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September 24, 2019 at 10:12 am #105587ZooeyModerator
This is another “everyone here knows all this” article, but this one says it very well.
Why is Nancy Pelosi protecting Donald Trump?
There’s no point burbling about whether she is. From felony campaign finance violations, to collaborating with the Russians in the 2016 election, to multiple counts of obstructing justice, to emoluments-related self-dealing, to now extorting Ukraine to help take down Joe Biden, Trump is the most manifestly corrupt, conspicuously impeachable president in the history of the country.
Nancy Pelosi’s decision to not confront Trump on his rampant destruction of American institutions is not an accident. It is intentional, and purposeful. It amounts to actively protecting Trump as he carries out his reign of terror against America.
So, again, the question is, “Why is Nancy Pelosi protecting Donald Trump?”
She’s doing so because she represents many of the same economic interests that Trump does, and serves the same economic masters. And beyond simply economics, Trump is dismantling the capacity of democracy to stand up to capitalism, to hold capitalism accountable for its inflictions on the body politic and the planet. That is the foremost agenda of those self-same economic masters, and they are the ones that Pelosi serves.
In protecting Trump, Pelosi is protecting Trump’s devastation of the liberal economic and Constitutional orders that are the intrinsic essence of America. Her purpose is to let Trump get as much of the wrecking done under his watch as he can, so it will be all but impossible to reconstitute it later.
Both Trump and Pelosi are stewards—caretakers—of neoliberalism. That is the ideology begun under Ronald Reagan and carried out by every administration since. Neoliberalism promotes the interests of Great Wealth, the Ruling Elite, those that own and run the country. For neoliberalism to be fully realized, it must free capitalism from the constraints of democracy, because democracy is the only institution in society with the authority to stand up to capitalism. Neoliberalism manifests as policy in very specific ways.
In the economic sphere, it includes reducing the taxes imposed on Great Wealth so it can grow, unfettered, deregulating of all facets of the economy, fostering monopolization, and privatizing what had once been public commons, such as education. In political terms, neoliberalism achieves its agenda by packing the courts with right-wing ideologues who summarily disallow challenges to property, gerrymandering to reduce the voice of liberal or progressive votes, vote suppression such as by illegally purging voting rolls or removing voting stations from poor districts, and other artifices intended to impede the will of the people in favor of the prerogatives of the rich.
Neoliberalism is an encompassing ideology intended do destroy liberal democracy in favor of authoritarian oligarchy. When it is finished, neoliberalism will leave us with neo-feudalism, a retrograde, reactionary system where very few own everything and government exists only to protect the interests of those few. It will be a return to the days of the Bourbons, the Tudors, and the Hapsburgs, that is to the time before the political and philosophical revolutions of the 1600s and 1700s that we now call The Enlightenment. We are almost there, and Nancy Pelosi has been instrumental, in fact, essential, in shepherding that new neo-feudal order into being.
She is the single most influential steward of neoliberalism in the world. That’s why she occupies the office that she does: to look over and defend the interests of Great Wealth, the exclusive club of which she is a member. As so many commentators have observed, Pelosi is one of the shrewdest and most effective Speakers in the history of the House of Representatives. But you don’t get to that position unless you have repeatedly, convincingly, effectively proven your bonafides in promoting and protecting the interests of Great Wealth. Pelosi has.
She has served 17 terms in Congress. She has led the Democratic party in the House of Representatives since 2003. Pelosi’s genius is that she adroitly masks her neoliberal agenda under the façade of traditional liberalism. This has been possible because of the fissures within the Democratic party itself.
The Democratic party is, in fact, a party of two branches that happen to share a common social ideology. The Corporate (neoliberal) and Progressive branches of the Democratic party hold common values about access to abortion, support for LGBT rights, responsible gun control, race relations, etc. This is the penumbra under which the two branches nestle in a common, albeit uncomfortable, embrace.
But on economic matters, on foreign policy, and especially on the sanctity of democracy, the Corporate wing of the Democratic party has much more in common with Republicans, including Trump, than it does with real Democrats. Those are neoliberal values: passing national wealth to the already wealthy, and debilitating democracy from being able to regulate capitalism.
It is the values of this branch of her party, the Corporate branch, the neoliberal branch, that Pelosi is honoring as she resolutely impedes the impeachment of Trump. Her track record reveals her leadership as a Corporate Democrat, as a neoliberal, and as a political consigliere to Great Wealth.
Pelosi helped Bill Clinton, the original and archetypal Corporate Democrat, push through NAFTA so corporations could profit by transferring manufacturing jobs from the Midwest to Mexico. She helped Clinton create the suffocating media monopoly we live under today, end welfare as we know it, criminalize black-only crimes, and, most importantly, deregulate banking by abolishing Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law that separated commercial from investment banking. The result was the Great Recession, begun in 2008.
Pelosi was there and silent when, in 2000, the Supreme Court carried out a judicial coup d’etat to install George W. Bush as president. She voiced “unequivocal support and appreciation” to the same George W. Bush for his illegal and catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003. She promised to “stand shoulder to shoulder with the president,” on the Patriot Act, the most sweeping rescission of civil liberties in the country’s history.
She helped Barrack Obama betray his campaign promise to create a public option on health care, installing, instead, a gutless program—Obamacare—that doubled the stock prices of healthcare providers by having the government underwrite private provisioning of services while doing nothing to control the costs. She helped Obama shaft the five million families who lost their homes to foreclosure in the Great Recession, while the government shifted trillions of dollars to the same banks that caused the crash.
The economy that Pelosi, over her 32 years in Congress, helped create has failed to raise the inflation-adjusted wages of the average working American even a penny. It has dismantled more than 50,000 factories, shipping them to China so that American corporations could make greater profits by paying Chinese workers one tenth what they paid American workers. Then, when the devastated incomes of downsized workers were not enough to keep the economy afloat, Pelosi helped the government run up over $18 trillion in debts to pump things up, while keeping a restive, downwardly-mobile population pacified.
More than any person active in American politics today, it is Nancy Pelosi who midwifed the anemic economic recovery from the Great Recession that gave rise to the election of Donald Trump. And she was central to the Democratic National Committee kneecapping Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primaries. Polls indicated that Sanders would have handily defeated Trump.
Today, as the country desperately needs transformational leadership and policies, Pelosi stands “shoulder to shoulder” with Trump against Medicare for All, despite the likelihood that it could reduce annual health care spending by $2 trillion, a staggering 10% of the economy. She and her Corporate Democrats take tens of millions of dollars a year from fossil fuel companies, even as she blocks the Green New Deal. It is the only policy construct in play today that would both mitigate some of the apocalyptic damage from climate change, while revitalizing the economy by rebuilding it in a matter befitting twenty-first century needs.
However, immediately on re-ascension to power in January of this year, Pelosi announced a “Pay-Go” policy that will make it impossible to enact progressive legislation that might need deficits for their funding. This, despite her having shepherded in $18 trillion dollars of cumulative deficits since joining Congress in 1987. Much of that was accomplished by her endless sluicing of funds to the grotesquely gorged military, despite the country having no meaningful security challengers, and the military being unable to win any of its even trivial self-elected “wars.”
In virtually all of these actions, Pelosi is advancing the same neoliberal agenda as is Trump: shifting income and wealth to the already-richest, binding the working and middle classes to generations of debt servitude, all while undercutting the capacity of democracy to rein in the predatory excesses of capitalism. It is at once as looting operation on the accumulated wealth of the country, and a decapitation of Constitutional government.
Bill Barr, as Trump’s Roy Cohn, has effectively decreed that there will be no prosecution, or even investigation, of presidential transgressions, no matter how egregious or destructive. That leaves only a political remedy for Trump’s depredations against the Republic. But in disallowing impeachment, Pelosi has assured that that remedy is no longer available. Pelosi is directly, and personally, undermining the role of Congress as the sole institution of government designed to hold to account a corrupt, inept, and destructive executive.
In other words, Nancy Pelosi has single-handedly decided for the country that Trump will be unaccountable, above the law, and beyond the reach of the only remedy the Framers made available in the Constitution. By protecting Trump, she has licentiously, peremptorily created an autocrat, a monster, who continues to escalate his violence against the existing order, precisely because he knows that Pelosi provides him immunity from accountability. In Nancy Pelosi’s obdurate refusal to impeach Trump for his heinous assaults on law and the Constitution, we are witnessing in real time the end of the rule of law, of checks and balances, of Constitutional government. We are witnessing the end of the very concept of America.
September 24, 2019 at 10:36 am #105590wvParticipant“Both Trump and Pelosi are stewards—caretakers—of neoliberalism.”
Yeah, and if ya wanted to micro-cize the whole article down to its essence it would be that sentence.
Though, to my dying-day I will argue that its a mistake to ever use the word “neoliberalism” in any dialogue or article aimed at the masses. They dont know what it means. I test this all the time here in WV. They…dont…know…what…it…means. It loses them and confuses them.
I have tried to find terms they understand. ‘Corporate-Capitalism’ aint perfect but it gives em a better sense of what the point iz.
September 24, 2019 at 11:00 am #105591Billy_TParticipantTo me, the problem with “neoliberalism” usage is that it implies, or states directly, that this was something brand new on the scene, starting roughly in the early 70s. In reality, it was just a restoration of the previous regime, the one in effect before the Keynesian era. Sure, it was more sophisticated. Much more. And, yes, it added all kinds of “technocratic” methods and expertise, especially via an unprecedented onslaught of lobbyists, marketing, media.
But the big mistake “progressives” make when they use this term, is that they seem to be saying all was beautiful and wonderful and fair prior to neoliberalism’s rise, and that’s simply not true.
The Keynesian era was a brief pause of sorts, not some established norm for capitalism. And it happened due primarily to an unprecedented series of global events. And even it couldn’t have done the work of “democracy” without accepting a large group of “losers” as well . . . . Capitalism simply can’t operate without them. So, in the lower 48, it was minorities and women. In our colonies, it was everyone there but the 1%. Same thing via overseas labor in nations we didn’t control.
“Neoliberalism” was like the various restorations of monarchies in Europe, after brief “Republics.” It wasn’t new. And there’s a hard and a soft version. The two money parties represent each, respectively, at the moment.
September 24, 2019 at 11:13 am #105592Billy_TParticipantAbout that additional sophistication. Basically, the US government has always been all about protecting, promoting, bailing out, supplementing business. More than any other nation on earth, in fact. Prior to the Keynesian era, industry and the super rich didn’t have to do much at all to get the government to help them. It was understood. It was abnormal for them not to help them. Consequently, they didn’t need lobbyists and think tanks and major marketing sprees to get the government to listen. That was assumed.
But the Keynesian era, the Great Depression and WWII put a lot of those assumptions in doubt . . . at least from the point of view of the financial elite. So they became aggressively proactive in their own interests, starting in the 1960s, roughly, built up new infrastructures for protection and expansion, sent wave after wave of lobbyists to DC — again, they hadn’t needed them in the past, etc.
Conservatives and the further right led the charge. The center-right and the center followed with their own lite version. People to the left of center tried to fight back, failed and are still failing.
Boiled down, the GOP is the party of aggressive “hard” neoliberalism. The Dems are the party of “soft” neoliberalism. Americans should be able to boot both these parties out of power, as they don’t represent us. At all. But between the two? If we can only choose one wing of the War/Money Party? The least destructive of the two is the Dem wing. But our choices should include a thousand options beyond both of those wings.
September 24, 2019 at 11:30 am #105595ZooeyModeratorYeah. Getting rid of Republicans is only Phase One, and it’s the easiest part. We then have to overpower the Democrats. And NOTHING we ever accomplish will be permanent unless we cut out the corrupting influence of money in politics. Any gains we make will only be temporary. We have to make a law that Money is NOT free speech, and corporations are not “people.” We have to get rid of legal bribery. We have to stop the revolving door between lobbying, congress, and Wall St. We have to finance elections with public money, and implement Instant Runoff Voting. We have to break up the media monopolies. We have to undo the damage the GOP has done to the judicial system. And…as wv points out, in the Senate we are outnumbered 99-1. In the House, there are no more than about 10 people who would consider doing this, and it may be fewer than that.
And…so… there goes the planet.
Bash on, regardless.
September 24, 2019 at 12:04 pm #105601wvParticipantYeah. Getting rid of Republicans is only Phase One, and it’s the easiest part. We then have to overpower the Democrats….
…Bash on, regardless.
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Right. Haf to get rid of Dems, Reps, and Money-in-Politix.
In other words we need “Magical” solutions.
We need the people to magically wake up. To magically be able to think critically, after they’ve spent a lifetime of being dummed-down and corporotized.
Magic.
And yes, we bash on relentlessly, regardless. Indeed. Why not 🙂
I suppose we are doing pretty good for progressed-forward primodal ooze.
w
v
September 24, 2019 at 12:13 pm #105602Billy_TParticipantGood points, Zooey and WV.
The sword of Damocles has hung over my head for nearly 17 years now. So the likelihood of me witnessing the changes we so desperately need . . . the kinds of changes that oh so brave Greta Thunberg talks about . . . isn’t all that great. But I do hope her generation sees it happen. And she and people like her do give me hope that will happen.
Btw, Pelosi apparently will be meeting with the Dem Caucus at 4pm today. The topic is Impeachment. The emerging narrative is that she will go forward with the inquiry stage, due to the recent Ukrainian incident. She may have no more wiggle room to protect Trump or the status quo.
And a sidebar about “better messaging”: I don’t think the Dems should lead with Trump blocking their oversight attempts. Congress is incredibly unpopular with America right now, and this can come across as whining and looks very weak. Better, IMO, to talk about Trump and the GOP hiding their actions from “the American people,” keeping what they do secret, behind closed doors, preventing Americans from knowing what those in power are doing with their tax dollars, etc. Make it about corruption in the dark, and how Americans deserve all of this to be out in the open.
Again, Congress is too unpopular for it to be about the horse race between the two parties.
September 24, 2019 at 12:53 pm #105613wvParticipantBtw, Pelosi apparently will be meeting with the Dem Caucus at 4pm today. The topic is Impeachment..
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Well, ‘what we need’ is for 99 of them to vote to impeach themselves. And Trump.
And Antonio Brown, just to be thorough.
w
vSeptember 24, 2019 at 2:55 pm #105617ZooeyModeratorI agree with you on the messaging, but IF they go through with it, I’m gonna wager they don’t do that. Probably they will go with some Trump the Villain narrative. That would be a mistake, but….
September 24, 2019 at 5:45 pm #105620ZooeyModeratorShe’s calling his conduct “a violation of the law.”
I read somewhere this morning that such an approach might not be the best because a president doesn’t have to violate the law to be impeached, so she may have set the bar higher than it needs to be, but I dunno about any of that.
But…here we go.
September 24, 2019 at 6:23 pm #105622wvParticipantShe’s calling his conduct “a violation of the law.”
I read somewhere this morning that such an approach might not be the best because a president doesn’t have to violate the law to be impeached, so she may have set the bar higher than it needs to be, but I dunno about any of that.
But…here we go.
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What would be funny iz,
if the Politicians somehow impeached Trump — and then he won re-election, anyway.
(losing the popular vote again, of course 🙂 )Amerika.
w
vSeptember 25, 2019 at 10:10 am #105638ZooeyModerator=====================
What would be funny iz,
if the Politicians somehow impeached Trump — and then he won re-election, anyway.
(losing the popular vote again, of course )Amerika.
w
vBe a lot funnier if it were a movie instead of reality.
September 25, 2019 at 11:03 am #105643Billy_TParticipantAfter the Senate voted unanimously to release the Whistleblower report, it looks like the White House changed its mind a bit. The transcript of the call is out now.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/25/politics/donald-trump-ukraine-transcript/index.html
It’s beyond damning. It’s quite clearly a quid pro quo ask for help inventing dirt on Trump’s political opponent. And Barr is a part of it too. Giuliani and Barr.
Also, today, we learned that the Intel IG — a Trump appointee — lodged a criminal complaint that the DoJ stuffed. Conflict of interest, anyone? Barr is named as a part of the ask in the Trump phone call, and he gets to decide if the complaint goes forward?
Also of note: It looks like the new Ukrainian president was very willing to help Trump. If this call had remained secret — and it would have without the whistleblower — I’m betting he would have helped Trump invent dirt on Biden. Which leads to this question: How many other times has Trump done this? How many other nations are involved in his machinations?
September 25, 2019 at 2:49 pm #105656Billy_TParticipantThis is kind of interesting, and not very Pelosi-like:
Excerpt:
Trump tried to negotiate with Pelosi on the whistleblower complaint after she announced an impeachment inquiry. Pelosi told him to take a hike.
President Donald Trump reportedly reached out to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to negotiate about releasing a whistleblower complaint after she announced an impeachment inquiry into him on Tuesday.
Trump told the California Democrat he’d like to “figure this out,” NBC News’ Heidi Przybyla reported: “Hey, can we do something about this whistleblower complaint, can we work something out?”
Pelosi apparently swatted him down with a curt response: “Tell your people to obey the law.”
September 25, 2019 at 3:44 pm #105658ZooeyModeratorBarr denies he knew anything about this beforehand, and that may be true. It may not be. But the fact Trump said something about Barr proves nothing in itself.
The Dems have crossed the Rubicon now. They have to go for the throat, or they are screwed. I would think that there would be calls for Barr to recuse himself soon, and I would think they would start amping up the demands for testimony, documents, etc. I don’t know what avenues are available – what citing someone for Contempt of Congress actually MEANS legally, and so on, but they better have a strategy for compelling access to some of this stuff, or we’re going to watch the Dems punch away at the air the way they have been for nearly 3 years now.
They have to get the whistle blower report. The transcript is not enough, especially since it has passed through the White House filter. The whistle blower provided context, and probably had some dots to connect to this conversation. I don’t think the transcript of the call itself is the whole picture. If it is…the Dems are probably going to fail at this.
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