If Kamala Harris Loses Don't Blame Me

Americans cannot live on a steady diet of Trumpaphobia, genocide and perpetual war

October swing state polling does not look favorable for Harris. If Democrats could field a candidate who showed a shred of authenticity and could answer a question it wouldn’t even be close. The bar could not be set any lower.

Those noble Democrats who are hell bent on “saving democracy” from the clutches of that root of all evil Trump have a funny way of going about it. Those who refuse to vote for Kamala Harris are invariably find themselves on the other end of neoliberal vote shaming from the top down, from Barack Obama wagging his finger at black males for their sexism in not casting a vote for Harris to the intimidation on all platforms leveled at Third Party candidates and their supporters to editorials and pundits telling Muslims whose families are being obliterated by Democrats in power why they should be voting for Harris. The reality is that Harris has nothing to offer people like me, and has evidenced her morality and sense of humanity to be diametrically opposed to mine, so why should I cast a vote for her? Am I somehow going to save the country from the boogeyman that Democrats themselves created with their deceptive milquetoast neoliberal policies which have benefited the donor class far more than they have benefited the working class and the poor? A party that consistently works against the public interest is ultimately doomed, Democrats reaping the political good fortune of the opposing party being more openly racist and inhumane. But relativism is not good enough for some. The lesser of two evils is still too evil for me and millions of Americans who see through the smiles and feigned indignance of war criminals, liars and the arrogant incompetents who are fatally wrong in their Islamaphobic, McCarthyist, Zionist and xenophobic cancer capitalist nationalism.

How many reasons do I have not to vote for Kamala Harris? Let me count the ways….

1. Health care— Harris has never really been a proponent of Medicare for All. She just sheepishly raised her hand when Bernie Sanders asked who was in favor of eliminating for-profit health insurers during the 2020 presidential debates, going along for the ride. Of course, as the Democratic Party anointee she is no longer in favor of Medicare for All, siding with the health insurers she raised her hand to eliminate in 2020. Democrats were campaigning for a while on their breakthrough in allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices like the VA does to reduce prescription costs. that this “breakthrough” only covers 10 of the 20000 medications currently prescribed in the US and does not go into effect until 2026. While the medications covered are expensive and widely used, pharmaceutical companies are responding by raising prices exponentially on other medications. This bare-bones legislation is a compromise with the pharmaceutical industry and will barely be felt by seniors struggling with the increased costs incurred by the ongoing privatization of Medicare into Medicare “Advantage.” Harris’s campaign has been weak to non-existent on healthcare because the only viable answer is a national health care system that reduces or eliminates the role of for-profit insurers who are major donors to Democrats. Grade for Harris on health care: D-

2. Immigration— Democrats have lurched to the right on immigration, joining the right-wing Republicans in their transformation of immigration from a justice issue to that of “homeland” security. The Democrat’s immigration bill that Harris is touting on the campaign trail is more draconian than anything Trump had proposed and includes a continuation of his border wall, limits on migrant flow that will result in a complete shutdown of the southern border, and mass denial of asylum rights. Her entire campaign she has linked immigration to her time as a prosecutor busting cartels and M13, amplifying the xenophobic characterization of migrants as “invaders.” Grade for Harris on immigration: F

3. Inflation and Wealth Inequality— While it is not reasonable not blame all of inflation on the Biden/Harris administration, I do blame their lack of criticism of the Fed’s crippling interest rate hikes and their unwillingness to publicly address the problem in a sincere and empathic manner. And Harris’s boneheaded “plan” to bring down grocery prices has the FTC suing manufacturers over the pricing of specific products is yet another painstaking and ineffectual Democratic Party remedy for corporate greed. Harris’s wealth tax plan is weaker than Biden’s. Her “billionaire minimum tax” would affect only those whose net worth exceeds 100 million dollars, and her increase of realized capital gains from 20% to 28% will affect only millionaires. Grade for Harris on inflation and wealth inequality: D

4. Poverty— Haven’t heard this mentioned since Bernie Sanders is not on the campaign trail. Democrats rarely talk about the 38 million Americans living in poverty, or the 49 million who sought food assistance in 2023. Poverty is not a concern of the multimillionaire pundit class and certainly not of the donor class. Harris and Trump are using child poverty as a political football, jockeying on the generosity of their child tax credits. While the Biden/Harris administration implemented a child tax credit program successfully in 2021, after touting their achievement of reducing child poverty with the program for the 2020 midterms the program ended with little public fanfare from Democrats when only a handful of Republicans vowed to vote against it. Apart from the sparring over this program, poverty is not mentioned by Democrats or Harris (remember Bernie Sanders is not a Democrat) at all. Grade for Harris on poverty: D-

5. Foreign policy—This is where Harris is exposed as dangerous in her chameleonic (Kameleonic?) shift to neoconservatism, her most most recent nationalist rant putting Iran in the crosshairs of American hegemony. She is maddeningly avoidant on the subject of Gaza to the point of making certain Muslims do not have a part in the DNC and her staged town halls. She stokes the flames of Islamaphobia at least as well as Trump and dehumanizes Muslims to the point of playing politics with Israel’s genocidal rampage in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. There is no excuse for her negligence in not at least saying she would contemplate a weapons embargo on Israel. It is too late for that now, but her stoicism in towing the company line makes her at least as dangerous as Trump in escalating conflicts around the globe (and with nuclear superpowers no less). Grade for Harris on foreign policy: F

6. Authenticity—Leave it to the Democratic Party to anoint the most inauthentic candidate in modern history. Kamala Harris is devoid of vision, imagination or ideology. She is unable or unwilling to answer virtually any question in a direct fashion and repeats the most banal political rhetoric as if she were already an animatronic in Disney’s Hall of Presidents. The only reason someone so incompetent and generic would spark “joy” and enthusiasm is to cover up for the fear generated in the liberal base by the drumbeat of Project 2025 and January 6th. We have come to a point where someone who stands for nothing and who whitewashes and sidesteps their complicity in genocide is now “better” than the only alternative in a shitshow of a two-party system. Could there be a more inauthentic and inarticulate presidential candidate than Harris? It’s not Trump, so we will have to keep searching. Grade for Harris on authenticity—F

7. $15 minimum wage—The Biden administration pretended it wanted to pass a federal $15 minimum wage because that was one of the campaign promises Bernie squeezed out of Biden in 2020. So when it came time for a bill to be drafted Democrats balked because the Senate parliamentarian claimed the $15 minimum wage could not be included in the COVID relief bill due to the arcane Byrd Rule which the president can overrule. Biden never even tried, Democrats never included it in any other bill, and Harris only started talking about it, again at Bernie Sanders request, on October 23rd just two weeks before election day. She has talked precious little about labor, and not at all about the working poor. Grade for Harris on $15 minimum wage—F

8. Criminal justice/policing—Kamala Harris is a cop who boasts about prosecuting drug cartels and gangs every single time she mentions immigration. As a prosecutor less than 15 years ago, she opposed the death penalty but she cracked down on drug courts she saw as letting drug dealers off the hook, wrote of the need to punish thieves no matter their motivations, and fought for higher bail amounts to keep dangerous criminals behind bars and reduce gun violence.

   2009 Harris possessed, in her words, “the desire to prosecute criminals to the fullest extent of the law.” While she said during the 2020 campaign that we need to redirect resources from the police to other services. that was also the campaign during which she raised her hand against for-profit insurers and was all in on banning fracking. While she straddles the line with her rhetoric, she will ultimately always follow the will of an establishment whose wealth has been built upon the backs of labor and incarceration. Her origins in policing are so harsh and cynical, her rhetoric so simplistic and nationalist, it is hard to believe she would ever consider addressing the issues at the root of police violence and their occupation of black communities. Grade for Harris on criminal justice/policing—D

So there is no motivation for me to vote for Harris other than the threat of another narcissist who is more impulsive than she is doing things that he didn’t do in his first term as president. It is a double-edged sword to consider that one candidate will do anything that Wall Street and the military intelligence complex tell her to do in the interest of attaining power, and the other will do whatever he thinks will increase his popularity in the interest of attaining power. This is why we are backed into an electoral corner, expected to continue to support the candidate put forward by a party that is largely responsible for the rise of the even more dubious candidate. We have come to a point in which the political parties offer such little tangible advantage to the vast majority of Americans that it is now our duty to serve the interests of our representatives and not vice versa. I am expected to vote for Kamala Harris because of the threat of Trump, regardless of the fact that she has proven that she is not to be trusted any more than her nemesis. Harris has to give me a reason to vote for her—it is not my obligation to do so just because I’m a registered Democrat. But on every issue she is a phony, recycling half-baked and/or unrealized Biden/Obama/Clinton policies, many that rely on private sector contractors, that nip at the edges of systemic crises and reward the donors without initiating the systemic change necessary to actually repair the damage done by five decades of the bipartisan neoliberalism that brought Trump to power in the first place!

This maddening cycle has to end. Those who choose not to vote for Kamala Harris have just as much right to do so as voters who choose to support Trump. I am unconcerned with who is voting for who on a microscopic basis, although I would hope that those who are not voting for Harris would vote for Jill Stein in order to send a unified anti-genocide, ant-war, pro-worker, pro-Medicare for All message to the Democratic Party. But if the objective is supposedly to “vote your conscience,” I cannot vote with any good conscience vote for candidates who do not have one.