Fuckin Narc: The Kamala Harris Story

Usually I would never spend too much time thinking, let alone writing, about a Vice Presidential nominee. They’re generally far more boring than the person above them and they most often recede into the president’s platform, maybe putting a different face or voice to the same points. But Kamala Harris is the VP for Joe Biden, can you fucking believe that? Do you remember her standing on the Democrat debate stage, making Biden look across at her with that thousand yard stare and relive how he used to just play old dog politics with every former Klan member in Congress?

“But I also believe- and it was personal and it was actually very… hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States Senators who built their reputations and their career on the segregation of race in this country. And it was not only that but you worked with them to oppose busing. And you know there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me”.1

Thunderous applause! Biggest claps of the night! A small black girl speaking truth to power! It’s time to turn over a new leaf in America! One of us! One of us! Only hours after she dropped this line, the Harris campaign was selling ‘That Little Girl was Me’ shirts. Fresh print, picture of little Kamala, $29.99, link in bio. If you couldn’t quite guess that she was full of shit when she turned her childhood trauma into a wearable prop to get 5 percent of the vote in a Democrat primary, just wait, there’s more!

At this point, multiple women had accused Mr. Biden of sexual misconduct, something that, regardless of your opinion on the particular allegations, Kamala believed!2 She said “I believe them, and I respect them being able to tell their story and having the courage to do it.”3 Apparently not! Apparently, she didn’t give a shit! Between that statement being issued and right now, she’s issued no retraction, made no qualification, offered no nuance, so according to the public record, Kamala Harris is the vice president for a man she believes is guilty of sexual assault! Did she forget? Did she never care at all? Remember when Kamala had her audition as the ‘tough, smart no-nonsense anti-Trump prosecutor’ going after Brett Kavanaugh, when she told Christine Blasey Ford she believed her too? Was Tara Reade’s allegation of horrific trauma, much like Ford’s, much like her own, just a throwaway tool for her to get a louder clap on a stage or a couple more points on a poll, furthering a doomed presidential camapiagn for just a couple more weeks, maybe getting a nicer cabinet position in an increasingly morally bankrupt administration? I guess, good job? $29.99. Link in bio.

Stephen Colbert, to his little credit, picked up on Kamala’s apparent massive change of heart in an interview, “How does that transition happen? How do you go from being such a passionate opponent on such bedrock principles for you, and now, you guys seem to be pals?”, to which Kamala responded, laughing, “It was a debate!” “Not everybody landed punches like you did though.”, said Stephen, pleading for a real answer. “It was a debate!” “So you didn’t mean it?” “It was a debate!”4 It was a joke! It’s a prank! Kamala Harris was personally victimized as a child by Joe Biden’s palling around with Klan members and currently believes that he is guilty of sexual assault, all of that is just water under the bridge! What is it that she could stand for?

As soon as Joe Biden threw out that he was going to pick a woman at the very last debate, and adding a black woman after the nomination, you could tell a certain fix was in, and it’s worth picking apart the latest hollow Democrat example of ‘representation’ meaning progress. I’ve been glued to my stupid TV and my stupid phone, watching anchor after anchor after correspondent after ‘CNN Senior News Analyst’ report breathlessly about how historic an achievement this is, how truly progressive this Democrat ticket is, how exalted the ranks she joins are; Parks, Tubman, Chisholm, one of the greats. Cory Booker, reportedly “so happy it’s been hard to control (him)self”, compared his and surely an electorally determinant portion of America’s joy to some fucking movie,

“My phone is blowing up by people that are not political, by folks who just — it’s like that old movie Waiting to Exhale where we’re just like (exhales) I am seen! I am valued! This country is including me in a way that we’ve just seen doors close… A woman, a black woman, a Howard graduate, an AKA, every step of her career climbing to the highest heights of a political ticket”5

SHE’S A COP. The obvious pitfall of just picking literally any black woman is that old segregationist prison warden Joe Biden might pick one has run on being a tough on crime COP. Even worse than an actual cop, she was a district attorney and then an attorney general, meaning that she not only had to step on the face of her own people, she then had to convince them they liked the boot to get elected again. Putting yourself in a position to enforce laws that you know are corrupt, through a system that you know is corrupt with the threat of imprisonment, is a really special kind of moral forfeiture, essentially making wooden men (and women, such progress!) out of people that sell their morality as their value, while funnelling all of that responsibility to the top, or sometimes in the politician’s case, the bottom. This manifests in Joe Biden blaming local governments for not enforcing the federal order of desegregation, in police chiefs blaming a few bad apples in their department for clearly systemic problems, in Kamala Harris locking up thousands for weed and then laughing about smoking it on a podcast, and if you want a bigger historical comparison, it manifested in several perpetrators of several genocides throughout history saying that they were just following orders. Putting yourself in this position as a black person, and then turning around and campaigning on it, spinning it as a good thing for your people through some bastardization of crime logic, while later partnering with the guy who wrote the legislation that put your people behind bars would be in a word, traitorous. Kamala Harris, inescapably, is a race traitor.

Shitty Cop

Most of Kamala’s theoretical appeal comes from her supposed ‘smart on crime’ stance, a reasoned tough but fair path to a promised land of black prosperity. A deeper look reveals something closer to a lust for incarceration that has ruined scores of lives.

Harris covered up exculpatory evidence for Jamal Trulove, a black man sentenced to 50 years to life for a murder he didn’t commit. The attorney Trulove hired detailed how Harris’ prosecutors relied on a single witness testimony, from two floors up in the dead of night, with no other physical evidence to support the state’s case. As Trulove described it, Harris personally showed up to his conviction and sentencing as if “she wanted to be present for a celebration”.6 She fabricated evidence and testimony in the trial to make it seem as if the witness was threatened by Trulove, which she never was. At the time, Harris was looking to run for attorney general, and as such needed to have a higher rate of conviction than she did, whatever the costs may have been to the people she locked up. While she was securing her title as the highest prosecutor in the state, Trulove was witnessing murders and getting shanked in the stomach in the state penitentiary.7 Trulove said later that Kamala Harris “ruined a lot of lives” and called her an “opportunist at the highest degree”.8 The ruling that overturned his conviction found that police fabricated evidence to convict Trulove, with the same inertia and political selfishness that Harris had in prosecuting him.

Much like Trulove, Maurice Caldwell was convicted for two counts of murder on the shaky testimony of a single witness, excluding other potentially exculpatory evidence.9 When questions were raised about his conviction and his appeal in 2010, and finally another man confessed to the crime, he won a ruling that his conviction be set aside, and still Kamala backed Caldwell’s opposition. When Caldwell appealed his sentence, Harris’ office was at the ready to stop the process at every turn, despite her knowing that somebody else actually confessed to the shooting. Most of her office’s assault on Caldwell’s freedom rested on arguments about the timing of the appeal and inconsistencies so small they “need not be addressed by the court”.10 It might seem like a strange reaction from a politician, or really anyone, after learning of a man’s innocence, to continue to try to keep him in jail, but over and over, this is the only reaction Kamala seemed to have. Today, Caldwell is out of prison and still in poverty, struggling to feed his children since he was denied compensation by none other than Harris’ office. In California, any claim for compensation is basically dead on arrival with a recommendation from the state attorney general, which Kamala declined to give him, despite his ruled mistrial. She contended that although his trial was faulty, he was not able to positively prove his innocence, so he doesn’t deserve any compensation for the 20 years he spent illegally imprisoned.

Jose Diaz was exonerated of two counts of sexual assault in 2013 after spending 19 years in prison, but that didn’t stop Harris’ attorney general office from arguing that he should be put back on the sex offender registry and tried to stonewall his compensation claims for false imprisonment.11 Despite the formal ruling of Diaz’ innocence, Diaz’ lawyer said the attorney general’s office “penalized an innocent man with technical arguments,” running “fundamentally contradictory to the whole purpose of the criminal justice system”.12 Kamala defended herself here, strangely enough, by saying that she didn’t know her office was making these arguments, making herself mortally incompetent instead of just evil. When your job is to make arguments that take people’s freedom, not knowing what arguments your office is making is murderous negligence. This isn’t the only time she’ll use this excuse.

In 1999, Daniel Larsen was wrongly convicted on possession of a concealed weapon after a barfight got broken up by police. While two cops testified that they saw Larsen throw away a knife as they pulled up, nine other witnesses said that they saw another man, not Larsen, with the knife. Larsen’s cut rate attorney didn’t call a single witness in his trial, didn’t get DNA or fingerprint analysis on the knife, and didn’t challenge police testimony about Larsen’s location or his possession of the knife. He may as well not have been there. As this was Larsen’s third offense, he was sentenced to 27 years to life under California’s three strikes law. For the next 8 years, the California Innocence Project fought to prove Larsen’s innocence of the crime, but were largely stonewalled by then district attorney Jerry Brown, relying on a process rule that said appeals had to be filed withing a year to be considered valid. Kamala, after running as some sort of progressive in her 2010 election for attorney general, saw it just as fit as Brown to deny Larsen his freedom based on his papers being late. Even after the Innocence Project went to Harris’ office and laid out a detailed case of Larsen’s innocence, complete with a 100,000 signature petition, they continued to neglect Larsen and fought to keep him locked up, saying that he couldn’t prove his actual innocence, only that the trial that convicted him was unfair. Even after Harris’ office lost their fight in 2013 and the Ninth Circuit Court ruled Larsen should be free, Harris wasn’t done making sure his life stayed miserable. The California rate for wrongful imprisonment is $140 a day, which would have given Larsen, $496,300 before taxes, but Kamala made sure that Larsen wouldn’t see a dime of it.13

Kamala presided over hundreds of fraudulent convictions, revealed all at one time in the case of Deborah Madden. Madden was a police technician before she was caught in 2010 “purposely sabotaging” her forensic work and stealing bumps of cocaine from the lab for good measure.14 An internal memo from the assistant district attorney complained about the tampering of evidence, indicating Kamala’s office knew about it, but did nothing to notify authorities or work to overturn potentially fraudulent convictions.15 Under the Brady disclosure rule, prosecutors are constitutionally required to disclose any potentially exculpatory evidence that they know about the defendants or their own case, even without it being requested, as a guarantee of a fair trial. As early as 2005, staff in Kamala’s own office urged her to implement an internal Brady system for each case, but she shut it down “because she didn’t want to anger police officers and their union”.16 If Kamala had cared enough to put a reliable Brady system in her office, most of her other false convictions would have been avoided as well, and decades of people’s lives would have been saved. But very simply, she didn’t care enough. Instead, she covered up her systematically unconstitutional office until she couldn’t anymore, and then fought to keep people in prison who were convicted on this inadmissible evidence.17

Harris supported state prosecutor Robert Murray, who was accused of “outrageous government misconduct” after falsifying a transcript of a defendant’s testimony.18 Murray, in just about the lowest thing a prosecutor could do, literally made up testimony to say that Efrain Velasco-Palacios had confessed to child molestation and threatened him with life in prison.19 After the trial date was delayed and several requests from the public defender for the full transcript, Murray admitted that he had made up the two lines

“[DETECTIVE]: You’re so guilty you child molester.

[DEFENDANT]: I know. I’m just glad she’s not pregnant like her mother.”

Murray, somehow, had the balls to say that his tampering with evidence was a “joke”, and wasn’t harmful to the defendant’s case, while he was considering a plea bargain.20 After the judge had the case thrown out for prosecutorial misconduct, Kamala rushed to Murray’s side, saying that because Murray was not “physically brutal” with the defendant, there was no misconduct and the case should not have been thrown out.21 I don’t feel I need to explain why a prosecutor making up a confession to child rape is reprehensible and immediate grounds for dismissal of a case. Obviously, our first black, female and South Asian vice president would have known this at the time she defended it. What you may not know is that in Imbler v. Pachtman, the Supreme Court ruled 8–0 that prosecutors have “absolute immunity” when pursuing their cases.22 So if, by some absurd, truly unimaginable turn, a prosecutor were to totally invent a child molestation case against you, there is absolutely nothing (legal) that you can do about it. And if the future vice president, but then attorney general were to defend that case, knowing full well it was totally invented, fuck you, there’s nothing (legal) you can do about that either.

There’s a lot more of these false convictions that I didn’t cover here, but I hope you get the point that, on an operational level, Kamala Harris was absolutely unhinged, driven by a near inhuman hunger to put people in prison. As much as I’d like to pin it totally on her being a horrible person, which she must be on some level, convictions, true or false, are the currency of her office. Despite whatever bullshit she put on a sign to lose in the primary, despite how well you thought she did in the debate, she, like all politicians and all cops, has separated herself from you. She is not held to the same laws, or any laws, on her job. She can end someone’s life at work on evidence she knows is false and never worry about any sort of trouble. She has tried to do so multiple times. Elected state prosecutors, absolute immunity on their job, a political drive to lock people up, and total disregard for defendants’ basic rights. These four walls, among others, trap anyone suspected of a crime and kill any real concept of procedural justice in this country, and they get you heinous excuses for ‘public servants’ like Kamala Harris.

Shitty Policies

Kamala championed legislation that criminalized truancy, subjecting parents to fines and jailtime if their kids missed too much school. When questioned about the ethics and reasoning of jailing parents to teach their kids not to skip class, she called the imprisonment “unintended consequences” even though, from the outset, this exactly what the law was intended to do.23 The initial justification for the law, encouraging kids to stay in school and out of trouble, is theoretically admirable, but threatening parents with jail time or hitting them with hefty fines is necessarily counter-intuitive to keeping kids from becoming criminals. Private schools in California aren’t legally required to participate in this system, exempting parents who can afford it from ever having to worry about facing prison for their children’s absence. Especially since generally poorer and disadvantaged parents would really be the only ones who would ever have to deal with this law, pushing parents further into poverty or taking them away altogether would send kids directly into the arms of the criminal life the law claims to prevent. Cheree Peoples, mother of Shayla, a child with sickle cell anemia, had notified her school of the sporadic and unannounced absences that her daughter would have as a result of her illness. That didn’t stop her from being arrested and hauled out of her home in pajamas on early April morning for her daughter’s ‘truancy’, a total of 20 absences. “You would swear I had killed somebody.”, she said an a later interview about her experience in handcuffs. Advocates for this program, including Kamala Harris, insist that the program is all about getting parents the resources that the need to help their children. This particular program, and Kamala’s career at large as a self-styled ‘progressive prosecutor’ are a classic case of every problem looking like a nail when your only tool is a hammer. The office of district attorney exists to prosecute people. It does not exist to bump up school attendance, it does not exist to increase the quality of education in poor communities, it does not exist to tackle mental health issues or poverty at home or the myriad of other factors that contribute to ‘truancy’. It exists to prosecute people and put them in prison. Kamala Harris, for most of her career, has been incapabable of tackling the issues that most affect the black community she claims to vanguard, least of all its education system.

Kamala has made decriminalization for sex work an important part of her criminal justice package since her extremely timely announcement of her support in 2019. She put out what I’m sure her advisors told her was a principled, forward looking stance “I think that, yes, we should really consider that we can’t criminalize consensual behavior as long as no one is being harmed. But, at the point that anyone is being harmed or exploited, we have to understand that’s a different matter.”24 In 2008, Kamala pushed to keep prostitution illegal, opposing a city ordnance called Proposition K that would have effectively decriminalized it in San Francisco. Kamala called the bill “absolutely ridiculous”, explaining with the nuance of a drunk Richard Nixon, “Prostitution is not a victimless crime. It’s a crime that victimizes neighborhoods and plagues communities and compromises the quality of life of the people who live in those neighborhoods”25. The first thing that strikes me about this answer is that she said literally nothing concrete at all. Every single one of her supporting points could be answered with the question ‘How?’, as if it were the beginning of a conversation, but instead it was a statement she gave to a newspaper, supposedly the final word on a much more complex issue. Second is that nowhere in her hollow justification does she show any concern for the sex workers who are caught in a cycle of abuse. Horrible arguments like these and a legal framework in front of them trap sex workers in a legal state of near-inhumanity, unable to come forward to law enforcement if they ever were in danger and essentially subject to the whims of whoever may be pimping or trafficking them. The same arguments for the legalization and decriminalization of prostitution that might clip the furthest left side Democrat party platform today existed in 2008, in the same article that Harris was quoted in, “Decriminalize prostitution and you bring it out of the underground and off the black market. That way you can start organizing, clean up the dangerous elements.”26 When she had the time to listen to these arguments and the power to employ them in her state, she ignored them and shot them down. But now she’s here to claim the people she neglected as a moral high ground, and make this an election about ‘character’.

Kamala, most related to today’s uproar against police, fought against statewide body cam legislation in California and nationwide investigation of deadly police shootings, funny enough, under the exact same federalist argument by which Joe Biden denied her busing when she “was that little girl.”27 In the face of criticism from civil rights advocates, Kamala said “I as a general matter believe that we should invest in the ability of law enforcement leaders in specific regions and with their departments to use [their] discretion to figure out what technology they are going to adopt based on needs that they have and resources they have”, bureaucratically defending a lack of overarching will to enforce accountability and defend black people’s lives.28 She delegated the responsibility to individual police departments and local governments to ‘decide’ if bodycams fit the department’s “needs” and “resources”, rather than mandating the protection of people’s rights and making the resources available. To quote one of history’s most prolific civil rights leaders, Kamala Harris, in a debate against a segregationist about another civil rights issue, her being bused to school, “There was a failure of states to integrate public schools in America. I was part of the second class to integrate Berkeley, California public schools, almost two decades after Brown v. Board of Education.” The segregationist retorts, slowly, as if she needs help understanding, “Because your city council made that decision”, to which she fires back, with anger, “So that’s where the federal government must step in!”29 Kamala understood how a higher government’s mandate for civil rights was supposed to work when it could help her in the polls, but when she actually had to do something to protect her constituents, it must have slipped her mind.

Kamala and her fellow California prosecutors were so good at their jobs that in 2009, a federal district court ruled that overcrowding in California prisons constituted cruel and unusual punishment.30 After a series of challenges, this ruling was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2011. At this point, the state’s prisons were at 200 percent of their designed capacity on average, and 300 percent in some high traffic intake areas and the state was ordered to bring it down to a nice manageable 137.5.313233 By 2013, the plaintiffs from this same lawsuit were back in court, alleging that Harris’ office was “slow-walking” the process, which they were at almost every level.34 In response, Harris’ office argued that they couldn’t go too fast because releasing these nonviolent inmates “would severely impact fire camp participation- a dangerous outcome while California is in the middle of a difficult fire season”.35 Harris’ lawyers went on to say that releasing these inmates could jeopardize local budgets statewide, pointing out the high number of prison slaves that worked municipally, doing things like picking up trash and maintaining city parks for pennies an hour.36 For those that don’t know, the 13th Amendment, which banned privatized slavery in the US, didn’t ban it for the government in their prisons. The phrase “except as punishment for a crime” would see the United States government become the world’s largest slaveowner, and Kamala, or at least lawyers from her office, argued in court that this slavery needed to be upheld so that the state of California wouldn’t have to hire actual firefighters to handle their annual out of control fires. Kamala, for her part, came out after she was criticized and said she was “shocked” to learn such honest arguments came out of her office, saying learned about it when she read it in the newspaper. Even if I believed that bullshit, which I don’t, what sort of hellhole office do you have to run to where your subordinates make the ‘Who’s gonna pick all the cotton?’ argument behind your back and you have to learn about it from the LA Times? Were they disciplined? Fired? Guillotined in a public square? Of course, she doesn’t say. Even if she didn’t approve of what they said, this seems like the sort of thing that happens when your job is to send people into slave camps and pretend like you’re changing the system from the inside. Most people by now, and I would assume, most politicians know that slavery exists in prison, and while the some of the furthest right will try to justify it, liberals generally sit with it in a tentative unease, maybe pointing it out as a problem but chugging along on top of the system all the same. Kamala is the only politician I’ve ever seen that has defended prison slavery in court. This is your vice president now.

Shit Career

It’s important to explain why Kamala seemed so determined to lock up the people she represented, and keep them locked up, even when it was very clearly unwarranted. While all of this moral failure is common and seemingly inherent to a state prosecutor, it’s by no means the only route for these ‘public servants’ to take. When Kamala first ran for office in 2003, she squared up against one of the most progressive prosecutors in San Francisco history, Terence Hallinan. Terence, during his re-election campaign, had touted his extremely low conviction rate (29 percent) as a positive for the county.37 Instead of convicting and incarcerating people, he diverted many non-violent drug offenders into rehabilitation programs and treatment, and avoided mandatory life sentences for 3 strikes prosecutions. Hallinan maintained that if conviction rate were measured by cases tried, rather than cases referred by police, they would have about an average rate, and more importantly, crime rates in his district sharply decreased by almost 60 percent.38 As Hallinan explained, “We have 3,000 people who are in diversion. That’s hell on your conviction rate.”39 But Kamala, shrewd politician even at a young age, knew not to let facts get in the way of a good narrative. Kamala ran essentially as a tough on crime prosecutor, attacking Hallinan’s low conviction rate as a failure, and playing up fear of an out of control problem that wasn’t real. She extended her conservative streak, criticizing Hallinan for refusing to prosecute demonstrators for property damage while protesting against the nascent War on Terror, putting her on Trump’s side in the ongoing fight against police brutality, or perhaps even further right given Trump’s criticism of the war.40 She posted fliers one would expect out of the Reagan era, chalk outlines with the subtitle ‘An Outline for Disaster’, asking ‘Which District Attorney has ranked last in convictions every year for the last eight years?’.41 Harris doubled the amount of money her opponent raised, fueled in part by her rhetoric’s appeal to San Francisco’s “social and legal elites, people with power and money… who respond well to Harris’ message that Hallinan is… soft on crime”.42 San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, who Harris dated, raised money for her election fund and introduced her to some of the elites that would pitch in. Hallinan was investigating Brown’s city hall for corruption at the time, and Harris, whether she knew it or not, served as a very convenient way for him to discredit the city hall investigation and ensure it didn’t continue. It also would have served for any of the elites pitching in to shield themselves from any current and future investigations. Harris fundraising machine was so effective that she was fined for breaking the race’s voluntary spending cap of $211,000 after promising to abide by it.43 Nevertheless, she won her first election “the old fashioned way: big money, police endorsements, and fearmongering about crime”.44

Kamala Harris, from the beginning of her career, was incentivized by the interests that got her elected and her own choice of campaign strategy, to lock people up. The use of a conviction rate, without context or qualification, as a political attack against others when low and an achievement for oneself when high, is one of the more disgusting commonplace occurrences in American politics. Kamala, in her very next election, went on to tout her increased conviction rate of 67% as a centerpiece of her progress. Kamala Harris made her career on the platform, ‘I am going to lock more people up’. This, on some level, may be intrinsic to the office of district attorney, but its inherence does not excuse it, and it certainly doesn’t excuse her record when she portrays herself as a progressive, desperate to catch up to a voter base leaving her behind. Trying to ascend from the standard tough vs soft dichotomy, Kamala branded herself as “smart on crime”, but smart on crime would be realizing that incarcerating parents for their children skipping school is a massive injustice. Smart on crime would be realizing that sex workers are more likely to help convict people that traffic them when they can come forward without fear of reprisal. Smart on crime would be allowing retrials for people convicted with tampered evidence. Smart on crime might be stepping back, taking a look at the factory of unjust misery that is the California, and writ large, US justice system, having a stroll through the fleet of slave labor that fuels the profitability of what became her prisons, the mass of black faces looking back at her in chains, and deciding maybe this is something to be torn down rather than joined. She’s come full circle chasing her own tail, defeating Terence Hallinan with a Republican assault on compassion in criminal justice, only to rush back to his ‘soft on crime’ policies of rehabilitation and reform when it returned to fashion. Kamala Harris has not been a progressive at any point in her career, and hasn’t really pretended to be one up until now. The occupation of prosecutor, elected on the basis of mass incarceration, would nearly forbid one from having a progressive career, and the one ‘progressive prosecutor’ I can think of was beaten by Harris in her first election. Her job was to put people in jail for the city of San Francisco and later for the state of California. She did it well.

Running Cover

Just like a capitalist politician that knows what’s good for her, Kamala managed to curb her appetite right at the door of powerful interests. As if to make sure everyone knew straight off the top just how hollow of a person she is, just how comfortable any rich asshole with a lobbyist should be with her, she landed on the wrong side of organized pedophilia, covering up for rampant child abuse in California Catholic churches. Terence Hallinan, while on the way out of office, was on the trail of a massive abuse scandal within the church, compiling mountains of evidence and files that were set to become public record. Harris, for whatever reason, refused to release these documents to the public, even after of waves of pleas from alleged victims.45 “It went from Terence Hallinan going hundred miles an hour, full speed ahead, after the Catholic Church to Kamala Harris doing absolutely nothing and taking it backwards hundred miles an hour”, said sexual assault survivor Joey Piscitelli, molested while attending high school.46 Dominic De Lucca, a California resident who says he was molested by a priest, said that Harris gave victims the cold shoulder, “She didn’t want to have any meetings… She wanted the public to think this is an issue that happened years ago, that it doesn’t happen anymore. Let’s just move on.”47

Piscitelli had repeatedly asked the Harris DA office to release the files they had on his abuser, “I know you have files on clergy sex abusers in San Francisco, and you may have a file on him. Please send me that file. Several San Francisco … priests are being sued for sex abuse right now, and you may be able to help their victims, and protect other kids from being new victims.”48 No response! Under a false guise of privacy, Kamala denied these documents outright, knowing full well she could have redacted the victims’ names. When asked by reporters, she said “We’re not interested in selling out our victims to look good in the paper.”49 to which Piscitelli responded when he read it, “They’re full of shit. You can quote me on that.”50 Dominic De Lucca theorized along the only line that would make sense, “The Roman Catholic Church is very powerful and I think they didn’t want to step on any toes, especially in San Francisco”.51 Curiously, several defense lawyers and firms representing Catholic priests donated to Harris’ campaign for district attorney, showing a previously unknown interest in the outcome of DA elections.52 As of me writing this, six hours ago, Joe Biden tweeted “Kamala never shies away from fighting tooth and nail for what’s right. It’s why I chose her to be my running mate.”53 In her 8 years as San Francisco district attorney, and 7 more as California attorney general, she did not prosecute a single case of pedophilia in the Catholic Church.5455

By 2010, Kamala had learned that the tough on crime Reagan shit wasn’t gonna play statewide, and in her push for attorney general she fashioned herself as the ‘progressive prosecutor’ that we all know and love today. Just as the media is doing now, they played up her being black, South Asian and a woman as proof positive of her leftist core, repeating again and again she was the first to be any of those three categories in the California AG’s office. One political consultant called her “the female Obama that progressives thought they were voting for”, a comparison that continued throughout her career.56When she rose to attorney general in 2011 on this hollow reputation, she was given center stage for what could have been her one woman show. In the depths of the subprime mortgage crisis and the ensuing rise of scam artist mortgage consultants, she stood as the chief prosecutor in the hardest hit state in America, pantsuit flapping in the wind above a sea of newly homeless Californians, all begging, pleading for her just to do her job, the one she was so good at; lock them up.

By 2011, teams of housing rights advocates, prosecutors, and foreclosure victims from across the country were working on cases and begging for help from the state. Banks that were declared “too big to fail” were guilty of massive and extremely open fraud, and the most important part of this declaration was a near blanket protection from prosecution for their executives. Harris, to this day, touts her record of ‘standing up to the big banks’, most famously through a $25 billion deal struck with the five major mortgage servicing banks in the US; Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, GMAC(now Ally Bank) and Bank of America, banks that many of you may have accounts with today. $25 billion between these five banks, I cannot stress to you enough, is one of the biggest jokes of all time. They must sit there watching Kamala’s cute little press conferences, rolling on their marble floors as she talks about how she marched in their boardrooms, shoulders broad, and demanded a DEAL with them. Almost all of these banks made their share of the payment back within one quarter, maybe two. Most of the fines were structured to where the banks only had to pay a small portion in actual cash, the rest coming in loan modification and reduction to help people keep their homes more directly. Of the $25 billion, only $1.5 billion went to actual money for foreclosure victims, working out to $1,480 each, barely enough for a month’s rent in California(Inadequate relief checks are a Democrat pastime).57 Almost half of the money went to short sales, where victims sell their house without having to make up the difference to the mortgage, essentially just a better deal on kicking people out of their homes.58 The IRS later confirmed to California Senator Barbara Boxer that short sale ‘relief’ in a non-recourse state(like California) is worthless, because banks aren’t legally allowed to collect the difference on the mortgage anyways in these states.59 So to be clear, $9.5 billion of Kamala’s hard won $25 billion was totally useless for California, the hardest hit state in the country. Even worse, in at least one case, these banks paid their fines ‘relieving’ mortgages that they didn’t even own. JP Morgan Chase, allegedly with complete knowledge from their CEO Jamie Dimon, claimed to have forgiven mortgages he had sold to a third party years earlier.60 They actually sent out forgiveness letters to people in debt, who were of course overjoyed, only to later find another bank calling to collect the same debt.61 Jamie Dimon, also known as “Obama’s favorite banker”, got off 100% scot free.62

Kamala missed a golden opportunity to join the Resistance(TM) early when she declined to prosecute OneWest Bank, then run by Trump administration Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. Mnuchin had been ruthlessly foreclosing on houses, breaking the law over a thousand times in the process and “effectively gam(ing) foreclosure auctions”.63 An internal memo from the attorney general’s office found that the bank had signed backdated and fraudulent documents and then reported them to the state, made unlawful credit bids and evaded taxes, and foreclosed and effectively evicted people without proper notice, all in an effort to reap profits from the Obama-era subprime mortgage crisis.64 All of this was found within a limited review of public records and incomplete OneWest documents, partly because the bank had obstructed the state’s investigation and could possibly further obstruct if the state investigated more aggresively. OneWest had foreclosed on 35,000 homes in California and was set to foreclose on 45,000 more at the time of the memo. Despite the her own office’s strong recommendation to sue the bank and protect this mass of Californians from homelessness under a fraudulent pretext, Attorney General Kamala Harris, with no explanation, chose not to sue, letting Mnuchin get away with open crime. None of this was even made public until Kamala was safely out of the attorney general’s office and in the US Senate. Steve Mnuchin, apparently grateful for Kamala’s judicious approach to corporate law enforcement, donated to her 2016 Senate campaign through OneWest’s parent company CIT Group. Harris was the only Democrat Mnuchin gave money to that year. As of me writing this, 18 minutes ago, Joe Biden posted on his Instagram, “There is no door Kamala won’t knock on, no stone she’ll leave unturned, if it means making life better — for the people”.65 10 million people lost their homes.66

The disparity in law enforcement for powerful and powerless shines no brighter than through the cop politician. Beholden to capital forces to get her elected and often covering for the crimes of those same forces to stay elected, Kamala’s hypocrisy was almost baked into her job. To force people out of their homes illegally and systematically is a violent crime. It was probably the most violent and destructive series of crimes that went on under Kamala’s jurisdiction. California’s housing market never truly recovered and today they have the country’s worst homeless problem by far, so much so that the UN called the crisis a human rights violation, not that that has ever meant anything in this country.67 4 of the country’s top 10 worst cities for homelessness are in California, and record numbers of homeless people die there every year.68 Homeless people catch diseases at rates 3 to 6 times higher than people with homes and their life expectancy can drop all the way down to 50 years, the average American life span in 1900.69 Very certainly, people that were put out illegally by this cartel of banks died as a direct result. Of course, these bank chiefs don’t have to run around like the robbers they are, guns drawn, forcing people out of their homes. They had the police to do that for them. Through our capitalist system, these banks wield the force of the state, whether or not what they do is unjust or illegal. Even if what they do is illegal and destructive enough to tank the world economy, they aren’t hauled to jail like, say, someone who stole food to feed their families. They’re negotiated with, offered deals, as if they were a separate government themselves, and one we didn’t want to piss off. Prosecutors like Kamala who make these deals for minuscule fractions of the bank’s actual worth get to brag about ‘standing up to the big banks’ on their road to the second highest office in the country, where they’ll have the privilege of letting the same people get away with crime again.

Covering for banks that stole people’s homes openly is evil. Covering for pedophile priests, allowing them to walk free and denying the victims justice is evil. Taking money from these two evil groups to fund your campaign evil. Fighting to keep people in jail that you know are innocent is evil. Fighting to defend prosecutors that make up confessions of sexual assault, because they didn’t literally beat the shit out of the defendant is evil. Rushing to a sexual assault victim’s side for a few points in the polls, and then turning around to be the vice president for the assaulter is a level of evil, a caricature of walking hell that I’ve never seen before, and I spend a lot of time watching evil politicians. Kamala Harris, just like the man she signed onto, are fucking EVIL. Their records are EVIL and there’s zero way around it. There’s no depth to which they won’t sink. There aren’t any principles to be found here. These people are not here to save you. They’re not even here to try.

I could spend two more pages yelling about it, but again, looking back to Terence Hallinan, this willingness to ignore the crimes of the politically powerful, this total in a very perverse way, is self-preservation in a capitalist ‘democracy’ that allows these same powerful people to determine the outcome of political campaigns. Kamala won her first election, in major part, due to the hundreds of thousands she raised from these donors. These deep pockets, herded by Mayor Willie Brown, surely found Terence Hallinan and his investigations of city hall and the Catholic Church a bit too hot to handle. Harris, a candidate that they funded and propelled to prominence, was far more kind to their interests of staying out of jail and keeping the prosecutor’s office focused on poor people. Kamala Harris, I cannot overstate, HORRIFIC, DESPICABLE record, even more than most district attorneys and attorneys general, one that wouldn’t even pass in conservative districts, let alone as ‘the most progressive VP in history’ or whatever the hell they’re calling her. As much hate as I have for Kamala, there is a deeper reserve for the system that enabled her, the campaign finance system cheered her on and allowed her to be showered with donations for echoing 40 year old tough on crime talking points, the justice system that allowed her to rack up unfounded prosecutions like she was padding stats at the end of a season, the prison labor slave plantations where she sent her captures, forcing them unpaid to fight the fires that pop up every year in her state, and finally the capital based media that hasn’t explained any of this, instead focusing on her gender and the color of her skin.

Kamala’s repeated insistence on Colbert’s show might make more sense in this light, as it really does seem like she and the rest of us have different definitions of the word debate. See, when she said “it was personal and… actually very hurtful” to hear Joe Biden praise racists he worked with, I thought, if only for a second, that she meant it. I thought maybe, if solely out of professional courtesy, she would keep in mind the sexual assault victims that she ‘believed’ before she jumped headfirst into a Biden administration. It is refreshing to hear self-criticism within the Democrat Party, but when these real, points are forgotten about by the entire media and voter base without resolution, you’re just making it too easy for me to write shit like this. Debate for politicians whose real opinion has been captured or nonexistent for so long, does not mean debate in the sense that Socrates envisioned, or even in the sense of the more ambitious of you in the comments of this post. A debate must be for them, a show, a game whose stakes are a few more poll points a night, a few minutes of embarrassment, maybe a nice round of applause. It doesn’t mean a serious discussion of opposing principles that two or more people abide by, obviously not because they don’t have any. Clearly, it didn’t matter if Biden had personally victimized Kamala through his inaction. It didn’t matter if Biden had led a Klan rally to her porch so long as he stood, 50 years later, on the road to her rise to power, ready to trade her a walk to the top for a black face and long hair.

1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cX7hni-zGD8&

2https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/437107-harris-i-believe-biden-accusers

3https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/kamala-harris-joe-biden-accusers-i-believe-them_n_5ca4fb96e4b094d3f5c5750f?ri18n=true

4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkTOpWzC9Rc

5https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiVQQ14QL3U

6https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8xwkab/jamal-trulove-wants-kamala-harris-to-talk-about-his-wrongful-conviction

7https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8xwkab/jamal-trulove-wants-kamala-harris-to-talk-about-his-wrongful-conviction

8https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8635985/Wrongfully-convicted-man-spent-nearly-20-years-prison-labels-Kamala-Harris-opportunist.html

9https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Conviction-of-S-F-man-in-prison-21-years-set-2453015.php

10https://missionlocal.org/2020/08/maurice-caldwells-conviction-was-overturned-ten-years-ago-the-city-attorney-says-hes-still-a-killer/

11https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-14/kamala-harris-offices-fought-payments-to-wrongly-convicted

12https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-14/kamala-harris-offices-fought-payments-to-wrongly-convicted

13https://splinternews.com/kamala-harris-and-the-case-of-the-innocent-neo-nazi-1834760983

14https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/sfpd-crime-lab-case-from-a-z/1866446/

15https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Judge-rips-Harris-office-for-hiding-problems-3263797.php

16https://www.wsj.com/articles/kamala-harriss-balancing-act-demands-of-law-enforcement-and-reformers-11560194725

17https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Judge-rips-Harris-office-for-hiding-problems-3263797.ph

18https://observer.com/2015/03/california-prosecutor-falsifies-transcript-of-confession/

19https://observer.com/2015/03/california-prosecutor-falsifies-transcript-of-confession/

20https://www.bakersfield.com/news/breaking/prosecutor-who-falsified-document-faces-one-month-suspension-one-year-on-probation/article_6790b1ea-0651-536e-ba48-1916075aad9d.html

21https://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions/nonpub/F068833.PDF

22https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/424/409/

23https://www.factcheck.org/2019/05/kamala-harris-spins-facts-on-truancy-law/

24https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/kamala-harris-sex-workers-rights-799021/

25September 15, 2008 (page B6). (2008, Sep 15). The Los Angeles Times (2008 — Recent) Retrieved from http://libproxy.tulane.edu:2048/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/1970895974?accountid=14437

26September 15, 2008 (page B6). (2008, Sep 15). The Los Angeles Times (2008 — Recent) Retrieved from http://libproxy.tulane.edu:2048/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/1970895974?accountid=14437

27https://www.latimes.com/local/politics/la-me-pol-ca-harris-police-shootings-20160118-story.html

28https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/how-kamala-harris-record-on-police-body-cameras-fits-into-the-2020-debate-on-criminal-justice

29https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cX7hni-zGD8&

30https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/kamala-harris-office-sought-to-keep-inmates-locked-up-so-that-california-could-use-them-for-cheap-labor

31https://edition.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/02/10/california.prisons/index.html

32https://www.reuters.com/article/us-california-prison-budget-insight/california-prison-reforms-have-reduced-inmate-numbers-not-costs-idUSKBN0UK0J520160106

33https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/5914af11add7b0493474ada5#p_178

34https://www.thedailybeast.com/kamala-harris-ag-office-tried-to-keep-inmates-locked-up-for-cheap-labor

35https://www.thedailybeast.com/kamala-harris-ag-office-tried-to-keep-inmates-locked-up-for-cheap-labor

36https://www.thedailybeast.com/kamala-harris-ag-office-tried-to-keep-inmates-locked-up-for-cheap-labor

37https://theintercept.com/2019/02/07/kamala-harris-san-francisco-district-attorney-crime/

38https://theintercept.com/2019/02/07/kamala-harris-san-francisco-district-attorney-crime/

39https://theintercept.com/2019/02/07/kamala-harris-san-francisco-district-attorney-crime/

40https://www.sfweekly.com/news/kamalas-karma/

41https://theintercept.com/2019/02/07/kamala-harris-san-francisco-district-attorney-crime/

42https://www.sfweekly.com/news/kamalas-karma/

43https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Harris-violated-S-F-campaign-finance-law-D-A-2554388.php

44https://theintercept.com/2019/02/07/kamala-harris-san-francisco-district-attorney-crime/

45https://theintercept.com/2019/02/07/kamala-harris-san-francisco-district-attorney-crime/

46https://theintercept.com/2019/06/09/kamala-harris-san-francisco-catholic-church-child-abuse/

47https://theintercept.com/2019/06/09/kamala-harris-san-francisco-catholic-church-child-abuse/

48https://theintercept.com/2019/06/09/kamala-harris-san-francisco-catholic-church-child-abuse/

49https://theintercept.com/2019/06/09/kamala-harris-san-francisco-catholic-church-child-abuse/

50https://www.sfweekly.com/news/a-secrecy-fetish/

51https://theintercept.com/2019/06/09/kamala-harris-san-francisco-catholic-church-child-abuse/

52https://www.catholicleague.org/did-harris-cover-for-the-catholic-church/

53https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1293593087172730880

54https://www.catholicleague.org/did-harris-cover-for-the-catholic-church/

55https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-arellano-catholic-church-sex-abuse-california-20180912-story.html

56https://www.newspapers.com/image/635092683/?terms=kamala harris progressive&match=1

57https://theintercept.com/2019/03/13/kamala-harris-mortage-crisis/

58https://theintercept.com/2019/03/13/kamala-harris-mortage-crisis/

59https://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/IRSResponse.nonrecourse.pdf

60https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/how-americas-biggest-bank-paid-its-fine-for-the-2008-mortgage-crisis-with-phony-mortgages/

61https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a12787808/jp-morgan-mortgage-scam/

62https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/business/19dimon.html

63https://theintercept.com/2017/01/03/treasury-nominee-steve-mnuchins-bank-accused-of-widespread-misconduct-in-leaked-memo/

64https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3250383-OneWest-Package-Memo.html

65https://www.instagram.com/p/CD15ZgBFWCj/

66https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-financial-crisis-experiences-20180915-htmlstory.html

67https://sf.curbed.com/2018/10/26/18028576/united-nations-rapporteur-homeless-farha-human-rights-violantion

68https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-homelessness-states-worst-crises-2018-11

69https://www.unitedwayla.org/en/news-resources/blog/understanding-devastating-connection-between-homelessness-and-death/