politics @lemmy.world jeffw @lemmy.world 4 mo. ago

Nancy Pelosi did what she’s always done

www.motherjones.com Nancy Pelosi did what she’s always done

The former speaker didn’t just help drive Joe Biden from the presidential race. She may have saved her legacy.

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Insider trading?
- Negative shit thrown at Pelosi in recent years:
  
  She got a haircut during COVID.
  
  She has a separate freezer for her ice cream.
  
  She profits greatly from stock trades.
  
  Two are non issues, and one is an issue that a great deal of congress members are guilty of.
  
  Knock it off.
  
  It's petty, it reduces her accomplishments to a meme, and it ignores the true scale of the problem that neither party wants to stop.
  
  I agree it's a problem but it isn't solely a Pelosi issue. This is misogyny on full display. She isn't the Speaker. She's in the minority party and not even the minority leader.
  
  Shutting down legitimate criticism of leadership is MAGA type thinking. Knock THAT off. Pretending the politicians you support are flawless or deflecting valid grievances with whataboutisms is not how you hold your party accountable for its shortcomings.
  
  So ~~last year~~ earlier this year when this issue was getting a lot of attention, this chart produced by unusualwhales.com was spread around:
  
  Looks kind of bad, right? SPY is being used for comparison, and it's near the bottom of that chart. Look at all those congress critters playing the market and winning! They must be corrupt.
  
  Except that this is a small fraction of the total membership of the US Congress. Out of 435 Representatives and 100 Senators, the 32 members shown here represent 6% of congress, and they have been specifically selected as the top performers. There's nothing exactly wrong with showing them in a chart this way, but it's very important to understand that this means 94% of congress members did not beat SPY. If you have the idea that congress members in general are substantially profiteering from stock trading, that is directly contradicted by the evidence.
  
  OK, so what about these top performers? Are they individually corrupt? How could we know?
  
  If certain members of congress were regularly using their legislative access to earn profit on the stock market, well that should show up in long-term statistics. If they do this a lot, they should be beating SPY consistently, right?
  
  So we can look at the larger chart from the 2023 report:
  
  And then we can compare it with the one from 2022:
  
  And so do we see any correlations? Well, no not really. The names at the top of 2023 are completely different from 2022. Nancy Pelosi actually lost about 20% of her portfololio value in 2022. There are a couple names that appear on both lists but their performance varies wildly from one year to the next.
  
  Obviously 2 years isn't enough data to identify real trends, but at least in this context we can see that you can't really justify the idea that stock trading corruption is common in congress. Only a small fraction of congress members do better than SPY in either 2022 or 2023, and they aren't the same people year to year.
  
  The vast majority of congress members have lower returns than SPY, and that is the only actual trend supported by the data.
  
  I'm cool with throwing them all in prison for it.
  
  Two are non issues, and one is an issue that a great deal of congress members are guilty of.
  
  Nope! She's not alone in the practice but as the speaker she greatly normalized the corruption and made incredible money at the cost of her constituents.
  
  She did a fair amount of good but her deserved legacy is someone who ripped off those she represented for her personal gain.
  
  Wait, so how many congress people have an ice cream freezer, then?
  
  She's an influencal member of Congress that was in the leadership postion and holds herself out as a defender of the working class as she blatantly enriched herself. She's fucking married to a investment banker. Responding to calling out a power elite for behavior they 100% engaged in as misogyny is a bit much.
  
  She IS a meme of old money greed. That's all it is.
In the month that followed President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate with Donald Trump, it has sometimes been hard to escape the conclusion that, for all the warnings that the Republican candidate was an existential threat to democratic governance who must be defeated in November, many of the people tasked with stopping him really didn’t seem to feel that way.

…

If there was one Biden comment that stung more than all the others, it was his response to a question from George Stephanopolous during his first post-debate interview about how he’d feel in January if Trump went on to win.

“I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did as good a job as I know I can do,” Biden said, “that’s what this is about.”

That answer. Right fucking there. He said that in the “recovery” interview and I said aloud “oh god we are completely fucked”. I was cautiously optimistic (albeit quite concerned on a lot of fronts) before, but that one limpdick, unenthusiastic, tired comment made me realize that Biden apparently did not seem to fully understand the stakes nor have his head in the game, and it made me absolutely fucking furious. Like, come the fuck on. You cannot do that in the face of a potential fascist takeover of government. That is objectively the wrong strategy. Fucking try harder, because the situation desperately calls for it. And if you can’t try harder, you need to get the fuck out, because you’re not the candidate we need.

So yeah; I’m absolutely fucking stoked that he stepped back from the campaign. But I’m still completely shocked and dismayed that he had to be literally saved by some careful prodding from Pelosi to avoid utterly shredding his political legacy - alongside, you know, democracy in America in general. The hubris in the context of the direness of the situation was quite simply appalling.

All that said, I’m absolutely ready to move on, back Kamala (or whoever gets the nomination, but realistically it’s going to be Kamala) and kick the fucking fascists in the teeth - electorally, for sure, but literally too, if necessary.
- This is how I felt in the debate when he called trump a liar and then turned around and was like I'd golf with you any time!
  
  Like wtf dude...trump should be in prison and tried to overthrow your election and you're like let's play the back nine quick?
  
  I think he was failing to make a quip about beating him at golf
- Ssssasooooo...wanna continue to be pissed after Trump is triumphed over? Cause we can all do a lot if we just STOP. FUCKING. NOT CARING. THE INSTANT A PRESIDENT IS ELECTED.
  
  Be like, "We don't like all the things." while also not being even remotely involved if it's not an election year. COME ON NOW.
  
  What about my comment leads you to believe I’m generally detached from political goings-on, or that I’m being anything but ruthlessly pragmatic in the context of what we need to do to defeat the fascists?
Great read.
- I have this little rule of thumb that the best articles I share often get the least upvotes lol. Probably just confirmation bias on my part but a lot of votes just come from how good the headline is
  
  It helps to add some quotes from the article into the post, to give your readers an idea of what it is they're about to click.

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