Why would you be surprised by that? When a 100 person Senate puts together a complex piece of legislation thousands of pages long, regulating industries they’ve never worked in, how do you think they go about doing that? Do you thnk they’re all brilliant sages who know everything and just figure out what’s best on their own and write it up?
In actuality, these people have huge staffs. Those staffs themselves are not experts in the fields they are trying to regulate. So who do they listen to? Lobbyists. They bring in experts from the industries they will be regulating. They listen to special interest groups allied with their political beliefs, who have their own agendas. Then they get together and horse-trade with each other, giving up and adding their own pet ideas gathered from their teams until everyone’s at a point where they can vote ‘yay’. The bill passes.
Then what do you think happens to it? The health care bill and the financial bill, along with other regulations coming out of Congress, are increasingly devoid of detail. They are political documents more than technical regulatory documents ready for consumption. To get the exact legislation actually written, these bills are then handed over to the bureaucracy - agencies full of technocrats and bureaucrats and lawyers who are charged with turning them into specific law. They in turn are influenced by other lobbyists and special interests as they turn to industry to seek advice.
In the end, the actual laws that passed are a massive conglomeration of rules that have been heavily distorted by the people who have the ears of Congress and the bureaucracy. That’s largely big business.
For example, Obama set up a ‘jobs’ commission, headed by Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE. GE makes wind turbines, CFL light bulbs, and factory equipment. So what did the commission recommend as a ‘jobs creation’ strategy? Why, more windmills, updating factories, and ‘green jobs’, including replacing current light bulbs with CFL’s. What a shock.
In the meantime, GM, which was bailed out by the Obama administration, has this electric car, subsidized by the Obama administration, that no one wants. So who becomes the major purchaser of those cars (at a heavy, government-funded discount)? Why, Obama’s bestest buddy, Jeffrey Immelt. GE becomes the major purchaser of those vehicles, which helps GM’s bottom line and makes Obama’s green plan look better. In return, GE is the largest recipient of ‘stimulus’ dollars. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.
Then the big unions get into it - they funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to Obama’s campaign. In return, they get precedence over bondholders in the GM restructuring, they get rules passed that force stimulus dollars to only go to union employees, and they ensure that a good chunk of the stimulus money is used to insulate union government workers from the effects of the recession - at the expense of everyone else.
Hell, they even get their ‘gold plated insurance’ tax removed from the health care bill. They also go along with the large company’s requests for waivers from Obamacare, which will increase the cost burden on all those companies not connected enough to get their own waivers. In return, they agree to fully support the administration’s other efforts and finance Obama’s re-election campaign.
Big business, big labor, big government. Supposedly three enemies, but in fact they all work together to scratch each other’s backs - at the expense of everyone else. It’s time some of you on the left woke up to the fact that your basic belief system has been hijacked by these people.