Entrenched economic power fights needed reform

There’s something twisted about the upper crust in America attacking legislation to protect middle class consumers.

And that’s exactly what we’re seeing in high roller opposition to a proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency, to equitable health care reform, to an expanded Clean Water Restoration Act, and to various stimulus efforts in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Of course, the party that brought us to the edge of national bankruptcy would be opposed anything that hindered it from covering up its tracks in tall tales and whopping lies.

But by attacking middle-class consumers along ideological lines, the upper crust is defeating its own propaganda. It turns out that what’s good for predatory big business is not good for the rest of us. Groups like the national Chamber of Commerce, the Republican Party, and Big Bank, Big Pharma, Big Insurance, and other Big Rip-Off lobbyists that have made it all now irrefutably clear that they don’t give a rat’s behind about the rest of us.

This is bald class warfare. And the millions of Americans who voted for change will never forget it.

There’s no such thing anymore as the loyal opposition. There are badgerers of quality minority judicial candidates, fantastically rich pharmaceutical and insurance companies that want to keep rationing health care by price and price alone, business organizations that want no public oversight while wallowing in public bailouts so they can keep fleecing us of every dime they can find. Nearly 85 percent of Americans support structural changes in health care insurance. How long can a political party and the upper class it represents survive bucking those odds?

Middle class consumers are the goose that laid golden egg for our economy and for merchandisers around the world. Everyone knows this. When the goose stops buying because it’s broke, economies collapse.

Health care and insurance inflation are killing us all. There’s no way we can continuing the kind of buying spree that the market depends on. We need relief.

And the very people who have made the most of American consumer culture are balking at helping the consumer afford to consume.

Virtually everyone I know, myself included, has a long history of being gouged, deluded, given the runaround by financial institutions who want the golden egg, but treat us all like silly geese with hidden charges. Why shouldn’t there be a Consumer Finance Protection Agency with the sole purpose of looking out for our interests? No one else is, that’s for sure.

And when the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act actually starts working to bail out small farmers and produce jobs for some of the millions of people laid off by the Bigs, the upper crust denies that the “stimulus” package is working at all. Class warfare, for sure.

The hysterical opposition to health insurance reform would have us believe that rationing health by wealth is somehow fairer and better for us than doing the hard work of making decisions about national medical ethics and its impact on the health of ordinary Americans.

Right now, the vast majority of us have our health care rationed by price, and many of us are priced out of the market.

What makes the rich more deserving of first class health care than the nonrich? Nothing but the financial and political might of the upper class. Class warfare at its worst.

Bank, mortgage, and other financial institutions have joined the U.S. Chamber to oppose the Obama Administration’s proposal for a Consumer Financial Protection Agency. The agency would regulate payday loans, credit card charges, mortgage interest, foreclosures and a host of other practices. How twisted can you get? Take public money in the billions and then fight tooth and nail to protect your “right” to fleece the public in anyway you can think of.

Stimulus money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, signed in February, has already aided cities and rural areas across the country with job creation for roads and bridges, wildlife management, and alternative energy development. The stimulus has a long way to go, and it probably isn’t enough anyway, but the political predators on the right are bound and determined to keep it from working.

The polarization between Big Money and ordinary people is going so far that the Association of Commerce and Industry, utility, and agribusiness are opposing the proposed Clean Water Restoration Act on the grounds of protecting local property rights and state control of water quality. The association contends that the act will give the federal government too much control over local farming and, worse, local development.

A key provision in the act would extend federal clean water standards to all waters in the country, not just “navigable waters” like lakes and big rivers. Water pollution often travels down small steams, creeks and washes, or is conveyed by flooding and runoff from industrial agriculture, contaminating underground water by unregulated recharge, for instance, in desert arroyos.

Giving potential federal oversight and aid to all water restoration in the country is a primary step in insuring that we all have safe, high quality water.

But once again, Big Money, and the political party that represents it, doesn’t care about the health of ordinary people. It cares about getting more money, period. And where do they get that money from? From us.