Biden is floundering, but not as grievously as his subordinate.

By Curt MILLS

As counterintuitive as it may seem, Americans have become accustomed to a strong vice president.

From neighboring Tennessee, Al Gore (veep from 1993-2001) was the Arkansan Bill Clinton’s Mississippi River brother of a sort… wonkish and weird, he was Gordon Brown to Clinton’s Tony Blair: It was one whole New Democrat package. It was enough to carry Al Jr. through Clinton’s impeachment (the president’s peccadillos offended the more buttoned-up Gore—though, who’s still married?)

When Gore narrowly and protractedly lost the presidency himself in 2000, it was the Democratic fringes who cried that an election was stolen. He was plausible presidential candidate through 2004 and 2008, and became the de facto Climate Man of the decade, in what may yet become the issue of the century, securing the quite arguably limp figure a true human legacy.

Dick Cheney (second chair from 2001-2009) was, of course, Dick Cheney.

Darth Vader himself, or so it’s said, was the anchoring force behind the cause of which this magazine was laudably founded to stand against: that is, the Iraq War. But, say what you will for the man, at least he got something done. From 2001 to 2006, the first year in which President George W. Bush was first delivered a Glenn Youngkin-sized humiliation of his own, Cheney was unassailable, if not essentially the president. Even after his W-delivered defrocking, Cheney was a leading candidate for the 2012 GOP nomination for a time, and his scion, Rep. Liz Cheney, remains perhaps former President Donald Trump’s pluckiest elected enemy. Cheney mattered. He was “BIG.”

His successor, some guy named Joe Biden, became the president. You know about him.

Even Mike Pence, much-maligned, deserves inclusion in the modern canon. Cut on as Mikey-one-note—Trump this, some Reaganite hit that—the Hoosier actually brought a lot to table, electorally and philosophically. As much as I’d like to flak for Chris Christie (Trump’s runner-up choice), it’s difficult to imagine that Trump weathers the Access Hollywood affair without Mr. Evangelical in his back pocket and at the bottom of the ticket.

In office, in terms of what Trump actually did, Pence’s fingerprints were all over it: a tax cut lusted over by House backbenchers like Pence for a generation, a criminal justice plan backed by Koch (a TAC supporter) and Pence’s canny caporegime Marc Short, to say nothing of the 45th president’s Iran policy, which Pence summed up in the final days of that White House: “They’re evil.” If Mike Pence was so unimportant, why would any ever propose hanging him?

Enter Madame Vice President.

Kamala Harris, first truly tipped for glory by Barack Obama in a bizarre retro read of a New Yorker article with David Remnick in the waning days of his presidency…big things were expected of her. From her days as San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown’s date to Frisco’s district attorney at the height of the tech boom, to the Golden State’s top law enforcement official, to its senator, to a presidential candidate with the politics and background that were a worthy, feminine successor to Obama’s own…it was supposed to be her.

When she became vice president, in the delirium of Covid-19 and Trump’s shambolic conclusion of a Washington tenure, her effectively 11th place showing in the 2019-2020 Democratic primary was supposed to be swept under the rug.

Nevermind how it all happened. Assailed as a racist by the California senator during the primary, future President Biden’s selection of a chief lieutenant was an unlikely one. But he boxed himself in. Biden made a pledge of a female (she/her…) vice president to seal the deal in the spring 2020 primary season. When George Floyd met his end, he had to eject his putative favorite, Sen. Amy Klobachur, for reasons both Minnesota and melanin. He needed a black woman—and stat. Biden considered Harris, Angelino Rep. Karen Bass, and Florida’s Congresswoman Val Demings (now prepping to run against Ron DeSantis).

But Biden, the seasoned pol, had a warranted phobia of anyone who had not run and won statewide. Resurfaced tales of Congresswoman Bass, her grandmotherly charm aside, hailing Fidel Castro were reminders of why Congresspeople from D+36 districts don’t usually wind up on national tickets (an interesting counterfactual: What would have happened if Barack Obama had defeated Black Panther Bobby Rush for Congress in 2000?). And Demmings was tossed aside, her career as a cop too outre for the spirit of 2020. Harris, the only female black Democratic senator, got the nod, at last, by default.

She arguably peaked there.

As we near Thanksgiving, Harris has little to thank her lucky stars over. She stands at Cheney-like notoriety, a 27.8 percent approval rating according to Suffolk University. Staff problems were clear, and whispers of frayed relations with The Boss abounded even before the White House’s sudden nosedive since summer. Or as Janan Ganesh puts forward in the Financial Times, arguing for a 2024 Democratic ejection of both Biden and Harris: “Harder to forget is the fact that she quit the party’s 2020 primaries early for lack of funds — some feat for a California senator. Among those who outlasted her was the mayor of Indiana’s fourth-largest city”… that is, perhaps Harris’ top rival, the crisp-as-a-chip, if deflating, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.

It’s not hard to conjure up the Harris buy low case: At this point even outright offending British royalty with American garishness, Biden bows out soon enough, and sets the stage for a Harris nomination and a “long and loud” 2024 campaign. The Democratic Party dares America: “Yeah, she’s not great, but are you really in for Trump, the sequel? Dear God.” 

So goes the pitch.

But it’s just as easy to dream up the opposite scenario: Both Harris and Biden are overwhelmed by events…Biden suffers the fate of the last most-experienced-guy ever to become president (George H.W. Bush) and somnolently loses re-election…and Harris goes as the elder Bush’s deputy, Dan Quayle, went. Biden has, thus far, done little to save her from this fate, giving the Californian the poison chalice portfolio of the U.S. Southern Border (especially given their party’s de facto open borders preference)… this is on top of the 46th president’s apparent passion for ejecting Harris to peripheral foreign theaters any time things get hot in Washington.

Come the 2024 season, it’s no longer unimaginable that Harris quietly suffers the fate of Quayle when he made his own White House volley in 1996 (this, after all, is what happened Harris the last time America got a full look).

“We were convinced that a winning campaign could have been accomplished and the necessary funds could have been raised,” Quayle, so convincingly, told the New York Times in 1995. Quayle’s legacy ended up being his radical staff, helmed by future Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol. One only wonders who a future Tucker Carlson (or Tucker Carlson) will be assailing as “some has-been functionary from the Kamala Harris offices in the 2020s” in the future, as Carlson blasted Kristol this week.

theamericanconservative.com

What can we make of Kamala Harris’ trip to Mexico? The public reads reports about success, but without anything to back that up. Naturally, from corporate media and from Harris, we are left with meaningless platitudes and cackling vagueities. We are roughly informed that Harris (and not Biden) goes to meet with heads of state of Guatemala and Mexico. Guatemala is one of the Northern Triangle (Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador) states caught up in the ‘Root Causes’ of the refugee crisis.

Harris has been under pressure to visit the U.S. border with Mexico, since the Biden administration had appointed her Czar of the border issue.

In the most clear and simple terms, Kamala Harris’ trip to Mexico was a clean-up job in the aftermath of an aborted plan to flood the U.S. with refugees in the event that Trump attempted to remain in office after January 20^th.  Without that understanding, we are left with vague generalities about ‘Root Causes’ of migration which are almost always going to be described in banal economic terms, or (conveniently within the rubric of Great Reset mythology), climate change.

This may appear to the uninitiated as a big claim, but we have provided even larger proofs in our past work on the subject in exposing the Transition Integrity Project. If we are going to talk about the ‘Root ‘Causes’ of the crisis, then the TIP stands front and center. This was the project financed by a group including George Soros and Nicolas Berggruen of the World Economic forum (under Klaus Schwab), and led by John Podesta of the Clinton clique. Its war-games were published in all the major Operation Mockingbird-type operations of the intelligence services – The Atlantic, The Washington Post, the New York Times, etc.

Alex Soros and Kamala Harris after the Final Interview round in Biden’s VP vetting process in 2020

Borrowing from the language and methods of standard destabilization/color revolution schemes, the ‘Transition’ was based on the all-out gambit to remove Trump from office. This even included an openly promoted secession movement wherein “Cascadia’’ (California, Oregon, Washington) would all secede if Trump won the election or refused to accept a Biden victory, and these actions would be endorsed publicly by Biden and Harris. This much isn’t speculation, but the openly published outcomes of the TIP war-game.

Because color revolution and coup techniques involve destabilization campaigns, we know that all assets that can be wielded in that direction, will be. One very visible sign of intentional destabilization is when ‘conditions’ create large population displacement.

Therefore, we cannot ignore the vast network of Soros-backed NGOs operating in Central America and, much to the chagrin of the Mexican government, also in Mexico. These NGOs were activated to organize ‘Root Causes’ into actual human waves of migrants who magically arrived into U.S. facilities with their documentation completed, well-dressed and well-fed, and already coached on the precise words to use to qualify them not as a regular migrant, but as a victim (refugee) of inhumane conditions.

Honduran migrants aiming to reach the U.S. border walk alongside a highway in Chiquimula, Guatemala, Saturday, Jan. 16, 2021

And these ‘economic problems’ at the ‘Root Causes’ themselves are not acts of nature nor of God, but calculated cycles intended to produce certain outcomes. Corporate media continues to misinform the public that specific economic realities are too complex to be projected and controlled for specific outcomes by conscious actors on the global stage. In that make-believe world, it is as if interest rates determined by central banks, or the future of any publicly traded company at the hands of the hedge fund practice of short-selling, are random market-driven events and not operationalized as part of globalist policy.

But since Biden was inaugurated, why did we have a migrant crisis anyhow?

Simply put, the inertia of the assets already deployed and the process already in play to ‘hit the ground running’ pre-determined that a certain initial flow would hit the U.S.. The number of people involved, organizations, promises, moneys spent, bureaucracies involved – all together created the scenario of steering the Titanic away from the iceberg. The captain of the ship in a “worse-case scenario” (for the IMF and WEF) would have been Trump. And so what we saw, and are seeing in Harris’ trip, is purely damage control and clean-up.

The “New Era” of this scheme took place when then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave the green-light for a coup to overthrow the popular left-nationalist Honduran President Zelaya in 2009. This led to a dehumanizing policy of austerity, that countless hundreds of thousands fall into austere and destitute conditions.

Subsequently, Soros-backed NGOs began to organize ‘Human Waves’ out of Honduras and into the U.S. over the following years. In other words, Soros organized the coup against Zelaya: a private-sector moratorium on Honduran firms, using hedge funds to harm the Honduran economy. This may well have included his own Soros Fund Management, a hedge fund company. Soros after all is number 27 on Forbes’ list with a net worth of $23 billion. At the end of the havoc, this compelled the military to seize power to ‘save the country’.

The solution to the Soros created economic crisis that lead to austerity and rising poverty, was for Soros NGOs to go in and organize the malcontent into a human migration wave. Problem – reaction – solution.

Likewise, we have been disinformed in corporate media that Hurricane Amanda is responsible also for the refugee crisis. And of course, that these (actually seasonal) events are now attributable to global warming, and if because of cooling conditions, then of climate change in general. Is this really credible?

Hurricane Amanda claimed the lives of just 17 people in El Salvador and Guatemala, and temporarily displaced some 7,000 citizens across 154 shelters in El Salvador. Is this what we, in part, owe the massive migration crisis at the border? Prudence tells us, probably not. But corporate media insists otherwise.

We cannot underscore the significance of the Soros human-wave phenomenon, which was also carried out after the Arab Spring in Syria into Turkey, Lebanon and finally Europe – or conversely, into Michigan.

While human beings have naturally migrated in trickles for time immemorial, or in waves in relation to massive changing climactic conditions or vastly changed political realities (the end of the last ice-age, or the Mongol incursions westward), a mass human wave had not been consciously organized until late modernity. This fact alone should impress upon anyone the sheer power of that intersection of capital, NGOs, and sociology, in such a planned undertaking as the transplantation of massive numbers of people.

It is important to note that the crisis facing many would-be migrants is a real one. While it is questionable if these are caused by local governments, natural disasters, or climate change, there is no doubt that they are caused chiefly by the capital-driven motives of transnational corporations and banking structures like the IMF. The general trend, towards the aim of restoring the post-cold war unipolar moment, of the trans-Atlantic power establishment, has been to upwards distribute wealth and geographically relocate this. As a rule, this has been from the periphery of global development (the so-called global south) to the core of global development (the so-called global north).

The Crisis Planned for Trump

While Harris scrambles to do damage control, and now inform migrants ‘not to come’, we know that these NGOs were informing migrants that U.S. policy would create an open door for them if Biden won the election. Long before November, these organizations began to prepare the next wave, and after the election, received the green light. Bear in mind that any number of possibilities regarding an unclear succession process were still in game until late January 20^th.

Color Revolutions and related destabilization campaigns involve a number of assets including traditional soft-power mechanisms and media campaigns. It appears that the thinking was that if Trump were to somehow invoke a state of emergency to remain in power post January 20^th, then the secession plan and a refugee crisis would be engaged.

Trump with top military brass in the State Dining Room of the White House on October 7^th, 2017 quoted as stating ‘This is the calm before the Storm’. Credit: Getty Images

But this refugee crisis would have been orders of magnitude greater than what we have seen, and what Harris is trying to wind-down. In conjunction with this, we consider the media hysteria surrounding Covid-19, and the prospect that migrants would be carriers.

The IMF would have placed additional pressures on Northern Triangle States and Mexico for Covid-19 compliance, regarding lockdowns. Only Mexico would have been strong enough to buck these pressures, but as for the Central American states, it is clear that their conditions of lockdowns would have further destroyed those economies. That would contribute to the ‘Root Causes’, economic destitution misframed as ‘Covid’, along with ‘Global Warming’. Hence, economic destitution created intentionally by the IMF and WEF (which openly opposed Trump) for a destabilization campaign, would be misframed by media as ‘acts of Nature or God’.

Media would play upon fears in all directions, and Trump would be forced to use the only tools at hand, the same that Obama had: people in cages.

But such numbers would have overwhelmed the present facilities, and the solutions would be limited. Any solution would have been characterized a catastrophe, and politically destructive for a Trump-in-power, already by now being called a military dictatorship.

Trans-Atlantic media would have gone full-court press, and the U.S. would have been a pariah state, with the refugee crisis full of Covid-19 stricken inmates placed on par with the concentration camps of Hitler’s Germany. The ‘civil-war’ scenario with the secessionist states, and likely military operations underway to resolve this, would have only contributed to the planned scenario. With programs like HARP, we might also see weather disasters within the U.S., and more (and this time, serious) in the Northern Triangle to spurn further human waves.

Taken together with Klaus Schwab’s ‘warnings’ of cyber-terrorism striking energy and food supplies, we can understand the scope and magnitude of what was planned.

Conclusion

Forensically, we can say with a high degree of certitude that this indeed was the plan.

An interesting fact about destabilization strategies like Arab Springs or Color Revolutions, and related coup-techniques that  involve complex systems and multivariate/multipronged vectors of attack, is that even when this or that part of the plan is aborted, or even if the whole plan becomes superfluous, we nevertheless see fragments of it in vestigial or primordial form. Furthermore, those elements may be re-integrated into any number of concurrent contingencies of value.

This is what we are seeing with the border crisis currently. This does not exclude that going forward, to a lesser extent, with this or that destabilizing disaster doesn’t also come with realizable benefits for those well-connected interests anyhow. Political divisions, cheap labor, and the general mantra of ‘never let a good disaster go to waste’ would still be fruitful.

It is also what we have seen currently with the cyber-attacks in the U.S. that have effected energy and food supply: they serve a purpose for the IMF and the transition from plutocracy to technocracy within the context of the Great Reset, but also (and chiefly) are fragments of a larger, but aborted, plan to create a failed-state scenario in a Trump-led nationalist military dictatorship against the neoliberal IMF globalist plan.

The reason why the public has heard nothing concrete about the real nature of these meetings with Latin American leaders, is that in all likelihood these were conducted to flatten-out the remains of the planned refugee crisis. It’s simply too politically inconvenient, and ill-suited for the administration now responsible for it. We are likely to hear of various economic commitments, but not of the agreements to curtail the activities of the NGOs involved in this plot. This, in conclusion, explains the administration’s about face with Kamala’s new slogan “Do Not Come”.

Vice President Kamala Harris spent the weekend under fire from Republicans, which of course means that Kamala Harris spent the weekend being criticized for the most silly, vapid reason you could possibly criticize Kamala Harris for.

Apparently the likely future president tweeted “Enjoy the long weekend,” a reference to the Memorial Day holiday on Monday, instead of gushing about fallen troops and sacrifice.

That’s it, that’s the whole entire story. That silly, irrelevant offense by one of the sleaziest people in the single most corrupt and murderous government on earth is the whole entire basis for histrionic headlines from conservative media outlets like this:

‘DISGUSTING’ DISRESPECT: Vice President Kamala Harris ignites outrage over ‘misfire’ Memorial Day tweet https://t.co/J8VMtU2OCM

— Fox News (@FoxNews) May 29, 2021

Harris, the born politician, was quick to course correct.

“Throughout our history our service men and women have risked everything to defend our freedoms and our country,” the veep tweeted. “As we prepare to honor them on Memorial Day, we remember their service and their sacrifice.”

Which is of course complete bullshit. It has been generations since any member of the US military could be said to have served or sacrificed defending America or its freedoms, and that has been the case throughout almost the entirety of its history. If you are reading this it is statistically unlikely that you are of an age where any US military personnel died for any other reason than corporate profit and global domination, and if you are it’s almost certain you weren’t old enough to have had mature thoughts about it at the time.

Whenever you criticize the US war machine online within earshot of anyone who’s sufficiently propagandized, you will invariably be lectured about the second World War and how we’d all be speaking German or Japanese without the brave men who died for our freedom. This makes my point for me: the fact that apologists for US imperialism always need to reach all the way back through history to the cusp of living memory to find even one single example of the American military being used for purposes that weren’t evil proves that it most certainly is evil.

But this is one of the main reasons there are so very many movies and history documentaries made about World War Two: it’s an opportunity to portray US servicemen bravely fighting and dying for a noble cause without having to bend the truth beyond recognition. The other major reason is that focusing on the second World War allows members of the US empire to escape into a time when the Big Bad Guy on the world stage was someone else.

Happy Memorial Day pic.twitter.com/khOjpLZpET

— ᴀɴɪꜱʜᴇᴅ ᴇʀɴɪᴇ (@BanishedBernie) May 30, 2021

From the end of World War Two to the fall of the USSR, the US military was used to smash the spread of communism and secure geostrategic interests toward the ultimate end of engineering the collapse of the Soviet Union. After this was accomplished in 1991, US foreign policy officially shifted to preserving a unipolar world order by preventing the rise of any other superpower which could rival its might.

A 1992 article by The New York Times titled “U.S. Strategy Plan Calls For Insuring No Rivals Develop”, reporting on a leaked document which describes a policy known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine after then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz, reads as follows:

In a broad new policy statement that is in its final drafting stage, the Defense Department asserts that America’s political and military mission in the post-cold-war era will be to insure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territory of the former Soviet Union.

A 46-page document that has been circulating at the highest levels of the Pentagon for weeks, and which Defense Secretary Dick Cheney expects to release later this month, states that part of the American mission will be “convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.”

The classified document makes the case for a world dominated by one superpower whose position can be perpetuated by constructive behavior and sufficient military might to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy.

This is all US troops have been fighting and dying for since the Berlin Wall came down. Not “freedom”, not “democracy”, and certainly not the American people. Just continual uncontested domination of this planet at all cost: domination of its resources, its trade routes, its seas, its air, and its humans, no matter how many lives need to risked and snuffed out in order to achieve it. The US has killed millions and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century in the reckless pursuit of that goal.

And, as Smedley Butler spelled out 86 years ago in his still-relevant book War is a Racket, US military personnel have been dying for profit. Nothing gets the gears of industry turning like war, and nothing better creates chaotic wild west environments of shock and confusion during which more wealth and power can be grabbed. War profiteers pour immense resources into lobbying, think tanks and campaign donations to manipulate and bribe policy makers into making decisions which promote war and military expansionism, with astounding success. This is all entirely legal.

It’s important to spread awareness that this is all US troops have been dying for, because the fairy tale that they fight for freedom and for their countrymen is a major propaganda narrative used in military recruitment. While poverty plays a significant role in driving up enlistments as predatory recruiters target poor and middle class youth promising them a future in the nation with the worst income inequality in the industrialized world, the fact that the aggressively propagandized glorification of military “service” makes it a more esteemed career path than working at a restaurant or a grocery store means people are more likely to enlist.

Without all that propaganda deceiving people into believing that military work is something virtuous, military service would be the most shameful job anyone could possibly have; other stigmatized jobs like sex work would be regarded as far more noble. You’d be less reluctant to tell your extended family over Christmas that you’re a janitor at a seedy massage parlor than that you’ve enlisted in the US military, because instead of congratulating and praising you, your Uncle Murray would look at you and say, “So you’re gonna be killing kids for crude oil?”

And that’s exactly how it should be. Continuing to uphold the lie that US troops fight and die for a good cause is helping to ensure a steady supply of teenagers to feed into the gears of the imperial war machine. Stop feeding into the lie that the war machine is worth killing and being killed for. Not out of disrespect for the dead, but out of reverence for the living.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

By Raul DIEGO

The White House announced recently that Vice President Kamala Harris would take charge of the Biden administration’s “efforts to deter migration to the southwestern border by working to improve conditions in Central America.” The effort would oversee an infusion of billions of dollars into the “ravaged economies” of the so-called Northern Triangle of Central America (NTCA), comprising the nations of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.

According to the Pew Research Center, immigration to the United States between 2007 and 2015 from these three countries outpaced all others, growing by 25%. More recent data provided by the UN Refugee Agency shows how the pandemic has exacerbated the endemic problems of violence and extortion that motivate the emigrants’ departure, causing over half a million people from the region to migrate in 2020.

The Missing Migrants Project, which tracks incidents involving migrants on their way to an international destination, reveals how dangerous such journeys can be – in particular for those who attempt the 2,000-mile excursion through Mexico towards the U.S. – with 65% of the 4,000 deaths recorded from 2014 until 2020 occurring along this migration corridor alone.

The brutality of this humanitarian catastrophe is underscored by the recent massacre of 19 Guatemalan migrants in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas in January by cartel-linked, U.S.-trained state police special forces called Grupo de Operaciones Especiales (GOPES). Early reports had pointed to drug cartel assassins looking to sabotage a competing cartel’s migrant smuggling business, but evidence increasingly mounted against the GOPES and 12 of its officers were formally charged with the heinous crime two weeks later.

News of Harris’s selection came one day after a delegation led by Roberta Jacobson, former U.S. ambassador to Mexico, arrived in the Mexican capital to engage in high-level talks between the governments to address the “root causes” of the ongoing immigration crisis at the border. The axiom seems to be an agreed-upon phrase that will be used as part of any public-facing discourse of this multilateral initiative, but it is unclear how far down into those actual roots any of the governments involved will be willing to dig.

The politics of the matter

Leading on one of the most polarizing and complicated issues in American politics is already being billed as Kamala Harris’s ‘signature’ issue. It comes on the heels of intense media scrutiny over the actions of the Biden administration, which has been accused of hypocrisy after it restored migrant detention facilities to “pre-pandemic” capacity, relying on its press secretary and establishment media to distinguish its approach from the previous administration’s family separation policy.

Despite their arguments, photos released by Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) of a crammed U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) detention center in his state, the day before the bilateral meeting was scheduled to take place in Mexico, reveal that conditions have changed little for migrants.

P released its own photos and video in response to Cuellar, accompanied by a statement assuring the public that it is doing the best it can to “transfer unaccompanied minors to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as quickly and efficiently as possible.”

As the golden goose egg of American politics, immigration will give Harris an opportunity to carve out a strong national profile and, with her background as California’s top cop, she is perfectly positioned to reap the political benefits sure to come her way as she parries predictable blows from the opposition, like Arizona governor Doug Ducey’s characterization of her as “the worst possible choice” for the assignment.

When children are ripped from their parents and put in cages, immigration justice is on the ballot. pic.twitter.com/gtSlFQAn5V

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) November 11, 2019

Attacks from a three-term Republican governor who signed Trump’s patch of border wall will help Harris to gloss over her troubling history as a state prosecutor and questionable track record as a member of Congress, which go right to the heart of those “root causes” she has now been tapped to address in relation to the crisis at the border.

Progressive deception

Among the litany of horrors hiding in the broad definition of the migrant crisis are issues like child labor, sex trafficking, kidnapping, organ trafficking, and the so-called war on drugs, which is often part and parcel of these crimes and goes hand in hand with the carceral state where Harris made her career.

During her tenure as attorney general for the state of California, Harris presented herself as a “progressive prosecutor.” Nevertheless, her record left a lot to be desired in terms of any actual progressive results and she has been roundly criticized for controversial stances on the death penalty and her staunch defense of California’s notoriously racist and trigger-happy police forces.

One of the California AG’s most high-profile cases centered on the issue of sex trafficking when she “zealously” prosecuted Backpage.com, forcing the online publication to shut down as part of her office’s ostensible campaign to prioritize the fight against human trafficking. The actual consequences of the state’s victory had the opposite effect of its purported goal, further pushing the sex trade underground and opening sex workers to greater risks of abuse and exposure to criminal networks, according to critics.

As a member of the Senate, Harris once again played a key role in the issue, this time at a national level with the passage of the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), which were signed together into law as the FOSTA/SESTA by Donald Trump in 2018. The legislation has come under fire from sex workers and LGBTQ advocacy groups for worsening conditions for victims of sex trafficking by removing “safe” venues for sex workers to sell their services.

According to Nina Luo of Decrim NY:

[The law] targets, arrests, and incarcerates clients of sex workers; as well as drivers, landlords, family members, partners, who provide services and care to sex workers; and sex workers collaborating to keep each other safe [and] puts people who trade sex at increased risk of violence, economic instability, and labor exploitation.”

Significantly, Harris’s participation was geared exclusively towards working with Big Tech and their concerns over how the bills would affect their business. In fact, Harris ­– along with Bernie Sanders – refrained from sponsoring the bills until these matters were settled to the satisfaction of Google, Facebook, and others represented by the Internet Association, which testified on their behalf in the Senate regarding the legislation.

Immigrant Song

Beyond Harris’s familial ties to Silicon Valley through her brother-in-law, who is Uber’s chief legal counsel, California’s former top cop has displayed an abiding interest in technology applied to government, which is especially concerning given her law enforcement background and the job she has now been tasked with in regards to the dispossessed of Central and North America.

In 2015, Harris launched a “first-of-its-kind” smart criminal justice platform called OpenJustice, which she touted as a way for the state to measure “effectiveness in the criminal justice system with data and metrics.” The platform’s publicly available dashboard features statewide data on arrest rates, death in custody, and arrest-related deaths, as well as law enforcement officers killed or assaulted. A year later, Harris expanded the system with URSUS – a use-of-force data reporting and collecting mechanism developed by social entrepreneurship non-profit organization Bayes Impact in conjunction with the California Department of Justice’s Bureau of Crime Information and Analysis.

OpenJustice partnered with the White House to create multiple versions of the software that other states could implement. The “OpenJustice team” focuses on different parts of the criminal justice system, develops “roadmaps” for juveniles, and conducts “deep data dive[s]” into the “school-to-prison pipeline,” according to Justin Elrich who was Harris’s special assistant attorney general on tech policy matters and is currently head of trust & safety policy at Americans for TikTok. Another OpenJustice project, taken on by Stanford and Facebook engineers, revolved around “understanding of what goes on in jails and state prisons, as well as ending the vicious cycle of recidivism.”

Last year, Harris’s successor at the California attorney general’s office, Xavier Becerra, unveiled the newest OpenJustice dashboard before leaving to head the Department of Health and Human Services, which is the lead agency that provides housing for undocumented children coming across the U.S.-Mexico border. Add the former Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Alejandro Mayorkas — who Harris swore in on February 2 as the seventh Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and direct boss of CBP — and the stage is set for a massive tech overhaul of the migrant crisis.

Bread and circus and data

By the time Becerra had filed the one-hundredth lawsuit against then-President Donald Trump, the political circus was already drawing to a close. California had been the butt of Trump’s jokes since the early days of the campaign, and his crude insults against Mexicans and promises to build a wall that the neighbors would pay for made what was once the northernmost part of Mexico a natural ally of the “resistance” that ended up carrying Biden into office.

At the end of March 2019, only about 50 lawsuits had been filed by the California DOJ, but the tarp was still up and Trump was in the middle of the John Bolton epoch of his administration, which featured a number of very loud saber-rattling incidents targeting multiple Latin American nations. The world was living through the “migrant caravans,” the height of the Juan Guaidó quasi-regime-change efforts in Venezuela, and the short-lived “troika of tyranny” – a derisive moniker coined by Bolton to lump together all the “evil socialism” of Nicaragua, Cuba, and Nicolas Maduro’s government that failed to catch on.

That month, the President would announce the discontinuation of aid to the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala in an ostensibly punitive move designed to teach the countries a lesson about keeping their unruly border-crashing citizens home. About $500 million in financial assistance was paused while Mike Pompeo’s state department developed “a list of criteria that governments of the three countries have to meet in order for U.S. assistance to resume.

The spectacle hid the reality. While some funds were cut, most were repurposed to serve the interests of the U.S. national security state in those countries. Approximately 58% of the revamped 2019 Central American aid budget was allocated to a program developed jointly by the Obama and Bush administrations called the Central America Regional Security Initiative (CARSI), which funds equipment, training, and technical assistance for the military and police in those regions.

Numerous companies were involved in CARSI. Israel’s Cellebrite, profiled by MintPress in a previous article, received $782,000 to furnish the Honduran police with its proprietary UFED mobile data extraction technology. IBM, Pen-Link, CellXion, and JSI Telecom are just a few of the many private sector security technology firms that have been benefiting from America’s vast transnational law enforcement client-state apparatus.

Most significantly, no aid was cut to federal programs working with NTCA countries to establish “information exchange mechanisms in the fight against human trafficking and other crimes,” most of which are conducted through the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) International Operations Division, such as a program called Biometric Identification Transnational Migration Alert Program (BITMAP), first created in 2011.

The Biometric Identification Transnational Migration Alert Program Authorization Act of 2018 was passed despite strong objections from the ACLU and other civil rights advocacy groups decrying the lack of privacy protections and allows ICE agents to provide biometric training and equipment in countries around the world. In addition, the data collected is shared with U.S. biometric databases like HART, developed by Northrop Grumman for DHS and intended to become the “largest database of biometric and biographic data on citizens and foreigners in the United States.”

According to Privacy International, a DHS presentation of HART in 2017 projected it would be able to “scoop up” 180 million “new biometric transactions per year by 2022.” The staggering figure won’t come from NTCA countries alone: BITMAP has already been deployed to more than 14 countries, with “near-term plans to expand” to others.

Show and tell

Harris has now been given the green light by the White House to “pump billions of dollars” into the economies of the Northern Triangle countries in order to “address the root causes that cause people to make the trek.” Considering that human trafficking is a $150 billion-a-year industry and the concomitant drug war waged by the government Harris represents produces many multiples of that, it would take a rather serious investment to pull those “root causes” from the ground.

The language dovetails with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s own exhortations calling for Washington to “spur development” in Central America in order to address the “root causes behind migratory flows in the region” — as posited in a statement by Mexico’s foreign ministry issued after the first leg of the talks, which were supposed to continue in Guatemala but were postponed thanks to a volcanic eruption.

Formal deployments by the Mexican military in the state of Chiapas and the ostensible closure of the border with Guatemala to “stop the spread” of Covid-19 show that Mexico is on board with the Biden party line. But, for now, the crisis at the U.S. border remains a political priority and hundreds of Central American migrants continue to cross daily into Mexico through deliberately unguarded portions of the border.

Any actual halt to the unfettered passage of refugees on their way north would also put a halt to the political ambitions of Kamala Harris, who is poised to make immigration the highest yielding asset in her burgeoning “portfolio,” which will be modeled on Biden’s own path to the Oval Office when he took the lead on these same issues during his time as Barack Obama’s VP.

According to La Jornada reporting from the ground in Chiapas, established transportation channels over land and water continue to funnel migrants through the Lacandon jungle as they make their way north to their intended destination.

“Look,” Harris told CBS, “we are addressing it. We’re dealing with it. But it’s going to take some time.”

mintpressnews.com

In what may become the most unexpected and, perhaps, unwanted political comebacks in American political history, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, who never inspired much confidence on the 2020 presidential campaign trail, may soon find herself, through default, the next president of the United States. Should the world start praying for Joe Biden’s continued good health?

As U.S. President Joe Biden enters the ninth week of his ‘shadow presidency’ without a single press conference under his belt, while uttering absolute nonsense when forced to speak, the possibility of Vice President Kamala Harris assuming the reins of power – exactly as many predicted would happen – is looking more likely with each passing day.

A shocking 47 percent of U.S. voters believe that “others” are making decisions for Biden behind the scenes, according to a Rasmussen poll. Could it be that Vice President Harris is the brains behind the duo, making the tough calls? That seems highly unlikely. As witnessed on the campaign trail that failed to excite the American imagination, Kamala Harris conspicuously lacks charisma, leadership qualities, and the diplomatic experience needed to navigate the White House through this time of crisis just weeks into Biden’s banana regime. Nevertheless, Harris is exactly the sort of ‘leader’ the powers behind the throne desperately want following four years of Donald Trump’s very hands-on presidency, which clipped the wings of the hawks, closed down the U.S. border to illegals and reinvested in U.S. manufacturing – the very pro-American developments that the globalists fear most.

In other words, with Biden barely aware of his surroundings, it is mere child’s play to foist Harris into the leadership role; indeed, the Democrats and the media will only be too relieved to see bumbling Biden sidelined lest his cognitive decline draw any further suspicion as to how such an incapacitated individual was able to garner more votes than any other presidential candidate in U.S. political history. Less than three months into the Biden presidency and that feat seems almost fantastical, and one that future historians will certainly have a lot to say about it. But I digress.

The story of Kamala Harris is one sports fans are familiar with: the scouts just got it wrong. That’s really it.

— Joel Wertheimer (@Wertwhile) December 1, 2019

Already, Harris has assumed many of the duties traditionally performed by the commander-in-chief, like speaking with other heads of state, as she has already done with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau, and French President Emmanuel Macron. At the same time, Biden is wantonly destroying bilateral relations with Russia, calling President Putin “a killer,” in the very same week that his Secretary of State Tony Blinken threw diplomatic caution to the wind, accusing Beijing of threatening the “rules-based order that maintains global stability.”

In one fell swoop, the blundering Biden administration has accomplished what U.S. foreign policymakers have long hoped to avoid, and that is a strategic partnership between Russia and China that is aimed primarily at the United States. Such an unattractive scenario, at a time when both Moscow and Beijing are in prime condition, now looks to be a certainty. Or is this merely the premeditated destruction of foreign relations in anticipation of the day when ‘President Harris’ rides to the rescue and performs her diplomatic ‘magic,’ undoing the mess that her dithering predecessor made on the global stage? It’s almost possible to imagine the Orwellian-style headlines already: ‘Harris Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize as U.S. Military Buildup Continues Across Eurasia.’

But that sort of apocalyptic speculation ignores a nagging question that has largely gone unanswered, which is: how on earth was such a conspicuously lackluster politician like Kamala Harris able to rise to such a high position – literally one step away from the Oval Office – in the first place?

Among an original field of 29 Democratic hopefuls to unseat the incumbent Donald Trump, Kamala Harris was a brief flash in the pan, mostly over an overhyped clash she had with Joe Biden in the first primary debates when she criticized her future boss over his past opposition to busing.

“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,” Harris said with her trademark emotion that covers for nervousness. “That little girl was me!” Although that bittersweet moment resulted in a quick infusion of $2 million pouring into Harris’ campaign coffers, coupled with a short-lived uptick in popularity, her star was in the descendant.

That much seemed certain following her scrape with fellow Democratic presidential contender Tulsi Gabbard in the second round of the debates.

“I’m concerned about this record of senator Harris. She put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana,” Gabbard said with a degree of calm and composure that made her look the most presidential on the crowded stage.

Gabbard continued: “She blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row. She kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California, and she fought to keep cash bail system in place that impacts poor people in the worst kind of way.”

In a matter of seconds, the photogenic soldier-candidate from Hawaii had laid bare the claim that Harris would serve the interests of the progressives once in office. Clearly that was a well-crafted fairy tale.

In the aftermath of the debate, the hashtag #KamalaHarrisDestroyed blew up on Twitter, sounding the death knell to Harris’ presidential ambitions. However, to read about the exchange between Gabbard and Harris is one thing, but to hear the way the audience cheered following Gabbard’s scathing attack was quite telling: Harris was simply not respected and revered – and, I am guessing, is still not – as a serious presidential candidate.

Happy Anniversary! #KamalaHarrisDestroyed pic.twitter.com/C52OSEyywJ

— Students For Peace (@students4warbad) July 31, 2020

Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton nailed it when he wrote: “California Senator Kamala Harris should never have run for president in the first place. Her ambition far exceeded her ability.”

The American public seemed to feel exactly the same way about Harris’ political abilities as the polling that followed confirmed. From a short-lived high of 15 percent in July, 2019, the former California Senator’s popularity hit rock bottom at 2.5 percent just five months later when she announced she was withdrawing from the contest.

Yet it seems that particular ‘lackluster-ness’ is precisely what got Kamala Harris noticed in the first place. After all, the unfortunate fate of the Western democracies at this crucial moment in history is that they are increasingly being led not by the most intelligent, courageous and honorable of individuals, but precisely by the weak, venal and compromised. Unless you are damaged goods, the system has little use for you.

Let’s not kid ourselves; the powers behind the scenes – the ‘deep state,’ if you will – have no desire to be dragged around on a leash by a rabblerousing populist cut from the same cloth as a Donald Trump or an Andrew Jackson, especially after investing so much of their own money into the horse race. What they want is an individual who they fully control – lock, stock and barrel. What they want is a person exactly like Kamala Harris, and that should be of tremendous concern to every American, regardless of political allegiance.

The current war being waged against the United States and its constitution hinges on the expressed desire to extirpate “white supremacy” aka “white privilege” aka “systemic racism.” It is a convenient campaign slogan as it immediately creates guilt and apprehension in those white people who are foolish enough to believe it. It also is a vague enough term that it becomes possible to wrap a lot of other issues into it, like gun control, destruction of traditional education, reparations and affirmative action, and even de-policing urban areas. As minorities allegedly suffer disproportionately from coronavirus it might even be expanded to include mandatory national lockdowns every time a pandemic appears, as Biden has suggested in the past.

We are already seeing how some crimes are no longer crimes if they are committed by sanctimonious social justice warriors. Prosecutors in a number of states are dismissing charges against rioters because they have “concluded the protesters were exercising their basic civil rights.” It is generally being claimed that prosecutions continue for the “real” crimes of arson, looting and destruction of public property, but at least one liberal California District Attorney will not charge anyone who maintains that he or she was doing what they did to combat racism or feed their families. She calls it considering the “needs” of the looters. The looted shops that will as a result go out of business and whose employees become unemployed evidently have no “needs.”

The Democrats have long been adept at playing identity politics. They believe that appealing to a number of groups with grievances to create a voting majority is good for the country, which it is not, because sooner or later the ticket has to be paid for and deals that abridge the freedom of most Americans must be consummated. That will certainly take place with Biden and Harris.

And Biden and Harris will likely get away with much of their divisive domestic agenda, if only because it will be carefully hidden behind fear of the Coronavirus and of more civil unrest, but the one area where they will meet real resistance is the Second Amendment. One critic describes how “There is much overlap between Biden’s platform and Harris’s previous presidential campaign proposals. They both emphasize holding gun manufacturers accountable, enacting universal background checks, banning the manufacture and sale of semiautomatic rifles and higher-capacity magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds, [and] prohibiting those convicted of domestic violence from buying guns…” And that is only for starters, with national gun registration and some confiscation certainly being considered.

Many Republicans as well as Democrats own guns and will resist any attempt at registration, much less the seizure of certain types of firearms. The death by shooting numbers have indeed risen dramatically, particularly in urban areas, but the victims and perpetrators are largely black-on-black and the weapons used are obtained illegally. Ironically, the rise in crime is in large part attributable to Democratic Party pandering to movements like Black Lives Matter with their message that violence is acceptable to bring about change. To argue that somehow controlling the legal owners of weapons is a “safety measure” is a convenient fiction.

To help the Democratic Party agenda along there will also of necessity be restrictions on free speech. One can expect greater political control over the propagandistic state media like Voice of America and it is perhaps inevitable that already censorship-heavy social media and news sites will also be regulated for content. Biden has appointed as one of his transition team for “regulating” news reporting one Richard Stengel who has argued that there is a flaw in the First Amendment of the Constitution’s Bill of Rights. He believes that free speech cannot be allowed in some cases and that anything that constitutes a “hate speech” should be criminalized. Stengel explains somewhat confusingly “I’m all for protecting thought that we hate, but not speech that incites hate.” This is, of course, yet another Democratic Party gimmick to secure the support of groups with grievances but it will impact on every American who believes that free speech is a fundamental right.

Yet another brilliant appointment by Biden is Ezekiel Emanual, bioethicist brother of former Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Ezekiel is on the Biden administration’s COVID transition team. He has a lot of interesting things to say, notably that the United States should give any newly developed and in short supply COVID vaccines to countries with younger populations so that the young could live while older Americans die. He has also said that everyone should die by age 75.

Finally, Joe’s ambitions do not end on the nation’s borders. In addition to pulling together a cabinet that will include a host of warmongers, there is talk that the new president will early in his presidency convene a “Summit of Democracies” with the stated intention of coordinating a response to Chinese, Iranian and, of course, Russian “aggression.” If it sounds like old wine in new bottles, it should.

Enthusiastic reporting from military contractor funded online newsletter DefenseOne supports the Biden initiative but with a warning: “And if this is truly a Democracy Summit, then Biden should make it clear that government leaders of China, Russia, Iran, Syria, North Korea and their ilk are not invited.” The process of selecting democracies will in fact be more complicated than this with politically protected states like Israel being included even though it is a serial human rights abuser and war criminal. The United States is itself a flawed democracy that is widely seen in negative terms by most of the world, but that will not stop it from attempting to host the summit.

So we Americans and presumably much of the world have a lot to look forward to in the new Biden-Harris regime that is currently taking shape. Internal democracy for all will increasingly be imperiled by pandering to special interests and more foreign wars. It is particularly interesting to note that the one thing that Democratic Party voters as well as other Americans overwhelmingly wanted above all else was a national health care system. That subject is not even on the Biden to-do list.

All of it is nonsense, especially the last conspiracy theory. The neo-conservatives have no chance of penetrating either Harris or any possible Biden administration because their rival neoliberals – who hold identical views anyway but genuinely think they are different – are determined to keep all the prime jobs for themselves.

The truth about Kamala Harris is hiding all right – in plain sight. All the talking heads and political prognosticators of London and Washington cannot recognize an obvious reality even when it walks up to them and belts them across the head with a two by four heavy wooden plank. Kamala Harris is going to be Business as Usual. And today that has dire implications for the peace and survival of the world.

The great Sigmund Freud was right again: Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Joe Biden’s vice presidential pick follows the familiar U.S. political cliché of dressing up mediocre conformism – and continued Russia-bashing – in the hypocritical veneer that something wonderful and new is happening: She is Barack Obama all over again.

There is no mystery or dark secret in Harris’s background. Instead the ironies and paradoxes, while thick on the ground have always been in plain sight.

Paradox Number One: The possible first African-American lady vice president of the United States failed miserably in her own presidential campaign because she failed to pick up any significant support whatsoever from the African-American community, So did New Jersey senator Cory Booker. Instead, that support went to old “Sleepy Joe” Biden (as President Donald Trump with his unerring genius for nicknames that stick forever labeled the Great Hope for Liberal Renewal in America).

At a time when pundits from Washington to Moscow were writing off Biden as a dead duck, I pointed out repeatedly in these columns that the 40-million strong African-American community was staying loyal to him. So Biden, a white Democrat, won his party’s nomination because of black support that the African American community refused to give to the African American candidates in the race.

Paradox Number Two – Biden picked a candidate from a state he is sure to carry rather than from a Purple or “swing’; state. This is being repeatedly held up as a sign of how crazy Biden is. Sure he is crazy – crazy like a fox.

As a senator from the most populous state in the Union, Harris automatically carries national credibility or street-cred. She has a political weight that absurd little Mayor Pete Buttigieg from South Bend, Indiana or other political performing dwarves like entrepreneur Andrew Yang never had.

When senators or governors from California run on national U.S. election tickets either for president for vice president, they win elections. This has happened six times since the end of World War II – in 1952, 1956, 1968, 1972, 1980 and 1984. By contrast, unless your name is John F. Kennedy, if you come from the state of Massachusetts, as the feminists beloved Elizabeth Warren does, you suffer the same fate as John Kerry, Michael Dukakis and Mitt Romney – You lose. (Technically, President George Herbert Walker Bush came from Massachusetts, but he was in reality a Texas Man, body and soul all the way.).

Paradox Number Three – Kamala Harris’s very supposed weaknesses are her strengths: And cunning old Irish Joe Biden knows it.

Harris runs weak among African-Americans at the head of any ticket because her entire background has been as a law and order attorney general – at least by liberal West Coast standards – first in the city of San Francisco and then for the entire state of California. She held those two positions for 13 years before moving into the Senate. She knows how to debate those issues backwards. I predict she will shred Vice President Mike Pence, who came up in genteel, easygoing Indiana – in the vice-presidential debate.

Here is Paradox Number Four: Racism is indeed alive and w thriving in U.S. national elections, but for it to work it has to have a fig leaf of deniability. Whenever it is exposed in its true ugliness, I even its most avid practitioners – who are always cowards – run a million miles from it. Harris’s campaign will smoke them out.

To have a black lady senator from a major state with a Teflon record on law and order is a dream come true for the Democrats: It will boost them among independents and genteel Republicans across the United States who pay no attention to Trump’s policies and do not care a dime about War and Peace but who are repelled by the president’s tweets.

If Harris is reminiscent of any kind of generic lady political leader, it is Margaret Thatcher or Indira Gandhi. It does not matter if she knows nothing about any major issue: She will be decisive on it for good or ill. She will not pretend to be touchy feely like wimp male politicians who “feel your pain,” or among Republicans who pretend to. She will not hesitate to crack down on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib or Tulsi Gabbard. She may even try to drive them from public life if they dare to defy her.

And because Harris is a female, black Democrat, she will be able to get away with vastly more repression than any Republican president would dare to.

Paradox Number Five: Precisely because Harris got nowhere in her own presidential race will make her more effective, not less as a vice presidential candidate. For a national U.S. politician she is relatively young, still an attractive lady and she has wit and charm. She does not send people of every race, especially among the young, fleeing screaming in panic to the Exits the way Senator Elizabeth Warren does.

Make no mistake, if Joe Biden wins in November, Kamala Harris will be President of the United States. Not in eight years but very possibly in less than one.

Biden is 78 and his confusion issues in public are now painfully obvious to all, which is why the 65 million Americans who voted by reflex for both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton still refuse to acknowledge them. But they are there. and Biden is 78. At first the United States will be run by his chief of staff, which will be the real power position. But sooner rather than later, Kamala Harris will be President of the United States.

This is a prospect welcome and comforting to the Deep State. For Paradox Number Six is that they far prefer Kamala Harris as president to either Donald Trump or Joe Biden.

As I have also noted before repeatedly in these columns, the Deep State and the neocons have never liked or trusted Biden – to his great credit. Whatever his other shortcomings, it is a matter of historical record that Biden strongly urged President Barack Obama to pull all U.S. forces out of both Iraq and Afghanistan in early 2009, when Obama had just won the greatest Democratic national election victory in 44 years. At that point, Obama could have done anything, but instead with his usual amazing total lack of courage, conviction, energy and intellect, he chose to do – nothing. He should have listened to Old Joe.

Harris does not have that problem. Like many other successful U.S. legal prosecutors I have known, she thrives as an attack dog and appears to be entirely unreflective. Point her in the right (or wrong) direction and she will bite like a pit bull. That is why she will be such an effective main voice for the Democrats in the upcoming campaign. Like Theodore Roosevelt in 1900, Richard Nixon in 1952 and Biden himself in 2008, she will serve as Biden’s rottweiler

And this leads us to the seventh and most dangerous paradox of all: The same qualities (and lack of them) that will make Kamala Harris such a lethally effective attack campaigner for the Democrats over the next three months will make her a menace to the world as President of the United States.

She is ‘woke’ on social issues, yet has been notably zealous in incarcerating pot-smoking LA youths, and paradoxically, drew “very little black support in the primaries”. However, in this era of mass protest, Harris will plausibly gild Biden’s ticket –  as a Law and Order Vice-President. That counts. And the ‘woke’ contingent on Wall Street, they love her. That counts too.

But down to ‘brass tacks’: Does this tell us anything about Biden’s probable foreign policy, were he to prevail in November? Harris indeed has not adopted war and militarism as her platform –  however she hasn’t offered a major foreign policy speech, either. Nonetheless, hers, is no blank page –  she has very discernible stances.

Her ‘signature stance’ has been a strong commitment to Israel and to AIPAC: In March 2017, she told the AIPAC Policy Conference: “Let me be clear about what I believe: I stand with Israel –  because of our shared values, which are so fundamental to the founding of both our nations.” At the 2018 AIPAC conference, Harris gave an off-the-record speech in which she recounted how, “As a child, I never sold Girl Scout cookies, I went around with a JNFUSA (The Jewish National Fund) box, collecting funds to plant trees in Israel”. And her husband is Jewish. (She skipped the 2019 conference, along with several other Presidential candidates.)

Apart from unwavering support for Israel (which the more panglossian amongst us may see simply as the entry-price to office in the U.S.), Harris has been noted for bellicose rhetoric toward North Korea and Russia, and for her reluctance to co-sponsor legislation aimed at preventing war with Venezuela and North Korea. In short, on such military intervention issues, she’s in line with—and sometimes to the right of—a hawkish Democratic establishment.

‘Move along: Nothing to see here!’ might seem the appropriate riposte: She’s just ‘boilerplate’ Democrat. Maybe that’s right. But to focus on this would be to miss the wood for the trees –  for the foreign policy real action is happening almost unnoticed elsewhere.

Executive editor of The American Conservative, Kelly Beaucar Vlahos, warns that we might miss noticing the Neo-con “wolves, dressed in NeverTrumper clothing, sniffing around Joe Biden’s foreign policy circle, bent on influencing his China policy – and more” (emphasis added):

“Never-Trumper Republicans have been worming their way into the Biden campaign, offering to flesh out his “coalition” ahead of the election and pushing their way into the foreign policy discussions, particularly on China. Given their shared history with liberal interventionists already in the campaign, don’t for a second think that there aren’t hungry neoconservatives among them trying to get a seat at the table.

“Some hawkish Democrats may see the neocons as convenient allies in preserving an outdated interventionist mindset,” offers Matt Duss, who is Sen. Bernie Sanders’ longtime foreign policy advisor, who maintains close ties with the Democratic campaign to replace President Trump. “And of course, neocons are desperate for any opportunity to salvage their own relevance.””

A Daily Beast report at the end of last month quoted unnamed “individuals who work for conservative think tanks in Washington” acknowledging that they were “informally speaking with members of the Biden team in recent weeks”.

Their focus is said to be on the ‘failing China trade deal’, and Trump’s supposedly ‘weak posture’. Reportedly, they are “so frustrated with the U.S-China trade deal, and the Administration’s efforts to hold Beijing accountable, that they are willing to offer counsel to the Democratic nominee”. And moreover, are proposing not just support to the Democratic candidate, but also to provide guidance on ways to formulate a tough economic posture toward Beijing, (in order to undermine Trump).

In a later update, the Daily Beast says that with the election less than 100 days away, some members of Trump’s own inner circle are pushing him too in the hawkish direction –  urging him to make a new bet: Rather than to put his chips on the trade deal, Trump would hit the electoral jackpot (they counsel) were he just to ‘blow it up’.

Four people knowledgeable about the issue told The Daily Beast that in the past three weeks, an internal campaign has intensified within the Trump administration to convince the president ‘to nuke’ the China trade deal.

The ‘back-story’ here is Biden’s campaign to expand its months of back-channel outreach to Republicans –  with the goal of hitting President Trump on his signature campaign issue: China.

Interviews with several of the most prominent NeverTrump Republicans reveal that for now, the nascent effort to mobilise a ‘Republicans for Biden’ movement –  alongside the extant Lincoln Project –  is loosely defined, and could ultimately take a variety of forms. Essentially, however, Team Biden is being pressed by the Republican strategists to ‘out-Hawk’ Trump on China policy by taking a tougher line than the President. In other words, the campaign is setting up to be about who will be tougher – and will be fought out on the President’s key platform.

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos opines that: “It’s hard to think that real hardline conservative hawks on China, like Steve Bannon and the folks at the Committee on the Present Danger: China [see here] are involved in the Biden collusion. Some of them are certainly neoconservative … They’d be pushing for cold –  if not hot –  war from Trump’s Right – [and therefore would] not be hedging bets with Biden”. Vlahos continues:

“No, it can only be the establishment Republican types, perched at places like Brookings and AEI, who now see some sort of opening on the D-team. But if they seem like the mushy end of the Right flank, think again. These guys are charter members of the Washington foreign policy consensus, mixed in with neoconservative NeverTrumpers, like Eliot Cohen and Robert Kagan (his wife Victoria Nuland was a top neo-con official in the Clinton State Department) and who have despised Trump from the beginning. They think his America First foreign policy is “deeply misguided” and leading the country to “crisis.””

Ah –  It is precisely here where the link back to the choice of Kamala Harris becomes more obvious. She is not likely to bring the Progressive Dems constituency to the Biden campaign (It would take Elizabeth Warren as VP to do that), and she has not had an impressive record of attracting the Black vote in LA. But, she would mesh-in seamlessly with the ‘Washington foreign policy consensus’, whilst still giving ‘the ticket’ a veneer of wokeness.

She thus could be an effective point person for NeverTrumper Republicans. This is a path down which Biden, it seems, is already embarked –  at least as far as China is concerned. On domestic issues – such as energy – Biden tilts more towards Sanders, and even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (the latter sits on his advisory panel).

And Biden – if elected in November – may not last (or, at least, not attempt a second term). In which case, Harris could theoretically be front-runner for 2024 Presidential contest. And here is the point: If there is one area where these neo-con entryists despise ‘policy weakness’ as much as they do on China, it is Iran. On that issue, Harris is clear. She is an unreserved Israeli partisan.

Anyone therefore hoping for a softening of U.S. policy towards Iran, should Biden win, may be pinning too much hope on Bernie Saunders or ‘The Squad’ being able to ‘round off the sharp edges from U.S. foreign policy stances’ –  they may be being overly-optimistic. It is just too obvious: As China veers towards Iran and the Middle East in search of energy-supply security, the temptation of any success with forcing a hawkish stance on China will be to link the two (Iran and China), and to try to push for a ‘kill-two-birds-with-one-stone’ policy stance.

Keep the eyes fixed on the neo-con ‘wolves’, not on Harris.

Joe Biden made the pick that maximized his chances of continuing to make the race a straight referendum on Trump while also selecting someone whose resume suggests being ready to step in, if and when Biden decides to step aside. | Analysis by @CillizzaCNN https://t.co/Ek4d6sfGfT

— CNN (@CNN) August 11, 2020

Senator Kamala Harris could become president of the United States. Joe Biden, who enjoys wide leads in national polls and battleground-state polls, may well win the election. Many people on both Left and Right, including the socialists at Jacobin and Republican congressman Matt Gaetz, suspect Mr. Biden is mentally declining. When a black reporter asked Mr. Biden if he would take a cognitive test to prove his mental fitness, Mr. Biden replied by asking if the reporter was a “junkie.” If elected, Mr. Biden would be the oldest man ever to become president. Most voters, including about half of Democrats, think he won’t finish his first term. Kamala Harris would then become president.

Some progressives, especially former Bernie Sanders supporters, are unhappy with the Biden-Harris ticket. Mr. Biden is a white man who has said “racist” things by today’s standards. Kamala Harris’s lackluster presidential campaign had only one high point: when she shamed Mr. Biden for his friendship with segregationists and opposition to forced busing. “[T]here 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,” said Senator Harris. “And that little girl was me.” Senator Harris even sold T-shirts with this clearly rehearsed line.

Kamala Harris’s campaign sputtered out after Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard exposed the former prosecutor’s own record:

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

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

WATCH: Tulsi Gabbard tears into Kamala Harris’ tough-on-crime record as California Attorney General. #DemDebate2 pic.twitter.com/Bw8iFW5wgI

— America Rising (@AmericaRising) August 1, 2019

Sen. Harris was rattled, but arrogantly claimed to be a “top-tier candidate.” Her support vanished.

The senator has always been willing to bite in the clinches. A Politico story about her first political campaign had the title, “Ruthless.” And she has run brazenly on race. When she campaigned for San Francisco district attorney, her final mailer said “it’s time for a change,” and showed a picture of her white opponent.

But there wasn’t much change; she stayed tough on crime. In 2010, DA Harris smiled when she told an audience about using her staff to threaten parents with jail if they didn’t send truants to school. In 2013, she chided liberals who didn’t believe in prisons, saying that they didn’t understand “why I have three padlocks on my front door” and that there should be “a broad consensus that there should be serious and severe and swift consequences” for criminals. “Kamala is a cop” was a devastating slogan during the campaign because it was true.

Kamala Harris continued on to describe how she’d brought charges against a single homeless mother of 3 who was working 2 jobs because her children were truant…and this was a success story. pic.twitter.com/FT5uJmI6x9

— Walker Bragman (@WalkerBragman) January 28, 2019

Sen. Harris locked up plenty of pot smokers, but cracked a joke when someone asked if she had ever smoked it. “Half my family’s from Jamaica” she said. “Are you kidding me?” Her Jamaican father, an economics professor, wasn’t laughing. He said his ancestors “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.”

Tariq Nasheed repeatedly criticizes Kamala Harris for not being “really” black. He’s got a point. Her “African-American” identity is about as authentic as being “Wakandan” or wearing kente cloth.

In 2004, the Los Angeles Times profiled her, calling her “a privileged child of foreign graduate students whose academic pursuits led them to UC Berkeley.” Her mother is Indian and a scientist. Kamala Harris married a Jewish lawyer and became stepmother to his two white children. They reportedly call her “Mamala.”

My ancestors didn’t own slaves, but hers probably did, at least according to her father. Like Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris is a poseur, pretending she’s an oppressed minority. Unlike Elizabeth Warren, she has enough melanin to make it plausible.

In 2018, Sen. Harris said that people who criticize “identity politics” are trying to “divide” and “distract,” or to “shut us up.” “Identity politics” is the game she plays, and its purpose is to split Americans into competing racial and sexual groups. In February 2019, she said Columbus Day should be renamed Indigenous Peoples’ Day, which implies that European settlement was wrong. She called America “the scene of a crime when it comes to what we did with slavery and Jim Crow and institutionalized racism in this country, and we have to be honest about that.” Is she going to be “honest” and tell us about her slave-owning ancestors? Later in 2019, she asked whether “America was ready for a woman and a woman of color to be president of the United States of America.” Pure identity politics.

Still, her specific black agenda is as vague as her identity. In 2019, she called President Trump a racist and said “there has to be some form of reparations and we can discuss what that is.” She told Al Sharpton’s National Action Network she would sign a bill to “study” reparations. She also co-sponsored Cory Booker’s bill for a commission on reparations. She’s even mused that mental health treatment could be “reparations” and talked about putting “extra resources” into “those communities that have experienced that trauma.” It’s hard to say what all that means.

But Sen. Harris does want to eliminate the “racial wealth gap.” Her plan would give money to “families living in historically red-lined communities.” This may not be a straight handout to blacks because it would be based on geography, and racial housing patterns no longer fit those old maps. In an October 2019 report, the Brookings Institute found that plans built around “redlining maps” “will prove to be insufficient in dismantling the legacy of racial inequalities in homeownership and wealth in the United States.”

Senator Harris’s most worrying policies would be for “combating violent hate.” Her plan (now archived) called “anti-immigrant manifestos” a sign of “impending violence” that could justify removing suspects’ Second Amendment rights “if they exhibit clear evidence of dangerousness.” Who defines “dangerousness?” Candidate Harris said she would “immediately direct the National Counterterrorism Center to address the threat of global white-nationalist terrorism, and seek authority to include domestic terrorism in its mission.” She would also “reverse President Trump’s dangerous efforts to deprioritize countering white supremacy and commit $2 billion to investigate, disrupt, and prosecute domestic terrorists.” This includes making it a “priority” for the FBI to “more vigilantly monitor white nationalist websites and forums – consistent with well-established legal requirements and civil liberties protections – where extremists discuss and encourage violent acts.”

The next sentence reads, “This will put pressure on online platforms to take down content that violates their terms and conditions.” She therefore wants the federal government to pressure platforms to remove legally permissible speech, not just violent content. She would also tell the FBI to “identify and penetrate extremist networks and seek Domestic Terrorism Prevention Orders to preempt terrorist attacks.”

Her plan is silent on antifa and black identity extremists. She has only whites in her crosshairs. And if the federal government splashes out billions to combat “hate-based violence,” the bureaucracy will invent a threat to justify its existence. We already see this in the “non-profit” sector, where phony hate crimes justify constant fundraising.

As I write this, Joe Biden is invoking the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville as a specter of white terror. The violence that day was the city’s fault. However, even if we accept the worst possible interpretation and blame “white nationalists” for everything, Charlottesville was a picnic compared to the riots, property destruction, and deaths that have gripped the country since George Floyd’s death. President Trump’s timid efforts to grapple with this violence, which Democrats openly opposed, are far less intrusive than Kamala Harris’s plans.

Would President Harris do what she says? Her record suggests she would. As a district attorney in 2005, she rejected suggestions from her staff that defendants be informed of police misconduct. She changed policy only after a political scandal. In 2013, she refused to defend the state’s ban on same-sex marriage because she disagreed with it, even though it was her job, as California attorney general, to defend state law. In other cases, she pursued her duty to a fault, fighting against compensation for men wrongfully convicted. In one case, she did her best to keep a man in prison even after a judge tossed the conviction on the basis of police misconduct, incompetent defense, and a lack of evidence. The man was allegedly tied to a Nazi gang, but the case was so outrageous that even Jacobin blasted Kamala Harris for it.

Sen. Harris is not particularly extreme by today’s standards, but her life is about acquiring power. Once she has it, she would surely wield it against us. She is likely to restrict freedom of speech and other constitutional rights. Even those who have criticized her in the past would cheer it on.

She has the right skin color, right sex, and enemies. Sounds like privilege to me.

 American Renaissance via unz.com