Excluding discrimination based on wealth was deliberate. The members of the U.S. Congress, pimps and prostitutes for special interests of great wealth, dared not include wealth as a potential discrimination category in passing the Civil Rights Act. If the members of Congress had dared to include level of wealth, as a category to be added to the lesser classifications (such as “race") for determining when there is invidious class-based discrimination, the special interests of great wealth would have cut off their campaign finances and poured on contributions for their opponents.
Just think of the implications. According to a U.S. Department of Commerce figure repeated annually for half a century, there are 35 million Americans living in poverty. A United Nations study puts the figure at 50 million. And there are at least another 50 million, considered “middle class,” who exist on the edge of poverty and are driven over that edge by job loss or major illness. Taken together in the category “low income people,” at least 100 million Americans get the short end of the stick. They are the first to suffer and suffer the most from a downturn in the economy. When the state and federal budgets “must be cut” according to legislators who are in the meantime awarding themselves higher salaries and more expensive automobiles and more benefits of various kinds, low income people in need of emergency and survival programs established for their assistance are the first to be whacked via the cuts in those programs. They are often forced to live in the most wretched of neighborhoods, where they are subject to the most gang warfare, other forms of violence, filth, disease, drug dealing and other crimes, and the least amount of law enforcement and other city/state services. They are the ones most excluded from health insurance, and they get the least skilled medical care. Their children for the most part (with exceptions) depend for education on the least skilled teachers working in the most inadequatly financed schools. Most of the low income people cannot get help from lawyers when in dire need of legal assistance, because they cannot afford a lawyer and cannot find one to represent them pro bono. Pressured to resort to credit for survival, they are punished by the highest interest rates, compounding their financial difficulties. They are even punished by bankers for being poor: bankers who hit them with exorbitant charges for inability to keep their accounts at levels that the bankers insist upon imposing.
In the past, when low income people managed to find a few lawyers or legal organizations to attempt rectifying the wealth-based discrimination against them through litigation, they were undercut by the most supreme form of judicial hypocrisy in U.S. Supreme Court opinions holding that “the Constitution does not protect against poverty.” You would think they never heard of the equal protection of law clause in the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But, of course, if the U.S. Supreme Court applied that clause to discrimination on the basis of wealth, the Congress and state legislatures, along with the various bar associations, would have to come up with some means of seeing to it that people unable to afford lawyers, and therefore unable to obtain them when in dire need of legal assistance, must be provided with that assistance by means of some kind of legal care equivalent to Medicare; and that is precisely what the U.S. Supreme Court justices are determined to prevent from happening.
None of this will change until those of us who have worked so long and so hard for social reform can reach and convince the millions of sheep comprising the majority of the people that it is time for a social revolution against the rich and privileged. Meanwhile, it would help if more of you demanded from your (purported) representatives in Congress that wealth be added to the Civil Rights Act as a potential basis for invidious class-based discrimination.
