January 28, 2019:

She said, “We are here because the American Dream & our American democracy are under attack & on the line like never before.”

Senator Kamala Harris officially launched her campaign for Democratic presidential nomination at a rally at which she said the world & the United States were at an “inflection point”, attacked President Donald Trump’s policies, & invoked repeatedly her Indian-origin mother as her inspiration.

Harris had announced her White House 2020 run past week on Martin Luther King Day, but on Sunday, she kicked it off ceremonially in Oakland, California, where she was born & spent her formative years &  where she returned as a lawyer to start her career in law enforcement as a district attorney.

With a giant US national flag as the backdrop, Harris, 54, began by talking about her parents — Donald Harris, who came to the US from Jamaica, & Shyamala Gopalan Harris, who came from India. And said she &  her younger sister were raised to value public service and fight for justice.

Her mother would say, she said,”Don’t sit around a& d complain about things, do something’. Basically I think she was saying, ‘You’ve got to get up & stand up & don’t give up the fight’.” She mentioned her mother a couple of times & the word “fight” more than 20 times, in varying contexts.

Harris launched shortly into her reasons for the seeking the highest political office in the country. “We are here knowing that we are at an inflection point in the history of our world,” she said. “We are at an inflection point in the history of our nation.”

“We are here because the American Dream & our American democracy are under attack & on the line like never before.”

And in a thinly veiled reference to President Trump — who she did not name even once — she said, “we have leaders who lie &  bully & attack a free press & undermine our democratic institutions that’s not our America”. Trump has made more that 8,100 false & misleading statements since taking office, according to fact-checkers at The Washington Post, & has called press “the enemy of the people”.

Harris was scathing in her all-around criticism of the Trump administration. On immigration, Harris called the proposed wall along the border with Mexico the president’s “medieval vanity project” — & said it will not work & spoke of the administration’s practice of putting children separated from their families in “cages”.

The first-term senator addressed bluntly questions of race, anti-Semitism & discrimination of all kinds that have seen a resurgence.

“Let’s speak an uncomfortable but honest truth with one another: racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia are real in this country. They are age-old forms of hate with new fuel.” She mentioned the march of white supremacists in Charlottesville & the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburg.

On foreign policy, the senator said America’s position in the world has never been weaker than it is under the Trump administration. “Democratic values are under attack around the globe. When authoritarianism is on the march. When nuclear proliferation is on the rise. We have foreign powers infecting the White House like malware.”

Harris left barely any issue untouched in what was the most high-profile launch rally by any of the Democrats who in the fray so far — climate change is “not science fiction”; “too many unarmed black men & women are killed in America”; people are “drowning” in debt; “economy today is not working for working people”. Source Link

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