Americans, whether or not you’ve ever slept with a prostitute, you now know what it must feel like. Because we all just spent a ton of cash to get screwed.
As the Huffington Post reported, bailed-out companies are using taxpayer money to lobby against taxpayers. Since receiving federal dollars, those corporations have spent $70 million to oppose things like tigher financial regulation, credit card consumer protection, and judge ordered mortgage renegotiation.
Outrageous.
These corrupt corporations received the gift of life from our government using our money, and are now using that money to fuck us over. And they’re succeeding! Proposed financial regulation is punctured with loopholes. Credit card companies have staved of legislation so they can jack up interest rates while Congress debates locking them in. And all the while, non-lending banks are raking in cash while more and more jobless Americans suffer.
The politicians have not been fighting hard enough to combat this shocking anti-consumer lobbying. Financial insiders like Treasury Secretary Geithner are out having brunch with the lobbyists (on us), and taking their advice on how they should be regulated. Rep. Barney Franks, usually a reliable progressive, was cowed into proposing weaker by the corporate donors who own him.
The system seems increasingly impermeable to real regulation efforts.
This all sounds so cynical, but what other conclusions am I supposed to draw? In a way, my anger is a relative of the rightwinger “Teaparty” movement. I look around and see businesses buying off their supposed regulators, and it seems all of the reins of power are stacked against the common person. Teabaggers seem to think the same thing, but in an ironic twist, their anger is being channeled by politicians and large corporations (Fox News and insurance companies) to oppose the very regulations that would benefit regular people. I, on the other hand, believe that government really could be the solution if it wasn’t owned by business.
We must break the positive feedback cycle of fucking over the American people through lobbying that we funded. The best chance we have is to support campaign finance reform. Knocking politicians off the corporate teet is one legitmate and necessary step to getting true government representation, so I’ll leave you with this link:
The original opening line and title of this post were changed after some extra research cast doubt on the accuracy of the opening quote.
should have voted for Nader people!
precisely why we must abandon ship, no panacea in Obama- it takes more than an election under the same status quo to remedy how severely f-u-c-k-e-d we are.