Professor Zizek’s paradox is due to a false contradiction that can exchange their roles with each other like any other paradox:
A) Those who can give up their own identity and have the privilege of talking about the victimization of the victims: We call this group WASP: the initials of white; Anglo Saxon; Protestant. Male is often added to it too: WASP+male.
B) Those who can declare their own identities without being stamped as fascist: This group includes all skin colors and ethnicities other than WASP. We call this group non-WASP. However, this group is not uniform in itself. They position themselves in a spectrum of different degrees of grievances and victimizations: the farther you are from WASP, the more authentic victims you are. For example, an Afro American is more underprivileged than a “brown” (mixed blood); a Bengali is more underprivileged than a Chinese; a Chinese is more than an Italian; a muslim is more than a buddhist; a buddhist is more than a catholic; a transsexual is more than a homosexual; a lesbian woman is more than a straight woman … and they altogether are victims of the WASP+male.
Preface
Professor Slavoj Zizek started his legendary talk at the Oxford Union Society on 9 November 2018 with the following joke:
“On a Saturday, the communion gathered in the synagogue for the Sabbath ritual. When the rabbi enters the conversations are interrupted and the attention turns to him. Rabbi calls to the communion,
– “Please, please … I am nothing but an humble servant of God! ”.
Soon, when one of the leading wealthy merchants of the region enters, the same thing happens, the murmurs stop, attention turns to him. The rich merchant calls to the communion:
– “Please, please … I’m nothing but an humble servant of God!”.
Then a very poor, tiny man from the back rows stands up and pointing up with his forefinger,
– “Me too, I’m nothing but just an humble servant of God too!” he says.
The rich trader nudges the rabbi next to him muttering:
– “Who is this guy, who says he is nothing against us? ”
This joke is interesting in that it reveals what Lacan calls “surplus enjoyment”. Whenever someone comes out with a language that belittles himself, we need to pay attention to what kind of a privilege he secretly extracts by this attitude to himself (the subject can also be a female or any kind of LGBT+, however for the sake of simplicity, we always use “he”, “him” as for the singular form of “they”).
Similarly, in the Western world today, we hear a lot of sayings like “I have no belonging, I’m not a patriotic”. The formula of the joke above comes out in this phenomenon too: the farther your ethnic and religious affiliations away from being white, male, Anglo Saxon, Protestant, the more tolerated you are to reveal your identity.
Professor Zizek continues as follows:
“If you are an American-Indian, you can easily say that. Moreover, they will correct that you are not Indian, but you are [politically-correct new name] native-American. If you are black, it’s okay again. But it becomes somehow uncomfortable if a Chinese says I am Chinese. If you say I’m Italian, this is more or less tolerable. But if you say you are German or Scandinavian, the discomfort grows. Especially, you can never say that you are Anglo Saxon because if you say so you will directly be stamped as fascist. By “giving up” your own identity in this way, you create a veiled universal position against other local [and “authentic”] identities that you [provoke and applaud] on which you extract the right to speak on their “victimization”. Thus, you establish a moral authority over them. ”
This paradox defined by Professor Zizek for the liberal-left is no longer exclusive to the political-correctness of the liberal-left. This attitude became the general line of the discourse and policy making of the left and the “communist” stance. The left invented the term “underprivileged“, meaning “deprived of the living standards and rights of the majority” to fill the category of “exploited”, which it can no longer define with clear lines as before, while it still claims to represent. This concept assumes two more categories stemming from the meaning of its constituents under- and -privileged. We list all three below:
1) Privileged
2) Non-Privileged
3) Underprivileged – The root -privileged assumes that there is a category of non-privileged, while the prefix under- assumes that there is also an upper which implies that both the two other categories are both privileged. Let’s keep this paradox in mind.
Professor Zizek’s paradox is due to a false contradiction that can exchange their roles with each other like any other paradox:
A) Those who can give up their own identity and have the privilege of talking about the victimization of the victims: We call this group WASP: the initials of white; Anglo Saxon; Protestant. Male is often added to it too: WASP+male.
B) Those who can declare their own identities without being stamped as fascist: This group includes all skin colors and ethnicities other than WASP. We call this group non-WASP. However, this group is not uniform in itself. They position themselves in a spectrum of different degrees of grievances and victimizations: the farther you are from WASP, the more authentic victims you are. For example, an Afro American is more underprivileged than a “brown” (mixed blood); a Bengali is more underprivileged than a Chinese; a Chinese is more than an Italian; a muslim is more than a buddhist; a buddhist is more than a catholic; a transsexual is more than a homosexual; a lesbian woman is more than a straight woman … and they altogether are victims of the WASP+male.
Let us then place this bilateral opposition that is in stake in the Zizek Paradox (non-WASP versus WASP) on the trilateral distinction (privileged; non-privileged; underprivileged). Thus, we establish the pseudo-sociological topic of the vast majority who define themselves as leftist and / or communist today:
We call the “Anti-WASP Leftism” the political stance adhered to this understanding of the world.
Having placed the bilateral separation of the Paradox on the trilateral categorization implied by the concept “underpriviledge”, it is seen that the bilateral separation axis – as in the real world – cuts some pieces out from each of the three categories. The anti-WASP leftist assigns its revolutionary mission to non-WASP individuals based on the assumption that the non-WASPs are deprived and victimized. It selects and promotes its leaders, intellectuals, role models among non-WASP individuals. However, the WASP / non-WASP separation that cuts each layer of the privileged, non-privileged and underprivileged confounds this revolutionary mission letting it stuck to Zizek Paradox at every step.
As is known, the Nazi-era anthropology considered the brachiocephalic as a developed species, ahead of the general of humanity. With the term “species”, we mean here the misuse of a biological term as the assignment of a naturally given (anthropometric, phenotypical, genotypical, etc.) feature to a group (community) of individuals affiliated to a common mission (politics). It does not matter what the assigned mission is: this mission can be either a so-called environmentalist, or against capitalism, very “humanitarian” and so on … No matter how pleasant it sounds. The fact that that community in charge is defined by such naturally endowed qualities makes it far from being socialist but primarily communitarian (gemeinschaft).
The adjacency of racism with the Left is not a new phenomenon in history. Christian Rakovsky, one of Trotsky’s closest comrads, provoked a racist Ukrainian nationalism under the socialist pretext in the direction of first German and then British plans, from 1915 to 1920s. Trotsky himself, advocated a Turkish-Islamic synthesis obscured by his “supreme” socialist discourse which was in fact a politics of religion and identity that coincided exactly with the Wilson doctrine. A similar socialist revolutionary rhetoric, with reference to religion and ethos, came to its sharpest logical conclusion with Sultan Galiev’s muslim-Tatar racist-communism. The legendary so-called “socialist” Doctor Hikmet Kıvılcımlı had assigned the authentic revolutionary spirit to the notion of barbarian tribes. This assignment beared racial associations too: in this formula, each ethnic group before being assimilated / mixed in the historical process are considered more authentic and more revolutionary than the mixed ethnics that appear after them.
However, despite these examples in the past, the Left and the socialist movements have never put the skin color and the ethos at the center of its politics as the anti-WASP leftism does today.
In this study, we will examin the anti-WASP leftism through real people and concrete facts. We will explain in concrete terms how the figures it promotes – as in the case of the US senator Kamala Harris, a typical example of this phenomenon – get stuck in Zizek Paradox at every step and how the anti-WASP leftism functions as an ideological tool for the interests of a particular capitalist block.
In our study, we will also try to contribute to the discussion of populism which has been on the rise since 2010. In his article titled “Neopopulism: The Political Zeitgeist of our Times”, Prof Asım Karaömelioğlu first shows the similarities of the current wave of neo-populism with the previous historical examples in terms of anti-elitism; kulturkampf; claim to speak for the majority; stress on the threat from outside and defense of the national against the global; claim of being against establishment; defining the situations as being into uncompromising dilemmas and making inevitable and compulsory decisions, etc. Having shown these resemblances, he then accurately points out the historical particularity of today’s situation in the vote distribution and the political reflexes of the masses, which are into a state of bipolarity and parity (50% / 50%). He then questions the reasons for this situation. Thus, by analyzing this new position (its claims of radicalization, moving away from the center with its anti-WASP discourse, and so on) of the Left, we will propose an answer to Prof Karaömerlioğlu’s question.
We have to say a preface remark about the title too: the main purpose of this work is not to tell the reader about the adventures of Kamala Harris. This study uses Kamala Harris to correspond to Max Weber‘s concept of ideal type. According to Max Weber, social scientist needs first to make a hypothetical conceptualization to understand and interpret a social phenomenon. Anti-WASP leftism is such a conceptualization. Although the phenomenon existed for a long time, it has not been possible to conceptualize it since it has been into effect in the hegemonic discourse. Thus, the concept is new and belongs to us. Such conceptualizations are the prerequisite for investigating a social phenomenon. Max Weber defines ideal type as an example that hits the phenomenon to a certain extent and reflects certain typical features of it. While the reasonning in natural sciences move from the concrete / the empirical research object towards abstract conceptualization / theorisation (one way), in social sciences, the object of research is also to a certain extend an abstraction / an ideal type. The relationship between the theory and the ideal type is established throught he referrals to concrete empirical cases. Due to the fact that both the object of research and the theory are abstract, it is of priority to identify the paradoxes in the actions and intentions of social actors – that is doing the immanent critique, rather than doing the Popperian falsification. We could also focus on The Squad (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib) or Ash Sarkar. However, Kamala Harris is a more dramatic example than others with both her age and career. She started her career as a good lawyer, as a woman of Justice, while as she entered into politics, she has gradually evolved into a tragic heroine similar to that of Marquis de Sade’s Justine.
In the following sections, we will investigate the company Uber again as an ideal type to understand the phenomenon of IT rentier oligarchy. Finally, we will look at how the anti-WASP leftism’s and the IT rentier oligarchy’s paths cross at the current predominant antagonistic constellation.
The moment when the clarion distorts
Before we attempt Kamala Harris autopsy, let us warm our mind with the following simpler examples:
The New York Times, the leading century-long “Red Horror” propaganda device against the Soviet communism, has suddenly decided to celebrate the centennial anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution – like bringing the memories of its readers into derision – in 2017 publishing a series of articles called “The Red Century”. This serial consisted of 40 articles. In one of them, a writer named Sarah Jaffe, telling about the effects of the Revolution in the United States, asserted in her article that communism was compatible with the black spirit. Thus, to our knowledge, Sarah Jaffe became the first ever “intellectual” who introduced the concept of communist black racism, as a new type of racism.
Viennese sociologist Ramazan Yaylalı drew our attention to the following interviews in VICE magazine dated February 8, 2019, as the most absurd examples of anti-WASP victimization discourses:
A 22-year-old brunette girl with frizzy hair named Sarah complained that she could not get as much attention from men as her white peers because of her skin color, and that the men she was flirting saw her as “an exotic fruit”.
A 32-year-old black man named Shamiro complained that the girls he was flirting with saw him as a sex machine with a big penis, expressing his aggrievedness with the words, “The girls’ eyes immediately slip into my pants.”
Besides these dramas, Ash Sarkar, also known as “Leftie Corbynista” who introduces herself as anti-imperialist, feminist, anti-fascist, libertarian communist, anti-Trump, etc., declares her opposition to the integration of immigrants, argueing that integration policies mean fascist cultural assimilation. She decrees a fatwa that practicing of art and playing the music of non-WASP people by the WASP people should be considered as cultural appropriation, culture vulture and that this commodification of the music and art of the non-WASPs by the “white man” should be prevented – having also determined some exceptions in her own way and declaring on how to deal with these facts. Then the clarion distorts in the upshot: When a statistic is published that the immigrant population in Britain is growing faster than the WASP population, she screeches “Yes lads, we are winning!”.
We couldn’t find a report that investigates how many points Ash Sarkar made Jeremy Corbyn to lose and how many points she made Boris Johnson to gain. We hope that historians can work on this question should the political elite pulling the wires of anti-WASP leftism in Britain be deciphered in the future.
A writer named Emily Cousens, who says she is a faculty member of Oxford University in her article Huffington Post, dated April 23, 2020, wrote “I’m from Oxford too, but I hope it will not Oxford University who will first find the covid-19 vaccine!”. Then she listed the reasons behind this prayer as follows: Oxford’s finding the vaccine gives Boris Johnson points. But more importantly, a university known for its WASP+male identity will be celebrated. And the worst of all, it will boost the pride of Britishness…
Who’s more American?
During the presidency of Ronald Reagan, The third monday of january every year was accepted as the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. and enacted as a national holiday.
Senator Kamala Harris announced her candidacy from the Democratic Party for the 2020 presidential election on January 21, 2019, the day when MLK’s birthday was celebrated. He appeared on two separate TV shows on the same day – one was Inside Politics on CNN and the other was Good Morning America on ABC).
Political analyst Maeve Reston, who appeared on the CNN Inside Politics program with Kamala Harris, commented that Kamala Harris’s ruthless attitude towards the crime during her service as Attorney General would seriously challenge her in the presidential race. A year later, this comment of Maeve Reston was justified. According to the surveys on December 3, 2019, public support to Kamala Harris fell to 1% and she announced that she withdrew from the race. The discrepencies she experienced in the political arena, while she had a good lawyer career during her early DA period, were reminiscent of the “Justine” figure of Marquis de Sade.
The fact that Kamala Harris coincided her candidacy statement especially to the day celebrated as the MLC day signaled that she would pursue an anti-WASP leftist populist policy. In the following days, Kamala Harris began to say in all occasions that she was an African American of slave lineage. Besides this rhetoric, she was collecting big donations from the richest white elite of the state of California – we will tell about these capital ties of her in the following sections.
While Kamala Harris used to introduce herself as African American, the tweeter phenomenon Ali Alexander, the man of oligarch investor Bob Mercer, one of the biggest donors of the Republican Party, wrote that Kamala Harris is an Indian-Jamaican mixed-blood and not African American. Upon that proclaim, Donald Trump Junior, Trump’s son, tweeted “Is it true? Wow! “. By then, the question of how and why Kamala felt herself as an African American while she is Indian-Jamaican mixed-blood became a matter of discussion among the US public.
Indeed before all, in the ABC’s Good Morning America program, the presenter George Stephanopoulos squeezed Kamala saying “but your parents are not from the USA?”. Kamala Harris, who refrained from saying that she was an Indo-Jamaican mixed-blood, in the face of this question, immediately began to explain how she loved and how she served her country.
At this point, let’s note that George Stephanopoulos came from a Greek immigrant family and that his father was a priest at the Orthodox Greek church in the USA. George Stephanopoulos has been an advisor to the Democratic Party in the past, donated to the Clinton Foundation, and an influential name within the Democratic Party.
In the US media, it is very common for a person whose family came to the United States two generations ago to ask such questions to another person whose family immigrated to the US after them. This strange situation causes such debates on “who is more American than whom and why…”. Sounds weird, since one cannot even imagine such a discussion in Turkey, as in the above example, the two popular figures, one is an Indo-Jamaican mixed-blood and the other a jus sanguini Greek, discussing “Who’s more Turkish?” no matter their origins are. However in the USA, nobody can openly and clearly reply against such annoyances, “Are you questioning how much I am a US citizen because you are the child of a family that migrated to the USA one or more generations before mine?”
So why did George Stephanopoulos needed to squeeze Kamala Harris – who used to say she was African American while she is Indo-Jamaican – from the very first day?
The attack of Stephanopoulos was twofold: In the USA today, the americanism of African-Americans of slave origin cannot be questioned. But how much the immigrants can be from the USA and whether they can do politics can be discussed. Stephanopoulos also showed that he knew Kamala is an Indo-Jamaican immigrant family – without explicitly expressing it – by asking this question and weighing her down.
Was this attack of Stephanopoulos on Kamala a reflection of the faction within the Democratic Party? Or was a manifestation of racism that is deposited in the depths of a jus sanguini Greek’s brain? Or both?
The only thing that actually makes Kamala Harris, an African American, is that she studied at Howard University in Washington DC, known as the black university. Howard University is a university where black people and mixed-blood people defined as “brown” used to study. It is known as a very good university. The university was run by Dr. Mordecai Wyatt Johnson Sr, a white man, from 1929 to 1960.
Stephanopoulos’ Good Morning America program ignited a debate on social media on whether Kamala Harris meets the legal terms for being president. Kamala Harris’s mother emigrated from India in 1960 and her father from Jamaica in 1961. Born in 1964 in Oakland, California, Kamala became a citizen on the basis of Article 14 of the US constitution (according to Article 14, which came into force in 1790, everyone born in the USA has the right to become a US citizen). On the other hand, in order to become president in the USA, it is enough to be a US citizen, to be 35 years old and to live in the USA for 14 years. As it is clear that Kamala meets these conditions, this issue remained as media speculation.
So, while the law that set the criteria for being elected President was so simple and clear, why was this subject brought into agenda for Kamala Harris – as it was for Obama too? Was there again a seeking for victimization and profiting out of this victimization? It may be as follows: This discussion was being pumped through some media to ignite the anti-WASP discourse, which, otherwise, might not be on the public’s agenda. It aimed to give an argument in the hands of the opposite facade and then to call it “fascist”, to justify its discourse of victimization.
After the first two TV shows, on February 11, 2019 Kamala Harris made one of the most important candidate speeches in The Breakfast Club program of New York City Power FM 105.1 radio, which is very popular. In this speech, she continued to introduce herself as an African American. The presenter said, “But wasn’t your mother Indian and your father from Jamaica? ” Instead of giving a sound reply, she began accusing the presenter of not knowing what it is to be a “black”.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump said in August 2019 that he was against to immigrant’s children to obtain US citizenship even if they were born in the United States and would do serious work to prevent them from taking advantage of Article 14 of the Constitution. The momentum Kamala Harris gained in the first period after she announced her candidacy might have been effective in Trump’s attempt to prevent immigrants to take advantage of the Article 14.
Trump launched an initial project for it in January 2020: The new visa system, which prevents pregnant women from coming to the USA for birth if they do not have enough money, has been started. By contrast, the Democratic Party 2020 presidential candidates advocate the right of children born in the US to become citizens, regardless of how they entered into the country. Unlike many European countries, it is not an offense to enter the USA illegally, to stay without a residence permit, with an expired visa and so on. In this debate, Kamala Harris argued that this was not a felony but a “civil violation”.
In Germany and Britain, to enter the country illegally is an offense. In France it is even a felony to help to someone entering illegally in the country. In the USA, however, there is such a phenomenon defined with the term “birth tourism” for gaining citizenship, which has become a sector in tourism.
The election system in the USA is extremely corrupted. In 2019, Trump said that the voters’ ID law should be issued, at a time when the allegations that the Democratic Party led many immigrants, non-citizens and those without a residence permit to vote. The Democratic Party ramped and raged against this “voter card” project. The immigrant population in the U.S. created a vote reservoir for the Democratic Party. While the powerful capitalism and the traditional weakness of the Left validated a pro-immigrant legislation in the US, the more organized Left and the working class in Europe has brought a stricter and more restrictive legislation against immigrants. This historical phenomenon embodied in the legislation of different countries is still a paradox that the Left avoids arguing and cannot confront.
A good lawyer career getting spoilt in politics
The functioning of the judiciary system in the United States is ghastly backward when compared with Turkey (and even when compared with the Continental European countries). The prosecution is the benefice to politics. The chief prosecutors named as District Attorneys for cities and General Attorneys for states are elected from either independent or affiliated candidates to a party through elections every four-year. The district attorneys are bound to general attorneys and general attorneys are bound to the federal government’s ministry of justice. If a district attorney contradicts with the general attorney (the reasons of conflicts can be political too, as they may belong to opposing political parties) or with the ministry of justice, the higher level of office may depose the elected prosecutor (attorney) by the popular vote. Since judicial members are charged with such a hybrid and virtually unregulated order under the influence of the populist politics the lynch logic prevails and the situations that contradict the most basic and universal legal norms of modern legal systems such as the equality before the law and the right to a fair trial, occur quite frequently. Trump criticized this phenomenon saying “our judicial system is archaic. ”
Kamala Harris was elected the District Attorney of the city of San Francisco in 2004. The opponent of Kamala Harris in this election was Terence Hallinan. Terence Hallinan was the DA in San Francisco since 1996.
Terence Hallinan, the opponent of Kamala, was the child of a very rich family and was a member of the youth organisation of the US Communist Party in his youth. Terence Hallinan’s communism gradually evolved into “liberal communism” and became “progressive” in many areas including advocating the legalization of prostitution. Terence’s father, Vincent Hallinan was also a lawyer and also an athward personality as his son. He heroicaly defended people arrested by the police during the Communist hunt in the USA in the 1940s and 1950s. He was a candidate for the 1952 presidential elections. Terence Hallinan, the rival of Kamala Harris, came from such a strong political family tradition. Both Hallinan and Harris participated as independent candidates in the 2003 San Francisco District Attorney elections. The fact that Kamala Harris took the San Francisco DA from such a strong candidate like Hallinan with very little difference of votes created allegations of fraud in the elections.
Although Kamala Harris was an “independent candidate”, her proximity to the Democratic Party was considered as an important gain for the Democratic Party.
In an interview with Matt Kibbe, Reason Magazine’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown stated that the propaganda talks that Kamala Harris made during her candidacy for the presidency were the opposite of what she was doing when she was the Attorney General in California. For example, she relentlessly used to apply the law that punished the parents by imprisonment for children who did not go to school or were not sent to school when she was AG. However during her candidacy she said that this law was extremely compelling and needed to be changed. While she was the AG, she started a war against Backpage – a website which used to publish sexual intercourse advertisements on the internet – and she enforced them to remove these postings. However she adhered a liberal approach to prostitution during her candidacy period.
Elizabeth Nolan Brown emphasized the inconsistency of Kamala Harris, saying that the poor and desperate Americans who sold their body fell on the streets and were even more exploited by pimps and criminal organizations beating, robbing, injuring and even killing them as a result of the banning of these advertisements.
Kamala Harris had attempted to convict Backpage owners for pimp since they had resisted closing the platform. But the court did not accept her indictment.
After Kamala became a senator, California’s new AG, Xavier Becerra, again sued the owners of Backpage. Behind these lawsuits against Backpage there was the Republican Party senator John McCain – who died in 2018 – and his wife Cindy McCain. This lawsuit is still pending.
A heroic stance against death punishment
Soon after Kamala Harris was elected District Attorney (while she had “her flower in her nose”, meaning that while she was new in her job) in SF, in April 2004, a police officer, Isaac Espinoza, was shot dead by a black gang member named David Hill. Immediately after the incident, the police union called Kamala Harris to request a death sentence. Three days after the murder, Kamala Harris declared that she will not ask for a death sentence. At the funeral at St Mary Cathedral, attended by 2000 polices, Democratic Party Senator Dianne Feinstein, who was also the mayor of San Francisco, goes to the rostrum and during the speech she made here she said “the Killer must be sentenced to death” by looking at Kamala Harris, who was sitting in the front row. Upon this proclaim, the cops immediately stand up and applaud Senator Feinstein.
However, despite all this pressure, Kamala managed to maintain her principled stance. In the following days, her mother Shyamala sent a note to her daughter’s office with a bouquet of white roses: Courage! . District Attorney Kamala Harris did not want a death sentence. The killer is sentenced to life imprisonment. Police union president Gary Delagnes said for Kamala that they would never forgive her.
Although Kamala Harris did not bow to pressures, what happened here is an example of what kind of weirdness the American legal order is. Both the police union and senator Dianne Feinstein have committed the public crime (The Turkish Criminal Code, art. 288) – by using their official attributes based on their duties and publicly – ‘attempting to influence fair trial’.
While Kamala Harris continued his post as DA in San Francisco, she participated in California AG elections from the Democratic Party in 2010. Her opponent was Steve Cooley, a Republican Party member who was the California Attorney General for two terms. Kamala Harris won the election with only a difference of 75,000 votes. Kamala Harris received 4,442,781 votes, while her opponent Steve Cooley received 4,368,624. The election with such a small margin again caused allegations of fraud. Steve Cooley objected to the count. It turned out that thousands of votes were not counted in some of the regions that voted for Kamala Harris. However, despite the objections, the result did not change, and Kamala Harris started her post as Attorney General in California.
A week before the 2010 California Attorney General’s elections, President Barack Obama came to California and personally demonstrated to the public that he supported Kamala Harris by attending the night organized by Kamala Harris to raise money.
When she re-nominated for the 2014 Attorney General’s elections, even the Democratic Party’s heavy guns and California politicians, the House of Representatives MP Nancy Pelosi, Senator Barbara Boxer, and Dianne Feinstein whith whom she had been in conflict by the death penalty issue in 2004, were the important names to support her re-election.
Steve Cooley, the opponent of Kamala in the 2010 elections, was pro-death-penalty. Cooley’s spokesman Kevin Spillane said that Kamala Harris won the election because of her opposition to the death penalty. Because, it was a well known fact that 70% of the people of San Francisco were against death penalty and that the opposition to death penalty in the public affected even the jury decisions and that this was a problem in the trials. Thus, Steeve Cooley was trying to attack Kamala from this point: Being against death penalty is a categorical imperative that should not be linked to mass trends – it is a purely philosophical stance. So, was the heroic stance of Kamala Harris against the death penalty in 2004 actually a populist stance, wasn’t it principal, but due to vote anxiety? The words of Steeve Cooley aimed to scratch the public minds with this disturbing question.
An Inquisition Law: “Three Strikes Law”
The 1992 Los Angeles Riots are one of the most important social events in the recent history of the USA.
On March 3, 1991, a black man Rodney King was stopped at excessive speed while he was driving in his car with his two friends, he was beaten with batons by 5 white police officers. The incident was filmed by someone passing by, and became a news for world television. At the court session on April 29, 1992, the jury, consisting of 9 white, 1 mixed-blood, 1 latin and 1 Asian, decided that the perpetrators of the incident – the policemen – were not guilty. Upon this court decision blacks and hispanics rioted in Los Angeles. The shops were looted, 3767 buildings were set on fire. Republican President George W. Bush described the riot as a major crime against the state and declared ‘state of emergency’ in Los Angeles. When Los Angeles’ own security forces were not enough to suppress the events, 13,500 soldiers were dispatched to the city. 63 people died in the five-day uprising. According to official records, 2383 people were injured. 11,000 people were arrested.
Two years after this uprising, in 1994, a draft law called “Three Strikes Law” was presented on a report by Robert Parker, the president of the University of California Riverside Presley Center for Crime and Justice Studies. This law had then been put into effect in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin.
In modern legal systems, the crime is punished, not the criminal. Because crime is seen as a social phenomenon, not related to the “nature” of the individual. The idea that the crime is caused by the nature / spirit of the person is an archaic feature peculiar to Inquisition Law. In modern legal systems, people cannot be punished for their tendency to commit crimes.
The Three Strikes Law, on the other hand, provided that those who had been convicted of their previous crimes and who had completed their sentence, when they commit a third crime, they shall be sentenced at least 25 years in prison, regardless of the amount of punishment prescribed by the law. In other words, the inmate is to be punished from the beginning and over again for the crimes that they previously completed their sentence. Or if we read it in reverse: it is rather justified to commit crimes twice, but not three times!
In fact, similar laws have been in force since 1797 in New York, since 1952 in Texas, since 1973 in Delaware, and since 1975 in Maryland. However, with the law enacted in 1994, these were also revised and entered into force again. This law, enacted during the period of Bill Clinton of the Democratic Party, did not decrease the crime rates during the past quarter of a century, but on the contrary caused the state and federal prisons to overfill.
At this point, let us remind our reader that the prisons are privatized in the USA and that the stocks of the companies operating the prisons are traded on the stock exchange and that their shares are considered as one of the most reliable investment instruments since there is no cut in state allowances for them.
In a statement he made in July 2015, Bill Clinton expressed his regret for this law he enacted. When former president Bill Clinton made this statement, the US president was Barack Obama, who, obviously, again from the Democratic Party. Despite all these criticisms, no president and the Supreme Court of the USA have ever attempted to abolish this law so far. The Three Strikes Law – named after the baseball game rules – is still in force.
Kamala Harris has always defended the Three Strikes Law during her DA and AG services.
Kamala Harris released her book “Smart on Crime” a year before (in 2009) participating in the 2010 California Attorney General elections. The California press reported speculations that she did not write this book herself but ordered to a ghost writer or that the book was written by a staff working at the back. Kamala Harris did not make a statement about these speculations. The book explains how to deal with problems such as increasing crime rates and overfilling the capacities of prisons in the state of California.
After Kamala Harris was elected to the California Attorney General’s Office in 2010, she was introduced by the media as the first female African-American attorney general in the state of California. She also frequently stated that she was against the release of the suspects on bail during this period. The reason here was that African-American suspects did not have the ability to pay bail and this caused inequality between the whites and the blacks.
Kamala Harris quit the Attorney General service in 2017 and participated in the US Senate elections. Barbara Boxer, a supporter of Kamala Harris for years and a California senator from the Democratic Party since 1993, announced that she would not participate in the 2017 elections, and paved the way for Kamala Harris.
Kamala Harris took on very important duties after becoming a senator. As she is at the forefront of anti-Trump propaganda, became a member of the “Senate Intelligence Committee” looking for the Russian finger in the 2016 elections. The use of Russian Kaspersky’s virus protection software in the US government units and all companies doing business with the government is prohibited. However, the US could not avoid Kaspersky – which produces the best virus protection programs in the world – from its own computers. On August 30, 2019, a woman named Caroline Orr tweeted, “Although the US banned the use of Russian-based Kaspersky Labs’ software by government officials in 2017, many of the top 500 companies dealing with the US government departments are still using this software. ”
Kamala Harris, who used discourses against the bail during her service as prosecutor, never expressed this bail issue again during her senatorship and during her race for candidacy for the Presidency in 2019 (but still she continued her claim to be African-American, as we described above).
Why did Kamala Harris “forgot” the bail injustice (that she used to be sensitive to, during her services as DA and AG) after she became a candidate for presidency?
Here is the answer to this shift, which is again – not personal but – systemic:
While she was DA and AG, she was able to perpetute the discourse of “Black are victims because they cannot pay bail”, since she wasn’t lawmaker but she was a law enforcer. Thus, while she was a law enforcer she could collect sympathy without taking responsibility for her words while, at the same time, pursueing a tough and uncompromising attitude towards black criminals – thus, her discourse was covering up the real injustice in the very logic of the bail. However, when she came to the point of being a lawmaker, being the candidate for the “Presidency” of millions of white citizens who have no ability to pay bail too, in this new position, she could no longer cover up the real injustice in the very logic of the bail.
And for her to explicitely promise the abolishing of the bail for all – without using a racial rhetoric – was obviously beyond her dare!
Upon the nomination of Kamala Harris as a candidate from the Democratic Party, law professor Lara Bazelon sent an article to The New York Times on January 17, 2019. The title of the article was “Kamala Harris Was Not a Progressive Prosecutor”. Lara Bazelon made serious criticisms of Harris’ period of San Francisco prosecutor. The most important of the charges was that she sentenced Daniel Larsen to a 27-year prison, while his commitment was not fully proven. Fortunately, thanks to the campaign of some non-governmental organizations, Daniel Larsen was released after being kept 13 years in prison. Let’s briefly explain the event:
Daniel Larsen was arrested for robbery. In 1999, the two police officers testified that they had seen a long knife was throwen under the car. Defending the Three Strikes Law, the DA Kamala Harris, based on this law, demanded that the suspect be imprisoned for 27 years. During the trial, Daniel Larsen’s lawyer could not bring any eyewitness to court and therefore could not prove that the knife did not belong to Larsen. Although Daniel Larsen applied to the upper court, the prosecutor Kamala Harris caused Larsen to be sentenced to 27 years in prison for a procedural reason like the deadline for the application was passed.
The unreliability of the two police officers, who caused Daniel Larsen’s conviction, was then proved due to other questionable testimonies. Larsen’s lawyer was expelled from the Bar for other reasons in other years. In the following process, the eyewitnesses were found and they said that the person next to him, not Larsen, had thrown the knife under the car.
Lara Bazelon wrote that, like Daniel Larsen, the prisoner George Gage has been serving prison terms for 20 years also without deserving it.
Kamala Harris is still accused of curtailing and covering up the murder of Mitrice Richardson murder and not investigating the guilt of law enforcement officers.
On September 17, 2009, 24-year-old lesbian black Mitrice Richardson goes to a luxury restaurant called Geoffrey in the district of Malibu, where the wealthy people of Los Angeles live. The restaurant manager calls the police when Mitrice Richardson doesn’t pay the bill and start making strange conversations. The incoming police team takes Mitrice Richardson to Malibu / Lost Hill Sheriff Center and interrogates her.
The next day, her mother said she couldn’t hear from her daughter Mitrice. Mitrice was missing. Eleven months later, parts of Mitrice’s body were found in the middle of an old marijuana farm, with some parts naked and some parts mummified. The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department hurried the corpse before the forensic doctor arrived, and when asked why they did so, the said that the photos were sufficient. The forensic doctor who examined the body in the morgue wrote in his report that death was not murder and that the cause of death was uncertain.
Mitrice’s family filled a complaint against the Los Angeles Sheriff Department, but the Attorney General Kamala Harris decides to close the file.
Officers at the sheriff’s office say that Mitrice Richardson was calling her grandmother four times while in custody, but the telephone company explained that such a call had not been made. Meanwhile, the mother of Mitrice, who was not explained how she was taken there, called Sheriff’s office and asked them for her daughter not to be left until morning telling that she had bipolar disorder. The ID card and the wallet, which are said not to be near Mitrice, are found in her car parked in front of the Sheriff’s office. The sheriff and his deputy explained that they had to leave Mitrice, who wanted to go because she is an adult. They say that Mitrice started walking on the dark road at midnight. They also said that the cameras of the Lost Hill Sheriff station were out of order when the query was made, so no recording was made. Three months later, it turned out that the records were at the police station. According to the Prosecutor’s Office, she started walking after leaving the office of the Sheriff and died of anaphylaclic allergy shock from the smell of oak trees in the region. However, although it was certain that her clothes, which were found a little away from the corpse, were not removed by wild animals, were not examined in forensic medicine. In addition, those who lived in the vicinity where the corpse was found, notified the police that a few nights after Mitrice had been disappeared, they heard a woman screaming out. The police did not do anything for these notices.
Mitrice’s parents are paid $ 450,000 in compensation for negligence. The file is closed in 2016. Although the mystery in the death of Mitrice Richardson remains on the agenda in the media, no new judicial investigation decision has yet been taken.
Aside from the Mitrice Richardson incident, there were 7 more undeciphered murders associated with the Malibu / Lost Hills Sheriff station between 2000 and 2010. Los Angeles sheriff Lee Baca, elected by the people every 4 years from 1998 to 2014, was sentenced to 3 years in prison for crimes such as torture in custody and bribery.
Meanwhile, Sheriff Lee Baca’s relationship with the Church of Scientology was revealed. Though this is not a crime, the relationship of the sheriff of such a giant city like Los Angeles with the Church of Scientology should have disturbed the voting people. This issue, however, was not raised until Sheriff Lee Baca was convicted. During the period when the California state law enforcement agencies had such strange relationships, Kamala Harris was the state’s Attorney General.
Willie Brown: The Shadow-Man
How did Kamala Harris get financial assistance from the wealthiest families of a city like San Francisco in 2004 and became the District Attorney of this important city? How the rise continued and by 2010 she managed to become the Attorney General of California, a state with 40 million inhabitants (which is only the registered population where immigrants are not included), the territory of which is twice the size of Britain, and with the Gross State Product of $ 3,018 trillion (in 2018). How was she appointed as the AG of such an important state? How did she get the support of California oligarchs?
Of course, thanks to Willie Brown. Willie Brown was the first African-American mayor of San Francisco and served between 1995 >> 1999. In 1994 Kamala Harris had a relationship with Willie Brown. Despite Willie Brown was married, they did not need to hide their relationship from the public. Photos of this relationship were even published in newspapers. Herb Caen, the gossip writer of the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper (one of the oldest newspapers in San Francisco, published since 1865) had long been involved in this relationship.
One reason that Willie Brown became popular both in SF and throughout the state of California during his mayor was because he was a defender of gay rights. San Francisco and California are the city and state with the highest gay population in the USA.
Kamala Harris “worked” at the California Medical Assistance Commission with a $ 70,000 annual salary from 1994 to 1998, thanks to Willie Brown. This commission was meeting only twice a month. Kamala Harris did not even attend 20% of these meetings, but she received her salary. The commission consisted of 7 people, and the youngest of them was Kamala Harris. During this period, thanks to Willie L. Brown, Kamala Harris met the richest and most powerful families of the city of San Francisco and the state of California.
Here we do not judge Kamala Harris’ extramarital affair with Willie Brown, of course. On the contrary, we approve and encourage extramarital affairs in terms of the individual’s enjoyment of life and as they boost both physical and intellectual efficiency. The point we judge here is that Kamala Harris could only benefit from the networking of Willie Brown through this love affair, and thanks to this relationship that she was able to climb to the candidacy for presidency. The anti-WASP leftist rhetoric, however, associating the skin color and the ethnicity with the authenticity and victimization conceals this naked truth – the truth that such privileged positions are almost always earned through a network of private personal relationships: “she is both black, both woman, both immigrant, that is she is “underprivileged” ” … but still, she became a presidential candidate by climbing the career steps one by one!” . However, the goose’s foot is not so – it’s scalloped: What is actually happening is a trade of connections within the relationship of “love”.
Now let’s look at the career of Willie Brown, who has taken an important place in the life of Kamala Harris:
Willie Lewis Brown was elected to the California House of Representatives in 1964. From 1980 to 1995, he was the second most important legislative body after the California Senate, the Speaker of the California State Assembly, from the Democratic Party. Willie Brown is the first African American elected for this post.
The Democratic Party resigned Willie Brown from his post at the California House of Representatives in 1995. Willie Brown, who finished his job in 2004, has retired. Willie L. Brown told the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper in January 2019, “Yes, 20 years ago, I had an affair with Kamala Harris, even helping her career in the state, even Democratic Party spokesperson Nancy Pelosi, California governor Gavin Newsom and other Democrats. I helped party senator Dianne Feistein come to these days too, so what? ” he said.
For those who know that this is how things work, “so, nothing! ” of course … However, one should notice here that as for the WASP individuals, things work in the same way for the non-WASP individuals too, they gain careers, status and privileges with the same types of nepotic networks.
In summary, Willie Brown is the shadow-man who has brought many names known to the California veterans of the Democratic Party to the world of politics.
Kamala versus Monica
Kamala Harris has been one of the foremost and ardent defenders of the #metoo movement in the state of California.
Kamala Harris and Monica Lewinsky are about the same age.
Monica Lewinsky remembered her relationship with Bill Clinton these days, after 20 years, and said #metoo.
Both Monica’s relationship with the President and Kamala’s relationship with Willie Brown were experienced in the same years, in the late 90s.
As is known, the logic of the #metoo movement is based on a template where the harassing man exerts pressure on the harassed woman by using his “influence” (this “influence” may be in the form of career, money, status, etc.) and the woman is assumed not able to resist this pressure.
However, when the relationship between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky broke out in the press, in 1998, then 25-year-old Monica Lewinsky told the magazine Time that the relationship was realized with her own will, consent and desire. Moreover, she described the relationship with such a wise statement, “The sensuality sharing between the president and the intern equalized different statuses. ”
Twenty years passed, she turned 45, and she said #metoo, saying, “He shouldn’t have used his influence on a young, vulnerable girl like me. ”
And we also asked in our previous articles: which one is the true feminist consciousness: her saying in 1998 that she experienced sexuality with the President with her own desire and will and that the status difference between them was “equalized” in this relationship?
Or changing her mind after 20 years and saying that the President had abused him?
Which one?
Was Monica Lewinsky more feminist when she was 25 or is she more feminist today, when she is 45?
Moreover, in the relationship between Monica and Bill Clinton, there was a situation where the standard harassment roles were inverted: Bill Clinton said, “I was passive” while defending himself by saying “I did not have sex with this girl“. The media then questioned what this “passivity” was like, and as a result of the ongoing discussions, it was believed that the “relationship” experienced was a form of oral sex in which the woman was active and the man was passive. If this was true, the #metoo roles in this case were reversed: Monica Lewinsky made Bill Clinton a victim of harassment in the Oval Office, whom she called “the strongest man in the world. ” Thus in this case, it should be Bill Clinton who was supposed to say #metoo and not Monica.
Let’s leave the people aside and compare these two relationship forms by referring to the logic of #metoo again:
In both the Monica + Bill Clinton relationship and the Kamala + Willie Brown relationship, the parties are not complaining of each other, everyone is happy with the relationship. However, the Monica + Bill Clinton relationship is an equalizer according to Monica’s own words, that is, a form of relationship in which the parties do not make any other exchanges, except their sharing of sensuality. The Kamala + Willie Brown relationship, on the other hand, as Willie Brown expresses and Kamala doesn’t deny, is a relationship form that opens political career paths to Kamala in addition to being a love affair.
And let’s ask: Which form of relationship is more “authentic“?
Kamala Harris became close friends with Summer Tompkins Walker, daughter of Susie Tompkins Buell, one of the biggest donors of the Democratic Party, thanks to her affection and intelligence. This woman was the second most important gate – after Willie Brown – that allowed Kamala Harris to penetrate the California elite.
After a while, Kamala Harris and Willie Brown’s love affair ended. Willie Brown started to live in love with a very influential San Francisco’s high society figure Carolyn Carpeneti, who donated $ 2.33 million to the SF Mayor’s campaign, to which Willie Brown was nominated for re-election. They had a daughter from this relationship in 2001. These facts show how the love relations established by Willie Brown, who was also continuing her marriage with a woman during the whole process, was subject to an order of mutual benefits.
As for Kamala Harris, there is no information in the media about her love life after she quit Willie Brown until she married California lawyer Douglas Emhoff in 2014. Douglas Emhoff is a lawyer in the DLA Piper Law company. He is expert on cases related to business, real estate and intellectual property rights. Kamala was introduced to Douglas by her public relations consultant Christte Hudlin in blind date.
The Left and the drug culture
The togetherness of leftism with drugs has a history of at least 200 years. In the post-revolutionary France, bohemianism, which was derived from the gypsy culture, emerged as a subculture that affirmed alcohol and drugs along with contradictory and marginal lifestyles. The bohemianism, which continued its influence throughout the 19th century, also influenced various art movements and continued its effect in some anarchist movements at the beginning of the 20th century. In the interwar period, avant-garde art and artists were once again mentioned with the drug: Salvador Dali said, “I don’t do drug, I am the drugs. ” Much has been said about Jackson Pollock’s alcoholism and its impact on his art. By the 1960s, drugs started to rise once again and became the symbol of the 68 Revolution with the civil disobedience movement. The coexistence of dope addiction and leftism continued in anti-war and hippie culture in the 70s.
To summarize, the rebellion culture and leftism were mostly together with the dope addiction throughout history. There had even been some leftist fantasies that link their historical tradition to Hassan Sabbah and the Alamut Castle in the 12th century, saying: “Hassan Sabbah was “leftist” cuz he fought against the brutal and fascist Seljuk State. ”, and so on…
We, however, will look at this subject of drug use, again in reverse. We will focus on the drugs in the hands of the rulers – not on the drugs in the hands of the leftists. And again, with the examples we will give from Kamala Harris, we will ask what kind of a “leftism” is this junkie-glorifying leftism.
Kamala Harris opposed the legalization of the marijuana in her book “Smart on Crime”, published a year before (in 2009) her nomination to the 2010 California Attorney General as a Democratic party candidate. During the election campaign of Kamala Harris, also on the same days, a referendum was held in California for the legalization of marijuana (2010 California Proposition 19). Kamala Harris had made it clear that she would vote “NO” in this referendum. In the referendum, the people of California said no to the legalization of marijuana (5,333,230 no votes vs. 4,643,592 yes votes). In those days Kamala Harris claimed that by taking measures against marijuana, she would reduce the crime rate in the state.
8 years after this referendum, in July 2018, Republican Party Colorado senator Cory Gardner and Democratic Party Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren submitted to the Congress a federal bill to legalize the use of marijuana in all states. Elizabeth Warren was also one of the Democratic Party’s most important candidates for the 2020 presidential election – she was bursting out “I am a socialist! “. One of the reasons for this law proposal was that 66% of the US people were for the legalization of marijuana in the surveys.
In the pharmaceutical industry, the word cannabis is used instead of marijuana. American media started using the word “cannabis” instead of “marijuana”. With this shift in wording, the medicine connotation was loaded into marijuana. That way, the image of the state that legalizes the drug use was tried to be embraced to people. During this period when Gardner + Warren federal bill was discussed, marijuana has increasingly lost its criminal associations in the public. In August 2018, another step was taken in this direction: The state of California abolished the law that prohibits the availability of marijuana on school campuses.
The liberation of the marijuana in California at this level also had an important result at the bottom: the marijuana gangs – the street bagman – began naturally liquidated. 17 other states lifted the ban too.
As soon as she was nominated to the Democratic party candidate for the 2020 presidential election, Kamala Harris changed her stance and began supporting this bill by Elizabeth Warren, who wanted to legalize marijuana.
On February 11, 2019, when Kamala Harris was asked in the The Breakfast Club program of New York City Power FM 105.1, whether or not she was using marijuana, she laughed and said, “I’m from Jamaica, are you kidding! We were hanging out in marijuana by listening Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg at the University … “.
Whereas Kamala Harris graduated from university in 1986. The first albums of Tupac Shakur and Snoop Doggs were released in 1991 and 1993. Therefore, it was not possible for Kamala Harris to be listening to them while she was a university student.
Then again in the same program, Kamala Harris was asked why she supported the drug. She responded to this question by saying that she believed that the effects on the users could be freely investigated through the legalization of the marijuana, thus making more efficient decisions.
Let’s note how Kamala Harris is stuck between the hard and rock here: when she is asked the first question, she laughs and stesses, telling him that she used to use marijuana in her youth, so she presents herself to him as a romantic and authentic leftist. By telling that she listened rap music – known as the culture of non-WASP people- she associates this subculture to leftism and appropriates it; moreover, she associates the so-called youth spirit and leftism to the non-WASP subculture, saying that she did this during her student years; that way, she gives an ideological call to her target base through these connotations.
When asked for the second question, however, she takes people as guinea pigs: marijuana will be legalized -> so that “science” can investigate its effects on people -> so the executive will make more efficient decisions -> and the judiciary will apply them …
After a short a while, however, Gardner + Warren federal bill was rejected. Consequently, Kamala Harris not only lost an important argument she used for the election, but also affixed “junkie” label on herself with her own words.
This dilemma that appeared with Kamala Harris, who tried to speak both as politician and then as lawyer and made the leftists and the blacks guinea pigs, is in fact a systemic issue. As we mentioned above, it is a dilemma caused by the fact that one leg of the jurisdiction (the prosecutor) in the USA is the manger for politics. While the usual “democrat” discourse judges the state apparatus that it calls “Asian type” by being centralized and autocratic, the American “democracy” is in fact fascist right at the base – not at the top. The same individual’s ability to speak both as politician (legislative) and as prosecutor (judiciary), causes to a dialectical collapse: when one of the three powers of the state touch one of the other two, the third collapses and connects to the others. American fascism is a fascism that doesn’t fit to the usual dogmatic stereotypes of political science. It does not apply on the familiar “they came by the democratic ways but then they destroyed democracy” template. It is a fascism that proceeds together with democracy and even functions thanks to “democracy”. While the dogmatic acceptance of political science places the concepts of democracy and fascism on opposite poles, the US example shows that these two can function together by each feeding each other.
Let’s look at the real function of this making the plebs guinea pigs, in the system:
Having grown in consumption in recent years, marijuana has a trade volume of $ 10 billion only in the USA. Cultivation of Marijuana for the pharmaceutical industry was permitted in the state of California, since the 1970s. With the rapid increase in the use of marijuana, this sector is expected to reach a volume of 30, maybe 50 billion dollars shortly. With the legalization of marijuana, both a new sector will be created in the economy and the work of law enforcement and courts will decrease.
Also, since the majority of those who are imprisoned for the sale and use of marijuana are African-American, the question of why the whites who have committed the same crime are not caught and prosecuted will not be addressed.
On the other hand, planting regions of marijuana are crime slots. Thanks to the fires in these lands set at certain intervals, the gangs and junkies nested there are burned and cleaned together with the product. Thus, crime rates are balanced without bringing extra burden to courthouses and prisons.
Although in the radio show Kamala Harris said “I am from Jamaica, of course I used to do marijuana!”, marijuana is not an authentic part of the Jamaican culture. The Indians who migrated from India to Jamaica in 1845 brought and spread the marijuana in Jamaica. Indians used to use marijuana, which they call “ganja”, in their religious rituals. Although doing ganja is prohibited by law in India today, its use continues during religious rituals.
The story of the spread of marijuana in American society is also very dirty:
As the Vietnam War continued, presidential elections were held in 1968. Richard Nixon became president. During the Nixon period, there were two major problems before the government: One was the anti-war leftists. The other was Afro-Americans, who gained equal rights with whites – at least on paper – with the removal of the final crumbs of Jim Crow laws by Lyndon Johnson.
President Nixon’s team made a plan to pacify these two groups. According to this plan, leftists and blacks would first be made drug-addict, disfavored in the public, and then the opposition leaders would be jailed by drug-related crimes. It was planned that leftists could rather be addicted to marijuana and black people to heroin. The supply chains were created through CIA plans and organization.
The music idols that were mentioned with drugs were promoted through the media and they made popular. The hippie culture was associated to marijuana. This trend was led by musicians such as Bob Marley from Jamaica, Jimi Hendrix and Brain Jones, the founder of the Rolling Stones group.
The first thing that comes to mind when Marijuana’s relationship with music is Bob Marley, who introduced the reggae music to the world. Bob Marley, who constantly used to smoke marijuana and used say that it is good to smoke it, composed many songs about marijuana. Among the drug-related songs, Ganja Gun and Kaya are the most popular. Peter Tosh, co-founder of the Bob Marley and Wailers music group, was one of the radical pioneers of the black society. Jamaican musician Peter Tosh, who had been working with Bob Marley for many years, composed the world-famous song Legalize It, in 1976 asking to remove marijuana from the drug category. Peter Torsh, who led the spread of marijuana among African-Americans, was killed on September 11, 1987, when staying in his home in Kingston (Jamaica) with his friends, by two “thieves”. Some commentators in the press defined the killing of Peter Tosh by two “thieves” as the retirement of someone who completed his task.
As for the relationship between the drug and the academic world, we should not forget the famous American psychologist Timothy Francis Leary (22 October 1920 – 31 May 1996). Timothy Francis Leary was an academic at the most important universities in the United States, such as Harvard University, Kaiser Family Foundation, and the University of California at Berkeley. He advocated the use of drugs such as LSD. He wrote books on this subject from the 1960s till the 1970s.
During this period, the drug spread so much that the period between 1964 and 1976 was called “psychedelic culture”. And the President Nixon administration pressed the button in 1971: it launched the war against drugs. Both the drug traders and the drug-user anti-war cadres’ leaders were arrested. A special unit called the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE) was established in January 1972 to manage a fast and effective attack against the leftist and the blacks.
John Ehrlichman, who was the Undersecretary of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1994 during the period of President Richard Nixon, told to Dan Baum from Harper magazine that the dissemination of the drug culture and the passifization of left-leaning groups with all kinds of civil disobedience formations was a planned and programmed operation by American deep State.
Since social media did not have tools like today, that time popular culture was spreading over magazines, newspapers, radios and TVs. In the meantime, we should not forget the effect of drug-related pictures that are used freely on the covers of the albums released by musicians. The media identified the marijuana hanging out (smoking) with the Rastafarian culture, but actually the two had no connection. Marcus Garvey, a black activist from Jamaica, founder of Rastafarianism, founded the International Negro Improvement Association in 1912. The aim of this union was to lead the black diaspora spread all over the world to return to Africa and to build a developed country there. This movement, which was influential in its period and called Garveyism, paved the way for Rastafarianism. In 1927, Marcus Garvey began using a rhetoric that a black king on the African continent would ascend to the throne as a prophet. Garvey never pointed to a country or a king. But in 1930, when Ras Tafari Makonen (“Ras” meaning prince) became the Emperor of Ethiopia under the name of Haile Salasie and since it was the only African country having declared independence in those years, Ethiopia was seen as the “promised land” for Rastafarianism. Garvey’s followers were mostly African Americans and he was seen as an emperor, the savior of the oppressed Africans. This is how the story of Rastafarianism started.
In the 1970s, it was Bob Marley who founded the link between the Raggae music and Rastafarianism. Bob Marley used to believe in Rastaman.
Father scolding
Her father was very angry to Kamala when she said “I am from Jamaica, of course I smoked marijuana” on the radio program on February 11, 2019.
Prof Donald J. Harris emigrated from Jamaica to the USA in 1961. After receiving both his undergraduate and PhD from the Department of Economics at the University of California Berkeley, he worked as a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin and Stanford University. He has over 100 academic publications today and is an emeritus professor.
This father was very angry with his daughter’s identifying the Jamaican community with marijuana and said, “How can you show Jamaica, our country, as a country of junkies! ” He publicly scolded Kamala by giving a clear statement to the press. And the scolding continued as follows: “Don’t be an identity politician! ” Because Kamala also criticized people in avoiding talking about identity politics in the same radio program.
Let’s stop here and think about father Harris’ objection to identity politics.
The most familiar objection to identity politics usually comes from orthodox Marxists: “Making identity politics undermines class exploitation. The politicization of all kinds of identity can be reduced to class antagonisms and labor exploitation in the background”. Ergin Yıldızoğlu recently made a good statement that could respond to this cartoonishly simplistic Marxist view, which we call “vulgar deterministic Marxist topic”. Hereunded we translate his remarks:
“Mode of production is only an abstraction. In real life (in time and space), there are “social formations” in which different modes of production, relations of production, modes of accumulation are bound to each other. Unlike the mode of production, “social formation” includes the structures and relations defined by the concepts of politics (state), country, class formation and ideology.
The central (descriptive) relationship of a social formation dominated by the capitalist mode of production (labor and capital) coexists with the relations defined by the concepts of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender. The political and economic life of the society cannot be understood by only reducing them to the central relationship and ignoring the problems related to justice arising from other relations.
The Covid-19 lens makes it easy to see this complexity. Among the victims of Covid-19 in the U.S. and the UK, ethnic minorities from the working class have an undeniable weight. For example, when we look at the first victims of the healthcare system in the UK, we see that they consisted of black, Asian, Middle Eastern specialists, doctors and nurses, to the extent that these numbers has worried even the most reactionary conservative government of the last 40 years. Evidently there is a situation that transcends class antagonism, to the relations to be defined in terms of race, ethnicity, nationality, and so on. On the other hand, It is not possible to say that all of the elderly who died in nursing homes belong to the working class, since a significant portion of these nursing homes belong to the private sector.
In either case, the imperialist racist codes of the “profit extraction machine“, as well as the coding of those above a certain age (as labor can no longer be consumed) as an “overpopulation” have an undeniable role. If we try to reduce the cluster of all these people to the category of the working class, we may miss the function of racism and population management in a white Christian and imperialist capitalist society. ”
The dark accents in the quote belong to us. The text points to the dimensions overlooked by the “simplistic deterministic Marxist topic” view (relations to be defined in terms of race, ethnicity, nationality; the imperialist racist codes of the “profit extraction machine”; the function of racism and population management in a white Christian and imperialist capitalist society…). However, it does not give a clue as to how to deal with such dimensions without falling into the Zizek Paradox.
The most important problem here is that the concept of “social formation” is kept too broad so as to include everything other than the “central relation” (labor-capital antagonism). If you fill everything in a concept, the concept becomes blurred and we cannot extract tools to produce rational and applicable politics from this insight (see the section titled “The moment when the clarion distorts” at the beginning of our study as examples to this impass).
What should be done in such deadlocks is to accept both the thesis (the Marxist topic) and the antithesis (social formation) first with their denial aspects by each others. Then we must take another step and reject both together. Thus, we can define two paths that one of which is wrong and the end is a defeat (vicious circle; paradox) and the other one which is “lifted away” (sublated) with its opposite and which will lead us to the right path.
Firstly, while accepting the antithesis, it should be the first rule that equality struggles outside the scope of the class struggle area do not obstruct the class struggle. Although the leftist understanding today adopts the idea to undertake the two together, the identity politics of the anti-WASP leftist can – quite obviously – not do this anyway.
Second, these direct struggles for equality – concerning the relations to be defined in terms of race, ethnicity, nationality – are inconsistent and even fake as a method, eventhough they do not obscure the class struggle. For example, all kinds of “positive discrimination” are inconsistent and prone to abuse: Let us recall the allegations in the 80’s and 90’s, that students from backward regions with low academic abilities, were secretly endorsed by being given the questions in advance in general selective exams for university. If these allegations were true, how do we differentiate such – the so-called – benevolent “positive discrimination” practices – aside from bringing down the academic level of the country as a whole — from that of the terrorist Gulen’s Community organisation’s stealing the questions for their own students? Let’s look at the quota application to increase the number of women deputies in a parliament: Shall we not have then to apply quotas to every letter of LGBTQ+ and for each of the new letters to be added to them, with the same logic? So when we try to directly interfere with every phenomenon that we see here as inequality within “social formation” then we overlook the holisticness and dialectics in the functioning of this structure as we call “social formation”.
If we manage to understand the function of racism and population management in a white Christian and imperialist capitalist society this understanding of ours wouldn’t be racist itself if and only if we can see that the relationship between being white and christian and being imperialist and capitalist and racist is not a relation of logical necessity but a historical contingency. On the other hand anyone who implies a logical necessity between the two would be racist, as in the case of the anti-WASP Leftist who at least implies such a relationship as in the case of Ash Sarkar.
Althusser, who uses the concept of “social formation” while objecting to the Marxist topic, explains this as follows: There are three areas revolving within each other that are compared to discs that are partially affected by each other’s motion, but that can also move partly independently (such as the discs of an automatic transmission that increases adherence with the increasing speed).
1) The economic sphere (means and relations of production);
2) The political sphere (the instruments related to state apparatus);
3) The ideological sphere (the means and practices related to the cultural sphere, i.e State’s ideological apparatus).
This metaphor also explains that it is futile to address directly to an inequality existing in one of the three spheres. The three discs should be conceived as the integral organs of an organism that work together and secure each other. Any improvement in one sphere can only be achieved by means of a deed in another (or two others) sphere. For example, you cannot fight against the WASP racism by fabricating “heroes”, role models, intellectuals, etc out of the non-WASP population. In this way, you can only create mummers. You can not fight against the patriarchal ideology with women’s solidarity, on the contrary, you will draw the inter-gender fight to an even worse quagmire. You cannot make any bit progress by putting the opponent directly in front of you. Because against a malfunction that occurs on one disc, other discs work like antibodies and repair the faulty one. You have to go beyond the ideological sphere, fight in the political sphere (using your civic rights, judicial tools) and / or fight in the economic sphere.
Similarly, the struggle of a black to be an equal citizen to the white man cannot be reduced to the legal battle against a biased prosecutor in order to prove the innocence of the black suspect, as this will not be a result beyond the acquittal of the suspect. The struggle must be extended to the ideological and / or economic sphere. The black must enter into the same ideological sphere (education, art, culture, etc.) dominated by the white man and / or gain power in the economic sphere.
At right: Donald J.Harris, an individual above skin colors
According to this formula, assimilation (and eventually miscegenation) is inevitable, necessary and the prerequisite for success. We use this word by simply facing all the negative connotations mounted on it. Yes, the one who struggles for equality should definitely struggle to be assimilated in the sense of meeting with the “target” at common values that coincide at a higher level of universality.
Since Kamala’s father sublated his blackness in this sense, he scolded his daughter stuck into the anti-WASP identity politics. Thus, the father is progressive, the daughter is regressive.
So, all the stereotypes of anti-WASP leftism should be turned down. In addition to cultural assimilation, miscegenation, cross marriages between races and ethnicities — which are in fact the most effective forms of assimilation — should be encouraged. Cross marriages and miscegenation are the most effective solution to all types of racism. Exogamy, cross marriages and miscegenation are the salvation of humanity, both biologically and socially!
The left salaming the left: Rakosi versus Gramsci
After reviewing the presidential election program of Kamala Harris, Richard A. Epstein at the Hoover Institution wrote that she was a Salami socialist. The term Salami socialism is produced from the term Salami tactics. It refers to the method of “tear off a piece, tie it to yourself“, which was applied by the Soviet Union to connect Eastern European countries after World War II. A major opposition movement is sliced and a part of it is connected to itself by hiding the real purpose and showing short-term targets. The inventor of this tactic is said to be the Hungarian communist Matyas Rakosi. According to Epstein, such tactics were not only implemented by socialists. Mussolini started using this tactic in Italy in March 1922, Hitler also used it for the rule of the Third Reich in 1933.
Epstein is correct in determining Kamala Harris’ salami socialism, but he makes a mistake here: Kamala Harris implements salami tactics against a sound socialist alternative – not against the capitalist order.
Let’s see how Matyas Rakosi, the father of the term, manipulated Gramsci, and created a discord within the Italian socialists: In 1922, the Civil War ended in Russia, the Bolshevik gang launched the liberal economic policies, the NEP, to – supposedly – revive the economy, while in fact, consolidated their power in accordance to the Western imperialist support. Considering 1917 and the subsequent developments as a success story, the new compass of the Italian socialists became the Soviet regime.
On the other hand, the British intelligence employed Mussolini (who was wounded in 1917 and returned from the War and was still not completely stripped of his socialist identity) to propagate for Italy to continue War within the Entente Powers. Mussolini was payed weekly salaries for his duty for pro-war propaganda among the socialists. Gramsci had had sympathy for Mussolini during this period. Thus he supported the English-made theses that Mussolini was propagating. Therefore Gramsci was not respected or taken into consideration for being marked by his old-Mussolinism in the Comintern in March 1919. Right after the Comintern, he started to publish L’Ordine Nuovo magazine to propagate the Bolshevik model, beginning from May 1919.
Thus, when he went to Moscow in 1922, he met with Matyas Rakosi. Matyas Rakosi instructed Gramsci to turn down and replace Bordiga, the founder and leader of the Communist Party of Italy. Gramsci couldn’t have rejected this order of Rakosi. He parried with an answer like “conditions are not yet suitable”.
The left official history tells about the liquidation of the revisionist wing within the party as if it was an undisputed necessity to stop Mussolini fascism. This historiography dogmatically justifies Gramsci who advocated the liquidation of revisionists against Bordiga, since Bordiga used to follow a policy of balance with the revisionists. Thus, it is not even possible to discuss whether the – consciously or unconsciously applied – salami tactic of Gramsci, that was provoked by Matyas Rakosi, affected the decision of the King of Italy and the trends in the masses, and whether it could have more guaranteed the failure to stop Mussolini or not.
When we say the official history of the Left here, we do not only mean the historiography in the Soviet Union. The historiography of both European Marxism and Trotskyism, which claims making much “deeper” analyzes by bending and twisting Marx is even more scholastic than USSR historiography, since it still seeks extracting a tradition out of failure. While each defeat is attributed to theoretical errors or to the prematurity of the masses, it is never questioned how much their iconified leaders and prominent figures had really depended on their own “great ideals”. Failure stories are romanticized and glorified. The conflicts between the heroized figures are described as if they were due to very deep theoretical discrepencies. However, the real reason for factions was often very simple personal ambitions, jealousies, grudger and sometimes their becoming the tools for conflicting imperialist blocs.
Tulsi Gabbard’s scolding
Tulsi Gabbard, like Kamala Harris, was a candidate for the Democratic Party in the 2020 presidential elections. Tulsi Gabbard was also very angry at Kamala Harris’ talk about marijuana in the radio show. She said it is not funny that Kamala Harris saying “I am from Jamaica, of course I would have smoked marijuana”, when considering the number of people she made convicted of using marijuana during her service at the California Attorney General. Tulsi Gabbard said that the number of people Kamala had convicted by marijuana use was around 1500 and that she used to be strictly against the drug use while she was prosecutor. She accused Kamala Harris harshly, saying that she caused many prisoners to spend longer time in prisons due to the exploitation of inmates’ labor as free forced labor in prisons.
In the meantime, let’s also note that forced labor is a common practice in US prisons – prisoners are paid $1.5 (one and a half dollars) a day in exchange for forced labor, thereby passing behind the Article 13 of the Constitution, which prohibits slavery. As we have recently seen in Covid-19 crisis, the cheesiest and heaviest jobs in the USA, such as the burial of corpses in mass graves, are made by forced laborers. While there are plenty of research and criticism in the literature on gulags in the Stalin era USSR – for some reason – nobody is interested in the fact that the gulags were originally founded by the Bolshevik gang in 1919 and also that the “forced labor” phenomenon is still a contemporaty fact in the US today.
Kamala Harris responded to these accusations, saying she was proud of everything she did during her California AG service. When asked about Tulsi Gabbard’s accusations after the debate, she described them as the attacks by someone with 0.1% public support in the polls, to collect votes.
Tulsi Gabbard, a member of the House of Representatives, is one of the left-wing deputies of the Democratic Party. Although her skin is colored and known as a leftist, we cannot include her in the anti-WASP leftist circle. She is known to be born in Samoa, but few people know that she is of Indian origin, since she does not mention her origin and use it in politics as does Kamala Harris. However, she is the first Indian-origin deputy in the history of the USA. Tulsi Gabbard, a former soldier who participated in the invasion of Iraq, is known as a brave and frank person. She never profits out of a victimization discourse. Since 2012, she is a member of the House of Representatives (representing Hawaii) from the Democratic Party. Her father, Michael Gabbard, has been a Democratic Party senator in the Hawaii State Senate since 2006. Therefore, Tulsi Gabbard has a political culture from the family.
Tulsi Gabbard went to Damascus in January 2017 and had a private conversation with Bashar Assad, and when she returned, she said that there was actually no difference between the US mainstream media and ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) in similarly denigrating Assad. After this incident, Hillary Clinton, by using the media close to the Democratic Party, launched a smear campaign against Tulsi Gabbard, describing her as the favorite candidate of the Russians and accusing her of being a Russian apparatus. In the meantime, let’s recall that Trump has accused Hillary Clinton of being the founder of ISIS.
Hillary Clinton’s attack on Tulsi Gabbard reached its goal, and public support for Tulsi Gabbard decreased in the surveys conducted. Angered to be wasted by Hillary Clinton, Tulsi Gabbard called on President Trump in her tweets on October 31, 2019, asking to declare the role of Saudi Arabia in the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
These tensions, which also deal with Trump at the very center of the Democratic Party, were one of the special moments that showed an institutional fault line (establisment / anti-establishment clash) that cuts both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.
Lesson from John Marshall Harlan
Let’s take a brief look at the historical and legal processes of the black / white discrimination that persisted after the abolition of slavery. After slavery was abolished, the US executive elite made the U.S. Supreme Court to invent the “separate but equal” doctrine in order to prevent blacks from having the same rights as whites.
Since the members of the US Supreme Court are elected by the president who belongs to a political party and approved by the Senate of which members do also belong to political parties, this – so called – jurisdiction institution is actually severely open to the influence of politics.
The separate but equal doctrine is based on the decision of the US Supreme Court as a result of the Plessy x Ferguson case. The development of the case is as follows: The state of Massachusetts, which is against slavery, adopted the law of “Separate Car Act” in 1841. With this law, blacks and mixed-bloods were prohibited from traveling in the same train car with whites.
Article 13, which was put in the US Constitution in 1865, after the end of the American Civil War, banned slavery and forced labor – except some federal services such as serving as a jury in courts and in military service accepted as compulsory service. Again, after the end of the American Civil War, Article 14 that was put into force in the Constitution on July 9, 1868 accepted the equality of all people born in the US and became citizen of the US before the law. Thus, the verdict of the US Supreme Court in the case of Dred Scott x Sandford in 1857 had lost its validity (according to the decision in Dred Scott x Sandford case, Americans of slave origin were not considered as citizens).
Despite these developments, the state of Louisiana adopted the “Separate Car Act” law in 1890. Thereupon, the state’s “Citizenship Committee” (The Committee of Citizens) made a plan to bring this law to the US Supreme Court. Following this plan, in July 1892, Homer Plessy, who was a light brown skinned “Octoroon” (one per eight black mixed) got into the wagon of the whites. The detective, who came upon the complaint, asked Homer Plessy to go to the black car. Homer Plessy objected saying that he was a free US citizen of equal rights and refused to switch to another car and he is arrested. In the court, judge John H. Ferguson decided that the train company was right under the state law. Homer Plessy was convicted and fined $ 25. The lawyers then applied to the Louisiana Supreme Court. The case was lost here too. This situation paved the way for lawyers to apply to the US Supreme Court. The US Supreme Court undertook the case on May 18, 1896, and Homer Plessy’s objection was denied by 7-1.
The verdict of this case made history of the USA. Because the doctrine separate but equal was born due to this verdict. Although the doctrine was never mentioned in federal or state official correspondence with this stereotypical expression, the media stereotyped the verdict in this way and the public adopted this expression – separate but equal.
Although the initiative of the Citizenship Committee and Homer Plessy did not yield results for that day, the objection of one of the judges, John Marshall Harlan, who – like a knight – put an objection commentary on the verdict of the Supreme Court, registered a priceless lesson into the history of law, a thesis to be read 150 years later, not only in the field of law but also in the fields of political science and sociology. Let’s summarize the annotation of John Marshall Harlan as follows:
Every law has a wording and has a logic. Although the law “Separate Car Act” claims to ensure that blacks traveling in separate cars find seats to sit in peace in their own cars, whilst looking at the logic of the law one should notice that it envisages an arrangement that will continue the idea and assertion of the supremacy of whites. It is unquestionable that whites’ idea and claim to be superior is based on black’s slave past. The law, then, is against Article 13 of the Constitution, which prohibits slavery. On the other hand, although the law seems to guarantee that blacks can travel freely and comfortably in their own cars, it divides a wider social sphere (the train, landing-boarding platform, the train station and so on) preventing citizens’ contacting to each other and freely circulating in this larger social sphere than just cars. Thus, it restricts citizen’s freedom with an arrangement that leads to continue the idea of supremacy of whites. So the law is also in contradiction with Article 14 of the Constitution, which guarantees the equality of citizens before the law.
John Marshall Harlan’s argument is based on two important premises:
1) The ongoing unlawfulness is material and objective, as it is reproduced in the daily life practices of society, so the materiality and objectivity of this reproduction is also the subject of the lawyer – here we understand that John Marshall Harlan was an Althusserian, although Althusser lived after John Marshall Harlan.
2) Law cannot be an attribute to social reality and historical heritage – take another example such as the train car case: if you build separate schools for black children and white children on the ground that white families do not want their children to study in the same classrooms with the blacks, in other words, if you prioritize the “law” of the local culture and community, then, you cannot stop the ideological reproduction of racism. This issue is as current today as it was in the US of the 1890s: Let us recall the demands of Muslim families in France to exempt their daughters from swimming lessons and sports lessons at schools. The fact that the discriminatory demand here comes not from the “white man” but from the so called “oppressed immigrant” must not blind us from seeing the unlawfulness of the demand. When the French courts rejected these demands, they were accused for persecuting Muslim girls who wanted veiling due to their “beliefs”. The French courts, on the other hand, were looking at the logic – and not the wording – of the demand (as did John Marshall Harlan): having not taken the “belief” for granted (wording) but instead questionning it as a “social-material practice” having a particular function in social life (logic), we find the causality between the “decency” and the “veiling”, according to which, the French girl who wears her swimsuit and practices the swimming lesson is seen as “indecent”. Thus, the task of the lawyer is to breakdown the self-reproduction cycle of this racist, discriminatory logic of the muslim.
Let’s look at the women’s cafes of the pseudo-feminists and the pink train cars in Dubai today to see the current versions of the “Separate Car Act” law of the 1890s in the US. We see the same logic in them too: the pink metro cars in Dubai are reserved for women who cannot find a seat in normal cars and are harassed when returning to their wards after a hard working day; women’s cafes are designed for women to “socialize” comfortably in an environment without men and harassment … etc.
Can you see the salami tactics used by the obscurantist here: by offering a comforting and easily applicable “solution” in the short term, a real egalitarian solution that can be effective on a larger scale is thrown out of the agenda.
(All the harassing men are getting out of the wagon)
Source: The photo is provided by the Political Scientist Dr Setenay Nil Doğan, from her special inspection and observation mission to Dubai
With Alain Touraine sociology revising the “separate but equal” doctrine to “different but equal”, you will not be free from being discriminative, fascist and racist when you say “different” instead of “separate”. On the contrary, you fall into a deeper and hypocritical racism under the image of respect for the “different”. Therefore, the anti-WASP racism is even more dangerous than the open and vulgar Hitler racism.
IT rent oligarchy
Kamala Harris had agreed with San Francisco-based SCRB Strategies for the presidential candidacy campaign. The partners of this company are Juan Rodriguez, Avarell Smith, Sean Clegg and Laphonza Butler. The same company also worked for Kamala Harris in the senator elections. David Huynh, Emmy Ruiz and Angelique Cannon, who worked in Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the 2016 elections, were also involved in the election campaign of Kamala Harris. Other important figures of Kamala Harris’ campaign were Nathan Bakin, Missayr Boker, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Lily Adams and Ian Sams.
But besides all these wide staff, the real name at the head of the campaign was Maya Harris, Kamala’s sister. Maya who is two years younger than Kamala is lawyer too. She played an important role in Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the 2016 Presidential elections and is a very close person to Hillary Clinton.
Creative Artists Agency, Google Inc. and several major companies in California, such as 20th Century Fox, began to support Kamala Harris as soon as she announced her candidacy. The huge support that this big capital group announced at the very first moment of her candidacy makes us think that Kamala Harris was pushed into the race by this lobby. In the first 24 hours of Kamala Harris candidacy, a total of $ 1.5 million was donated from 38,000 people.
Subsequently, money was poured for Kamala Harris from US billionaires. Kamala Harris’ presidential nomination was supported by 30 US billionaires in the first quarter, 6 in the second quarter, and 10 in the third quarter.
The network of the sister Maya Harris and her husband, which played an important role in the campaign, is a bit complicated. Maya Harris’s husband, Tony West, was an assistant to the California Attorney General between 2001 and 2009 and was an African American lawyer from the Democratic Party, who worked in the California election campaign of the presidential election of Barack Obama in 2008.
In the autumn of 2017, Iranian immigrant Dara Khosrowshahi was appointed as the CEO of the Uber company. World media suddenly begin to inflate Dara Khosrowshahi by putting this appointment on the agenda. With tens of thousands of Iranian immigrants with many of them very successful in their business and professional lives, living in California, why did the media highlight and overrate this appointment of Dara Khosrowshahi? We cannot yet give a clear answer to this question. However, a hint may emerge from what we will explain below.
As soon as Dara Khosrowshahi was appointed Uber CEO, he hired Maya Harris’ husband Tony West as chief advisor and chief legal officer to Uber. Tony West is still the chief consultant of the Uber company.
The Uber company was founded in 2009 by Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp. Having become popular by being one of the first big examples of the merger of information technology with operating technology (IT + OT merger) it was quite well promoted by the media. However it started to financially suffer from the first moment of its establishment. Softbank, one of the giant companies of Japan, The Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund, one of the strongest funds in Saudi Arabia, and Matt Cohler, the biggest financier of Silicon Valley, became the partners of the company. Thanks to these partnership and support of these giant companies, the Uber company did not close, but the share of the two founding partners fell to 5%.
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is a member of one of the most important and wealthy immigrant families in the US and Canada. They fled Iran’s Islamic Revolution and settled in the US and Canada. His uncle Hassan Khosrowshahi was an Iranian billionaire who settled in Canada in 1982 and then founded the Future Shop. Hassan and his wife Nezhat Khosrowshahi sold Future Shop to US Best Buy Inc. for $ 580 million, in 2001. sold to the company. Hassan and Nezhat Khosrowshahi still own Persis Holdings, which is worth to $ 1.6 billion. Uncle Hassan Khosrowshahi is still on the advisory board of the “right-conservative” Fraser Institute.
Dara’s brother Kaveh Khosrowshahi is a manager at Allen & Co., an investment bank, and his brother, Mehrad Khosrowshahi, is the chief executive of consulting firm Confida Inc. Khosrowshahi’s twin cousins Hadi and Ali Portavi have invested in Facebook, Airbnb and Dropbox, while other cousin Amir Khosrowshahi sold IT company Nervana to Intel for $ 400 million. Prof Farzad Khosrowshahi, known as “Fuzzy”, another cousin of Dara, made Google Sheets. Another cousin, Avid Larizadeh Duggan, is an IT employee who has held important roles in E-bay and Skype.
These connections show a small part of Kamala Harris and her sister Maya Harris and her brother-in-law Tony West’s organic ties to silicon valley capital.
SCRB Strategies, which manages Kamala Harris’ campaign in the presidential race, reported news that Kamala Harris was preparing to enact a state law that improves the working conditions of the workers of companies such as Uber, Lyft and Postmates. According to these reports, Kamala Harris is a worker-friendly, socialist senator.
However the goose’s foot is not like that (our readers must get familiarized with this expression. It means: the truth is different than what people say or what people think). The goose’s foot is actually scalloped, as the following:
In 2018, the California Supreme Court concluded a lawsuit about the Dynamex shipping company. According to this decree, workers working for Dynamex via subcontractor companies were forced to be directly registered as the employees of the Dynamex’s permanent staff. Thus, contracted workers lacking job security became Dynamex’s permanent, insured employees. This decree was a precedent for other job hiring companies – such as Uber – via subcontracting companies. This decision of the California Supreme Court was approved by the state senate and the California House of Representatives and became a law called AB5 (Assembly Bill 5). With this law, hundreds of thousands of subcontractors in California were made permanent workers.
In fact, it seems that Kamala Harris has no role in the enactment of this law. She made this a propaganda tool while just watching the process. However, some media writed that “the worker-friendly” Kamala Harris supported the law despite her brother-in-law, Uber chief advisor, Tony West.
With this law, the Uber company, which has already been at loss for many years, was going into even greater losses. The company’s losses increased further after Dara Khosrowshahi became CEO of the company in 2017. According to the newly released data, Uber lost $ 2.2 billion in 2017, $ 1.8 billion in 2018, $ 2 billion in the first six months of 2019, and continues to go into deeper losses. Despite this loss, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi launched the company into cargo transportation. Uber invested $ 200 million in Chicago for the shipping business in the summer of 2019 and rented the old Post building at the city center for 10 years to make it the company’s main office. Dara Khosrowshahi’s reason for choosing Chicago was that the AB5 law enacted in California was not yet enacted in Illionis, where Chicago is located. Dara Khosrowshahi fired a total of 435 people who worked in the company’s product and engineering departments on September 11, 2019, because he was afraid of the AB5 law.
Although the Uber company has lost billions of dollars for years, it has acquired Careem, the taxi application company popular in the Middle East and North Africa in March 2019. Uber paid a total of $ 3.1 billion for Careem, $ 1.7 billion in cash and $ 1.4 billion in term bonds. Meanwhile, Uber’s shares were constantly falling. The Japanese Softbank and Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund still funded this bottomless well. Why?
To look for an answer to this question, let’s first look at Uber’s logic. Uber (and similar companies) typically do not work with the logic of making production by purchasing labor in a competitive capitalist order or by exchanging goods and services. They regulate a service sector that already exists, but operates in an irregular and inefficient way. Through this regulation that it imposes, it receives a commission from the service that is being exchanged.
The prerequisite for Uber to achieve this operation is that the service sector to be connected to rent is already operating irregularly, inefficiently and troubledly, within the free market irregularity.
Thus, the service provider and the service receiver, they both profit out of this increasing efficiency: those who chase a taxi in a rainy weather do not make umbrella fight with each other by attacking the same taxi; the customer reaches where they go without having to argue with the driver who does not know the way; the driver doesn’t have to return to the station by burning extra fuel and after leaving each customer, instead, parks in the first place s/he finds and reads book, waiting for a new customer request to fall on the screen. In return for this comfy and efficiency-enhancing arrangement, both the customer and the serfice provider pay a commission to a company in the USA, for the exchange of service and money between you and the taxi driver in front of your home.
Here, while examining Uber, we again create a Weberian “ideal type” like Kamala Harris. There are many companies working in Silicon Valley with a similar business model and the state of California has become the world’s richest geography in the 21st century, thanks to such business.
Uber’s operation is a totally different phenomenon than the traditional technology transfers, such as the introduction of British looms into India in the 19th century, the introduction of CNC machines into China in the 1980s, and so on. In these previous imperialist examples, there was a product output, a rising mass production and a comprador class collaborating with the “core” and managing the local production and marketing. Whereas in the Uber type arrangement, there is no such a product that is commercialized and supplied to the market. Uber doesn’t creat a new sector but regulates the relationship between the already existing economic actors. In a sense, it sets a new “law”. Thus, the operation here is not capitalist. It is a business model that existed for 5000 years long before capitalism. We can compare this “arrangement” to the function of the feudal lord who secures the market and the road and collects tribute in exchange for the “security” he offers against the attack of the bandits within his sovereignty. This is rent. Moreover, it is the purest and most primitive form of rent – just like land rent. Because there is even no a lasting infrastructure, an initial investment like a port, road, base station, building, telegraph line, bridge etc. that can be permanent and serve other purposes. You cannot use the application on your device for any other purpose. In addition, the developer can disable the application on your device at any time.
The exact similarity of this business model with landlordship shows that the information technologies (IT) are not the main distinguishing feature of this phenomenon as a historical and economic category. Without resorting to the concept of “information technologies” (IT) – which is a new phenomenon in history – we can still categorize the operation of an information technology firm as a purely rentier and non-capitalist activity.
When we look at the software side of the business, it is a product that one or two developers can produce within a two-month work, as we told above in the establishment story of Uber. However, since the software can be produced so easily and cannot be patented since it regulates the relationship between people, they have to act fast in establishing the political and economic partnerships in order to create a user pool and spread the application. As a matter of fact, the developers have gradually lost the ownership of their project to the founding partners. This is exactly similar to the decreasing in the share of the overlord in the land, who shared it with the guards, since he could not protect his land alone. However, despite this share division, rent income can still increase with the availability of an increasing number of slaves to cultivate the land and their more efficient operation.
The obstacles to the acceptance and dissemination of the regulatory concept in this type of business indicate the determinative antagonism that this business model is facing. The growth of the business is not based on capital power (money as capital), as it is thought. It is based on field domination. While the first generation IT firms were transforming communication, information, in other words, the cyber universe they have created into the rent area, this time, with the merger of IT + OT, this sector has now started to penetrate into the physical world, attributing the real economy into a rent extraction field. Therefore, the money support behind this expansion is not called capital (neither the C-M-C cycle nor the M-C-M cycle in the case, thus, the activity is not a capitalist). Money doesn’t function as capital but with it’s quality of seigniorage. Therefore the determinative antagonism appears when it penetrates into the field of other regulatory forces. If there is already a centralized regulatory oversight operating in the same sector in the same field, this central power will resist an external regulatory entry into the sector. The company that takes the initiative finds money as long as it can convince its investors that it can expand its field domination by purchasing its competitors. However, a regulatory / political central power that is already controlling the field can make this money dysfunctional: Uber can pay billions of dollars to liquidate his opponent, for example, buys Careem, but if this firm’s license is revoked, all his payment is lost. In the event that money cannot be backed by political power and / or cannot buy bureaucrats through bribes, etc., the seigniorage feature of money is lost. Therefore, it is vital for the IT oligarchy that the dollar maintains its seigniorage feature as a global reserve currency and can travel internationally without borders. Let us emphasize once again that money will not function as capital in this new type of imperialist expansion. Because there is no need to local collaborator economic actors (compradors) who also boost employment locally and share earnings, for this business model – as it used to be the case in classical capitalist-imperialist expansion.
In another possibility, the competitor that prevents entry may not be for sale: A Uber-like company may have already been established by the state and dominated the market (eg yandex taxi) in order to prevent the entry of a private company like Uber. In our age, this phenomenon of non-capitalist domination stuggles is the cause of new international tensions and possible wars.
The map above is from 2018. It shows the war in geographical spread although it is not up to date.
Examples can be replicated: imagine a mobile application that collects and evaluates the real time demand for fruit, vegetables, meat from their consumers at home and tells the peasant how many crops they need to collect from the field, how many animals they should send to the slaughter and so on, in order to maximize their profits… and that a Silicon Valley company implementing this “arrangement” receives a commission from the tomato, the egg we eat every day. Such a firm will begin to undertake the 2000-year basic function of the institution that we call the “state”, that is, the retention of the rural-urban bond, the food security, and while doing this, without participating in production, it will have created a new set of rules, a new “law”, both in the rural and in the urban. The hinterlands of the states, which were regressed in the neoliberal period and even collapsed in many geographies, promise numerous new rent areas like this.
We need to read the impact of Silicon Valley, which has become a rent oligarchy today, on American and world politics, within such a globalist x etatist antagonism. Standard imperialism theories do not explain the current situation. Because in the current case there are no an increasing organic composition of capital (OCC); neither a “world system” that gradually evolves into a single world empire (unity theory); nor the nation states that are competing and conflicting between each others that fits to the “rivalry doctrine”. Thus, advocating an international organization and resistance of the working class is incongruous too, since it does not correspond to the situation we analyzed here.
A group of intellectuals’ claim that by the term “globalist” it is meant “Jewish” and their seeking of anti-semitist motives hidden behind this term is actually nothing but to overlook this systemic phenomenon.
Gemeinschaft democracy
Now let’s examine Kamala Harris’ other close friends and other wealthy people from San Francisco who supported her campaign. In the US there is such a distinction called old money / new money. The concept of old money refers to at least 40-50 years or at least two generations of big wealth. The power of old money families is decisive on politics. Because they have the capacity to shape the ideological reproduction apparata of the system with huge donations they make to religious institutions, schools, universities and charities in the country. We can actually grasp this order of things in the US, as a gigantic “tribal community” order. However we cannot say that there is a “parallel state” in the US (as it was the Gulen’s Community’s “parallel” order in Turkey), because the US government is already a government of a congregational state structure as a whole. In the US the state is invisible in deep, and the government is visible, on the surface.
Among the old money families in California, the most important of these is the Getty family with members, Anne, Peter, Billy and Vanessa Getty, they are among the world’s richest families. Let’s take a brief look at the strength of the Getty family and the importance of the Billy and Vanessa Getty couple who are very close to Kamala Harris. The father Gordon Peter Getty, born in 1933, is still alive. They are of Scottish origin. Gordon Peter Getty’s father Jean Paul Getty, who owns dozens of companies, especially Getty Oil, was an important businessman for the UK as well as the United States. Billy Getty’s father, Gordon Peter Getty, sold Getty Oil for 10.1 billions dollar to Texaco in 1984, 8 years after his father died. Gordon Getty is one of the most important financiers of the Democratic Party. Gordon Getty’s wife Ann Getty and their son Peter Getty are also members of the Getty family who donated to Kamala Harris. This family’s open donor affects many delegates.
The Getty family also donated to Gevin Newsom in the 2018 California governor’s elections and declared their support openly. Gavin Newsom is actually the son of Bill Newsom, who is Gordon Getty’s childhood friend. Bill Newsom represented Gordon Getty at the Getty foundation, and handed the ransom to the kidnapper of Gordon Getty’s son John Paul Getty. He is such a close person to Getty family. The ability to easily elect his friend’s son to California governor shows how greatly influential the Getty family in California politics. And here is the American democracy, which is shown to the world as a perfect example: it’s true that it’s not a one-party autocracy, it’s indeed a two-party democracy which operates under such an aristocratic tradition.
The Democratic Party senator Nancy Pelosi’s husband, wealthy businessman Paul Pelosi; the former owner of the Fairmont hotels and the real estate billionaire Swigg family’s members , Susan, Steven, Darian, Mary, Marjorie and Roselyne “Cissie” Swigg; the widow wife of California’s famous journalist Herb Caen, Ann Moller Caen; the shipowner San Francisco tycoon John Traina’s son Trevor Traina who was appointed to the Austrian Embassy by President Trump; the widow of the toy industry baron John Bowes, Frances Bowes; the former US Secretary of State George Shultz’ wife, the California state protocol chief, billionaire Charlotte Mailliard Shultz; the founder of GAP textile company, Fisher family; the banker Schwab family, are the other names that supported Kamala Harris.
Thanks to such a California elite, Kamala Harris had been elected as the state chief prosecutor and was prepared to be a candidate for a presidential elections.
Indian Diaspora: California x England conflict
Although Kamala Harris’ father is Jamaican, she speaks very little about Jamaica. However, in every occasion before becoming a presidential candidate, she used to state that she was proud of her Indian mother’s career and activism. After she became a candidate for presidency, she did not say a word about her mother and the Indian diaspora too, as she started promoting herself as an African American.
Her mother Shyamalan Gopalan, who moved from India to the USA in 1960, is the daughter of an important Indian diplomat. Kamala Harris’ maternal grandfather P. V. Gopalan was one of the strict advocates of Indian independence and an important non-school diplomat of India. After Shyamalan Gopalan came to the USA, she married Jamaican Donald Harris and they had two daughters: Kamala and Maya. Then, Shyamalan had divorced from her husband. Shyamalan, an endocrinologist, has been a strict civil activist who also participated in human rights actions in the United States while conducting cancer research.
There is a historic coincidence that San Francisco Indian diaspora member senator Kamala Harris and the Indian diaspora which settled in the state of California at the turn of the century. But the San Francisco Indian diaspora did not feel themselves as “African-American” like Kamala Harris did. And the Ghadar Movement, the most important movement against the British colonialism, was organized in this city.
Now let’s look at the history of the Ghadar Movement – as it provides controversial insights to today’s anti-WASP leftism:
In 1911, a group started assassinations, bombings and robberies in India and left no trace behind them. Meanwhile, Sir Charles Cleveland, the head of the British intelligence in India, reported the existence of an independent group to the upper authorities. Sir William Curzon Wyllie, an officer of the British occupation army in India, who later served in the protectorate government, returned to England in 1901. Sir William Curzon Wyllie was killed by an Indian named Madan Lal Dhingra during a reception of the Indian National Association on July 1, 1909, while he was tasked with investigating the activities of Indian students studying in England. M.L. Dhingra also injured Cawas Lalcaca, who was trying to prevent the assassination. Sir W. Curzon Wyllie died immediately. Madan Lal Dhingra was caught by the invitees. He was tried in the Old Bailey court. He was sentenced to death and executed on August 17, 1909 at Pentonville prison, which is still used today. Communist-anarchist Guy Alfred, the publisher of the then-published magazine The Indian Sociologist, was convicted for 12 months in the labor camp for praising Dhingra in this magazine.
As a result of the investigations, it was revealed that, the head of the student residence – where the Indian students stay – Vinayak Savakar was behind these attacks. V. Savarkar was captured but was not executed for fear of making him a hero. He was first sent to Bombay and then to the Islands of Andaman called “Devil’s Island” to exile. He was released on January 6, 1924.
V. Savarkar’s friend Har Dayal settled in California in 1911 and established the new organisation center here for the independence of India. He also found a ready environment there thanks to many Indian immigrants settled in California. Between 1905 and 1910, thousands of Sikhs left India and they mostly settled in the state of California, as well as in China, Malaya, Burma, Canada, and in the other parts of USA, because of the famine in Punjab. Har Dayal had a close relationship with these Sikhs and other Indians and gained their support.
The British government asked the US government handing over Har Dayal who was held responsible for the ongoing terrorist incidents in India. However, the people in the US endorsed the Indians. US officials procastinated the handing over asking for evidence and then refused Britain’s request. Meanwhile, Har Dayal set up cell houses in China, Malay and Japan.
Meanwhile, the German militarist general Friedrich von Bernhardi, a spokesman for the Pan-Germanic movement, published his book “Germany and the next War” (Deutschland und der Nächste Krieg). In the book, he wrote about Germany’s complaints about England and wrote that a German x British war was inevitable. In the “Either World Power or Collapse” section of the book, he wrote that India was like a powder keg soon to explode and that Indian nationalists and Indian Muslims were against the British occupation and that this trend would escalate to riots in India and also in Egypt should a war between Britain and Germany would have started.
Although Friedrich von Bernhardi has noticed a potential for uprising in both India and Egypt for that day, we know that these expectations were not met in the First World War. The separation and factions within the Indian independence movements, Mahatma Gandhi, who used to live in London as a “student” for a long time – and shown as the sole leader of Indian independence – and the effects of his pacifism doctrine in avoiding the uprises and procastinating the independendence, are still not questioned and investigated by historians today.
Having read the book of Friedrich von Bernhardi, Har Dayal secretly contacted the German authorities. Har Dayal held a meeting in San Francisco with the pro-independence Indians on 31 December 1913. The German Consul General also attended the meeting. This group of Har Dayal is called the “Ghadar Movement“. The first members of the group were Bahai Parmanand, Sohan Sing Bhakna, Mohammed Ikbal Shedai, Kartar Sing Sarabha, Abdulhafız Mohammed Barakatullah, Sulaman Choudhary, Aamir Choudhary, Rashbehari Bose and Gulab Kaur.
On March 6, 1914, the German press began to show interest in India. The Berlin Tageblatt newspaper published a report under the heading “Britain’s Indian Problems” and disclosed that Indian independents were getting organised in California and sending illegal weapons to India from there. Two weeks after this article, US officials arrested Har Dayal. But Har Dayal disappeared with $ 1000 bail (although England had asked the US the handing Har Dayal over to England again).
Har Dayal then emerged in Switzerland – where the Bolshevik nomenclature were also settled in the same period – a month after he was released on bail. During all this period when this tension on Har Dayal was experienced between the US and the UK, Mahatma Gandhi was a “student” in London.
Although there have been some studies about those who participated in the Ghadar Movement in the early 20th century as we have explained above, the situation of the Indian diaspora outside this movement is not known. Indians who settled in the USA between 1960-1979 are called “first settlers”. This group is mostly an educated group who had studied science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Kamala Harris’ mother belongs to this group. These “first settler” Indians then brought their families from India after forming their careers and adapting to the new life they established in the US. Thus, the second group of Indians who settled in the US between 1980-1995 are called “families”. In this leriod if time, very large Indian families were formed in California. Then, the Indians who settled in the US between 1995 and 2015 are called the “information technology generation” (IT generation) since they mostly work in the IT sector.
This generation, mostly working as software developers in the 90s, jumped up to the managerial staff in Silicon Valley in the 2000s. Google’s CEO, Pichai Sundararajan, is one of the most important and effective Indians in the IT sector.
Most of the US Indian diaspora supports the Democratic Party. In 2016 presidential elections, 77% of Indo-Americans voted for Hillary Clinton.
The Indian diaspora is the minority group with the highest income in the USA. They say that they take the Jewish diaspora as an example in terms of using common mind, in doing business, determining political preferences and founding their social organizations. Prof Devesh Kapur from John Hopkins University studied the US Indian diaspora in his book “Diaspora, Development and Democracy: The Domestic Impact of International Migration from India” published in 2010 and brought the importance of this diaspora to the academia’s agenda. In the meantime, a non-governmental organization called “South Asian Americans Leading Together” (SAALT) was established in Takoma Park, Maryland, to bring the Indians living in the USA together, in 2000. This organization claims to be politically neutral. According to the research conducted by this organization, the number of illegal Indian immigrants in the USA was around 630,000.
The Indian diaspora, which is strong in education, finance and population, has started to show its power in the US Congress. The first Indian woman elected to the House of Representatives at the US Congress was Pramila Jayapal with the Democratic party. P. Jayapal was a deputy between 2015 and 2017. However, the first Indian deputy elected to the House of Representatives was Dalip Singh Saund. Dalip Saund was elected to the House of Representatives from the state of California in 1957 and remained in this post until January 3, 1963.
As of today, the only Indian senator in the US senate is Kamala Harris. There have been four Indians from the Democratic Party elected to the House of Representatives. Academician and lawyer Ro Khanna from California, from Pramila Jayapal from Washington state since 2017, doctor Amerish Babulal since 2014, businessman Raja Krishnamoorthi from Illinois since 2017, have been members of the House of Representatives.
Raja Krishnamoorthi, a member of the Democratic Party’s Illinois House of Representatives, introduced the phrase “Samosa Power” into political literature to express the power of Indian origins at the American Congress.
The Economist magazine published an article under the title of “Samosa Power” in its issue dated July 27, 2019 and tried to bring this phrase that Raja Krishnamoorthi coined into political literature to the world agenda. In this article, which should be read very carefully, there were two points that caught our attention:
First, the article was published while Kamala Harris was at the peak of her popularity in the US media with a survey rate of up to 25%. However, The Economist had – for some reason – crossed Kamala Harris with just a few words in this one-page long article. Second, The Economist emphasized the power of the Indian diaspora in the United States, while it usually doesn’t mention the situation of the Indians in Britain, despite the fact that Britain is considered as the main historical center of the Indian diaspora.
What was the reason of this indifference of The Economist to Kamala? Did it notice that the US people did not have sympathy for Kamala before anyone else? If so, this prediction of the magazine’s “ignoring” Kamala Harris was correct, since Kamala was eliminated from the race after short a while. On the other hand, was The Economist holding a political position against the strengthening of the elite diaspora in the USA as against to the fact that India was a 190-year-old colony of UK?
We can look for a clue to these two questions by looking at the capital composition of The Economist magazine. The magazine no longer belongs to the British Pearson family. The magazine is the property of the Economist Group company. 43.4% of the Economist Group company belongs to the Exor company owned by the Agnelli family, which also owns Fiat. 26% belongs to the Rothschild family. Other shares belong to the Cadbury, Schröder and Layton families. In addition, managers who have worked in the magazine for many years also have small shares. The Economist magazine is run by Gianni Agnelli’s grandson John Elkann and Lynn Forester who represents the Rothschild family. Thus we should take into account that the capital block to which these partnerships represent are purely European and British origin.
So, one should ask the following question: Are there signs of a sectoral conflict – in The Economist‘s view of Kamala Harris and the US Indian diaspora – of a capital block representing the real economy as opposed to the Silicon Valley?
On the other hand, Indians no longer demand Britain anymore. Despite the convenience of immigration to the UK (compared to the US), the UK is lag behind the United States in terms of business, money and living standards. This fact has turned the route of Indian immigrants to the United States. The Indian diaspora in England is about 1,825,000 people and we do not know how many mixed bloods are included in this number. It is known that this number is gradually decreasing after Brexit and successful Indians migrate to California. The Indian diaspora in the UK is now the 3rd and 4th generation. However, while it is seen that the Indian people in the USA are successful and prominent both in business and in politics, the Indian and generally South Asian people in England, by contrast, consist of an untrained and lumpen profile.
The projection of this difference between the US Indian diaspora and the British Indian diaspora also manifests itself in two distinct profiles in anti-WASP leftism:
Kamala may avoid to express her origins and seeks to speak on behalf of other non-WASP “victims” and in doing so, she also willingly uses a patriotic discourse. By contrast, the anti-WASP rhetoric on the UK side is full of reaction and hate – as we see in the example of Ash Sarkar – running on the same track as the new fascism.
Probabilistic democracy in the T-maze
Let’s look at now, how the pathways of the Silicon Valley Oligarchy intersect with the anti-WASP leftism.
The immigrant problem is a global phenomenon today. We cannot think of this phenomenon separately from the concept of state. For two reasons: First, the source of the immigrant problem is the phenomenon of failed states. Second, for immigrants who set out with a better life expectancy, the state is both an object of desire and a physical limiter for them. We have explained above that the Silicon Valley Oligarchy is structurally in contradiction with the state as it started to undertake the most basic functions of the state. Thus, two historical phenomena that are both the products of late capitalism – but that are no longer functioning in capitalist mode of production – overlap each other: the immigrant movement and the rentier oligarchy are on the same front. On the other hand, there is an etatist and centralist political spine that keeps the goal of bringing the money back from the rentier economy and to reunite it with the real economy (re-making the capital as opposed to seigniorage). The anti-WASP leftism is the ideology of rentier oligarchy that hides this fundamental antagonism.
After presenting this postulate, noe we can suggest an answer to Prof Karaömerlioğlu’s question. An interesting parity situation (50% / 50%) is observed when we look at the voting rates of the liberal democratic fronts and autocratic leaderships (that are simultaneously and evenly rising in different geographies and characterized by adjectives such as new fascism and neo-populism…) Why ?
We explain this phenomenon with the T-maze allegory used in mouse experiments, in experimental psychology. The feed is placed in one of the above dead ends of a simple T-shaped labyrinth and a tool that delivers an electric shock is placed on the opposite dead end. Hungry mice are released from the entrance at the lower end of T. After a few attempts, the mice learn to go in the correct direction to attain the feed. In how many attempts the mice learn to find the right way with their painful experiences is statistically recorded.
Then, the location of the bait is replaced by the location of the tool that delivers an electric shock. It is again statistically recorded in how many attempts the mice – who have been on the path they have learned and get the electrical shock – can manage to avoid their “path dependency” and manage re-learn to go to the right side where the bait is found.
The comparison between the two statistics gives a measure of how “enlightened” are the mice or how “dogmatic” they behave.
Although anti-WASP discourse is plastered with leftist romance, it is essentially a racist and fascist discourse. Although it claims to be anti-system and radical leftist, it’s distancing from the center is a fake radicalization. It is not an alternative to neo-fascism or neo-populism. So we can compare the situation of the voter in this vicious contradiction to the situation of mice in a T-maze with both bait and electric shock on both sides. In such a labyrinth, decisions cannot be rational, even neither irrational nor ideological. They inevitably becomes probabilistic, ie in parity.
Gratitude Note
We are thankful to the political scientist Dr Setenay Nil Doğan, who provided us WASP and anti-WASP conceptualizations and contributed to this study with her valuable ideas.
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