Pelosi Says Trump Steals Attention From Her Dead Billionaire Hero

Every spring since 2010, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been an honored guest speaker at the annual Peterson Foundation Fiscal Summit. Every year, she has put the essential liberal gloss on the inherently cruel deficit hawk propaganda underwritten by late Wall Street ultra-right billionaire Pete Peterson. Every year, she has helped to spread the mendacious message that it's not oligarchs like the Petersons who are impoverishing the population. It's selfish retirees and poor people who are gorging themselves on all those precious Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare benefits, and who are thereby ruining the lives of entire future generations.

The Democrats want to snip a bit here, slash a little there, while the boisterous Republicans want to go wild with machetes. This makes Pelosi one of the good guys. She knows how to cut deals about what to cut, and when, and make it all seem so reasonable and therapeutic.

She didn't get away with her sweetened snake oil this year, however.

This year, Pelosi's carefully scripted diverting of public attention from the actual class war to some utterly non-existent generational battle over meager health and retirement benefits was rudely hijacked by Donald Trump.

No, the president didn't storm the stage. He wasn't even a guest. But he might as well have been, given that CNN news personality Manu Raju acted as Trump's virtual conduit, repeating his recent insults to Pelosi verbatim, ("You're a nasty, vindictive, horrible person!")  and semi-successfully goading her into reacting.

Pelosi did not take at all kindly to Trump's oblique hijacking of CNN, which is usually such a reliable deficit hawk co-propagandist. In fact, she was so ticked off by Manu Raju's relentless refusal to stay on the austerity topic and to help her fear-monger about the alleged government debt crisis, at times she almost sounded like that recent notorious doctored stammering and slurring Facebook video of herself. 

But this clip of her Peterson Summit interview is no doubt authentic, given that it was directly uploaded by CNN, the most trusted name in news. She does seem to garble and skip over and truncate her words at times. You be the judge:

"I don't care what you ask me. I'm not going to talk about him any more!" she seethes to Raju, before proceeding to talk about Trump some more, before going on to blather about "the future" and immigrant Dreamers who are here through no fault of their own and who often fight rich men's wars. (thereby implying that the desperate relatives who brought them here are not also human beings deserving of safety and security.) Plus, she added, "we have to protect our democracy from The Russians."

Pelosi did not explain what The Russians have to do with dishonest centrist scare-mongering about the deficit while Congress has cruelly implemented budget austerity for regular people and corporate welfare for billionaires. But as long as the whole performance already had been hijacked anyway, why not throw The Russians in for good measure? Anything to divert the attention from Trump's diversion of the attention.

"If I had been invited here to talk about the president, I would have found better things to do at home," she fumed, to enthusiastic applause from the fiscally responsible attendees.

In case you have never heard of Pete Peterson, he was Richard Nixon's commerce secretary before going on to lead Lehman Brothers and then to make billions as co-founder, and later seller, of the Blackstone private equity group. He might be personally deceased, but his thriving dynasty ranks right up there with the Koch Brothers as one of the most powerful oligarchic influences on national policy that this country has ever seen.

Peterson used a now-debunked 2010 study by Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, purporting to show that austerity stimulates economic growth, to justify his demands for cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

As the Center for the Media and Democracy reports:

The economists both have ties to Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson. As the Center for Media and Democracy detailed in the online report, "The Peterson Pyramid," the Blackstone billionaire turned philanthropist has spent half a billion dollars to promote this chorus of calamity.

Through the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, Peterson has funded practically every think tank and non-profit that works on deficit- and debt-related issues, including his latest 2012 astroturf supergroup, "Fix the Debt.”

Reinhart, described glowingly by the New York Times as "the most influential female economist in the world," was a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics founded, chaired, and funded by Peterson. Reinhart is listed as participating in many Peterson Institute events, such as their 2012 fiscal summit along with Paul Ryan, Alan Simpson, and Tim Geithner, and numerous other Peterson lectures and events available on YouTube. She is married to economist and author Vincent Reinhart, who does similar work for the American Enterprise Institute, also funded by the Peterson Foundation.

Kenneth Rogoff is listed on the Advisory Board of the Peterson Institute. The Peterson Institute bankrolled and published a 2011 Rogoff-Reinhart book-length collaboration, "A Decade of Debt," where the authors apparently used the same flawed data to reach many of the same conclusions and warn ominously of a "debt burden" stretching into 2017 that "will weigh heavily on the public policy agenda of numerous advanced economies and global financial markets for some time to come."

But nonetheless, here's what Nancy Pelosi gushed at the fiscal confab this week as she compared Peterson to the dishonest and dastardly Donald Trump, implying that Trump was deliberately stomping on his grave:

 "Pete Peterson was a national hero. He was the personification of the American Dream. I loved him dearly. He cared deeply about working people. He knew that the national debt was a tax on our children. He always said to me, 'Nancy, always keep your eye on the budget!"

And boy, has she ever kept her gimlet eye on the budget! From convincing her Democratic majority to end long-term unemployment insurance in 2013 during the height of the financial crisis (just as impeaching Trump is "not worth it" now, holding up a budget deal just out of silly concern for the needs of millions of desperate people was "not worth it" then), to this year insisting on a Pay-Go rule as a means of killing Medicare For All before it ever comes out of committee, Nancy Pelosi, a multimillionaire in her own right, has always been a true servant of the Richest of the Rich. 

Naturally, the funding and terrible human costs of our trillion-dollar wars never come up for discussion, neither at Fiscal Summits nor in Congress. War is way too profitable. And the poor, the old, the sick, the precarious and the desperate are not profitable - as much as the oligarchy strives mightily to suck every last drop of sweat and blood from them. And, never once did Pelosi suggest that Trump's grotesque tax giveaway to the wealthy be reversed should Democrats regain power, massive deficit-creator that it is.

 For, as Pelosi lectured to an indebted socialist-leaning college student at a televised town hall in 2017, barely one month after Trump took office: "I have to say, we're capitalists. That's just how it is." 

And as much as she pretends to loathe Donald Trump, she also joined in the raucous bipartisan applause at this year's State of the Union speech when he vowed that socialism will never, ever come to the United States of America.

We'll just have to see about that. Pete Peterson is dead, and Nancy Pelosi has promised to retire by 2022, at the very latest. 

Still, the zombie austerians are not going down without a fight. 

Ever so coincidentally, just as the Fiscal Summit was wrapping up, the New York Times has published its latest scare-mongering piece about Social Security facing an insolvency crisis. The article is heavy on the need for retirees to tighten their belts and live on less, and totally lacking in the suggestion that the cap on FICA taxes be raised or even outright abolished. In other words, it's light on the idea that the Peterson Dynasty might have to fork over any of their excess cash to help their fellow human beings.

Molting Season For Deficit Hawks

Resident New York Times altar boy Ross Douthat slunk into the confessional last weekend and pleasured himself with what he called some righteous journalistic flagellation. Now that Republicans are firmly entrenched in power, and now that the billionaires and corporations have been gifted with the permanent tax cuts costing the public at least a trillion dollars per decade, Douthat has nobly decided to apologize for being so wrong about his life-long crusade against Big Bad Government. It turns it's been a pretty damned Good Big Government  all along, working as it has for the benefit of the very rich at the expense of everyone else.

So in the interests of the sated (for now) alpha-raptors of the oligarchy and the mid-term appetites of the Reptilpublican Party, Douthat is dutifully retreating to the molting room for recovering deficit hawks. He's clinging to his John Maynard Keynes breviary as he recites the Confiteor and pretends to shed some of that self-righteous plumage of his.

Through My Squawk, Through My Squawk, Through My Most Grievous Squawk

Douthat used to pretend to be afraid of inflation. But now that the tax overhaul will inflate the wallets of the Forbes 400 to bursting, he no longer has the appetite for bullshit which has already served its purpose:

Instead, in hindsight the most important economic argument of the early Obama years was between two schools of thought that agreed we should put more money into the economy and only disagreed about how to do it — the Keynesians who wanted massive government spending and the market monetarists who favored looser monetary policy. Today, both sides of that debate look far better than the strict fiscal and monetary hawks, and the endless arguments about Bowles-Simpson look like an interesting exercise that did not deserve so much swarming attention from politicians and the press.

So far, so good. But then again,

 There are always real limits on what government spending or tax cuts can accomplish and how far they can go. A society only has so much productive capacity, dumb tax cuts can be hoarded and dumb spending used to enrich special interests or subsidize social pathology, and too much spending can eventually induce inflation.

Despite his self-flagellation with a few loose strands of al dente pasta, Douthat still cannot resist labeling the lower classes as a "social pathology," can he? He simply cannot flagellate to the extent of redirecting his knout at the real pathologies: the Pentagon and Wall Street, aka the Military-Industrial Complex.

My published response to his column:

This sounds suspiciously like a mea culpa of convenience. Now that the obscenely rich have been awarded their reverse Robin Hood of a tax cut, it's finally safe for the deficit hawks to admit that the austerity they've been shoving down our throats for the past decade and longer was nothing but a scam to enrich the oligarchs like they've never been enriched before.

Since this will be an election year, of course it behooves the GOP to pretend to embrace Keynes and modern monetary theory while the embracing's good... for them and their paymasters, that is. As long as they can fool enough of the people in their gerrymandered districts about their sudden devotion to Medicare and Social Security, they can bide their time until November, when the safety net slashings can re-commence with gleeful abandon.

 Ross gives the whole cynical game away when he implies that Social Security recipients "misspend" their paltry monthly checks, and furthermore, that this worker-funded insurance program be means-tested. Do you see too many old people selfishly eating three meals a day, Ross? Irresponsibly blowing their noses on three-ply tissue instead of two-ply? Wastefully setting their thermostats at 68 degrees instead of a more seemly 55? I really am curious about how you expect people just barely scraping by as it is to save cash.

If deficits really don't matter (and they don't) then I challenge Ross to support expanded Social Security and Medicare for All.

Now, just because Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has sorely disappointed diehard deficit hawk Paul Ryan by vowing that Medicare and Social Security cuts will be off the table during this election year doesn't mean that vulnerable people still can't be punished in other creatively destructive ways.

That the leaders of both corporate political parties are getting together with the White House this week to wheel and deal and horse-trade and sausage-grind on the budget should be cause for great concern. Safety net cuts always work better when they're done in an opaque, bipartisan, accountability-free fashion. For example, the GOP might give an inch on DACA protections for young immigrants coupled with inhumane border crackdowns, while the Democrats might give a mile on more food stamp cuts and a major "reform" of the federal disability benefit system for the extremely poor. It always helps the oligarchic cause whenever they're forced to work in secret under an artificial deadline - in this case, the January 19th end to their bipartisan "continuing resolution" to keep the government open.

So while the deficit hawks might be in their merely temporary rest period, the molting of the Snakes in Suits will proceed at breakneck speed every day of the year. It has to. They are so engorged on their prey they have to keep shedding to grow all that shiny, scaly new skin and continue slithering around, searching for new victims to torture and kill. As usual, vast expenditures for perpetual war and the mass surveillance of citizens will not be subject to much, if any, debate.

In the serpentarium known as Congress, the Democrats are the baby boa constrictors, who lie around lethargically when they're not lovingly squeezing their victims - who, legend has it, "have nowhere else to go" - while they sleep. The Republicans are the friskier reptiles, puff adders and rattlesnakes who make a lot of show and noise as they sink their fangs into the body politic before they feed the bulk of the carcass to the King of All the Reptiles: the Corporocracy.

Lament at the Billionaire Zoo: "I Can't Believe I Ate the Whole Thing"