Congress Making Themselves and Friends Richer, While Everyone Else Struggles to Make Ends Meet

It’s my honor every Sunday, to share space in the Times-Standard Opinion section with Jim Hightower.

I haven’t seen this column in the T-S, so I’d like to share it with you:

The great majority of Americans make about $30K a year. Incoming lawmakers, however? Extensive personal investments in Wall St. banks, oil giants and drug makers.

“Change is not the same thing as progress. In fact, change can be the exact opposite. It can be regressive, as we're now learning from -- where else? -- Congress.

A flock of tea party-infused Republicans has certainly changed the political dynamic there, and exultant GOP leaders are claiming that they are now the voice of "The People." But most people won't find themselves represented by this change, much less see it as progress.

That's because the newcomers in Congress, whether Republican or Democrat, tend to live high up the economic ladder, way out of touch with the people they're representing. Indeed, 40 percent of newly elected house members are millionaires, as are 60 percent of new senators.

Their wealth and financial ties might help explain the rush by the new Republican House majority to coddle these very same corporate powers. From gutting EPA's anti-pollution restrictions on Big Oil to undoing the restraints on Wall Street greed, they're pushing for a return to the same laissez-fairyland ideology of the past 20 years that got our country in massive messes.

At the same time, they're out to kill a green-jobs program, bust unions, cut Social Security, defund Head Start and generally stomp on the fingers of working families trying to hold onto the middle class rungs of the economic ladder.

The change in Congress is taking America backward, not forward, for the new majority literally is the voice of millionaires. That's not progress.

So we see corporations and billionaires wallowing in fabulous new wealth, while productive workers fall out of the middle class. And our new congress-members are just fine with that, even pushing a program of more tax breaks and subsidies for the corporate elite, while vehemently opposing efforts to create jobs and advance the middle class. Making the richest people richer is not a recovery -- it's a robbery.”

Condensed column – see Full Article Here.

- Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the new book, "Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow." (Wiley, March 2008) He publishes the monthly "Hightower Lowdown," co-edited by Phillip Frazer