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.
