or replace their bail systems.
This is a big part of the criminal justice system: By most estimates, hundreds of thousands of people are in jail right now, before they’ve been convicted of a crime, just because they can’t afford to pay their bail.
A lot of advocacy work is now dedicated to getting rid of money bail almost entirely, which some places, like Washington, DC, have done with success.
But the bill hasn’t moved far in Congress — although it’s now part of Harris’s presidential campaign platform.
In a team-up with Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Tim Scott (R-SC), Harris also introduced a bill that would for the first time make lynching a federal crime, which has long been a goal for racial justice and civil rights activists.
The bill passed the Senate but didn’t get through the House.
Harris also voted for the First Step Act, the most significant federal criminal justice reform bill to get through Congress in decades — although she tweeted at length about the bill’s shortcomings.
She signed on to Booker’s marijuana legalization bill, and voted for a bill that legalized hemp.
Other Democratic senators, though, have gone a bit further on criminal justice issues.
Booker, for one, introduced the Reverse Mass Incarceration Act — an effort, however flawed, to get states to systematically reduce incarceration rates.
Harris has yet to introduce bills that are just as sweeping, or any systemic reform bills besides her bail proposal, even as she uses rhetoric decrying the criminal justice system as a whole.
Harris’s limited role so far is perhaps expected for a junior senator, but it may be disappointing for people expecting more from a presidential contender with roots in the criminal justice system and who promised something closer to “a wholesale reconstruction” than tinkering at the edges.
But at least when the issue comes to a vote, she’s so far consistently been on the reform side in the Senate — and has made support for reform central to her presidential campaign.
Progressives will have to weigh what Harris is saying now versus parts of her past
The question Harris now faces: Are the reforms she pushed for as a prosecutor and attorney general, and her consistently progressive work in the Senate, enough to satisfy progressives and criminal justice reformers?
The concern here isn’t merely figuring out whether Harris is an honest person.
A constant worry in criminal justice work is what would happen if, say, the crime rate started to rise once again.
In such a scenario, there would be considerably more pressure on lawmakers — and it’d at least be easier for them — to go back to “tough on crime” rhetoric, framing more aggressive policing and higher incarceration rates in a favorable way.
Given that the central progressive claim is that these policies are racist and, based on the research, ineffective for fighting crime in the first place, any potential for backsliding in this area once it becomes politically convenient is very alarming.
This happened before.
From the 1960s through the ’90s, crime and drug use were skyrocketing in the US.
Americans were much more likely, especially in the early ’90s, to say that crime was the most important problem facing the country at the time.
That drove lawmakers, both Democrats and Republicans, to try to find solutions that they could sell to the public — and they by and large landed on a more punitive criminal justice system.
But any link to those “tough on crime” policies now could hurt Harris politically.
According to a 2016 Vox/Morning Consult survey, around two-thirds of Democrats support removing mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, reducing sentences for drug offenses in general, sentencing more people to probation and community service instead of prison, and adopting a national law decriminalizing marijuana.
Other polls have found even higher support for criminal justice reforms among Democrats.
In response to the criticisms, Harris said during the first day of her presidential campaign that she took “responsibility” for some of the problems: “The bottom line is the buck stops with me, and I take full responsibility for what my office did.”
In response to a question about her office’s efforts when she was attorney general, on behalf of the California Department of Corrections, to stop a transgender inmate from getting gender-affirming surgery, Harris elaborated further.
“I was the attorney general of California for two terms, and I had a host of clients that I was obligated to defend and represent,” she said.
“I couldn’t fire my clients and there were unfortunately situations that occurred where my clients took positions that were contrary to my beliefs.”
More broadly, Harris has explained that she rejects what she describes as “the false choice” between criminal justice reform and supporting law enforcement.
“I will never make an excuse for saying this, or an apology for saying this: One human being kills another human being, a woman is raped, a child is molested, there needs to be serious consequence and accountability,” she said during a one-hour interview for her new book in January.
“And I’m always going to say that, and I’m going to say America has a problem with mass incarceration, we have been locking up black and brown men in particular, [and] we have built-in biases that are implicit and explicit that need to be addressed.”
Whether all of that is enough remains to be seen.
Some argue that Harris might not ever be redeemed, because the past job she took at the time she took it just doesn’t line up with progressive values today.
As Briahna Gray wrote for the Intercept, “To become a prosecutor is to make a choice to align oneself with a powerful and fundamentally biased system.”
Yet some seem to have forgiven Harris.
Shaun King, a prominent racial justice advocate, told BuzzFeed that he’s come around to Harris, despite her past record.
“I was a little slow to trust her as a reformer on criminal justice, but I think she’s proven herself to me,” he said.
“I think she’s become one of the better spokespersons for really serious criminal justice reform in the Democratic Party.”
(Although King has remained critical of Harris at times.)
For Harris, where Democrats land in this debate could decide if she becomes the next president of the United States.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ ... P17#page=2
"Analysis: Kamala Harris’s controversial record on criminal justice, explained"
German Lopez
26 JANUARY 2019
Is Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) a progressive hero — or a relic of a “tough on crime” era going back to the 1990s and 2000s?
The answer to that question could determine the fate of her presidential campaign, which she announced on Monday.
A generation after Democrats embraced “tough on crime” policies that swelled prison populations, progressive activists are pushing to make the criminal justice system less punitive and racist — and polls show a majority of Democrats support such efforts.
Harris argues that her views align with the new progressive movement.
But her record in California, where she was a prosecutor, district attorney, and state attorney general before representing the state in the US Senate, is likely to come in for harsh scrutiny and debate in the coming months.
Harris argues that she’s fought to reverse incarceration, scale back the war on drugs, and address racial disparities in the criminal justice system.
But as her star has risen nationally — she’s had several viral moments questioning President Donald Trump’s nominees in the Senate — those more familiar with her criminal justice record, particularly on the left, have increasingly voiced their skepticism.
“In her career, Ms. Harris did not barter or trade to get the support of more conservative law-and-order types; she gave it all away,” wrote Lara Bazelon, a law professor and former director for the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent in Los Angeles, in a recent New York Times op-ed.
Harris’s supporters argue that these criticisms sell her short, missing the times she was ahead of the country and her party on criminal justice issues — such as when she implemented prison diversion programs as district attorney and a “first of its kind” racial bias training for police officers.
“Kamala Harris has spent her career fighting for reforms in the criminal justice system and pushing the envelope to keep everyone safer by bringing fairness and accountability,” Lily Adams, a spokesperson for Harris, told me.
A close examination of Harris’s record shows it’s filled with contradictions.
She pushed for programs that helped people find jobs instead of putting them in prison, but also fought to keep people in prison even after they were proved innocent.
She refused to pursue the death penalty against a man who killed a police officer, but also defended California’s death penalty system in court.
She implemented training programs to address police officers’ racial biases, but also resisted calls to get her office to investigate certain police shootings.
But what seem like contradictions may reflect a balancing act.
Harris’s parents worked on civil rights causes, and she came from a background well aware of the excesses of the criminal justice system — but in office, she had to play the role of a prosecutor and California’s lawyer.
She started in an era when “tough on crime” politics were popular across party lines — but she rose to national prominence as criminal justice reform started to take off nationally.
She had an eye on higher political office as support for criminal justice reform became de rigueur for Democrats — but she still had to work as California’s top law enforcement official.
Her race and gender likely made this balancing act even tougher.
In the US, studies have found that more than 90 percent of elected prosecutors are white and more than 80 percent are male.
As a black woman, Harris stood out — inviting scrutiny and skepticism, especially by people who may hold racist stereotypes about how black people view law enforcement or sexist views about whether women are “tough” enough for the job.
Still, the result is the same: As she became more nationally visible, Harris was less known as a progressive prosecutor, as she’d been earlier in her career, and more a reform-lite or even anti-reform attorney general.
Now critics have labeled her a “cop” — a sellout for a broken criminal justice system.
In the 2020 elections, she faces a balancing act again: managing constituencies on the left that will push for more radical reforms, particularly in the Democratic primary, and more centrist voters who may like some of her “tougher” roots as a prosecutor and attorney general, especially in the general election.
On the first day of her campaign, Harris partially addressed the concerns, taking “full responsibility” for some of the actions that her office took but offering few details about why Democratic voters should expect different from President Harris.
How she continues responding to these criticisms could determine how far her campaign goes.
Harris as a “progressive prosecutor”
From the beginning of Harris’s career in the criminal justice system, she said she saw herself as a progressive working within a system she wanted to change — “at the table where the decisions are made,” she told the New York Times Magazine in 2016.
She started out working at prosecutors’ offices in the late 1980s and early 1990s, then became San Francisco’s district attorney, the top prosecutor for the city, in 2004.
In 2011, she became California’s attorney general, the top law enforcement official in the state.
She held that position until 2017, when she became a US senator for California.
In her new memoir, The Truths We Hold, Harris described how she saw her role: “The job of a progressive prosecutor is to look out for the overlooked, to speak up for those whose voices aren’t being heard, to see and address the causes of crime, not just their consequences, and to shine a light on the inequality and unfairness that lead to injustice."
"It is to recognize that not everyone needs punishment, that what many need, quite plainly, is help.”
It reflects a view embraced by many progressives in the criminal justice reform movement: that the US puts far too many people — particularly people of color — in prison, typically for way too long, and without doing enough to fight the “root causes” of crime.
Parts of Harris’s record match that rhetoric.
In 2004, as district attorney of San Francisco, she refused to seek the death penalty against a man convicted of shooting police officer Isaac Espinoza.
She faced opposition from fellow Democrats; Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) called for the death penalty at the officer’s funeral.
But Harris didn’t budge — an act of principle that cost her key political allies (as she received almost no support from police groups during her first run for attorney general in 2010).
Harris also pushed for more systemic reforms.
Her most successful program as district attorney, “Back on Track,” allowed first-time drug offenders, including drug dealers, to get a high school diploma and a job instead of prison time.
Adams, Harris’s spokesperson, noted that the program started in 2005, “when most prosecutors were using a ‘tough on crime’ approach.”
The climate at the time was far less open to progressive criminal justice policy.
The year before, presidential candidate John Kerry had run, in part, on hiring more cops, adopting a “zero tolerance” approach to gangs, and “cracking down on drug trafficking.”
Crime wasn’t a major issue in the 2004 presidential election, but Kerry’s platform was the legacy of the 1980s and ’90s, when Republicans and Democrats — including President Bill Clinton — competed to see who could be “tough on crime.”
“When she became district attorney, no one was talking about progressive prosecutors,” Tim Silard, who worked under Harris at the San Francisco district attorney’s office, told me.
“She was absolutely an outlier within the California District Attorneys Association, [and] got some pushback and criticism from there.”
In one instance — her handling of California’s “three strikes” law — Harris was arguably ahead of the time.
Under the law, someone who committed a third felony could go to prison for 25 years to life, even if the third felony was a nonviolent crime.
But Harris required that the San Francisco district attorney’s office only charge for a third strike if the felony was a serious or violent crime.
California voters in 2004, the year that Harris took office, rejected a ballot initiative to implement a similar reform statewide — though the ballot proposal had some problems, leading to Harris’s own opposition.
It wasn’t until 2012 that voters approved the change.
“There’s been incredibly rapid change in public opinion, in attention to criminal justice,” Silard said, citing his decades-long experience in the criminal justice system and current experience as president of the reform-minded Rosenberg Foundation.
“Bringing a reverse lens to that is not fair, and also doesn’t recognize folks who were courageous at that time.”
As she geared up to run for California attorney general in 2010, Harris positioned herself as a criminal justice reformer, focusing on improving support for people leaving prison, and published a book in 2009, Smart on Crime, on criminal justice reform.
By this point, Harris wasn’t so much ahead of her time as she was in step with it.
Criminal justice reform had spread nationally: Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, effectively reducing penalties for crack cocaine.
States, facing budget constraints from housing so many prisoners, started to roll back punishments for nonviolent crimes — even in conservative states like Texas and South Carolina.
And books like 2010’s The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander drew attention, particularly among white progressives, to a criminal justice system plagued by vast racial disparities.
(Harris’s 2009 book, by contrast, was “largely colorblind” and “mentions racial bias in policing just twice,” Molly Hensley-Clancy noted at BuzzFeed.)
The progressive prosecutor has also in recent years become much more common, exemplified by Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Kim Foxx in Cook County (Chicago), and several others.
That changing context is part of why many of Harris’s next moves, as California attorney general, disappointed some progressives and criminal justice reformers, including some of her former supporters.
Harris’s troubling record as attorney general
Based on Harris’s record, supporters easily could have expected her to come into the California Department of Justice as attorney general and really shake things up.
But that didn’t happen: Her office’s handling of over-incarceration, the death penalty, and wrongly incarcerated people were among the several issues in which Harris by and large maintained the status quo.
She implemented some reforms: She expanded her “Back on Track” program to other parts of the state.
After Black Lives Matter took off, she introduced and expanded what her office described as “first-of-its-kind training” to address racial bias as well as procedural justice — earning praise from local newspapers.
She made the California Department of Justice the first statewide agency to require body cameras.
And she launched OpenJustice, a platform that, among other data, allows the public to track reported killings by police officers.
But Harris also allowed many parts of the Justice Department to essentially operate as they long had, which at times led to what many now see as major injustices.
In many cases, this led to her office making decisions that Harris, under scrutiny, tried to distance herself from.
For example, Harris’s office fought to release fewer prisoners, even after the US Supreme Court found that overcrowding in California prisons was so bad that it amounted to unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment.
At one point, her lawyers argued that the state couldn’t release some prisoners because it would deplete its pool for prison labor — but Harris quickly clarified that she was not aware her office was going with that argument until it was reported by media.
Or consider Harris’s handling of appeals for release by innocent people in prison.
In one case, her office argued against Daniel Larsen, who was proven innocent by the Innocence Project, because, Harris’s office claimed, he filed his petition for release far too late after a legal deadline.
The court disagreed, allowing Larsen’s release in 2014.
(In the New York Times, Bazelon lists several more such cases.)
Harris’s supporters argue that Harris likely wasn’t closely involved in these cases because Justice Department policy didn’t require state lawyers to seek approval from the attorney general.
As Harris said at a campaign event, “There are cases … where there were folks that made a decision in my office and they had not consulted me, and I wish they had.”
But Harris could have changed department policy and become more hands-on in pushing reform, if she was willing to risk a potential backlash from the people under her.
Then there’s the death penalty.
Harris remains personally opposed to the death penalty, and earlier in her career, she’d been willing to incur political backlash by refusing to seek it in 2004.
But as attorney general, she told voters she would enforce capital punishment.
And she did: In 2014, she appealed a judge’s decision that deemed California’s death penalty system unconstitutional.
Harris didn’t have to do this.
In another case, she declined to defend Proposition 8, which prohibited same-sex marriage.
But in office, she seemed to avoid antagonizing the rank and file — which opposition to the death penalty and other “tough on crime” policies could do.
She often described herself as one of them, calling herself California’s “top cop” and writing in her 2009 book that liberals need to move beyond “biases against law enforcement.”
Harris also overlooked and defended law enforcement officials accused of misconduct.
In one such case, a state prosecutor, Robert Murray, falsified a confession, using it to threaten the defendant with life in prison.
After a court threw out the indictment, Harris’s office appealed it, dismissing the misconduct because it did not involve physical violence.
Harris also resisted some attempts to hold police accountable for shootings, including a bill that would have required the attorney general’s office to investigate killings by police and efforts to create statewide standards for police-worn body cameras.
She also defied calls to have her office quickly investigate certain police shootings in California.
“There’s lots of resistance [to reform], both within your own ranks and then from the cops and their allies,” Silard told me.
And acting differently in these situations could have upset the rank and file — after Harris narrowly won her election in 2010 by less than 1 percentage point, without the support of most law enforcement groups.
But her inaction angered activists.
“How many more people need to die before she steps in?” an activist and former supporter, Phelicia Jones, told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2016, regarding police shootings.
Jones went on, directing her comments to Harris: “We don’t even know that you care."
"You have turned your back on the people who got you to where you are.”
In the Senate, Harris has championed criminal justice reform
Since her Senate campaign in 2016, Harris has tried to avoid the faulty parts of her record, and instead emphasized the reforms she’s supported and implemented over the years.
She has adopted sweeping rhetoric about the criminal justice system, arguing that it needs to be systemically changed.
Her presidential campaign website characterizes her as “for the people,” “speaking truth, demanding justice,” and “fighting to fix our broken criminal justice system.”
Consider one of Harris’s common lines: She’s described her support for criminal justice reform as pushing for a better return on investment, pointing out that US prisons see recidivism rates as high as 70 percent or more.
As Harris told the New York Times Magazine in 2016, “If we were talking about any other system where you have a failure rate of about 70 percent, the investors would say, at the very least, do a wholesale reconstruction, if not shut it down.”
This is strong rhetoric — which suggests that Harris’s ultimate aim isn’t to merely tinker with the criminal justice system, but to seriously transform it.
This aligns Harris far more with where Democrats are today, as Black Lives Matter, ACLU types, and criminal justice reformers push the party to the left on this issue.
In the Senate, Harris has consistently backed reforms, although her leadership role on these issues hasn’t been as extensive as that of some other senators.
She introduced a bail reform bill with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) that would encourage states to reform or replace their bail systems.
This is a big part of the criminal justice system: By most estimates, hundreds of thousands of people are in jail right now, before they’ve been convicted of a crime, just because they can’t afford to pay their bail.
A lot of advocacy work is now dedicated to getting rid of money bail almost entirely, which some places, like Washington, DC, have done with success.
But the bill hasn’t moved far in Congress — although it’s now part of Harris’s presidential campaign platform.
In a team-up with Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Tim Scott (R-SC), Harris also introduced a bill that would for the first time make lynching a federal crime, which has long been a goal for racial justice and civil rights activists.
The bill passed the Senate but didn’t get through the House.
Harris also voted for the First Step Act, the most significant federal criminal justice reform bill to get through Congress in decades — although she tweeted at length about the bill’s shortcomings.
She signed on to Booker’s marijuana legalization bill, and voted for a bill that legalized hemp.
Other Democratic senators, though, have gone a bit further on criminal justice issues.
Booker, for one, introduced the Reverse Mass Incarceration Act — an effort, however flawed, to get states to systematically reduce incarceration rates.
Harris has yet to introduce bills that are just as sweeping, or any systemic reform bills besides her bail proposal, even as she uses rhetoric decrying the criminal justice system as a whole.
Harris’s limited role so far is perhaps expected for a junior senator, but it may be disappointing for people expecting more from a presidential contender with roots in the criminal justice system and who promised something closer to “a wholesale reconstruction” than tinkering at the edges.
But at least when the issue comes to a vote, she’s so far consistently been on the reform side in the Senate — and has made support for reform central to her presidential campaign.
Progressives will have to weigh what Harris is saying now versus parts of her past
The question Harris now faces: Are the reforms she pushed for as a prosecutor and attorney general, and her consistently progressive work in the Senate, enough to satisfy progressives and criminal justice reformers?
The concern here isn’t merely figuring out whether Harris is an honest person.
A constant worry in criminal justice work is what would happen if, say, the crime rate started to rise once again.
In such a scenario, there would be considerably more pressure on lawmakers — and it’d at least be easier for them — to go back to “tough on crime” rhetoric, framing more aggressive policing and higher incarceration rates in a favorable way.
Given that the central progressive claim is that these policies are racist and, based on the research, ineffective for fighting crime in the first place, any potential for backsliding in this area once it becomes politically convenient is very alarming.
This happened before.
From the 1960s through the ’90s, crime and drug use were skyrocketing in the US.
Americans were much more likely, especially in the early ’90s, to say that crime was the most important problem facing the country at the time.
That drove lawmakers, both Democrats and Republicans, to try to find solutions that they could sell to the public — and they by and large landed on a more punitive criminal justice system.
But any link to those “tough on crime” policies now could hurt Harris politically.
According to a 2016 Vox/Morning Consult survey, around two-thirds of Democrats support removing mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, reducing sentences for drug offenses in general, sentencing more people to probation and community service instead of prison, and adopting a national law decriminalizing marijuana.
Other polls have found even higher support for criminal justice reforms among Democrats.
In response to the criticisms, Harris said during the first day of her presidential campaign that she took “responsibility” for some of the problems: “The bottom line is the buck stops with me, and I take full responsibility for what my office did.”
In response to a question about her office’s efforts when she was attorney general, on behalf of the California Department of Corrections, to stop a transgender inmate from getting gender-affirming surgery, Harris elaborated further.
“I was the attorney general of California for two terms, and I had a host of clients that I was obligated to defend and represent,” she said.
“I couldn’t fire my clients and there were unfortunately situations that occurred where my clients took positions that were contrary to my beliefs.”
More broadly, Harris has explained that she rejects what she describes as “the false choice” between criminal justice reform and supporting law enforcement.
“I will never make an excuse for saying this, or an apology for saying this: One human being kills another human being, a woman is raped, a child is molested, there needs to be serious consequence and accountability,” she said during a one-hour interview for her new book in January.
“And I’m always going to say that, and I’m going to say America has a problem with mass incarceration, we have been locking up black and brown men in particular, [and] we have built-in biases that are implicit and explicit that need to be addressed.”
Whether all of that is enough remains to be seen.
Some argue that Harris might not ever be redeemed, because the past job she took at the time she took it just doesn’t line up with progressive values today.
As Briahna Gray wrote for the Intercept, “To become a prosecutor is to make a choice to align oneself with a powerful and fundamentally biased system.”
Yet some seem to have forgiven Harris.
Shaun King, a prominent racial justice advocate, told BuzzFeed that he’s come around to Harris, despite her past record.
“I was a little slow to trust her as a reformer on criminal justice, but I think she’s proven herself to me,” he said.
“I think she’s become one of the better spokespersons for really serious criminal justice reform in the Democratic Party.”
(Although King has remained critical of Harris at times.)
For Harris, where Democrats land in this debate could decide if she becomes the next president of the United States.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ ... P17#page=2
Re: KAMALA HARRIS
FOX NEWS
"Kamala Harris snags early endorsement from Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu"
Paul Steinhauser
28 JANUARY 2019
The Golden State’s presidential primary is more than 13 months away, but that didn’t stop Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu from announcing an early endorsement Monday for fellow Californian, Sen. Kamala Harris, for president.
“I endorse @KamalaHarris for President,” Lieu wrote on Twitter Monday morning.
“Known Kamala for many years & worked together on various issues."
"She embraces the future, not the past, and is the person we need to move America forward.”
Lieu’s endorsement came less than 24 hours after Harris formally launched her candidacy at a large rally in Oakland, the city where she was born and raised.
Lieu’s backing of Harris appears to be one of the first by a member of Congress in what’s shaping up to be a large field of candidates vying for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
One of the only other congressional endorsements this cycle came when Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro endorsed his twin brother Julian Castro’s presidential bid.
Harris, the daughter of parents from Jamaica and India, would be the nation’s second African-American and first woman president if elected.
The former California attorney general was elected to the Senate in 2016.
Harris first announced her candidacy a week ago, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
At her rally Sunday, she highlighted her support for government programs like Medicare for All and universal pre-kindergarten.
And she repeatedly targeted President Trump.
Lieu represents California’s 33rd Congressional District, which stretches along the Pacific coast from the Palos Verdes peninsula through the west side of Los Angeles and Santa Monica up to Malibu.
The district is heavily pro-Democrat, with Hillary Clinton winning over two-thirds of the vote in the 2016 presidential election.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ ... P17#page=2
"Kamala Harris snags early endorsement from Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu"
Paul Steinhauser
28 JANUARY 2019
The Golden State’s presidential primary is more than 13 months away, but that didn’t stop Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu from announcing an early endorsement Monday for fellow Californian, Sen. Kamala Harris, for president.
“I endorse @KamalaHarris for President,” Lieu wrote on Twitter Monday morning.
“Known Kamala for many years & worked together on various issues."
"She embraces the future, not the past, and is the person we need to move America forward.”
Lieu’s endorsement came less than 24 hours after Harris formally launched her candidacy at a large rally in Oakland, the city where she was born and raised.
Lieu’s backing of Harris appears to be one of the first by a member of Congress in what’s shaping up to be a large field of candidates vying for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
One of the only other congressional endorsements this cycle came when Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro endorsed his twin brother Julian Castro’s presidential bid.
Harris, the daughter of parents from Jamaica and India, would be the nation’s second African-American and first woman president if elected.
The former California attorney general was elected to the Senate in 2016.
Harris first announced her candidacy a week ago, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
At her rally Sunday, she highlighted her support for government programs like Medicare for All and universal pre-kindergarten.
And she repeatedly targeted President Trump.
Lieu represents California’s 33rd Congressional District, which stretches along the Pacific coast from the Palos Verdes peninsula through the west side of Los Angeles and Santa Monica up to Malibu.
The district is heavily pro-Democrat, with Hillary Clinton winning over two-thirds of the vote in the 2016 presidential election.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ ... P17#page=2
Re: KAMALA HARRIS
CNN
"Kamala Harris defines her fight against Trump in CNN town hall"
By Maeve Reston, CNN
29 JANUARY 2019
As Kamala Harris introduced herself as a 2020 presidential candidate to Iowa caucus-goers and the nation on Monday night, she showed exactly why she is viewed as such a formidable contender.
During a CNN town hall at Drake University in Des Moines, she demonstrated an easy command of the policies that are most important to Democratic progressives in early states like Iowa.
She was warm, witty and quick to laugh at the jokes audience members made at President Donald Trump's expense.
She locked eyes with her questioners, responding to them by name and walking toward them as she answered, while displaying empathy for their struggles.
Perhaps most important, as Democrats weigh their options in the 2020 field, she made a succinct case for why she believes she would be the strongest candidate to take on Trump and not get "caught up in his crazy," as one questioner put it.
"It's very important that anyone who presents themselves as a leader, and wants to be a leader, will speak like a leader, and that means speaking with integrity — speaking the truth," Harris said.
"And speaking in a way that expresses and indicates some level of interest and concern in people other than one's self."
"Right there we will see a great contrast," she said to laughter.
She added the country deserves a leader who doesn't speak to "the lowest common denominators and base instincts and speak in a way that is about inciting fear as a distraction from the fact that you're getting nothing done, helping the richest people and the biggest corporations."
Her appearance at CNN's first town hall of the 2020 political season capped several weeks of events in which she has introduced herself and her biography to Americans.
She officially announced her presidential bid on Sunday in her birthplace of Oakland, California, where thousands showed up hoping to catch a glimpse of her in the surrounding streets.
During the hour-long town hall, Harris staked out a set of progressive policy positions, including backing "Medicare for all" and doing away with private health insurance as well expressing support for a "Green New Deal" to address climate change.
She also touted her plan to cut taxes for the middle class, saying it would be the first thing she would do if she were elected president.
She was passionate and definitive when she answered a question from a recipient of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, commonly called "Dreamers," who told Harris that she didn't want to be used as a bargaining chip in the negotiations over a border wall.
(Harris was the only potential 2020 presidential candidate who voted against the deal in February 2018 that would have created protections for Dreamers in exchange for wall funding).
"I will say to you, I stand with you," Harris said.
"We should not be trading on your life."
The former California attorney general, who also served as district attorney of San Francisco earlier in her career, was also critical of her congressional colleagues who have failed to support gun control measures like the assault weapons ban after mass tragedies like the Parkland, Florida shooting and the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut.
She argued that her colleagues in Congress should have been forced to look at the autopsy photos of the "babies" who were killed in Newtown and then be asked to vote their conscience.
Listing the various proposals that have been introduced, she argued that legislators have no shortage of good ideas: "What's missing is for people in the United States Congress to act the right way."
Often on the campaign trail, Harris is quick to dismiss questions about what the historical significance would be if she were the first black woman elected president.
She often deflects the question by quoting her mother, who told her, "You may be the first to do many things, but make sure you're not the last."
"That's how I think about those kinds of things," she said.
But she went on to add that it would also be about "breaking barriers, it is something that is very important."
She added that she has had similar conversations with fathers and sons.
"I will also say to you that I have seen fathers bring their sons up to me and say, 'she is the first,' in a way that is to also speak to those sons about the fact they should not ever be burdened by what has been and they should see what can be," Harris said.
"I think that's really the most important takeaway, which is that with each barrier we break, it is saying to all of us, don't be burdened by what has been."
"See what can be and strive for that."
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ ... P17#page=2
"Kamala Harris defines her fight against Trump in CNN town hall"
By Maeve Reston, CNN
29 JANUARY 2019
As Kamala Harris introduced herself as a 2020 presidential candidate to Iowa caucus-goers and the nation on Monday night, she showed exactly why she is viewed as such a formidable contender.
During a CNN town hall at Drake University in Des Moines, she demonstrated an easy command of the policies that are most important to Democratic progressives in early states like Iowa.
She was warm, witty and quick to laugh at the jokes audience members made at President Donald Trump's expense.
She locked eyes with her questioners, responding to them by name and walking toward them as she answered, while displaying empathy for their struggles.
Perhaps most important, as Democrats weigh their options in the 2020 field, she made a succinct case for why she believes she would be the strongest candidate to take on Trump and not get "caught up in his crazy," as one questioner put it.
"It's very important that anyone who presents themselves as a leader, and wants to be a leader, will speak like a leader, and that means speaking with integrity — speaking the truth," Harris said.
"And speaking in a way that expresses and indicates some level of interest and concern in people other than one's self."
"Right there we will see a great contrast," she said to laughter.
She added the country deserves a leader who doesn't speak to "the lowest common denominators and base instincts and speak in a way that is about inciting fear as a distraction from the fact that you're getting nothing done, helping the richest people and the biggest corporations."
Her appearance at CNN's first town hall of the 2020 political season capped several weeks of events in which she has introduced herself and her biography to Americans.
She officially announced her presidential bid on Sunday in her birthplace of Oakland, California, where thousands showed up hoping to catch a glimpse of her in the surrounding streets.
During the hour-long town hall, Harris staked out a set of progressive policy positions, including backing "Medicare for all" and doing away with private health insurance as well expressing support for a "Green New Deal" to address climate change.
She also touted her plan to cut taxes for the middle class, saying it would be the first thing she would do if she were elected president.
She was passionate and definitive when she answered a question from a recipient of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, commonly called "Dreamers," who told Harris that she didn't want to be used as a bargaining chip in the negotiations over a border wall.
(Harris was the only potential 2020 presidential candidate who voted against the deal in February 2018 that would have created protections for Dreamers in exchange for wall funding).
"I will say to you, I stand with you," Harris said.
"We should not be trading on your life."
The former California attorney general, who also served as district attorney of San Francisco earlier in her career, was also critical of her congressional colleagues who have failed to support gun control measures like the assault weapons ban after mass tragedies like the Parkland, Florida shooting and the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut.
She argued that her colleagues in Congress should have been forced to look at the autopsy photos of the "babies" who were killed in Newtown and then be asked to vote their conscience.
Listing the various proposals that have been introduced, she argued that legislators have no shortage of good ideas: "What's missing is for people in the United States Congress to act the right way."
Often on the campaign trail, Harris is quick to dismiss questions about what the historical significance would be if she were the first black woman elected president.
She often deflects the question by quoting her mother, who told her, "You may be the first to do many things, but make sure you're not the last."
"That's how I think about those kinds of things," she said.
But she went on to add that it would also be about "breaking barriers, it is something that is very important."
She added that she has had similar conversations with fathers and sons.
"I will also say to you that I have seen fathers bring their sons up to me and say, 'she is the first,' in a way that is to also speak to those sons about the fact they should not ever be burdened by what has been and they should see what can be," Harris said.
"I think that's really the most important takeaway, which is that with each barrier we break, it is saying to all of us, don't be burdened by what has been."
"See what can be and strive for that."
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ ... P17#page=2
Re: KAMALA HARRIS
THE WASHINGTON POST
"‘I am who I am’: Kamala Harris, daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, defines herself simply as ‘American’"
Kevin Sullivan
2 FEBRUARY 2019
SAN FRANCISCO —In early 2010, an Indian American couple hosted a fundraiser in their elegant Pacific Heights home for Kamala Harris, then a Democratic candidate for California attorney general.
Harris had been San Francisco’s high-profile district attorney for more than six years, but Deepak Puri and Shareen Punian had only recently learned that Harris was, as Punian said, “one of our peeps,” a woman whose mother was an Indian immigrant.
They had always assumed Harris was African American, and so did most of the 60 or 70 Indian American community leaders at the event, many of whom asked Puri and Punian why they had been invited.
“At least half of them didn’t know she was Indian,” said Punian, a business executive and political activist.
Harris, 54, now a U.S. senator and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, would be several firsts in the White House: the first woman, the first African American woman, the first Indian American and the first Asian American.
The daughter of two immigrants — her father came from Jamaica — she would also be the second biracial president, after Barack Obama.
Obama’s soul-searching quest to explore his identity, as the son of a white mother from Kansas and a Kenyan father who as largely absent from his life, was well-documented in his autobiography.
But when asked, in an interview, if she had wrestled with similar introspection about race, ethnicity and identity, Harris didn’t hesitate:
“No,” she said flatly.
Harris stressed that she doesn’t compare herself to Obama, and she prefers that others don’t, either.
She wants to be measured on her own merits.
She said she has not spent much time dwelling on how to categorize herself.
“So much so,” she said, “that when I first ran for office that was one of the things that I struggled with, which is that you are forced through that process to define yourself in a way that you fit neatly into the compartment that other people have created."
“My point was: I am who I am."
"I’m good with it."
"You might need to figure it out, but I’m fine with it,” she said.
Harris’s background in many ways embodies the culturally fluid, racially blended society that is second-nature in California’s Bay Area and is increasingly common across the United States.
She calls herself simply “an American,” and said she has been fully comfortable with her identity from an early age.
She credits that largely to a Hindu immigrant single mom who adopted black culture and immersed her daughters in it.
Harris grew up embracing her Indian culture, but living a proudly African American life.
“My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters,” Harris writes in her recently published autobiography, “The Truths We Hold.”
“She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women.”
Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was keenly attracted to the civil rights movement and the African American culture of her new home in the 1960s and 70s.
At first, she marched and protested with her black husband, then alone or with the girls after they divorced when Harris was very young.
She brought her daughters home to India for visits, she cooked Indian food for them and the girls often wore Indian jewelry.
But Harris worshiped at an African American church, went to a preschool with posters of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman on the wall, attended Civil Rights marches in a stroller, and was bused with other black kids to an elementary school in a wealthier white neighborhood.
When it was time for college, she moved across the country to Washington to attend the historically black Howard University.
“Her Indian culture, she held onto that,” said Sharon McGaffie, 67, an African American woman who has known Harris and her sister, Maya, since they were toddlers living in Berkeley, Calif.
“But I think they grew up as black children who are now black women."
"There’s no question about it.”
As Harris’s political profile has risen outside her home region, she will face pressure to discuss her heritage from a broader electorate seeking to fully understand her and politically connected Indian Americans who feel she has not previously put as much focus on her South Asian roots.
In her years in the public eye — seven years as San Francisco district attorney and six years at California’s attorney general before her election to the Senate in 2016 — Harris has tended to stress issues over her personal biography.
Harris, in the interview, said that was because, “It’s not about me."
"It’s about the people I represent.”
She said political campaigns, especially for president, require candidates to explain their background so voters “can figure out why you do what you do.”
So while she “was raised not to talk about myself,” she said that is why she wrote her book to lay out the details of her heritage and career.
“I appreciate that there is that desire that people have to have context, and I want to give people context,” she said.
Harris hasn’t tried to shape perceptions of her identity as much as she has simply accepted that most people see her as black, said Robert C. Smith, a recently retired professor of political science at San Francisco State University who specializes in African American politics.
“She has not used it politically,” Smith said.
“She has not avoided it, she has just kind of said it and moved on: ‘I’m this, I’m this, I’m that, now let’s move on’ to talk about the death penalty or whatever is the issue of the day.”
Smith said Harris’s “blackness was never ambiguous” and she didn’t feel the need to trumpet it.
Her lack of public focus on her heritage has left many people, even in her home state, unaware of her multiracial background.
Most people assume she is African American, and even some friends didn’t know that she was also Indian.
“I had no idea,” said Matthew Davis, a San Francisco lawyer and classmate of Harris’s at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, where they graduated in 1989.
“Even though we were good friends, I never really heard her talk too much about her personal life,” said Davis, who also worked with Harris in the San Francisco city attorney’s office before she was elected district attorney.
It was only when she was sworn in as district attorney in 2004, 15 years after they graduated from law school, that Davis learned Harris was half Indian.
“She introduced me to her mother, and that was the first time I knew,” Davis said.
“It was a sense of pride for her, but I didn’t get the sense that it was the way she defined herself.”
Even now, Harris still doesn’t seem fully at ease discussing her personal heritage.
In her first campaign stop after announcing for president on “Good Morning America” on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Harris appeared on her old Howard campus to take questions.
“You’re African American, but you’re also Indian American,” a reporter said.
“Indeed,” she replied.
“How do you describe yourself?”
“Did you read my book?"
"How do I describe myself?"
"I describe myself as a proud American.”
She said it with a smile, but with an “end-of-conversation” firmness.
Leah Williams, a San Francisco lawyer who has been friends with Harris since the early 1990s, said Harris inherited a “strong sense of self” from her mother, who raised two daughters as a single immigrant mom.
“She’s not a person who doesn’t contemplate herself or her identity,” Williams said in an interview.
“But there are just people who get up in the morning and look in the mirror and know who they are.”
Williams, who took her children to Washington to attend Harris’s Senate swearing-in ceremony in 2017, said Harris was “centered and anchored” because she grew up in a house with two other strong women who were role models.
“Growing up, they could all look at each other and see themselves in each other,” Williams said.
Harris agreed that her upbringing was filled with “pride and nurturing” that gave her a solid grounding.
“I’m no different than anybody else,” she said.
“I’m not suggesting that I don’t have the doubts and whatever that any normal person has."
"But . . . I don’t have any doubts about who I am ethnically or racially.”
Harris has often spoken of her mother, a Tamil from Chennai in southeast India, as her inspiration, and she writes about it extensively in her book.
Gopalan graduated from college in India at 19, then moved to California in 1959 and earned a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley.
There, she met and married Donald J. Harris, who is now an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University.
The elder Harris did not respond to a request for comment.
After their divorce, Harris visited her father’s family in Jamaica and stayed in touch with him.
But she credited her mother, a noted cancer researcher and civil rights activist who died in 2009, with being “most responsible for shaping us into the women we would become.”
On her visits to India as a child, Harris was deeply influenced by her grandfather, a high-ranking government official who had fought for Indian independence.
But while she had a “strong awareness and appreciation for Indian culture,” she writes, her mother raised her in an African American world.
“From almost the moment she arrived from India, she chose and was welcomed to and enveloped in the black community,” Harris writes.
“It was the foundation of her new American life.”
Sharon McGaffie’s mother, Regina Shelton, ran the preschool that Harris and her sister attended.
Because Harris’s mother traveled regularly for her work as a cancer scientist, the girls would regularly stay over at McGaffie’s house, two doors down on a quiet street in Berkeley.
Shelton became like a mother to Harris’s mother, and grandmother to Harris.
McGaffie said the Harris girls would regularly accompany her family to the Twenty Third Avenue Church of God in Oakland, Calif., an African American protestant congregation.
Their mother eagerly encouraged them to go but did not attend herself, McGaffie said.
When Harris was sworn into office as AG and senator, she did so with her hand on the Bible that Shelton carried with her to church every Sunday.
“She has always been engaged in African American politics, community struggles, community organizations, and life,” said Karen V. Clopton, a lawyer and former judge in San Francisco who has been a friend of Harris’s for more than two decades.
Harris’s college choice marked a notable contrast from the rest of her family.
Her parents both earned PhDs from UC Berkeley, and her sister went to UC Berkeley and Stanford Law School.
Harris opted for Howard, one of the country’s most prestigious historically black schools.
She said that was largely because her hero, trailblazing lawyer and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, went there.
“As a black woman, it gave her a real opportunity to be enveloped in that part of who she is,” said her friend Leah Williams.
“She holds that experience close to her heart.”
Four days after addressing reporters at Howard, Harris traveled to South Carolina, a key early primary state with a large African American electorate.
She spoke at the annual “Pink Ice Gala” hosted by her sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, the nation’s oldest black sorority, which has a network of 300,000 members.
In her official campaign kickoff speech in Oakland last weekend, Harris stood before 20,000 people and spoke of some of her African American heroes — faces she grew up with on Shelton’s walls.
“When abolitionists spoke out and civil rights workers marched, their oppressors said they were dividing the races and violating the word of God,” she said.
“But Fredrick Douglass said it best and Harriet Tubman and Dr. King knew."
"To love the religion of Jesus is to hate the religion of the slave master.”
Asked in the Washington Post interview how her African American background has influenced her, Harris said, “It’s kind of like asking how did eating food shape who I am today.”
“It affects everything about who I am,” she said.
“Growing up as a black person in America made me aware of certain things that, maybe if you didn’t grow up black in America, you wouldn’t be aware of.”
Asked for an example, she said, “Racism.”
“I grew up in a hot spot of the civil rights movement,” she said.
“But that civil rights movement involved blacks, it involved Jews, it involved Asians, it involved Chicanos, it involved a multitude of people who were aware that there were laws that were not equally applied to all people.”
As Harris has become a prominent figure in state and national politics, many Indian Americans are thrilled — and a little surprised to learn of her Indian background.
“It’s only been in the last year or so that she’s really come out and embraced it,” said Aziz Haniffa, executive editor of India Abroad, the oldest and largest South Asian newspaper in the United States.
Harris has never made a secret of her Indian heritage, and has she has fought on behalf issues of importance to most Indians, including immigration reform.
She has appeared at Indian American gatherings throughout her career.
Indian American publications proudly use her Indian first name, which means “lotus flower,” along with her middle name, Devi, the Sanskrit word for “goddess,” which Harris generally doesn’t use.
In a 2009 interview with India Abroad, Harris said her Indian background “has had a great deal of influence on what I do today and who I am.”
She told the interviewer her African American and Indian heritage “are of equal weight in terms of who I am.”
She continued: “We have to stop seeing issues and people through a plate-glass window as though we were one-dimensional."
"Instead, we have to see that most people exist through a prism and they are a sum of many factors.”
Shekar Narasimhan, chairman and founder of the AAPI Victory Fund, a national super PAC founded in 2015 that focuses on building the political power of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, said Harris in the past year has done several high-profile speeches and events with Indian American groups that have helped to raise her profile.
“I’m so glad she has discovered her Indian-ness,” Narasimhan said with a laugh.
“It’s sudden, but I absolutely love that it’s happening."
"It’s not something she has exhibited over the years.”
M.R. Rangaswami, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist, said Harris’s story parallels the rising influence of the U.S. Indian community.
Rangaswami said Indians represent about 1 percent of the population, and now have about 1 percent representation in Congress, with four members of the House of Representatives and one senator.
“My advice to Kamala would be: ‘You’ve got a great story.'"
"'You should tell it,’ ” he said.
“As the community has come of age, there is a yearning for successful role models, and she totally fits that model.”
In the Post interview, Harris said she disagreed with the perception that she has not stressed her Indian background, saying she had “been focused on the Indian community my entire life.”
She said the view that she embraced it wholeheartedly only more recently was “a matter of what people are aware of and what the press has focused on.”
She pointed, for example, to her advocacy as early as 2001, after the 9/11 attacks, when South Asians became the targets of abuse and violence.
“I was very active in fighting to make sure that the community was not the subject of hate and bias and ill-treatment,” she said.
“I grew up with a great deal of pride and understanding about my Indian heritage and culture,” she said.
In their San Francisco home, where they hosted the 2010 fundraiser, Puri and Punian said they were enthusiastic about Harris.
Puri, a Silicon Valley software executive, and Punian, a finance executive, have helped introduce Harris around Silicon Valley.
Puni said Harris’s multicultural background appeals to many people.
“It’s like a Rorschach test,” he said.
“Every person can interpret her differently.”
kevin.sullivan@washpost.com
Staff writer Chelsea Janes contributed to this report.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ ... P17#page=2
"‘I am who I am’: Kamala Harris, daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, defines herself simply as ‘American’"
Kevin Sullivan
2 FEBRUARY 2019
SAN FRANCISCO —In early 2010, an Indian American couple hosted a fundraiser in their elegant Pacific Heights home for Kamala Harris, then a Democratic candidate for California attorney general.
Harris had been San Francisco’s high-profile district attorney for more than six years, but Deepak Puri and Shareen Punian had only recently learned that Harris was, as Punian said, “one of our peeps,” a woman whose mother was an Indian immigrant.
They had always assumed Harris was African American, and so did most of the 60 or 70 Indian American community leaders at the event, many of whom asked Puri and Punian why they had been invited.
“At least half of them didn’t know she was Indian,” said Punian, a business executive and political activist.
Harris, 54, now a U.S. senator and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, would be several firsts in the White House: the first woman, the first African American woman, the first Indian American and the first Asian American.
The daughter of two immigrants — her father came from Jamaica — she would also be the second biracial president, after Barack Obama.
Obama’s soul-searching quest to explore his identity, as the son of a white mother from Kansas and a Kenyan father who as largely absent from his life, was well-documented in his autobiography.
But when asked, in an interview, if she had wrestled with similar introspection about race, ethnicity and identity, Harris didn’t hesitate:
“No,” she said flatly.
Harris stressed that she doesn’t compare herself to Obama, and she prefers that others don’t, either.
She wants to be measured on her own merits.
She said she has not spent much time dwelling on how to categorize herself.
“So much so,” she said, “that when I first ran for office that was one of the things that I struggled with, which is that you are forced through that process to define yourself in a way that you fit neatly into the compartment that other people have created."
“My point was: I am who I am."
"I’m good with it."
"You might need to figure it out, but I’m fine with it,” she said.
Harris’s background in many ways embodies the culturally fluid, racially blended society that is second-nature in California’s Bay Area and is increasingly common across the United States.
She calls herself simply “an American,” and said she has been fully comfortable with her identity from an early age.
She credits that largely to a Hindu immigrant single mom who adopted black culture and immersed her daughters in it.
Harris grew up embracing her Indian culture, but living a proudly African American life.
“My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters,” Harris writes in her recently published autobiography, “The Truths We Hold.”
“She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women.”
Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was keenly attracted to the civil rights movement and the African American culture of her new home in the 1960s and 70s.
At first, she marched and protested with her black husband, then alone or with the girls after they divorced when Harris was very young.
She brought her daughters home to India for visits, she cooked Indian food for them and the girls often wore Indian jewelry.
But Harris worshiped at an African American church, went to a preschool with posters of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman on the wall, attended Civil Rights marches in a stroller, and was bused with other black kids to an elementary school in a wealthier white neighborhood.
When it was time for college, she moved across the country to Washington to attend the historically black Howard University.
“Her Indian culture, she held onto that,” said Sharon McGaffie, 67, an African American woman who has known Harris and her sister, Maya, since they were toddlers living in Berkeley, Calif.
“But I think they grew up as black children who are now black women."
"There’s no question about it.”
As Harris’s political profile has risen outside her home region, she will face pressure to discuss her heritage from a broader electorate seeking to fully understand her and politically connected Indian Americans who feel she has not previously put as much focus on her South Asian roots.
In her years in the public eye — seven years as San Francisco district attorney and six years at California’s attorney general before her election to the Senate in 2016 — Harris has tended to stress issues over her personal biography.
Harris, in the interview, said that was because, “It’s not about me."
"It’s about the people I represent.”
She said political campaigns, especially for president, require candidates to explain their background so voters “can figure out why you do what you do.”
So while she “was raised not to talk about myself,” she said that is why she wrote her book to lay out the details of her heritage and career.
“I appreciate that there is that desire that people have to have context, and I want to give people context,” she said.
Harris hasn’t tried to shape perceptions of her identity as much as she has simply accepted that most people see her as black, said Robert C. Smith, a recently retired professor of political science at San Francisco State University who specializes in African American politics.
“She has not used it politically,” Smith said.
“She has not avoided it, she has just kind of said it and moved on: ‘I’m this, I’m this, I’m that, now let’s move on’ to talk about the death penalty or whatever is the issue of the day.”
Smith said Harris’s “blackness was never ambiguous” and she didn’t feel the need to trumpet it.
Her lack of public focus on her heritage has left many people, even in her home state, unaware of her multiracial background.
Most people assume she is African American, and even some friends didn’t know that she was also Indian.
“I had no idea,” said Matthew Davis, a San Francisco lawyer and classmate of Harris’s at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, where they graduated in 1989.
“Even though we were good friends, I never really heard her talk too much about her personal life,” said Davis, who also worked with Harris in the San Francisco city attorney’s office before she was elected district attorney.
It was only when she was sworn in as district attorney in 2004, 15 years after they graduated from law school, that Davis learned Harris was half Indian.
“She introduced me to her mother, and that was the first time I knew,” Davis said.
“It was a sense of pride for her, but I didn’t get the sense that it was the way she defined herself.”
Even now, Harris still doesn’t seem fully at ease discussing her personal heritage.
In her first campaign stop after announcing for president on “Good Morning America” on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Harris appeared on her old Howard campus to take questions.
“You’re African American, but you’re also Indian American,” a reporter said.
“Indeed,” she replied.
“How do you describe yourself?”
“Did you read my book?"
"How do I describe myself?"
"I describe myself as a proud American.”
She said it with a smile, but with an “end-of-conversation” firmness.
Leah Williams, a San Francisco lawyer who has been friends with Harris since the early 1990s, said Harris inherited a “strong sense of self” from her mother, who raised two daughters as a single immigrant mom.
“She’s not a person who doesn’t contemplate herself or her identity,” Williams said in an interview.
“But there are just people who get up in the morning and look in the mirror and know who they are.”
Williams, who took her children to Washington to attend Harris’s Senate swearing-in ceremony in 2017, said Harris was “centered and anchored” because she grew up in a house with two other strong women who were role models.
“Growing up, they could all look at each other and see themselves in each other,” Williams said.
Harris agreed that her upbringing was filled with “pride and nurturing” that gave her a solid grounding.
“I’m no different than anybody else,” she said.
“I’m not suggesting that I don’t have the doubts and whatever that any normal person has."
"But . . . I don’t have any doubts about who I am ethnically or racially.”
Harris has often spoken of her mother, a Tamil from Chennai in southeast India, as her inspiration, and she writes about it extensively in her book.
Gopalan graduated from college in India at 19, then moved to California in 1959 and earned a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley.
There, she met and married Donald J. Harris, who is now an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University.
The elder Harris did not respond to a request for comment.
After their divorce, Harris visited her father’s family in Jamaica and stayed in touch with him.
But she credited her mother, a noted cancer researcher and civil rights activist who died in 2009, with being “most responsible for shaping us into the women we would become.”
On her visits to India as a child, Harris was deeply influenced by her grandfather, a high-ranking government official who had fought for Indian independence.
But while she had a “strong awareness and appreciation for Indian culture,” she writes, her mother raised her in an African American world.
“From almost the moment she arrived from India, she chose and was welcomed to and enveloped in the black community,” Harris writes.
“It was the foundation of her new American life.”
Sharon McGaffie’s mother, Regina Shelton, ran the preschool that Harris and her sister attended.
Because Harris’s mother traveled regularly for her work as a cancer scientist, the girls would regularly stay over at McGaffie’s house, two doors down on a quiet street in Berkeley.
Shelton became like a mother to Harris’s mother, and grandmother to Harris.
McGaffie said the Harris girls would regularly accompany her family to the Twenty Third Avenue Church of God in Oakland, Calif., an African American protestant congregation.
Their mother eagerly encouraged them to go but did not attend herself, McGaffie said.
When Harris was sworn into office as AG and senator, she did so with her hand on the Bible that Shelton carried with her to church every Sunday.
“She has always been engaged in African American politics, community struggles, community organizations, and life,” said Karen V. Clopton, a lawyer and former judge in San Francisco who has been a friend of Harris’s for more than two decades.
Harris’s college choice marked a notable contrast from the rest of her family.
Her parents both earned PhDs from UC Berkeley, and her sister went to UC Berkeley and Stanford Law School.
Harris opted for Howard, one of the country’s most prestigious historically black schools.
She said that was largely because her hero, trailblazing lawyer and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, went there.
“As a black woman, it gave her a real opportunity to be enveloped in that part of who she is,” said her friend Leah Williams.
“She holds that experience close to her heart.”
Four days after addressing reporters at Howard, Harris traveled to South Carolina, a key early primary state with a large African American electorate.
She spoke at the annual “Pink Ice Gala” hosted by her sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, the nation’s oldest black sorority, which has a network of 300,000 members.
In her official campaign kickoff speech in Oakland last weekend, Harris stood before 20,000 people and spoke of some of her African American heroes — faces she grew up with on Shelton’s walls.
“When abolitionists spoke out and civil rights workers marched, their oppressors said they were dividing the races and violating the word of God,” she said.
“But Fredrick Douglass said it best and Harriet Tubman and Dr. King knew."
"To love the religion of Jesus is to hate the religion of the slave master.”
Asked in the Washington Post interview how her African American background has influenced her, Harris said, “It’s kind of like asking how did eating food shape who I am today.”
“It affects everything about who I am,” she said.
“Growing up as a black person in America made me aware of certain things that, maybe if you didn’t grow up black in America, you wouldn’t be aware of.”
Asked for an example, she said, “Racism.”
“I grew up in a hot spot of the civil rights movement,” she said.
“But that civil rights movement involved blacks, it involved Jews, it involved Asians, it involved Chicanos, it involved a multitude of people who were aware that there were laws that were not equally applied to all people.”
As Harris has become a prominent figure in state and national politics, many Indian Americans are thrilled — and a little surprised to learn of her Indian background.
“It’s only been in the last year or so that she’s really come out and embraced it,” said Aziz Haniffa, executive editor of India Abroad, the oldest and largest South Asian newspaper in the United States.
Harris has never made a secret of her Indian heritage, and has she has fought on behalf issues of importance to most Indians, including immigration reform.
She has appeared at Indian American gatherings throughout her career.
Indian American publications proudly use her Indian first name, which means “lotus flower,” along with her middle name, Devi, the Sanskrit word for “goddess,” which Harris generally doesn’t use.
In a 2009 interview with India Abroad, Harris said her Indian background “has had a great deal of influence on what I do today and who I am.”
She told the interviewer her African American and Indian heritage “are of equal weight in terms of who I am.”
She continued: “We have to stop seeing issues and people through a plate-glass window as though we were one-dimensional."
"Instead, we have to see that most people exist through a prism and they are a sum of many factors.”
Shekar Narasimhan, chairman and founder of the AAPI Victory Fund, a national super PAC founded in 2015 that focuses on building the political power of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, said Harris in the past year has done several high-profile speeches and events with Indian American groups that have helped to raise her profile.
“I’m so glad she has discovered her Indian-ness,” Narasimhan said with a laugh.
“It’s sudden, but I absolutely love that it’s happening."
"It’s not something she has exhibited over the years.”
M.R. Rangaswami, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist, said Harris’s story parallels the rising influence of the U.S. Indian community.
Rangaswami said Indians represent about 1 percent of the population, and now have about 1 percent representation in Congress, with four members of the House of Representatives and one senator.
“My advice to Kamala would be: ‘You’ve got a great story.'"
"'You should tell it,’ ” he said.
“As the community has come of age, there is a yearning for successful role models, and she totally fits that model.”
In the Post interview, Harris said she disagreed with the perception that she has not stressed her Indian background, saying she had “been focused on the Indian community my entire life.”
She said the view that she embraced it wholeheartedly only more recently was “a matter of what people are aware of and what the press has focused on.”
She pointed, for example, to her advocacy as early as 2001, after the 9/11 attacks, when South Asians became the targets of abuse and violence.
“I was very active in fighting to make sure that the community was not the subject of hate and bias and ill-treatment,” she said.
“I grew up with a great deal of pride and understanding about my Indian heritage and culture,” she said.
In their San Francisco home, where they hosted the 2010 fundraiser, Puri and Punian said they were enthusiastic about Harris.
Puri, a Silicon Valley software executive, and Punian, a finance executive, have helped introduce Harris around Silicon Valley.
Puni said Harris’s multicultural background appeals to many people.
“It’s like a Rorschach test,” he said.
“Every person can interpret her differently.”
kevin.sullivan@washpost.com
Staff writer Chelsea Janes contributed to this report.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ ... P17#page=2
Re: KAMALA HARRIS
ASSOCIATED PRESS
"Democratic contenders hoping to run on soaking the rich"
By NICHOLAS RICCARDI and ELANA SCHOR, Associated Press
4 FEBRUARY 2019
WASHINGTON — The last Democrat to win a presidential election, Barack Obama, ran in 2012 on a platform of raising taxes for top earners to nearly 40 percent.
Now a new crop of Democratic presidential hopefuls is signaling that they want to go even further.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren is floating a 2 percent tax on all assets of people with a net worth of more than $50 million — a moon-shot plan that could face legal challenges for hitting investments, homes and cars, not just income.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is pitching a steeply higher inheritance tax on large estates.
Others targeting higher income earners include California Sen. Kamala Harris, who has proposed rolling back the recent GOP tax cuts for wealthier families to pay for tax rebates for middle- and lower-income earners.
The eruption of high-end tax proposals is a shift for Democrats, who have traditionally not centered their presidential bids around tax hikes — particularly at this early stage of a campaign.
It underscores the party's march to the left and candidates' desire to tap into the Wall Street-rattling energy of liberal voters.
"If you're looking for a bumper sticker, 'tax rich people' is a pretty good bumper sticker," said Howard Glickman of the centrist Tax Policy Center.
Beyond its messaging power, taxing the wealthy also gives Democratic contenders a way to propose paying for their sweeping progressive agendas.
Sanders put it simply last week: "We need additional revenue if we're going to provide health care for all, rebuild our infrastructure, make public colleges and universities tuition-free."
The rush to tax the rich has prompted criticism from others eyeing the White House — namely billionaires Michael Bloomberg, a former Republican who is considering running as a Democrat, and former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, who is mulling an independent run for president.
Schultz says he was driven from the Democratic Party by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the rising star who's issued her own call for a 70 percent income tax rate on people making more than $10 million.
Democratic strategists worry Schultz could peel off a small but vital slice of affluent voters and help President Donald Trump get re-elected in a three-way race.
But to progressive Democratic contenders, the criticism from billionaires like Schultz proves their point.
"The billionaires are writing the rules around here."
"And guess what: all those rules favor the billionaires," Warren said in an interview.
Republicans, meanwhile, are eager to cast the Democratic tax proposals as damaging to an economy that has steadily grown since Trump took office.
Texas Sen. John Cornyn, a senior GOP member of the tax-writing Finance Committee, described Warren and Sanders' tax plans as playing off "the politics of personal envy."
He predicted economic blowback from reversing the current tax laws muscled through by Republicans in 2017.
The $2 trillion tax bill Trump signed into law was a boon for many wealthy Americans, with low-and middle-income Americans receiving smaller cuts.
While many Democrats have previously backed higher taxes for the wealthiest Americans, they've rarely made the issue such an early focal point of their campaigns.
Obama shied away from tax increases during his first run for office, as did almost every Democratic nominee since Walter Mondale in 1984 pledged to raise voters' taxes and lost to President Reagan in an historic landslide.
But polls now show that voters are happy to see higher-end taxes, to a point.
In April 2018, Gallup found that about 6 in 10 Americans thought the wealthy didn't pay their fair share of taxes.
A Fox News poll last week found 7 in 10 Americans supported raising taxes on people making more than 10 million dollars a year and 65 percent on those making more than $1 million.
But support plunges when family income drops, with only 44 percent backing higher taxes on those making more than $250,000.
"What's happened sometimes in these debates is the 'on the wealthy' gets left out in some people's minds," said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman.
"The question is to what extent you can control the interpretation" of tax increases.
Democrats seem to have learned that lesson, at least with the 70-percent rate from Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, and a Warren proposal that would only hit an estimated 75,000 households in the United States — the upper echelon of U.S. wealth.
"It's clear that the people they're targeting are the very, very, very well-off," said Alan Viard of the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
But Viard and other critics warn that the higher Democrats go, the less revenue they may actually get.
That's because the wealthy can shift around assets to avoid new levies.
And Warren's proposal, because it taxes more than income, may not comply with the Constitution, which was amended to allow the federal government to tax income, not wealth.
Glickman said that Warren's tax may be the most politically viable, because it targets such wealthy individuals.
But it may be the toughest to implement.
Several European countries have recently eliminated wealth taxes because they are so hard to administer, and the value of the mega-rich's holdings so hard to pin down, Glickman said.
Economists advising Warren's campaign project it will raise $2.75 trillion over 10 years, but Glickman was skeptical.
"When that much money is at stake, rich guys are going to go out and hire really smart tax lawyers," he said.
While Warren has enthusiastically embraced her tax plan's impact on the wealthy, Harris' early messaging has focused more on boosting middle-income earners with a $500 a month refundable tax credit to households earning less than $100,000 a year.
Harris would pay for this partly by eliminating the Trump tax cuts for households earning more than $100,000.
That could be politically risky because this group, while comfortable, is largely not the mega-rich.
___
Riccardi reported from Denver. AP polling writer Hannah Fingerhut contributed to this report.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ ... P17#page=2
"Democratic contenders hoping to run on soaking the rich"
By NICHOLAS RICCARDI and ELANA SCHOR, Associated Press
4 FEBRUARY 2019
WASHINGTON — The last Democrat to win a presidential election, Barack Obama, ran in 2012 on a platform of raising taxes for top earners to nearly 40 percent.
Now a new crop of Democratic presidential hopefuls is signaling that they want to go even further.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren is floating a 2 percent tax on all assets of people with a net worth of more than $50 million — a moon-shot plan that could face legal challenges for hitting investments, homes and cars, not just income.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is pitching a steeply higher inheritance tax on large estates.
Others targeting higher income earners include California Sen. Kamala Harris, who has proposed rolling back the recent GOP tax cuts for wealthier families to pay for tax rebates for middle- and lower-income earners.
The eruption of high-end tax proposals is a shift for Democrats, who have traditionally not centered their presidential bids around tax hikes — particularly at this early stage of a campaign.
It underscores the party's march to the left and candidates' desire to tap into the Wall Street-rattling energy of liberal voters.
"If you're looking for a bumper sticker, 'tax rich people' is a pretty good bumper sticker," said Howard Glickman of the centrist Tax Policy Center.
Beyond its messaging power, taxing the wealthy also gives Democratic contenders a way to propose paying for their sweeping progressive agendas.
Sanders put it simply last week: "We need additional revenue if we're going to provide health care for all, rebuild our infrastructure, make public colleges and universities tuition-free."
The rush to tax the rich has prompted criticism from others eyeing the White House — namely billionaires Michael Bloomberg, a former Republican who is considering running as a Democrat, and former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, who is mulling an independent run for president.
Schultz says he was driven from the Democratic Party by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the rising star who's issued her own call for a 70 percent income tax rate on people making more than $10 million.
Democratic strategists worry Schultz could peel off a small but vital slice of affluent voters and help President Donald Trump get re-elected in a three-way race.
But to progressive Democratic contenders, the criticism from billionaires like Schultz proves their point.
"The billionaires are writing the rules around here."
"And guess what: all those rules favor the billionaires," Warren said in an interview.
Republicans, meanwhile, are eager to cast the Democratic tax proposals as damaging to an economy that has steadily grown since Trump took office.
Texas Sen. John Cornyn, a senior GOP member of the tax-writing Finance Committee, described Warren and Sanders' tax plans as playing off "the politics of personal envy."
He predicted economic blowback from reversing the current tax laws muscled through by Republicans in 2017.
The $2 trillion tax bill Trump signed into law was a boon for many wealthy Americans, with low-and middle-income Americans receiving smaller cuts.
While many Democrats have previously backed higher taxes for the wealthiest Americans, they've rarely made the issue such an early focal point of their campaigns.
Obama shied away from tax increases during his first run for office, as did almost every Democratic nominee since Walter Mondale in 1984 pledged to raise voters' taxes and lost to President Reagan in an historic landslide.
But polls now show that voters are happy to see higher-end taxes, to a point.
In April 2018, Gallup found that about 6 in 10 Americans thought the wealthy didn't pay their fair share of taxes.
A Fox News poll last week found 7 in 10 Americans supported raising taxes on people making more than 10 million dollars a year and 65 percent on those making more than $1 million.
But support plunges when family income drops, with only 44 percent backing higher taxes on those making more than $250,000.
"What's happened sometimes in these debates is the 'on the wealthy' gets left out in some people's minds," said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman.
"The question is to what extent you can control the interpretation" of tax increases.
Democrats seem to have learned that lesson, at least with the 70-percent rate from Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, and a Warren proposal that would only hit an estimated 75,000 households in the United States — the upper echelon of U.S. wealth.
"It's clear that the people they're targeting are the very, very, very well-off," said Alan Viard of the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
But Viard and other critics warn that the higher Democrats go, the less revenue they may actually get.
That's because the wealthy can shift around assets to avoid new levies.
And Warren's proposal, because it taxes more than income, may not comply with the Constitution, which was amended to allow the federal government to tax income, not wealth.
Glickman said that Warren's tax may be the most politically viable, because it targets such wealthy individuals.
But it may be the toughest to implement.
Several European countries have recently eliminated wealth taxes because they are so hard to administer, and the value of the mega-rich's holdings so hard to pin down, Glickman said.
Economists advising Warren's campaign project it will raise $2.75 trillion over 10 years, but Glickman was skeptical.
"When that much money is at stake, rich guys are going to go out and hire really smart tax lawyers," he said.
While Warren has enthusiastically embraced her tax plan's impact on the wealthy, Harris' early messaging has focused more on boosting middle-income earners with a $500 a month refundable tax credit to households earning less than $100,000 a year.
Harris would pay for this partly by eliminating the Trump tax cuts for households earning more than $100,000.
That could be politically risky because this group, while comfortable, is largely not the mega-rich.
___
Riccardi reported from Denver. AP polling writer Hannah Fingerhut contributed to this report.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ ... P17#page=2
Re: KAMALA HARRIS
THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR FEBRUARY 12, 2019 AT 12:04 PM
Paul Plante says:
And since I made that post, VOX.com has come out with a further article on the “bait-and-switch” aspects of this GREEN NEW DEAL entitled “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s rocky rollout of the Green New Deal, explained – A fact sheet from AOC’s office about the Green New Deal was wrong. It also highlighted the underlying tensions in the Democratic Party.” by Tara Golshan and Ella Nilsen on Feb 11, 2019, where we learned further as follows:
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) barely got to take a victory lap on her Green New Deal resolution last week before a fight broke out over an accompanying set of talking points.
The conflict was rooted in what looks like a mistake on the part of Ocasio-Cortez’s office, which released a fact sheet inconsistent with the actual legislative text of the Green New Deal resolution.
In areas where the Green New Deal was purposefully vague to attract a broader base of Democratic support — such as renewable energy sources — Ocasio-Cortez’s fact sheet offered more specific and prescriptive priorities.
end quotes
Ah, yes, people, the old political game of “bait-and-switch” is being played here right before our eyes by Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – tell the suckers (Nearly every major Democratic Presidential contender say they back the Green New deal including: Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Jeff Merkeley, Julian Castro, Kirsten Gillibrand, Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, and Jay Inslee) one thing to get them on-board, when what you are really planning to do is something quite different!
This “Sandy the Bartender” is as cunning and crafty as they come, in that regard, except here, she looks to have gotten herself got with her pant’s down, as that saying goes, which takes us back to the VOX article, as follows:
The confusion opened up the Green New Deal to attacks from prominent conservative lawmakers and pundits like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and others, who used the talking points as fodder to call the proposal idiotic and impractical.
end quotes
I have read through the document several times now myself, and to a rational person, yes, the talking points are both idiotic and impractical, but this is not a program that is being sold to rational people.
To the contrary, “Sandy the Bartender” is setting herself up here as an American Caudillo, which takes us back to the VOX article, as follows:
It also left both Ocasio-Cortez’s advisers and supporting Democrats flatfooted on live television, forcing them to answer for text they either didn’t know existed or couldn’t support.
Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), one of the co-sponsors of the Green New Deal, told reporters, “Um … I’m familiar with the fact sheet.”
“But again, it’s separate from the resolution, all right?”
“The resolution is really what the document is that I was speaking to today, as was Sen. Wyden and Sen. Merkley and all of the House members that were here.”
“That’s the key document.”
“That’s what you should focus on.”
“Focus on the resolution.”
His comments were an indication that some of the more moderate Democrats who have signed on to the Green New Deal may have been caught off guard by the language in Ocasio-Cortez’s talking points.
Ocasio-Cortez’s office tried to smooth over the controversy by claiming the fact sheet was both an unfinished and old draft.
They also raised concerns about “doctored” documents about the Green New Deal being circulated by Republicans.
Rather than slowing attacks, these claims have only fed the conservative outrage.
end quotes
So, yes, there is a whole lot of horse**** going on here, but, hey, it’s America, so what else did we expect?
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/g ... ent-125350
Paul Plante says:
And since I made that post, VOX.com has come out with a further article on the “bait-and-switch” aspects of this GREEN NEW DEAL entitled “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s rocky rollout of the Green New Deal, explained – A fact sheet from AOC’s office about the Green New Deal was wrong. It also highlighted the underlying tensions in the Democratic Party.” by Tara Golshan and Ella Nilsen on Feb 11, 2019, where we learned further as follows:
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) barely got to take a victory lap on her Green New Deal resolution last week before a fight broke out over an accompanying set of talking points.
The conflict was rooted in what looks like a mistake on the part of Ocasio-Cortez’s office, which released a fact sheet inconsistent with the actual legislative text of the Green New Deal resolution.
In areas where the Green New Deal was purposefully vague to attract a broader base of Democratic support — such as renewable energy sources — Ocasio-Cortez’s fact sheet offered more specific and prescriptive priorities.
end quotes
Ah, yes, people, the old political game of “bait-and-switch” is being played here right before our eyes by Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – tell the suckers (Nearly every major Democratic Presidential contender say they back the Green New deal including: Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Jeff Merkeley, Julian Castro, Kirsten Gillibrand, Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, and Jay Inslee) one thing to get them on-board, when what you are really planning to do is something quite different!
This “Sandy the Bartender” is as cunning and crafty as they come, in that regard, except here, she looks to have gotten herself got with her pant’s down, as that saying goes, which takes us back to the VOX article, as follows:
The confusion opened up the Green New Deal to attacks from prominent conservative lawmakers and pundits like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and others, who used the talking points as fodder to call the proposal idiotic and impractical.
end quotes
I have read through the document several times now myself, and to a rational person, yes, the talking points are both idiotic and impractical, but this is not a program that is being sold to rational people.
To the contrary, “Sandy the Bartender” is setting herself up here as an American Caudillo, which takes us back to the VOX article, as follows:
It also left both Ocasio-Cortez’s advisers and supporting Democrats flatfooted on live television, forcing them to answer for text they either didn’t know existed or couldn’t support.
Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), one of the co-sponsors of the Green New Deal, told reporters, “Um … I’m familiar with the fact sheet.”
“But again, it’s separate from the resolution, all right?”
“The resolution is really what the document is that I was speaking to today, as was Sen. Wyden and Sen. Merkley and all of the House members that were here.”
“That’s the key document.”
“That’s what you should focus on.”
“Focus on the resolution.”
His comments were an indication that some of the more moderate Democrats who have signed on to the Green New Deal may have been caught off guard by the language in Ocasio-Cortez’s talking points.
Ocasio-Cortez’s office tried to smooth over the controversy by claiming the fact sheet was both an unfinished and old draft.
They also raised concerns about “doctored” documents about the Green New Deal being circulated by Republicans.
Rather than slowing attacks, these claims have only fed the conservative outrage.
end quotes
So, yes, there is a whole lot of horse**** going on here, but, hey, it’s America, so what else did we expect?
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/g ... ent-125350
Re: KAMALA HARRIS
THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR FEBRUARY 11, 2019 AT 10:39 PM
Paul Plante says:
Whoever authored Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal document would seem like a full-scale idiot to someone who was not a socialist, and yes, the people pushing a Green New Deal are using it as a vehicle to advance the traditional potpourri of the left’s political agenda, while putting literally every aspect of our lives under the control of the “federal government,” which in turn would be under the control of the Democratic Socialists and the Democrat party.
Consider this from the “Green New Deal: Fact Sheet and FAQ from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Edward Markey” by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on February 8, 2019, as follows:
The Green New Deal resolution a 10-year plan to mobilize every aspect of American society at a scale not seen since World War 2 to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and create economic prosperity for all.
end quotes
My focus is drawn to those words “mobilize every aspect of American society at a scale not seen since World War 2.”
Our lives are going to become the property of the “state” under this plan, as I read it.
As to the statement that whoever authored AOC’s Green New Deal document is a full-scale idiot, and there is no way to read that document as a rational person and think otherwise, that point comes across quite vividly in this following exchange in the FAQ section, to wit:
FAQ
Why 100% clean and renewable and not just 100% renewable?
Are you saying we won’t transition off fossil fuels?
Yes, we are calling for a full transition off fossil fuels and zero greenhouse gases.
Anyone who has read the resolution sees that we spell this out through a plan that calls for eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from every sector of the economy.
Simply banning fossil fuels immediately won’t build the new economy to replace it – this is the plan to build that new economy and spells out how to do it technically.
We do this through a huge mobilization to create the renewable energy economy as fast as possible.
We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast, but we think we can ramp up renewable manufacturing and power production, retrofit every building in America, build the smart grid, overhaul transportation and agriculture, plant lots of trees and restore our ecosystem to get to net-zero.
end quotes
Are they going to kill all the cows that are now farting to fulfill their goal of environmental and social justice for everyone in America?
Sounds like it to me, anyway.
And here is the real essence of this plan revealed:
Simply banning fossil fuels immediately won’t build the new economy to replace it – this is the plan to build that new economy and spells out how to do it technically.
end quotes
That new economy happens to be socialist, not capitalist!
As to the FAQ “How will you pay for it?” the answer is as follows:
The same way we paid for the New Deal, the 2008 bank bailout and extended quantitative easing programs.
The same way we paid for World War II and all our current wars.
The Federal Reserve can extend credit to power these projects and investments and new public banks can be created to extend credit.
end quotes
Except the Federal Reserve by law cannot extend credit to power these projects.
And what will these new “public” banks be?
Not a word in the document on that.
So yes, it is a document written by idiots for idiots, which takes us to this:
The Green New Deal has momentum.
* 92 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Republicans support the Green New Deal
* Nearly every major Democratic Presidential contender say they back the Green New deal including: Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Jeff Merkeley, Julian Castro, Kirsten Gillibrand, Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, and Jay Inslee.
* 45 House Reps and 330+ groups backed the original resolution for a select committee
* Over 300 local and state politicians have called for a federal Green New Deal
* New Resolution has 20 co-sponsors, about 30 groups (numbers will change by Thursday).
end quotes
So, the future is now, and socialism in America is on the way.
A brave new world revealed.
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/g ... ent-125207
Paul Plante says:
Whoever authored Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal document would seem like a full-scale idiot to someone who was not a socialist, and yes, the people pushing a Green New Deal are using it as a vehicle to advance the traditional potpourri of the left’s political agenda, while putting literally every aspect of our lives under the control of the “federal government,” which in turn would be under the control of the Democratic Socialists and the Democrat party.
Consider this from the “Green New Deal: Fact Sheet and FAQ from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Edward Markey” by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on February 8, 2019, as follows:
The Green New Deal resolution a 10-year plan to mobilize every aspect of American society at a scale not seen since World War 2 to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and create economic prosperity for all.
end quotes
My focus is drawn to those words “mobilize every aspect of American society at a scale not seen since World War 2.”
Our lives are going to become the property of the “state” under this plan, as I read it.
As to the statement that whoever authored AOC’s Green New Deal document is a full-scale idiot, and there is no way to read that document as a rational person and think otherwise, that point comes across quite vividly in this following exchange in the FAQ section, to wit:
FAQ
Why 100% clean and renewable and not just 100% renewable?
Are you saying we won’t transition off fossil fuels?
Yes, we are calling for a full transition off fossil fuels and zero greenhouse gases.
Anyone who has read the resolution sees that we spell this out through a plan that calls for eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from every sector of the economy.
Simply banning fossil fuels immediately won’t build the new economy to replace it – this is the plan to build that new economy and spells out how to do it technically.
We do this through a huge mobilization to create the renewable energy economy as fast as possible.
We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast, but we think we can ramp up renewable manufacturing and power production, retrofit every building in America, build the smart grid, overhaul transportation and agriculture, plant lots of trees and restore our ecosystem to get to net-zero.
end quotes
Are they going to kill all the cows that are now farting to fulfill their goal of environmental and social justice for everyone in America?
Sounds like it to me, anyway.
And here is the real essence of this plan revealed:
Simply banning fossil fuels immediately won’t build the new economy to replace it – this is the plan to build that new economy and spells out how to do it technically.
end quotes
That new economy happens to be socialist, not capitalist!
As to the FAQ “How will you pay for it?” the answer is as follows:
The same way we paid for the New Deal, the 2008 bank bailout and extended quantitative easing programs.
The same way we paid for World War II and all our current wars.
The Federal Reserve can extend credit to power these projects and investments and new public banks can be created to extend credit.
end quotes
Except the Federal Reserve by law cannot extend credit to power these projects.
And what will these new “public” banks be?
Not a word in the document on that.
So yes, it is a document written by idiots for idiots, which takes us to this:
The Green New Deal has momentum.
* 92 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Republicans support the Green New Deal
* Nearly every major Democratic Presidential contender say they back the Green New deal including: Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Jeff Merkeley, Julian Castro, Kirsten Gillibrand, Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, and Jay Inslee.
* 45 House Reps and 330+ groups backed the original resolution for a select committee
* Over 300 local and state politicians have called for a federal Green New Deal
* New Resolution has 20 co-sponsors, about 30 groups (numbers will change by Thursday).
end quotes
So, the future is now, and socialism in America is on the way.
A brave new world revealed.
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/g ... ent-125207
Re: KAMALA HARRIS
THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR FEBRUARY 12, 2019 AT 12:04 PM
And since I made that post, VOX.com has come out with a further article on the “bait-and-switch” aspects of this GREEN NEW DEAL entitled “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s rocky rollout of the Green New Deal, explained – A fact sheet from AOC’s office about the Green New Deal was wrong. It also highlighted the underlying tensions in the Democratic Party.” by Tara Golshan and Ella Nilsen on Feb 11, 2019, where we learned further as follows:
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) barely got to take a victory lap on her Green New Deal resolution last week before a fight broke out over an accompanying set of talking points.
The conflict was rooted in what looks like a mistake on the part of Ocasio-Cortez’s office, which released a fact sheet inconsistent with the actual legislative text of the Green New Deal resolution.
In areas where the Green New Deal was purposefully vague to attract a broader base of Democratic support — such as renewable energy sources — Ocasio-Cortez’s fact sheet offered more specific and prescriptive priorities.
end quotes
Ah, yes, people, the old political game of “bait-and-switch” is being played here right before our eyes by Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – tell the suckers (Nearly every major Democratic Presidential contender say they back the Green New deal including: Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Jeff Merkeley, Julian Castro, Kirsten Gillibrand, Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, and Jay Inslee) one thing to get them on-board, when what you are really planning to do is something quite different!
This “Sandy the Bartender” is as cunning and crafty as they come, in that regard, except here, she looks to have gotten herself got with her pant’s down, as that saying goes, which takes us back to the VOX article, as follows:
The confusion opened up the Green New Deal to attacks from prominent conservative lawmakers and pundits like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and others, who used the talking points as fodder to call the proposal idiotic and impractical.
end quotes
I have read through the document several times now myself, and to a rational person, yes, the talking points are both idiotic and impractical, but this is not a program that is being sold to rational people.
To the contrary, “Sandy the Bartender” is setting herself up here as an American Caudillo, which takes us back to the VOX article, as follows:
It also left both Ocasio-Cortez’s advisers and supporting Democrats flatfooted on live television, forcing them to answer for text they either didn’t know existed or couldn’t support.
Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), one of the co-sponsors of the Green New Deal, told reporters, “Um … I’m familiar with the fact sheet.”
“But again, it’s separate from the resolution, all right?”
“The resolution is really what the document is that I was speaking to today, as was Sen. Wyden and Sen. Merkley and all of the House members that were here.”
“That’s the key document.”
“That’s what you should focus on.”
“Focus on the resolution.”
His comments were an indication that some of the more moderate Democrats who have signed on to the Green New Deal may have been caught off guard by the language in Ocasio-Cortez’s talking points.
Ocasio-Cortez’s office tried to smooth over the controversy by claiming the fact sheet was both an unfinished and old draft.
They also raised concerns about “doctored” documents about the Green New Deal being circulated by Republicans.
Rather than slowing attacks, these claims have only fed the conservative outrage.
end quotes
So, yes, there is a whole lot of horse**** going on here, but, hey, it’s America, so what else did we expect?
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/g ... ent-125350
THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR FEBRUARY 11, 2019 AT 10:39 PM
Whoever authored Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal document would seem like a full-scale idiot to someone who was not a socialist, and yes, the people pushing a Green New Deal are using it as a vehicle to advance the traditional potpourri of the left’s political agenda, while putting literally every aspect of our lives under the control of the “federal government,” which in turn would be under the control of the Democratic Socialists and the Democrat party.
Consider this from the “Green New Deal: Fact Sheet and FAQ from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Edward Markey” by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on February 8, 2019, as follows:
The Green New Deal resolution a 10-year plan to mobilize every aspect of American society at a scale not seen since World War 2 to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and create economic prosperity for all.
end quotes
My focus is drawn to those words “mobilize every aspect of American society at a scale not seen since World War 2.”
Our lives are going to become the property of the “state” under this plan, as I read it.
As to the statement that whoever authored AOC’s Green New Deal document is a full-scale idiot, and there is no way to read that document as a rational person and think otherwise, that point comes across quite vividly in this following exchange in the FAQ section, to wit:
FAQ
Why 100% clean and renewable and not just 100% renewable?
Are you saying we won’t transition off fossil fuels?
Yes, we are calling for a full transition off fossil fuels and zero greenhouse gases.
Anyone who has read the resolution sees that we spell this out through a plan that calls for eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from every sector of the economy.
Simply banning fossil fuels immediately won’t build the new economy to replace it – this is the plan to build that new economy and spells out how to do it technically.
We do this through a huge mobilization to create the renewable energy economy as fast as possible.
We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast, but we think we can ramp up renewable manufacturing and power production, retrofit every building in America, build the smart grid, overhaul transportation and agriculture, plant lots of trees and restore our ecosystem to get to net-zero.
end quotes
Are they going to kill all the cows that are now farting to fulfill their goal of environmental and social justice for everyone in America?
Sounds like it to me, anyway.
And here is the real essence of this plan revealed:
Simply banning fossil fuels immediately won’t build the new economy to replace it – this is the plan to build that new economy and spells out how to do it technically.
end quotes
That new economy happens to be socialist, not capitalist!
As to the FAQ “How will you pay for it?” the answer is as follows:
The same way we paid for the New Deal, the 2008 bank bailout and extended quantitative easing programs.
The same way we paid for World War II and all our current wars.
The Federal Reserve can extend credit to power these projects and investments and new public banks can be created to extend credit.
end quotes
Except the Federal Reserve by law cannot extend credit to power these projects.
And what will these new “public” banks be?
Not a word in the document on that.
So yes, it is a document written by idiots for idiots, which takes us to this:
The Green New Deal has momentum.
* 92 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Republicans support the Green New Deal
* Nearly every major Democratic Presidential contender say they back the Green New deal including: Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Jeff Merkeley, Julian Castro, Kirsten Gillibrand, Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, and Jay Inslee.
* 45 House Reps and 330+ groups backed the original resolution for a select committee
* Over 300 local and state politicians have called for a federal Green New Deal
* New Resolution has 20 co-sponsors, about 30 groups (numbers will change by Thursday).
end quotes
So, the future is now, and socialism in America is on the way.
A brave new world revealed.
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/g ... ent-125207
THE HILLGreen New Deal: Fact Sheet and FAQ from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Edward Markey
By Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
February 8, 2019
Overview
This is a massive transformation of our society with clear goals and a timeline.
National mobilization our economy through 14 infrastructure and industrial projects.
Every project strives to remove greenhouse gas emissions and pollution from every sector of our economy:
* Build infrastructure to create resiliency against climate change-related disasters
* Repair and upgrade U.S. infrastructure.
ASCE estimates this is $4.6 trillion at minimum.
* Meet 100% of power demand through clean and renewable energy sources
* Build energy-efficient, distributed smart grids and ensure affordable access to electricity
* Upgrade or replace every building in US for state-of-the-art energy efficiency
* Massively expand clean manufacturing (like solar panel factories, wind turbine factories, battery and storage manufacturing, energy efficient manufacturing components) and remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing
* Work with farmers and ranchers to create a sustainable, pollution and greenhouse gas free, food system that ensures universal access to healthy food and expands independent family farming
* Totally overhaul transportation by massively expanding electric vehicle manufacturing, build charging stations everywhere, build out highspeed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary, create affordable public transit available to all, with goal to replace every combustion-engine vehicle
* Mitigate long-term health effects of climate change and pollution
* Remove greenhouse gases from our atmosphere and pollution through afforestation, preservation, and other methods of restoring our natural ecosystems
* Restore all our damaged and threatened ecosystems
* Clean up all the existing hazardous waste sites and abandoned sites
* Identify new emission sources and create solutions to eliminate those emissions
* Make the US the leader in addressing climate change and share our technology, expertise and products with the rest of the world to bring about a global Green New Deal
Social and economic justice and security through 15 requirements:
* Massive federal investments and assistance to organizations and businesses participating in the green new deal and ensuring the public gets a return on that investment
* Ensure the environmental and social costs of emissions are taken into account
* Provide job training and education to all
* Invest in R&D of new clean and renewable energy technologies
* Doing direct investments in frontline and deindustrialized communities that would otherwise be hurt by the transition to prioritize economic benefits there
* Use democratic and participatory processes led by frontline and vulnerable communities to implement GND projects locally
* Ensure that all GND jobs are union jobs that pay prevailing wages and hire local
* Guarantee a job with family-sustaining wages
* Protect right of all workers to unionize and organize
* Strengthen and enforce labor, workplace health and safety, antidiscrimination, and wage and hour standards
* Enact and enforce trade rules to stop the transfer of jobs and pollution overseas and grow domestic manufacturing
* Ensure public lands, waters, and oceans are protected and eminent domain is not abused
* Obtain free, prior, and informed consent of Indigenous peoples
* Ensure an economic environment free of monopolies and unfair competition
* Provide high-quality health care, housing, economic security, and clean air, clean water, healthy food, and nature to all
"What key 2020 candidates are saying about the Green New Deal"
Brett Samuels
11 FEBRUARY 2019
The Green New Deal has emerged as a key litmus test for prospective 2020 presidential candidates, with high-profile candidates jumping on board to back the progressive environmental pitch.
On Sunday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) entered the 2020 race after supporting the proposal.
Four senators who have declared presidential bids have co-sponsored the resolution, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who is mulling a 2020 campaign and has previously supported the concept, will back the plan.
Their support highlights one of the progressive ideas at the center of the Democratic race, while the Republican National Committee (RNC) dismissed the proposal as a "massive taxpayer boondoggle and a socialist dream come true."
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) introduced a resolution last week that would lay the groundwork for implementing the Green New Deal legislatively.
The resolution calls for the United States to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions within ten years, and a host of other environmental changes less directly related to climate change including support for family farming and investments in high-speed railroads.
Some have expressed skepticism about its chances of success or put caveats on their support.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) referred to the proposal as the "Green Dream, or whatever they call it," and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (D) stressed that a Green New Deal should offer realistic solutions and not "things that are pie in the sky."
Bloomberg is considering a 2020 bid, and has long been an advocate of combatting climate change.
Former Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke, who has said he will decide soon on a 2020 bid, last month expressed support for the "concept" of a Green New Deal.
Here's where most declared candidates for the 2020 nomination stand on the Green New Deal:
Kamala Harris:
Harris co-sponsored the Green New Deal resolution, which she touted as a "bold plan" to address an "existential threat to our nation."
The California senator laid out her support for the proposal in a blog post last week on Medium, where she called the proposal a "bold plan," and pressed the need to "aggressively tackle climate change which poses an existential threat to our nation."
"Bold action takes bold leadership, and I'm grateful to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey for leading the charge on this critical resolution," Harris wrote.
Elizabeth Warren:
Warren, who on Saturday officially declared her candidacy for president weeks after forming an exploratory committee, signed on as a co-sponsor of the Green New Deal after her office initially said she supported the "idea" of such a proposal.
"Climate change is real, it threatens all of us, & we have no time to waste to address it head-on," the Massachusetts senator tweeted in sharing her support for the resolution.
She listed the Green New Deal alongside other progressive proposals she supports, including Medicare for All, student loan relief and overturning Citizens United.
Warren has tied in her support for the Green New Deal to another of her most progressive proposals, an Ultra Millionaire Tax that would apply to the wealthiest Americans.
She suggested in a tweet earlier this month that revenue from such a tax could go toward a down payment on the Green New Deal, or other proposals like Medicare for All.
Cory Booker:
Booker is another Senate co-sponsor of the Green New Deal, and made his support for the measure clear during a recent campaign stop in Iowa.
The New Jersey senator shared a video on Twitter of a voter asking about the proposal and his explanation of the need for imminent action to address climate change.
"Doing nothing is not an option right now because our planet really is in peril," Booker said.
"So the question is, what's the United states of America going to do?" he continued.
"Is it going to lead the planet in terms of dealing with this crisis?"
"Or is it going to pull back from global leadership when we are the biggest economy on the planet Earth?"
"I believe that America should lead, and it should lead boldly," he continued, calling the Green New Deal a "bold idea" that would benefit the environment and the economy.
Kirsten Gillibrand:
Gillibrand co-sponsored the Green New Deal, but had made clear her support for the idea roughly two weeks before it was formally introduced.
"The way I see a green economy is this: I think we need a moonshot," the New York senator told Pod Save America late last month.
"We need to tell the American people 'we are going to have a green economy in the next 10 years, not because it's easy, but because it's hard, because it's a measure of our innovation and effectiveness.'"
Gillibrand also said on the liberal podcast that she supports putting a tax on carbon, likely through something similar to a carbon tax or cap-and-trade.
Amy Klobuchar:
The Minnesota senator on Sunday became the latest Democrat to officially join the field of presidential candidates, launching her campaign from snowy Minneapolis.
A spokesperson for Klobuchar told the Associated Press last week that she would sign on to support the Green New Deal.
While the senator made no mention of the specific proposal in her speech on Sunday, she emphasized her commitment to environmentally friendly policies.
Klobuchar vowed to "put forth sweeping legislation to invest in green jobs and infrastructure" if elected president, and declared that she would direct the U.S. to rejoin the Paris Climate Accord "on day one" of her administration.
Julián Castro:
Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio and ex-Housing and Urban Development secretary, has yet to publicly weigh in on the Green New Deal since the resolution was announced late last week.
However, he has been a proponent of the concept since he first announced his White House bid.
"As President, my first executive order will recommit the United States to the Paris Climate Accord," he said on Jan. 12.
"We're gonna say no to subsidizing big oil and say yes to passing a Green New Deal."
Castro has embraced a number of other progressive policy positions, including Medicare for All and "tuition-free" public colleges.
Tulsi Gabbard:
Gabbard, the congresswoman from Hawaii, has not offered a specific position on the Green New Deal resolution, but has a track-record of backing environmentally friendly policies that address climate change.
She introduced legislation in the last Congress that would have required 100 percent of electricity to be generated by clean sources by 2035.
In a tweet last month, Gabbard said the country needs "a green economy that rewards clean energy industries & ensures access to fresh, affordable, pesticide-free foods for all."
Gabbard's campaign did not respond to a request for comment on her views on the Green New Deal.
Pete Buttigieg
Buttigieg on Sunday emerged as the latest Democratic presidential hopeful to offer his support for the Green New Deal, calling it "the right beginning" and a framework for addressing climate change.
"Obviously, the Green New Deal, as we have seen it so far, is more of a plan than it is a fully articulated set of policies," the Indiana mayor said on CNN.
"But the idea that we need to race toward that goal and that we should do it in a way that enhances the economic justice and the level of economic opportunity in our country, I believe that's exactly the right direction to be going in."
Buttigieg noted that he's seen the effects of climate change first-hand as mayor of South Bend, Ind., which experienced historic floods in recent years.
He argued the Green New Deal could simultaneously address the environmental and economic impacts of the changing climate.
"I think the elegance from a policy perspective of the concept of the Green New Deal is, it matches a sense of urgency about that problem of climate change with a sense of opportunity around what the solutions might represent," he said.
John Delaney
Delaney has not publicly commented on the Green New Deal in recent days, but said last month that any such proposal should feature a carbon tax at its center.
"As Democrats and climate advocates, we can't turn this into an effort to move the goalposts," the former congressman in a statement.
"We need to unite behind a solution that will work and a solution that can win the support of a broad coalition - that's what we're going to need to take a big step forward."
"A carbon tax should be the centerpiece of the Green New Deal."
Delaney's campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment about his views on the Green New Deal.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ ... P17#page=2
Re: KAMALA HARRIS
MARKETWATCH
"Kamala Harris’s dad: Our family wants to ‘dissociate ourselves from this travesty’"
By Shawn Langlois
Published: Feb 20, 2019 1:49 p.m. ET
"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 any way, jokingly or not, with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics.”
That’s professor Donald Harris, the Jamaican father of Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris, reportedly sounding off this week in a statement to Jamaica Global Online about his daughter’s interview on the New York Breakfast Club radio show.
Kamala Harris, who admitted to smoking pot — “I did inhale” — was also asked by the host about accusations that she has, in the past, opposed legalization efforts.
“Half my family’s from Jamaica, are you kidding me?” she said.
That’s the part that apparently didn’t sit well with her dad.
“Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family,” he allegedly said, “we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty.”
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/kamal ... ewer_click
"Kamala Harris’s dad: Our family wants to ‘dissociate ourselves from this travesty’"
By Shawn Langlois
Published: Feb 20, 2019 1:49 p.m. ET
"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 any way, jokingly or not, with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics.”
That’s professor Donald Harris, the Jamaican father of Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris, reportedly sounding off this week in a statement to Jamaica Global Online about his daughter’s interview on the New York Breakfast Club radio show.
Kamala Harris, who admitted to smoking pot — “I did inhale” — was also asked by the host about accusations that she has, in the past, opposed legalization efforts.
“Half my family’s from Jamaica, are you kidding me?” she said.
That’s the part that apparently didn’t sit well with her dad.
“Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family,” he allegedly said, “we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty.”
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/kamal ... ewer_click