Here Comes Harris Policy

Harris to roll out economic plans as her econ team takes shape

Aug. 13: Harris economic team forming … Voters trust her more on the economy … Harris trumps Trump’s tip plan … Gaza reporting gaffes …

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Vice President Kamala Harris responds to protesters in Phoenix, AZ, Friday. (Screengrab / Campaign video.)

We now return you to the buzzkill portion of our campaign journey. Specifically, the part where TFN warns buzzkillingly that danger lurks in all the instant love that has flowed to Vice President Kamala Harris.

Yes, it feels great. And it’s an understandable human response to what feels like a great casting change after the movie’s first reel foreshadowed a very sad ending. 

But it was unhealthy from the get-go.

It’s one thing for people who favored Pres. Joe Biden over Donald Trump to get pumped about the switch. Total sense.

But who are all these people who weren’t on board with Biden but are now with Harris? Based on what? 

Two possibilities.

1) Harris has picked up folks who felt defeatist about Biden and were ergo causing his defeat. 

But what kind of sense does it make to say “I’m not with this guy because he can’t win without me — but I’m with her because she can win with me”?

Or 2) some people literally just dig the Harris vibe better, whatever aspect works for them: Gender, age, ethnicity, demeanor, whatever.

Which means that voters pre-Harris were effectively conceding the race based on nothing substantive whatsoever. And that Harris is winning based on absolutely zero policy differences.

Substacker Brian Beutler wrote about the fact that it’s not just that voters like Harris more. Despite those zero policy differences, voters trust her more with the economy. 

Beutler yoinked this Financial Times graph showing that Harris’s surge on the economy comes solely from people who were sitting on the sidelines. People, in other words, who had utterly surrendered their political power because vibes, and were willing to let the United States make a seismic shift in its trajectory because, again, vibes.

This is nutballs. There’s absolutely zero substantive reason to trust Harris more on the economy than the guy who pushed and won massive economic victories. Vibes isn’t a reason.

This is the electorate our forefathers warned us about and it’s terrifying. Not just because vibing was handing Trump the race, but because now it liberates Harris from any concern about winning voters over with policy.

And that comes with consequences.

On the stump, Harris has pushed legislation to codify abortion rights and expand voting rights after years of Supreme Court assaults thereon — but without specifics.

But she’s also dropped her opposition to fracking. And affiliated herself with Biden’s disastrous policy of putatively conditional arming of Israel.

Now the Associated Press reports that she’s rolling out policy stuff this week. Harris says it will focus on “the economy and what we need to do to bring down costs and also strengthen the economy overall.”

Harris comes from a law-enforcement background. Not economic, not financial regulation. In the Senate, the closest she came to the money was sitting on the Budget Committee, which is about spending it, not managing the economy.

So she’ll likely rely heavily on her economic team. Whom we’re now meeting.

Harris Economic Team Takes Shape

CNBC reported last night that the Harris economic team now includes “key advisor and sounding board” Brian Deese, former head of Biden’s National Economic Council [NEC]. That leaves a lot of room for ambiguity, but American Prospect Executive Editor David Dayen, who knows this shit, writes:

“Deese has a résumé to upset everyone: BlackRock experience, also was a good NEC that crafted much of the break with typical Dem policy on industrial manufacturing, full employment and more.

“I look at what he did in office and say it's good to have him in there.”

So look on Deese’s works, ye Newsfuckers, and rejoice! While ye may, anyway.

Because another Harris advisor is also a BlackRock veteran. That’s Mike Pyle, and in perfect CNBC style, CNBC cites his and Deese’s “key Wall Street experience that they bring to the Harris team.”

It’s important at moments like this — and especially before — to remember that Wall Street’s Primary Directive is to get our money. That’s the job. Not create jobs. Not grow the economy. Get. Our. Fucking. Money.

Now, are some money-getters savvy enough from their Wall Street experience to turn their evil eldritch knowledge to our benefit? Sure. Gary Gensler comes to mind.

But to assume that Wall Street experience in money-getting is “key” in helping politicians protect us from money-getting is like assuming that face-eating leopards are best qualified to protect our faces from leopard eatings.

Also on Team Harris is Deanne Millison, Harris’s previous chief economic advisor until last year, when she started working as a lobbyist for Ford (which isn’t quite as face-eating). I checked her lobbying disclosure filings, which show she was working on non-macro-face-eating issues like self-driving [sic] cars and implementing the Inflation Reduction Act.

Probably a good thing for Harris to have an old hand on board what with all those leopards.

Gene Sperling, a big name in these circles, is also advising Harris. Sperling led the NEC under Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, which should raise eyebrows what with Clinton’s financial deregulation (oops) and Obama’s bailouts and all. Sperling most recently oversaw the distribution of $1.9 trillion for Biden under the American Rescue Act, but it’s hard to say how much of that bailout went to folks other than the Wall Street/auto industry recipients of the previous bailouts.¹

What we’re not seeing in Harris’s mix is anyone partial to the Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) approach that made Sanders so popular and that, when actually implemented, made Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt one of the most popular presidents in U.S. history and also created the modern American economy and the rise of the middle class.

That absence might explain why the first economic policy specific we got was Harris following in the faux-populist footsteps of Trump. Harris yesterday said she supports what he pitched earlier this year: Ending taxes on tips for low- and middle-income earners.

The bad-idea-ness of this has been widely covered. (For one thing, every single job will now be incentivized to move to a tip model.)

To Harris’s credit, she beat Trump at his own game, upping the ante, as it were, by also supporting a much better idea, raising their minimum wage. In more fairness, the taxing-tips stuff is largely posturing as it’s unlikely to pass, so this is really more of a political move than anything substantive. Harris has smartly robbed Trump of a talking point on an issue that will likely never come to fruition.

But there are other warning signs. 

Other Warning Signs

Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan has been extraordinarily successful at putting the monopolies that shape our world on notice. Combined with the European regulatory not-fucking-around approach to Big Tech, Khan for the first time in decades has positioned us to take back at least some of our power.

But that may not last. 

Drop Site’s Ryan Grim flagged a worrying interview that Harris advisor and very popular Gov. Wes Moore (D-MD) gave, signaling a working-with-business approach from Harris’s regulatory regime. Which is not good. One does not create a healthy economy by partnering with face-eating leopards.

Grim specifically asked the Harris campaign whether she’d keep Khan — a transformative figure who is pissing off exactly the right people. The campaign gave a non-answer.

This, right now, is the time for conditional love. Unconditional love has no place in politics. It takes you off the table and frees politicians to craft policy not for you, but for those whose love isn’t unconditional. And we know who that is.

This is why we have the No-Stanning Rule!

If no one cares right now about Khan — or a million other things — Harris will focus on what will move the conditional lovers. You know: The money people.

The Harris administration’s genetic code is being written right now and if all they see from the masses is love, unsullied by policy priorities or personnel demands, they will of course bend more easily to those potential supporters who do express their priorities and demands.

Harris and the Hecklers

At Vice President Kamala Harris’s Phoenix, AZ, rally on Friday, she was again interrupted by protesters whose conditional love is focused on the daily drumbeat of Israeli atrocities coming out of Gaza and the virtual indifference/impotence of the entire international community to stop it.

Doing my weekly “The Fucking News” segment on The Nicole Sandler Show last night, I heard Nicole play Harris’s response to the protesters and was struck by this:

“We’re here to fight for our democracy, which includes respecting the voices that I think that we are hearing from [gesturing toward the protesters] … I have been clear, now is the time to get a cease-fire deal and get the hostage deal done… So I respect your voices, but we are here to now talk about this race.”

It would be nice to hear her grapple with their substance, which is that the United States is helping to kill civilians, in violation of State Department guidelines, U.S. law, and international law. That’s a political, policy, and moral problem she should address in detail and at length.

But leaving aside not playing my requested tunes, what she did say was great and a huge improvement over her previous response, in which she suggested that protesters want Donald Trump to win. Recognizing and respecting dissenting voices, without casting aspersions on their motives, is a huge leap for her to take in just a couple days. It’s the bedrock for party unity and it’s worth celebrating.

As for Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) on the other hand, the man makes Mr. Rogers look like Mr. Crowley and as an adversarial journalist and die-hard contrarian, I will not stand for this. 

I have a very special set of skills, and as Gandalf is my witness, I will find something on this man. The time he didn’t scoop his dog’s poop. Caught on a Ring cam picking his nose. I will GET you, socialist Satan!

Depressing Gaza Stuff

I haven’t written much about Israel and Gaza lately because I don’t know that wallowing in despair does any good. We know it’s horrific.

But I do think it’s important to flag those moments when relevant institutions aren’t doing what they should about it.

And what the institution of the press should do is get shit right. Yes, there will be propaganda swallowed whole. Which you correct when you know.

But that’s not happening. Not enough.

Drop Site News has the first-hand account of journalist Arvind Dilawar recounting how a story of his in the New York Times had a major stinky doody piece of bullshit in it — about a break-in at a pro-Israeli official’s home in New Jersey, part of a pattern of antisemitic abuse.

• Problem 1) It didn’t happen. 

• Really fucking big Problem 2) The Times wouldn’t correct the story.

Then there’s the Wall Street Journal. Over the weekend, Semafor’s Max Tani reported on the reporting behind that explosive January story that Israeli intelligence estimated that 10% of the UN’s refugee agency had ties to militant groups.

That story and a previous one in the Times led to the agency losing $450 million in funding. At a time when it needs funding.

As Tani reports, the Journal still doesn’t know if the Israeli intelligence is true. “[T]he Israeli claims haven’t been backed up by solid evidence,” according to an internal email Tani saw.

All this, of course, is another reason not to report on or freak out about every allegation instantly. But it also means we need our institutions to do better so that we are freaking out accurately.

Some Petty, Schadenfreudian Slips

Newsfuckers who eat their vegetables and make it through National Economic Council discussions deserve treats. Today, we offer treats which I can in no way justify as legitimate news other than making a half-assed stab that they’re indicators of the Donald Trump campaign’s top-down slip-shoddiness.

Last night, Trump and Tesla/SpaceX/X CEO Elon Musk attempted to have a conversation on Twitter. “Attempted” because tech wizard Musk’s platform couldn’t do it at first and glitched out. But also “attempted” because it wasn’t a conversation, as Musk claimed, much as he claims cars drive themselves although they do not.

I don’t think much any news was made, so I don’t want to linger on it, except to note that Trump spent quite a bit of time grousing about technical delays during his National Association of Black Journalists appearance, but doesn’t seem to have minded Musk’s own platform fucking up. Not to mention that at Trump’s own fucking hotel they couldn’t even mic the journalists at last week’s news conference.

There are other signs of campaign incompetence. Like, literal signs.

Signage is not easy. You can’t just slap words, um, slapdash on your signs. If your campaign does do that, you get words that are too small, meaning from a distance your “You’re Fired” signs look like they’re firing…you.

To wit, this inset from a Getty picture of Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) at an Aug. 3 rally in Atlanta, GA, that The New Republic spotted.

I mean, you can look at it close up, even, in video from the same rally, and it looks the same.

Even when the “You’re Fired” guy, Trump himself, is on stage, it looks like the signs are directed at/firing him. I’m not imagining it!

If you squint, you can just make out that someone put the words “Lyin’ Kamala” in smaller and lighter type above “You’re Fired.” Possibly written with lemon juice.

This means the Trump campaign either had multiple people not getting this shit right — out of incompetence/inexperience/whatever — or it means somewhere in their ranks toils a hero. If so, Newsfuckers everywhere salute you, clandestine sign-fucker.

On Tuesday, in Pennsylvania, our sneaky sign-fucker sign-fucked again in the name of freedom and, apparently, of Vice Pres. Kamala Harris.

Here’s Vance standing in front of a sign that reads “Kamala Chaos” or would read “Kamala Chaos” if it had been placed higher and/or if human beings were see-through. Literally see-through, not see-through in the sense of Vance’s many convenient transformations.

The symbolism is poetically perfect. The Trump campaign is inadvertently promoting Kamala Harris because it literally did not take into account the existence of other human beings.

Anyway, the point is, keep up the fine work, sign-fucker. Semper fuck!

TCB

Lemme say right up front that newsfucking, like real fucking, is not a competition. It, too, is a dialogue, a dance, sublime connection that transcends language.

Which doesn’t mean some people aren’t great at it.

I see you glorious Newsfuckers restacking TFN, and sharing TFN on your socials.

But yesterday we got a game-changer. Newsfuckers, I give you The Substack Profile of the Week, if not 2024 Q3:

Name redacted to protect the awesome, obvi, but I am honored beyond words, fellow Newsfucker!

You can also support TFN — more reporting on Vance is in the works, fer instance — by becoming a paid subscriber or making a one-time donation.

And I saw all you new financial supporters yesterday! I will choose to interpret it as support for original reporting, rather than me being an emotionally manipulative bastard, because that is what I choose.

Come say hi on Threads, Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, Spoutible, and still for some reason Twitter. I see you, Newsfuckers!

Go get ‘em, kids.

1. Fine, I looked it up and it looks like there’s no big alarm bells ringing about the allocation, other than the fact that some of it’s still unused.