A Look Back-- The Fight Over The Bankruptcy Bill

Friday, in a little-noticed post about Donna Edwards being named to head the DCCC's Red-to-Blue program, we glanced at the success Wall Street had in burdening American families with an unfair and grotesque new bankruptcy law. Needless to say, every single Republican voted for this monstrous concoction of the predatory banking lobbyists. Most of the Blue Dogs and conservative Democratic fellow travelers who betrayed the Democratic base-- like the slimy character (now a K Street lobbyist) Edwards replaced, Al Wynn-- were subsequently defeated. Two glaring exception-- both now high up in Democratic House leadership are two extraordinarily corrupt conservatives masquerading as Democrats, DCCC Chairman Steve Israel and his wretched boss, Steny Hoyer.

I'm about a third of the way through Elizabeth Warren's magnificent new book, A Fighting Chance and most of it has dealt with this epic battle. She was one of the leaders of the multi-year fight against that particular Wall Street assault against American working families. Her unique perspective fills in a lot of the blanks that went on behind the scenes in an effort that involves Ted Kennedy, Paul Wellstone and Hillary Clinton as heroes ultimately thwarted by the worst elements of American plutocracy.

Elizabeth Warren understands Wall Street-- and is one of the few Members of Congress willing to stand up to them. You talk about Hope and Change? Obama wrecked that phrase. Elizabeth Warren could revitalize it. During one of the academic studies she began in the late 1990s, she found that the astronomically growing number of families in financial collapse had several "unexpected" characteristics:

• More children would live through their parents' bankruptcy than their parents' divorce.
• More women would file for bankruptcy than would graduate from college.
• More people would file for bankruptcy than would be diagnosed with cancer.

Warren, a Harvard professor at the time, never stopped fighting, but neither did the banksters. Their financial self-interest wasn't dependent on fleeting partisan coalitions, elections, not even on deaths. They never give up, just like the GOP never gives up trying to destroy Social Security, Medicare, public education, the right for working people to organize and bargain collectively, the environment, and, ultimately, democracy itself-- all on behalf of the self-entitled multimillionaires and billionaires who claim their wealth gives them the right to run the country, in a kind of symbiotic partnership with the corrupt politicians they buy (on both sides of the aisle).

See more at: http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2014/05/a-look-back-fight-over-bankruptcy-bill.html#sthash.EfD1tZMQ.bTV2WPBt.dpuf