GOP: Be careful what you wish as Trumpism trashes affordability and regulatory enforcement. Last week, I caught a panel of experts on Stephanie Ruhle's new AM show on MSNow, who concluded it was the wild, wild west on Wall Street. That is a scary potential for our future becoming a crash and trash. . In the present era, that is a threatening cloud on the horizon, but now the new threat du jour the GOP sees is democratic socialism. In the wake of Democratic socialist candidates winning so much in the Democratic primaries last week in New York,, the right wing has found a new cause and has launched a political attack with howls of glee to paint all Democrats as the equivalent of communists (an echo of red scare tactic of the 1950's termonloty not heard by most voters who were not even born in the McCarthy era; it could work with some, though.. The GOP is not without its own wings, like de facto fascists and white nationalists. The political discourse is now as wild as Wall Street. New York is New York, and New York has never swung like the rest of the US, and all politics is very local there, so let's get a grip on reality.
If capitalism fears democratic socialism, it has only its own excesses to blame, but the GOP is hoping most voters, their own especially, remain ignorant of what is and what is not democratic socialism. or communism, for that matter. I'll leave that defining and name-calling to others and instead focus on what is happening, however, is reality, and who is feeling it. Unlike what Trumpists tout, Dow is not the measure that counts if resentment grows, because 80% of the economy is driven by what consumers do and feel. Consumer confidence is now in the dumps per polls. That gets reflected in political action and votes., Politically, there is a growing resentment that the "affordability" that middle-class consumers treasure is slipping from their grasp, and they are pointing the blame at those in power. and who are becoming trillionaires. The voters' buck stops there. Even some MAGA supporters are realizing that Trump betrayed them with his promises to lower their cost of living (AKA affordability).
There is an old truism: action creates reaction; To put it another way, extreme action begets extreme reaction. Capitalism is now facing a backlash of its own successes of the few,, causing the rise in political power of democratic socialism of many... For that, capitalism has only itself to blame. Capitalism also has the ability to address the anger it has caused... to observe the reforms resulting from the 2008 crash or. Due to Trump's public policies that favor the rich and his disdain for their pain, however, the concept that business can regulate itself flies in the face of humanity's great weakness: greed. Get it while the getting is good; never mind tomorrow. The will to self-regulate, or for the government to impose constraints on their excesses, does not exist, and consumers resent the results. As investors and Wall Street love their gains, ordinary people are just feeling their own loss in living standards.
The near-death of regulation is a ticking time bomb that has not yet been felt. Are we about to repeat the financial crash of 2008 or the scams of Bernie Madoff? Both are epic examples of a government's failure to enforce regulations. earlier in this century. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it is never more true than in the world of economics. The Trump regime is simply repeating what caused the 2008 crash and victims like those of Mdoff. The lack of regulatory enforcement. The result then was a strong backlash, evidenced by legislative reforms aimed at preventing a recurrence of the 2008 debacle. Laws without enforcement are not worth the paper they are written on.
Going back to the last century, the financial crash and poverty caused by the Great Depression led to FDR.His New Deal reforms and new government services were, in modern terms, an exercise in and implementation of what we now call democratic socialism, which is now inadequate to meet all the needs citizens demand as they struggle to keep up with even the basic economic needs of food and housing.
