. . . to do busines with evildoers.
Last week Houston Chronicle columnist Lisa Falkenberg said Walmart's bad business practices inspired her to "avoid shopping there if I can avoid it." Which raised the unavoidable question: Why can't she avoid it every day of the week and twice on Sunday? Who forces Ms. Falkenberg shop at such a nasty outfit? Ever?
A couple of days later, another Chronicle deep thinker weighed in with a similar complaint. The credit-card companies were hosing her, the editorialist declared. They even sent her letters telling her that they were hosing her. Not that she would know that's what the letters say, she cheerily confessed, because it was way too much trouble for her to read and comprehend them.
Clearly this isn't a relationship of equals. The bank gets to make unilateral changes to our contract, and we don't. The bank has a staff of Ivy League-educated Masters of the Universe to dream up new fees and tricky ways to disguise interest rates, and we have about eight minutes between getting home from work and making the kids' dinner, to decipher the mail. No surprise: The bank wins.
Poor baby! Math is hard! So is being an adult!
For the record, Ms. Editorialist has the ultimate power in her relationship with the credit-card companies, which is to quit doing business with them. Cut up the cards. Use cash or checks or online banking. It's not that hard. Millions of millions of people do it. Or shop for a card with better terms. Or just pay the darn credit-card balance every month.
But why, of course, do any of those sensible things when victimhood is ever so much more fun. In the voice of the royal we, the editorialist whined ever onward, her oars beating vainly against the financial current.
We briefly considered swearing off any financial dealings that we don't completely understand, down to the last footnote in teeny-tiny type. But then we realized that we'd have no credit card -- and most likely, no mortgage or checking account, either.
Now, having pictured herself as the perfect Little Ms. Victim, she got to the point of the editorial, which was, naturally, the pressing need to put the federal government in charge of protecting her from the financial calumnies against which she is so utterly powerless.
And the perfect person to do that, it seems, is Elizabeth Warren, recently appointed by President Obama "as a 'special adviser' to the new Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection."
(Editorial, "Dollars and sense: Why do banks fear Elizabeth Warren? Because she's on our side," Houston Chronicle, September 16, 2010, illustrated by a hear-me-roar! photograph of Ms. Warren)
Never mind that the level of financial and economic analysis in the essay was embarrassing, even by the usual low standards of the Chronicle. The financial system is simply "rigged" against good, honest debtors. Nothing more to say. Move along. This was the most intemperately and incoherently anti-business editorial in the Houston Chronicle since it took on energy speculators and insurance companies and auto companies.
Never mind that the editorial was utterly contemptuous of elected senators who see this issue a different way: Senators who oppose Ms. Warren's appointment are just doing the bidding of financial institutions that "bankroll" them. Senators who like Ms. Warren, of course, are not just doing the bidding of the unions or the Soros-financed lobby groups who "bankroll" them. Or of the herd of trial lawyers that will soon feast at the trough Ms. Warren will fill with tasty new regulations.
Never mind that Ms. Warren is a leftist ideologue. Ordinarily the Chronicle uses the word ideologue to insult conservatives. But for the ferocious Ms. Warren and her priestesses at the Chronicle, ideologue is hunky, not to mention dory.
[Critics] call her demands for clarity "ideological." Apparently they believe that only an ideologue would insist that lenders play fair -- that banks make loans whose terms a borrower can comprehend, loans that aren't likely to blow up and wreck a family's life or the world's economy.
Fine. Call us ideologues, too. . . .
And never mind that appointing Ms. Warren as special adviser is essentially lawless conduct. It is a violation of constitutional advice and consent by a lawless president. He knows his appointee cannot clear the Senate, largely because so many Democratic senators will not vote for such a ideological redhot in this sweet autumn of political repudiation for Obamaism.
Remember that our newly federalized health-care bureaucracy is also being run by an unconfirmable lefty, Donald Berwick. Evidently the Constitution has an exception in teeny-tiny type somewhere that protects professors from Harvard Law (Warren) and Harvard Medical (Berwick) from mere advice and consent.
Phooey on checks.
To heck with balances.
Coming soon to a Chronicle editorial near you: a call for a new government agency to drop by once a day to make sure you eat your government-approved ration of beets, broccoli, and arugula (have you seen what it costs lately?), once a week to take your laundry to the cleaners, and once a month to balance your checkbook.
* * *
The thing to read about Ms. Warren is Editorial, "Queen Elizabeth III," Wall Street Journal, September 18, 2010.
We have here another end-run around Constitutional niceties so Team Obama can invest huge authority in an unelected official who is unable to stand a public vetting. So a bureau inside an agency (the Fed) that it doesn't report to, with a budget not subject to Congressional control, now gets a leader not subject to Senate confirmation. If Dick Cheney had tried this, he'd have been accused of staging a coup.
UPDATE: Thanks for the links from Harris County Alamanc and bloghouston.net.
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