Convicted like you’ve never seen before It’s a first America doesn’t need, and yet it does. The Washington Post reports yesterday’s news: Donald Trump was convicted Thursday on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in his New York state hush money case, becoming the first former U.S. president to be tried and found guilty of a crime. All of America watched in the aftermath of the Great Recession as its architects in the finance industry took home bonuses even as they took back the homes of families to whom they’d sold “No income, no asset” (NINA) loans, a.k.a. “liar loans.” The Department of the Treasury under Barack Obama “foamed the runway” for the banks to prevent hard landings in the crisis. But it left homeowners out in the cold. The Department of Justice looked the other way. The officials “at the very center of the 2008 crash — former Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, and former head of the New York Fed and Obama Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner,” wrote Ryan Cooper in 2018, wanted their successors to have “quiet authoritarian power to make sure financial elites like themselves do not pay for their misdeeds.” You noticed? So did the rest of us. The system was rigged, Elizabeth Warren said even before becoming a U.S senator. It wasn’t just conservative panic over shifting demographics and the election of the country’s first Black president that led in 2016 to the election of a chaos agent…