Kamala Harris is the Embodiment of the Democratic Party

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

The modern Democratic Party is a weird merger of its donor-establishment and activist-progressive wings. It is the party of the majority of the billionaire class, who fund the party’s operations, and of the real and nominally “disadvantaged,” who provide votes in exchange for patronage.

As columnist Armin Rosen of the Tablet website, who was covering the Democratic National Convention noted, the left’s hero, Bernie Sanders, told the delegates that “Billionaires in both parties should not be able to buy elections, including primary elections.”

He was followed by Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, who is worth $3.6 billion and who spent $323 million of his own money to get elected governor. He is a member of the wealthy Pritzker family which owns the Hyatt hotel chain and numerous other enterprises.

But, smirked Rosen, “the living contradiction with Sanders’ speech from three minutes earlier disappears under the intoxicating influence of joy, which can not only contain both Sanders and Pritzker but can juxtapose them deadpan in prime time.”

So it’s only proper that its standard bearer in this presidential election is a Californian who embodies this “contradiction” with ease. Kamala Harris’s rise has been meteoric: She served as San Francisco District Attorney from 2004-2011, Attorney General of California from 2011-2017, elected to the United States Senate from California in 2016, and became Vice President in 2020.

In her ill-fated 2019 bid for the presidency, Harris’s campaign was chaired by her sister, Maya Harris, whose husband, Tony West, is an influential voice in Silicon Valley and a major fundraiser for Democratic politicians. West was the chief legal officer at Uber, and later helped to engineer Uber’s successive political victories over organised labour.

Kamala Harris has also availed herself of the expertise of Bearstar Strategies, a consultancy firm that helped her transition from the state’s attorney general to the Senate in 2016.

Bearstar strategists over the past decade have elected a cadre of prominent Democrats in California, while simultaneously advising the state’s largest corporations. Until last year, U.S. Senator Laphonza Butler also worked for the firm, where she advised Uber on its campaign to avoid classifying drivers as employees.

Harris was remarkably friendly to big business as California’s chief law officer, declining to criminally charge financial industry firms such as OneWest Bank, which had been accused of fraudulent foreclosure practices, and PG&E, the utility giant that ended up killing eight residents of San Bruno, south of San Francisco, with a gas pipeline explosion.

America has been introduced to Harris as an African American/South Asian candidate, the epitome of multicultural “woke” politics. This is, of course, true, but there’s more to her biography. She has been more privileged than almost every American, regardless of their ethnicity, religion, or class.

Kamala Devi Harris was born to an Indian mother and a Jamaican father. She is, in part, a descendant of a Jamaican slave owner, as Harris’ father, Donald J. Harris, explained in a January 2019 essay about his family’s heritage:

“My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (née Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town).”

Kamala Harris’ father would become a professor of economics at Stanford University, arguably one of the top five universities in the United States. He served as an adviser to multiple Jamaican prime ministers and was the first Black scholar granted tenure in the Stanford Department of Economics.

Harris has done research on the Jamaican economy, presenting analyses and reports on the structural conditions, historical performance, and contemporary problems of the economy.

In 2012 he produced an economic growth strategy for Jamaica, which at the time was suffering from sluggish growth and cripplingly large debt. It played a key role in righting the country’s economy. Donald Harris later received the Order of Merit, Jamaica’s third-highest national honor.

Kamala Harris’ mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, an upper-caste Brahmin Tamil, came from Chenai, in the state of Tamil Nadu, India. She was an internationally famous cancer researcher and the daughter of P.V. Gopalan, a high-ranking Indian diplomat. 

Kamala and her sister moved with their mother to Montreal in 1976 after her parents separated; her mother was hired to teach at McGill University and conduct research at the Jewish General Hospital. Dr. Michael Pollak, who worked with her, described her in a note published on McGill’s website as a “pioneer” who left a mark on the institution.

Kamala returned to the United States after attending Westmount High School  in Montreal from 1978 to 1981. Knowing that her future as an American politician would be more beneficial if she identified as Black, she chose to attend Howard University in Washington, DC, an historically African-American school. She obtained her law degree at the University of California.

Both sides of Kamala Harris’ family were upper-class political figures in their respective countries, with money and power. Her parents met while working on their PhDs at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the privileged child of two foreign grad students – a story not that different from that of Barack Obama, whose Kenyan father met his American mother while both were studying at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu.

Is Harris the new avatar of Obama-ism? History does rhyme.

 

English-Speaking Caribbean Countries have Big Political Differences

 

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

People may assume that the British Empire was a homogenous enterprise. But it was not. Governance diverged so much between places like India, New Zealand and Nigeria, to select a few examples, that in reality the empire’s colonies and protectorates might as well have been parts of different realms.

This also held true for Britain’s Caribbean possessions. The colonial administrations of Barbados and Jamaica, for example, managed these two islands quite differently and, as a result, they developed different sets of colonial institutions even before independence in the early 1960s. This has had a continuing impact on the economies and political cultures of the two countries, as any visitor can attest.

From around 1655 until 1865, Jamaica was governed by the plantation owners and their representatives. They did not care much about the economic progress of the island, but were concerned only with enriching themselves. However, their horrific mismanagement forced Britain to bring Jamaica under direct rule.

Only after Jamaica became a Crown Colony, lasting until independence in 1962, was there a dramatic increase in public investment in health, education and infrastructure by the government. Jamaica lagged behind Barbados because this started much later.

Barbados and Jamaica are both parliamentary democracies in the Westminster tradition. Their constitutions protect private property. Both adopted legal systems based on English common law.

So why did Jamaica and Barbados, which had similar income levels until the late 1960s, end up diverging so much? From 1960 to 2002, Barbados’ GDP per capita grew roughly three times as fast as Jamaica’s. Consequently, the income gap between Barbados and Jamaica is now almost five times larger than at independence. The GDP per capita in Barbados, population 281,635, is $27,671, as compared to $8,492 for Jamaica’s 2,827,000 people.

Economists Peter Blair Henry and Conrad Miller, in their paper “Institutions vs. Policies: A Tale of Two Islands,” claim that the divergence lies not with differences in institutions but differences in macroeconomic policy.

Jamaica’s socialist policies in the early 1970s, they write, including nationalization of industry, import barriers, subsidies for basic goods, and high deficits, did long-term damage, while Barbados’ relatively neoliberal policies avoided hurting its economy much during those troubled years.

Jamaica did make a big push for export-oriented industrialization, starting with exactly the kinds of labour-intensive light manufacturing industries that have worked well for the successful industrializers. Established in the 1970s and 1980s, the Jamaican Free Zones provided tax exemptions for businesses, facilitated foreign investment, and favoured export-oriented industries like textiles.

But the Free Zones never took off. Even with all the tax breaks, Jamaican manufacturing was just never competitive. It didn’t provide people with what they considered decent work.

Still, it isn’t all just about economic issues. Rasheed Griffith, executive director of the Caribbean Progress Studies Institute, argues that Jamaica’s economic performance has also been negatively affected by a history of violence that Barbados lacks. He also points to long-standing differences in literacy rates between the two countries, as well as more continuity of legislative institutions in Barbados. In 1946 Barbados was 91 per cent literate while Jamaica’s rate was 74 per cent.

Harvard sociology professor Orlando Patterson in his book The Confounding Island: Jamaica and the Postcolonial Predicament has investigated the failures of Jamaica’s postcolonial democracy, exploring why the country has been unable to achieve broad economic growth and why its free elections and stable government have been unable to address violence and poverty.

Rabid violence continues to be a factor. In December 2022 the Prime Minister of Jamaica, Andrew Holness, declared a state of emergency because of the perpetual killings. According to several indices, Jamaica has one of the highest homicide rates in the world.

The system of plantation-based slavery was exceptionally cruel in Jamaica. It was an especially dangerous place with a reputation for constant slave rebellions. Whereas in Barbados, there was just a single slave revolt during the entire period of slavery.

Jamaica’s brutality made for an exceptionally high mortality rate. Consequently, the enslaved population needed to be replenished more often. In Barbados, the locally born slave population of “creoles” exceeded the African-born population a few decades after the slave system began.

Even after the abolition of slavery in 1834, conditions in Jamaica remained dismal. Britain terminated the Jamaican Assembly and placed Jamaica under direct Crown Colony rule. In Barbados, though, its Assembly remained in place up until the 1950s where it transitioned to a self-ruling parliament.

Barbados (known as “Little England”) was akin to a settler colony, but this was not the case in Jamaica. Barbados is small, at 430 square kilometres, and could be easily protected, while Jamaica is about 26 times bigger, at 10,991 square km.

Jamaica is a society with low levels of trust, both a lack of trust of those in authority and lack of trust between ordinary people. The political establishment is so corrupt that there is a term specifically applied to it: garrison politics, in which criminal and political activity are controlled by politically affiliated gang leaders.

In such an environment, productivity is likely to be low. The issues facing Jamaica require a collective sense of urgency and effort to fix. All of this has contributed to massive emigration. On the other hand, Barbados, now a parliamentary republic, remains one of the Caribbean’s most stable polities.

 

 

 

Kamala Harris is a Taylor Swift Candidate

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

I recently saw the movie “Deadpool and Wolverine” while visiting family and friends in Toronto. It was pure spectacle -- just like the Democratic Party national convention in Chicago, where Kamala Harris is being “coronated,” as they call it these days. She didn’t even have to work to get the nomination.

Remember when Kamala Harris a year ago was the lowest-polling vice president in history, and an utter failure as “border czar?” Remember how many terrible gaffes she made, speaking in “word salads?”  

You’d never know that a mere few months ago, Democrats worried that removing poor old Joe Biden from running again might saddle them with the unpopular and ridiculed vice-president, one who was widely acknowledged as a political lightweight.

Forget all that. Now we have a Kamala Harris who’s prepared to be the leader of the free world. Bland is beautiful, or so it seems, given the adulation being showered on Harris. An August 26 Time magazine cover, with her looking almost saintly, tells us this is now “Her Moment.” Leaders within the Democratic Party have said they are harnessing the “energy” that Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, have brought into the race.

What a difference the liberal “legacy” media, both in print and on television, can make! She’s become our Taylor Swift! What’s not to love? It’s now all memes and vibes – show business, California’s contribution to 20^th century American culture, has now come to political fruition.

So her “sudden anointment,” in the words of a columnist, is not really so shocking. We are being fed little more than hagiography -- the portrayal of someone in glowing terms as being near perfect. The media have presented us with what can conceivably be called a “personality cult.”  

The former U.S. senator from the Golden State is now the country’s newest star, manufactured from whole cloth the way Ingrid Bergman, Judy Garland, Katherine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, and many others, were once marketed to the masses by Hollywood.

Harris has brought “joy” to the formerly perplexed masses now thronging the stadiums across America to hear her. On August 7 she took the theme a step further, branding the Democratic ticket “joyful warriors.” It’s become “Kamelot.”

Laughter seems to be an intrinsic part of Harris’ presidential campaign. Formerly criticized as “cackling,” it is turning into quite a useful weapon, the media tells us, much to the chagrin of Donald Trump.

This vacuous nonsense is front and centre while the world is in quite a mess. The Ukrainian-Russian war is getting worse. Israel faces Hezbollah in Lebanon while fighting Hamas in Gaza, all while worried about Iran. China ratchets up its threats against Taiwan.

Domestically, the U.S. economy suffered an unexpected setback in July as hiring fell sharply and the unemployment rate rose for the fourth straight month with raised interest rates taking a toll on businesses and households.

None of this seems to matter. “I can’t think of a race that was quite as unmoored as this one from the actual details of governance,” stated Jay Caspian Kang in the Aug. 8 issue of the New Yorker. Even the warnings about democracy have been mostly discarded.

“Vice President Harris sees hope (or conflict exhaustion) as the primary motivator” for swing voters, Zachary Basu of Axios reported Aug. 10. “She believes voters are tired of doom-and-gloom.”

As for the actual campaign, the scripts are already written. She needs merely to read from the teleprompter and smile, unlike her Republican opponent, with his perpetual scowl. She doesn’t say anything that wasn’t already approved because the propaganda machine knows about those confusing rambles.

They have created a total illusion of her greatness and somehow completely turned the polls around. Appearing as a relative blank slate on key issues could help her attract support from groups who had been put off by some of Biden’s policies and it provides fewer targets for attack on policy particulars. She also avoids having to explain why, as vice-president over the last four years, she didn’t suggest changes to Biden. This leaves her party’s many constituencies with no reason to object to her.

So whom will Democrats be voting for on Nov. 5? Kamala Harris or “Taylor Swift”?