One of the more alarming developments of life for ordinary people during the years of Bush Jr. has been the explosive growth of consumer debt. As it turns out, the reason for the vast increase in such debt because you and I buy too much. In fact, explained Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warner, the big factor in debt increase over the years has been the stagnation and decline in real wages together with vast increases in the core costs of housing, medical care, child care and transportation.

Prof. Warner was speaking at Demos a few days ago as part of the lively, lunch-time launching of an interesting advocacy alliance called the Americans For Fairness In Lending. If you want to know more about how banks and finance companies are draining resources from the middle class and lower-income working people give AFFIL a click.

AFFIL, funded in part by the Ford Foundation & the Annie E. Casey Foundation, is a sophisticated attempt to mobilize ordinary people, politicians and think-tankers (“the civic sector”) to try to right the imbalance of power between predatory lenders and ordinary people (which was tipped even further by the Credit Card Industry sponsored amendments to the Bankruptcy Act. How did your representatives vote on that travesty, by the way?) . AFFIL brings together ACORN, Consumers Union, US PIRG, Barbara Ehrenreich’s new free lancers group United Professionals together with the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza and the AFL-CIO.

Punch & zing were added to the AFFIL-launch by the simultaneous release of a major motion picture documentary and book both by James Scurlock: “Maxed Out” about credit cart debt and the predatory practices of the industry. (Yahoo has a bunch of clips ).

In addition, Senate hearings, held to coincide with the launch featured significant retreats in anti-consumer practices by major banks (A two-step designed, perhaps, to forestall Congressional intervention). I will write about related issues, especially NYC ones, discussed at the AFFIL launch, in later postings.