Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) is running for president and wasting no time trying to capture the title of ‘most left wing’ of the crop. She’s gunning to be the progressive candidate, pushing an agenda that would take California’s liberal antics to the federal level and pretty much guarantee that the nation endures economic death. In fact, most of the Left’s economic policies are trash. Just look at the New Green Deal. It’s a wrecking ball of socialism, pegged with unrealistic policy aims, like killing all cows and upgrading all buildings to be more energy efficient, high taxes, and ruinously expensive costs. As with most ideas from the progressive Left, it’s light on details. They’re pushing Medicare for All, which carries a $30+ trillion price tag in the first decade alone. I can’t imagine the price tag for a policy that aims to shift us away from all fossil fuels…within a decade. There’s a reason why these folks don’t name prices or tax rate projections. They know it’s so astronomically high that it’s electoral poison. You don’t need to be an economics graduate to know what the Democrats are planning is exceedingly expensive.
But would the Democrats’ wannabe progressive die-hard keep people in jail so as to not disrupt the pool of cheap labor in the state of California? Reportedly, when Harris was state Attorney General, she did just that. It was when California was ordered to empty its overcrowded prisons back in 2011. The Daily Beast has more:
In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Plata that California’s prisons were so overcrowded that they violated the Constitution’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. Three years later, in early 2014, the state was ordered to allow non-violent, second time offenders who have served half of their sentence to be eligible for parole.
By September 2014, plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit were back in court, accusing California of slow-walking the process, which lawyers for Harris’s office denied.
According to court filings, lawyers for the state said California met benchmarks, and argued that if certain potential parolees were given a faster track out of prison, it would negatively impact the prison’s labor program including one that allowed certain inmates to work fighting California’s wildfires for about $2 a day.
“Extending 2-for-1 credits to all minimum custody inmates at this time would severely impact fire camp participation—a dangerous outcome while California is in the middle of a difficult fire season and severe drought,” lawyers for Harris wrote in the filing, noting that the fire camp program required physical fitness in addition to a level of clearance that allowed the felon to be offsite.
Not only that, they noted, draining the prisons of“minimum custody inmates” would deplete the labor force both internally and in local communities where low-level, non-violent offenders worked for pennies on the dollar collecting trash and tend to city parks. A federal three-judge panel ordered both sides to confer about the plaintiffs’ demands and the state agreed to extend the 2-for-1 credits to all eligible minimum security prisoners.
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In other problem areas, Harris also reported juvenile illegal aliens to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Abolish ICE has become a war cry for the hard left in their fight against the Trump administration’s border policy. Even before she declared her candidacy, publications were noting how progressives weren’t all that thrilled with her, despite her liberal bonafides. The Sanders camp specifically was not warm to her at all. In 2017, the now defunct-Mic reported that Harris could have a Bernie bro problem (via Mic):
Freshman Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) has recently become the subject of much speculation about a potential 2020 presidential run. Several major news outlets have run feature-length profiles of Harris, and top Democratic donors are starting to coalesce around her as their preferred candidate to take on President Donald Trump.
But not everyone on the progressive left is feeling Harris-fever, and if the senator wants to win the Democratic presidential primary in three years, she’ll have to start making inroads with a growing grassroots movement that remains highly skeptical of Harris’s progressive bona fides.
Nomiki Konst, a Bernie Sanders supporter who serves on the Democratic National Committee’s Unity Commission had three words for Democrats interested in Harris as a candidate: “Follow the money.”
The Democrats will not win until they address income inequality, no matter how they dress up their next candidate,” Konst said. “If that candidate is in bed with Wall Street, you may as well lay a tombstone out for the Democratic Party now. Voters are smart; they can follow the money.”
Konst’s skepticism about Harris’s alleged ties to Wall Street and insufficient commitment to populist economic issues reflect a broader trend among the residents of Bernieland.
Supported ICE arrests, not populist enough like Bernie, and kept inmates in jail to keep the cheap labor pool well maintained. The baggage is piling on and we’re a long ways away until the debates begin.
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