When Will the Democrats Learn?

(c) by Mark Dempsey

"Nobody has been corrected; no one has forgotten anything, nor learned anything." - The Chevalier de Panat (often attributed to Talleyrand, about the aristocrats' response to the French revolution).

That quote sprang to mind after reading a resignation account from Ruth Marcus, a former Washington Post employee. She quit after the owner, Jeff Bezos, instructed the paper's editorial staff to promote "free markets and personal liberty," and to not endorse a candidate in the Harris v. Trump election of 2024. 

Ms. Marcus condemns Bezos, and the Post retiring presidential endorsements, but says nothing about how the Democrats deserved to lose. To this writer, that same inability to acknowledge failure in anyone but one's opponents continues to be the Democratic party's response to Trump.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not endorsing Trump. It's obvious that he's the "wrecking ball president," thrown, like a hand grenade into Washington's political and public policy system. He's chaotic, and incompetent. He's made America not "Great," but a laughingstock. Here's an apt description that came out after his first presidential victory. It still applies:

“Trump will not be defeated by educating voters, by exposing his many foibles and inadequacies. Highlighting what’s wrong with him is futile; his supporters didn’t elect him because they mistook him for a competent administrator or a decent man. They’re angry, not stupid. Trump is an agent of disruption — indeed, of revenge.....Workers now sense that economic justice — a condition in which labor and capital recognize and value each other — is permanently out of reach; the class war is over and it was an absolute rout: insatiable parasites control everything now, and even drain us gratuitously, as if exacting reparations for the money and effort they spent taming us. The economy itself, and the institutions protecting it, must be attacked, and actually crippled, to get the attention of the smug patricians in charge. Two decades of appealing to justice, proportion, and common decency have yielded nothing." - Thomas Greene (Noteworthy):

The question we're still waiting for "Team Blue" to answer is "What was so bad it needed to be destroyed by a wrecking ball?" 

So...to Trump's supporters, he was a protest against a system rigged to produce more than eight million foreclosures thanks to subprime mortgages and the beggar-on-every-corner economy we currently enjoy.  The Obama presidency, for all its "hope and change" proved to be more Caspar Milquetoast than FDR. 

Thanks to predecessors of both parties, Obama inherited the worst bank crises in US history. The subprime/derivates meltdown, now called the "Global Financial Crisis" (GFC) was literally seventy times larger than the previous biggest-ever financial and political problem, the Savings & Loans (S&Ls) scandal. 

But when it came to the S&Ls--which Reagan's initial strategy of deregulation worsened--regulators responded. They filed more than thirty thousand referrals for criminal prosecution and the Attorney General prosecuted more than twelve hundred cases with a ninety percent conviction rate. They got big fish, too--Mike Milken and Charles Keating among them.

Fast forward to the 70-times-larger GFC. How many referrals for criminal prosecution from the Obama regulators? Zero. Attorney General Eric Holder prosecuted about a dozen cases, all small fish. 

The template for how they treated the really big (seventy times bigger) criminals was how they treated Angelo Mozilo, whose frauds crashed Countrywide Mortgage as he made nearly a half-billion dollars in the process. The Justice Dept. fined Mozilo dimes on the dollar of his loot, without even requesting a confession of guilt--which makes the civil cases harder to prosecute. Mozilo, with his fellow criminals, got our central bank ("The Fed") to extend $16-$29 trillion in credit to the financial sector, at least according to its own congressionally-mandated audit. For only $9 trillion the Fed could have paid off all the mortgages in the country, but saving the banks was perhaps more important.

So...the Democrats were complicit in one of the largest thefts in human history. The indignation about how manufacturing has been shipped overseas, and how criminals got a "get out of jail free" card from the Obama administration inspired voters to vote for the wrecking ball. And until the Democrats have their come-to-Jesus moment, and repent their cowardly behavior, they'll continue to inspire more wrecking. 

There's a Russian sentiment the US has yet to learn: "Nothing's so bad it can't get worse." We'll see something like that in action in the years to come. And if the "smug patricians" continue to insist on the victor's spoils in the class war underway, the underclass will continue to elect wrecking balls until all of us--the guilty and the innocent--are swept away in the undertow of history.