After Ushering Us into a Coconut-Pilled Future, Let Nancy Pelosi Do All the Alleged Insider Trading She Wants
Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Like in my Shohei Ohtani sports gambling column, I need to legally cover my ass with Nancy Pelosi and introduce this Desus & Mero gif right up front as we are trafficking in insinuations based in the collective American imagination here, and the word “allegedly” is implied in all these charges as I have a little fun with a meme.
Nancy Pelosi, famously known as America’s greatest stock trader, is actually not the best according to the databases that track this stuff. She has had immense success in the market, but she is not perfect, and there are others in Congress who do better than her. Pelosi just gets all the attention on this widespread problem thanks to the dramatic rise in her net worth since she entered Congress and because she is perhaps the most well-known name left in it.
Our elected officials get information not privy to the public or even companies’ shareholders, yet are allowed to trade stocks that are influenced by this information, and the conflict of interest is obvious here even to a small child. “Insider trading” is a term that is mainly about people on the inside of the company trading its stock on knowledge they should not be trading on, and I would describe people in government doing it more like the baked-in corruption we have to come to know and hate in the descent of the American empire.
But after her all-time great performance in the shadows of the Democratic Party over the past month, I don’t care anymore. Let the G.O.A.T. trade.
By all available reporting, Pelosi was one of the main tacticians and soldiers in the fight to push Joe Biden off the ticket and Kamala on to it, and she also led the Congressional Walz-pilled caucus to pressure the party into a better future. The new vibes-based world we live in today was created in large part by the former Speaker of the House, so screw it, let her do whatever she wants now.
The post-1968 Democrats will forever be remembered for dragging the party far to the right through a toxic combination of fear, cynicism, anti-democratic impulses, and genuine conservative ideology. The Clintonian brand of neoliberalism got its start in the Carter administration, was put into action on the back of an Industrial Revolution-style event in the 1990s, then culminated with Barack Obama fumbling a generational bag and only pulling Mitt Romney and the Heritage Foundation’s healthcare plan out of it.
Joe Biden’s longtime rivalry with this ruling class bore fruit for rank-and-file Democrats desperate for the Party to return to its early and mid-20th century roots, as his transactional boots-on-the-ground style of politics clashes with the Party’s forty-plus year standard of detached neoliberalism by decree. Kamala Harris’s selection of Tim Walz as her vice president is another hopeful indication that we are leaving the superficial Clinton-Obama past behind, and entering a new era where liberal policy centers the Party’s focus.
And we can thank Nancy Pelosi for helping to drag these schmucks into a better future while the donor class plotted a coup and Barack Obama reportedly advocated to enable them with the terrible idea of a surely contentious open convention.
Besides, don’t you know how much money you could make from even just selling options in these volatile conditions? We can’t let an icon of finance miss this generational opportunity to establish some positions in the midst of a once-in-a-couple-of-decades regime change. The Japan carry trade is (maybe) dead, now there’s market inefficiencies to be found in them hills for anyone willing to dig, and she has long since proven that she and literally everyone else she works with just somehow know all the best spots to dig in!
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz should introduce the Nancy Pelosi Stock Trading Ban Act, which ends this farce in Congress once and for all…while also carving out an exception to let Pelosi do it until she retires. She reportedly did everything she could to save the Party from itself. This is her victory lap now. She’s earned it.