Democrats Boldly Pivot To Secret Wall Street Power Point Presentation

Maybe it's just a coincidence. But only hours after The Intercept published an interview with Ralph Nader, revealing that he'd personally telephoned House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to urge her to concentrate on "kitchen table issues," the New York Times up and announces that she will indeed be doing a complete 180 from her impeachment catastrophe to concentrate on kitchen table issues.

Without crediting Nader or mentioning his name, the Times puff piece attempts to rehabilitate Pelosi's tattered reputation and to convince its readers that her new Kitchen Table Initiative is both original and sincere.

But the attempt fails miserably. Maybe it's the subhead acknowledging that the Pelosi pivot is nothing but a gimmick to lure disaffected voters into the rapidly disintegrating centrist Democratic orbit. It's all talk and all strategy and no action whatsoever to make people's lives better.

As if to emphasize this cynical point, Pelosi brought in Wall Street mogul Steve Rattner to give a Power Point presentation to House members on how best to placate their constituents about an economy that serves Wall Street and punishes Main Street. This is according to "a person" who attended the secret session and shared the secret strategy with the Times. Since Rattner is also a regular columnist for the Times, let the guessing games begin.

 I'd call him a "disgraced Wall Street mogul" were it not for the fact that not only was he technically exonerated in 2010 for his financial malfeasance in a pay-to-play kickback scheme that stole from New York public employees -  he was handsomely rewarded for it. His Obama administration-assigned task of rescuing General Motors was accomplished by eviscerating its labor union and implementing a lower wage package for newer, non-unionized workers. And he got a lucrative book deal and the Times gave him his own column, which frequently harps upon the deficit and the need to cut social programs benefiting regular people while not taxing the uber-wealthy out of a couple of bucks.

His settlement with the government included a small fine and only a two-year ban from securities trading. It wasn't a slap on the wrist, it was a kiss on the hand.

Despite the top-secrecy of both Rattner's and Pelosi's private pep talks on strategy with congressional Dems, reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg magically manages to quote Madam Speaker directly:

“Health care, health care, health care,” the speaker said, describing the party’s message during a recent closed-door meeting, according to a person in the room who insisted on anonymity to reveal private conversations. She said they had to be laser-focused on getting re-elected: “When you make a decision to win, then you have to make every decision in favor of winning.”

If I were Pelosi, I think I'd insist on anonymity too. Those inanely quotable quotes make even Platitude Pete Buttigieg sound like Cicero by comparison. . She might have opted for "winners never quit and quitters never win, but that neoliberal aphorism would have failed to capture her far more sinister intent. That intent is to cruelly pretend to care about the voters for the duration of the campaign season, for the sole purpose of winning power and holding on to power. I'm not the one saying that. Pelosi is saying that through the ruling establishment organ known as the Paper of Record. It's as though she doesn't realize that ordinary people who read are thus also rendered cognizant of her machinations.

Pelosi has belatedly come to the realization that since her failed impeachment spectacle has only served to strengthen Donald Trump and to increase his popularity, it's time to change strategy and go through the neglected motions of serving constituents. There will be no further feeble or grandstanding efforts, other than from within individual committees, to rein Trump in.

But rather than, say, bowing to overwhelming popular demand and allowing Medicare For All legislation to advance from the limbo of its various subcommittees to a full floor debate,Pelosi distributed a "For the People recess packet" to her members,instructing them to visit food pantries, after-school programs and senior centers to prove to the voters that they really, really care.  These photo-ops would serve to "highlight" Trump's planned cuts to social welfare programs rather than to introduce concrete legislative plans to strengthen them as the final year of his first term plays out.

It's like the corporate "raising awareness" celebrity campaigns to combat various diseases like cancer while simultaneously fighting tooth and nail against taxing the rich to help pay for the universal guaranteed care of sick people

It's only toward the end of Stolberg's article that the real impetus for Pelosi's Racket Packet is revealed: the palpable plutocratic paranoia over Bernie Sanders. His rise in the polls, implies the Times, is every bit as bad as Trump's acquittal and the Iowa caucus debacle:

The move to put impeachment in the rearview mirror comes after a dismal two weeks for Democrats. First, the Iowa caucuses turned into an electoral debacle, with no clear winner. Then a triumphant Mr. Trump arrived at the Capitol on the eve of his acquittal to deliver his State of the Union address, which ended with a seething Ms. Pelosi ripping up the speech for all to see.The Senate acquitted Mr. Trump the next day. Then Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, won the Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire, jangling the nerves of moderate lawmakers who fear that having a self-described democratic socialist at the top of their party’s ticket will cost them their seats.

 Pelosi consigliere and fourth ranking House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries of New York is quoted as saying that since impeachment over one bribery scheme involving the withholding of high-tech missiles to Ukraine and possible subsequent financial harm to the weapons industry failed, we should just let Trump be Trump for the duration.

"His erratic, corrupt, unconstitutional behavior speaks for itself," shrugged Jeffries.

Although he has not yet joined with other members of the Congressional Black Caucus in formally endorsing that other oligarch, Michael Bloomberg, Jeffries is decidedly softening his once-strident criticism of the Stop and Frisk mayor. In a separate interview last week with GQ, Jeffries said he believes that Bloomberg's belated pandering apology for racial profiling was "heartfelt" because as a data geek, the former mayor finally looked at all the long-available data revealing that crime continued to go down after the courts finally put the kibosh on Bloomberg.

And just a few months ago, Jeffries very publicly welcomed Bloomberg to his "more the merrier" Democratic Party as a potential "change candidate" who can "get things done."

Letting Trump convict himself in the court of public opinion even as he ravages the public with renewed intensity with every passing day, and substituting pandering talk for even mild progressive action, is the exact opposite of Ralph Nader's prescription for Nancy Pelosi and her party.

He didn't suggest that her members simply drop by community centers and food banks to meaninglessly commiserate with people.He called on Pelosi to convene public hearings to which these ordinary people would be invited to testify and tell their own stories of life under Trump.

Such testimony, Nader said, would have far greater impact than the stories of a handful of State Department bureaucrats abused by Trump in the Ukrainegate scandal. But since such testimony would also implicate the Democratic side of the corporate duopoly, it's not going to happen.

"And what's really important here," Nader told The Intercept's Jeremy Scahill,  "is that she (Pelosi) wanted to tie up the Republicans in knots in the Senate and she only used one knot. She used one finger out of ten that could have been curled into a tough fist with very perceived abuses of the Constitution, of protective statutes, of income preservation and of turning over by Trump, turning over the U.S. government to Wall Street."

Of course, government by Wall Street was not only a done deal by the time Trump was elected, it was one of the main reasons why Trump was elected in the first place, chosen by millions of disgruntled victims of Wall Street over the corrupt tool of Wall Street known as Hillary Clinton.

The very fact that Pelosi actually took a phone call from Ralph Nader, whose stream of advisory letters to Obama and Bush in the past decade all went unanswered, is testament to her own mounting desperation. Nader readily admits that she simply wanted to pick his brain a little before she dispensed with his advice to hold public hearings.

She simply stole his idea for a Kitchen Table Initiative and turned it into a cynical propaganda campaign. And then she secretly called in Wall Street, in the person of of Steve Rattner, to give the Democratic majority their marching orders in a Power Point presentation.

Besides his regular gigs at the Times and on MSNBC's Morning Joe show,  Steve Rattner now primarily works for Michael Bloomberg, managing both his personal and philanthropic fortunes.

Way to pivot, Nancy! You're spinning your way right into a deep dark hole of your own corrupt making.

Biden Can Hide But He Can't Run

Status Quo Ante Uncle Joe's campaign has made the mistake of letting one pool reporter cover each of his big-dollar fundraisers in the interests of fairness and transparency.

On Monday night, Biden reportedly reassured a group of wealthy donors and lobbyists that he thinks quite well of the oligarchs whose interests they (and he) represent.

"Wall Street and significant bankers and people, they're all positive, they can be positive influences in the country. But they didn't build the country. The middle class built the country."

As for the Republican senators now so mysteriously in the thrall of Svengali Trump, Biden is cheerfully sanguine. Since he is essentially one of them, he is confident that he can jolt them out of their Trump hypnosis once he's back on the scene. Then they can relive the good old pre-Trump days of sedate racism, misogyny and generalized class war antics. All it will take, given that Biden has scrupulously avoided speaking to both the media and ordinary voters, is for the Democratic super-delegates to nominate him by acclaim at a brokered convention. Before that happens, though, the corporate media and his fellow candidates must be pressured into not attacking his debate performances as viciously as they will probably deserve to be attacked.

Meanwhile, Biden runs away from accountability, hiding behind closed doors as he dog-whistles to the Market:

"Here's the deal: we all know, and I don't think this is hyperbole, we all know in our gut this election is the most important election we've ever engaged in—and not just because I'm running," Biden said. "With Trump gone you're going to begin to see things change. Because these folks (his GOP pals) know better. They know this isn't what they're supposed to be doing."

Biden should just cut to the chase and admit that he's the candidate of the TINA (There Is No Alternative) Party. That acronym comes to us direct from the late British P.M. Margaret Thatcher, and it means that there is no alternative to cutthroat capitalism and a Hobbesian war of all against all.

That is why Biden and other "New Democrat" centrists of his ilk love to point to Trump as the only enemy that regular people should ever need to fight. It's better for the corporate wing of the party to sound the warning that Trump is the next Hitler who threatens to abolish democracy, cancel the election if he doesn't win, take over TV stations and newspapers, and send storm troopers into the streets to arrest well-heeled liberal #Resistance, Inc. freedom fighters. Oh, and threaten US standing in the world, as if increasing death rates in the US, crushing education debt, homelessness, police violence, gun violence and relentless coup attempts and bipartisan bombings abroad were not pre-existing reputation-killers enough.

We're instructed that it is up to political content-consumers ("we the people") to defeat Trump by electing a kinder, gentler, more discreet monster to regress the misery to those halcyon days of slow frog-boilings, in hopes that enough people will notice their pain less in the future than they are noticing it right now.

As long as we are still allowed to vote, then we should have nothing to complain about. Better to have dictatorship by the Market than dictatorship by a demagogue produced by the Market. 

To give you another example of how tainted Biden truly is, when I Googled "A.P. pool report" in hopes of getting a verbatim transcript of his Monday night remarks, what actually popped up on the front page were myriad reports of Biden's penchant for swimming naked in his pool in front of female Secret Service agents.

If that isn't bad enough, my search for the Biden pool report on the latest fundraiser also brought up the attempt in 2012 by his operatives to "edit" press accounts of his campaign appearances. This attempted censorship was on top of a separate controversial Obama White House directive to journalists to submit their stories for "quote approval" prior to publication. It was also on top of the the Obama administration's record war on whistleblowers and its spying on journalists.

So Trump's much-criticized verbal assault on the media as "enemy of the people" is not so much an anomaly as it is a direct extension of the no less frightening media suppression of free speech as practiced by the previous administration.

Biden is acting more like Candidate Hillary Clinton every day, hiding from the media as he sends out his various underlings to explain his unconvincing flip-flop over his Hyde Amendment support, to name just one recent controversy. You might remember that Hillary's campaign literally corralled the press behind ropes at public events in order to lessen the chances of them actually popping a non-scripted question at her. 

It is getting so desperately pathetic on the invisible Biden trail that his campaign actually tweeted out a picture of his special friendship bracelet memorializing his insipid good-buddy bond with Barack Obama. This image should make everybody just shut up and swoon, right? (Rather than, say, cackle or vomit.)

 Biden is not your normal phony candidate. He is an unabashed high-level factotum for the financialized economy, and a craven one at that. He tries to hide his naked history by ineptly draping himself with myriad spokeswomen and the first black president (who probably picked him as his running mate only to reassure conservative white voters that the first black conservative president didn't pose a threat to them.)

Biden keeps insisting that Trump is an anomaly who burst forth from the ether. He ignores the truth that the past four decades of transnational, labor-destroying, deregulated market neoliberalism - increased riches for the wealthy and increased poverty for everyone else - is the Petri dish that nourished Trump. And Biden himself provided a lot of those nutrients, what with his racist wars against drugs and welfare programs, not to mention his votes for corporate "trade" agreements like NAFTA and for the illegal Iraq War.

Trump is no anomaly, no creature from outer space.  He is a mutation. He is the birth-product of the tainted and inbred late-capitalist strain of Oligarchs Gone Wild.

And Joe Biden is among the fertility doctors whose depraved policies helped to create him.

"Doctor Moreau for President!" would make a good campaign slogan for Biden, don't you think?  

In fact, this picture of Biden posing in a flag-emblazoned laboratory setting with indicted blood-testing fraudster Elizabeth Holmes is the perfect campaign poster. It sends the message that while the anti-science Trump slashes and burns with a scowl on his face, Biden will always suck our blood with a jovial technocratic smile. The life-draining work of TINA will continue to be discreetly performed in the shadows of the gleaming laboratories of pseudo-democracy, just as Biden is conducting his fake presidential campaign right now.

Bring Back the Good Old Days of the Future!

Fifty Is Not So Nifty In Unequal America

People within a decade of retirement are at increased risk of not living their "golden years" in the same state of good health that their own parents enjoyed and in many cases continue to enjoy.

Sixty might be the new 40 for the rich and famous. But for too many people, it's become the new 80. The Great Recession has not only wiped out savings and jobs, it's been a main cause of premature aging and the development of chronic diseases which only get worse the longer that they go untreated. 

Depression-Era Photo Courtesy of the Social Security Administration

A study by University of Michigan researchers reveals that American workers in late middle age are at a higher risk of developing disease than the previous generation. People are forced to retire later, and they have fewer resources to pay for medical treatment and the high insurance premiums, co-pays and deductibles of the Affordable Care Act. Those who are within 10 years of qualifying for Social Security and Medicare are at especially high risk.

From UM's Health Care Institute for Policy and Innovation:

• Those born after 1967, who have to wait longer to receive their full Social Security benefits, tended to have higher rates of poor cognition, such as memory and thinking ability, in their 50s than the earlier cohort groups had at a similar age.
• When people in the latest-born birth cohort was asked at around age 50 to rate their own health, more of them said it was fair or poor—compared with lower percentages in the middle three birth cohorts when they were around 50.
• The later-born groups had higher percentages of people who had at least one limitation on their ability to perform a basic daily living task by themselves, such as shopping for groceries, taking medications or getting out of bed.
• There weren’t strong differences between the groups in physical function, such as being able to climb a flight of stairs without resting, lifting 10 pounds or walking several blocks.
• Stark differences in health between people with different levels of education were seen—echoing what other studies have shown. For instance, about 25 percent of people who had to wait until age 66 to claim full benefits and had less than 12 years of education reported at least one health-related life limitation when they were in their mid-50s. But among those who had more than 12 years of education and were in the same claiming group (age 66), only about 7 percent had at least one such limitation. Those whose education had stopped at high school graduation were in the middle.

Economic inequality has been growing steadily worse since the Reagan years. According to another survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the wealth gap among American senior citizens is the widest of any other developed country, with only Mexico and Chile doing worse.

 And if Donald Trump's regressive tax plan goes through, the divide will become even more extreme. Wealthy, healthy retirees will get to keep more of what their investments earn, and they'll be able to pass most of their money down to succeeding generations with the planned repeal of the estate tax.

No wonder that the predatory casino known as the Stock Market (heads they win, tails you lose) is posting record gains. These are gains for the rich at the expense of the rest of us. Meanwhile, Trump has even axed the Obama administration's milquetoast and rather cynical MyRa private retirement plan - for the quite logical reason that not enough workers have had the spare change to put into it.

Yet, the richest of the rich are still not satisfied with having it all. They want to extract every last penny from the poor, the old, and the sick.

"Centrist" Obama administration advisor and financier Steve Rattner, who had no qualms orchestrating the bailout of the auto industry after the 2008 crash, has now penned a New York Times op-ed warning of the dangers of Medicare for All. His elite class cringes at the very thought of hordes of vulnerable people escaping from poverty and illness. This unprecedented glut of healthy people threatens to suck the life right out of the billionaires - or at least prevent them from using their hoarded money to buy a larger mega-yacht or a fifth vacation home.

Of course, Rattner didn't put it quite like that. Rather, too much health care for too many people would have the awful affect of sinking the whole Democratic Party! What is more important than life itself, if not an exclusive political party?

Rattner begins with the stale argument that since Medicare for All proponent Bernie Sanders isn't even a Democrat, his proposals are absolute heresy, if not inherently un-American. This is definitely a question of Party Over People, especially when the partiers are billionaires and CEOs. And not only that - Sanders also viscerally offends the Upper Crust by dint of being a "crusty Vermont independent."

"A freight train is coming at us from the Left!" the Wall Street multimillionaire shrills in the proper spirit of Halloween and Krusty the Clown. 

That ghost train would run right over and crush the lucky few who now enjoy gold-plated health care. They would be inconvenienced if they were automatically enrolled in a Medicare-type health plan with little to no effort on their own parts. Single Payer insurance would take away all the pleasure of shopping and choosing among gold, silver, bronze, copper, plug nickel and paper plans. It wouldn't even require Internet access.

Even worse, public insurance would knock the joy right out of the booming stock market. Therefore, Rattner clownishly concludes, if Democrats would only get out their knives and join in the ghoulish fun and heartlessly deny single payer health care to the poor, the old and sick, they are bound to beat Trump in 2020!

Needless to say, the Times did not open Rattner's unhinged horror story to reader comments.

On a related note, though,  the Times is urging what it calls "consumers" (who apparently are human beings only secondarily) in that high-risk 50+ age bracket to blithely fork over $280 for a brand-new Shingles vaccine:

According to the C.D.C., almost 1 of every 3 people in the United States will contract shingles, a viral infection that can result in a painful rash and lasting nerve damage.

The disease, also known as herpes zoster, can range in severity from barely noticeable to debilitating. It is caused by the varicella-zoster virus, which also triggers chickenpox.

The newspaper made no mention of the cruel policies which have triggered the shameful morbidity and mortality rates in the richest country on the face of the earth.