NYT Magazine: Elizabeth Warren Is Completely Serious

TR Roosevelt: "Instead of instruments to promote the general welfare, (political parties) have become the tools of corrupt interests which use them impartially to serve their selfish purposes ... To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.'" Progressive Party Platform 1912.

Elizabeth Warren: "When government works only for the wealthy and well-connected, that is corruption — plain and simple. It’s time to fight back. Corruption is a cancer on our democracy. And we will get rid of it only with strong medicine — with real, structural reform. Our fight is to change the rules so that our government, our economy, and our democracy work for everyone. Announcement Speech, February 9, 2019

“There’s a concerted effort to equate Warren with Bernie, to make her seem more radical,” but Wall Street and its allies “are more afraid of her than Bernie because when she says she’ll change the rules, she’s the one who knows how to do it.” Economist Luigi Zingales.

Elizabeth Warren Is Completely Serious is a major feature by Emily Bazelon published in the New York Times Magazine. It is not behind a pay wall and is well worth reading.

The New Work Times Magazine, June 17, 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/magazine/elizabeth-warren-president.html

Elizabeth Warren Is Completely Serious

About income inequality. About corporate power. About corrupt politics. And about being America’s next president.

(snip) For her entire career, Warren’s singular focus has been the growing fragility of America’s middle class. She made the unusual choice as a law professor to concentrate relentlessly on data, and the data that alarms her shows corporate profits creeping up over the last 40 years while employees’ share of the pie shrinks. This shift occurred, Warren argues, because in the 1980s, politicians began reworking the rules for the market to the specifications of corporations that effectively owned the politicians. In Warren’s view of history, “The constant tension in a democracy is that those with money will try to capture the government to turn it to their own purposes.” Over the last four decades, people with money have been winning, in a million ways, many cleverly hidden from view. That’s why economists have estimated that the wealthiest top 0.1 percent of Americans now own nearly as much as the bottom 90 percent.

(snip) “Ask me who my favorite president is,” Warren said. When I paused, she said, “Teddy Roosevelt.” Warren admires Roosevelt for his efforts to break up the giant corporations of his day — Standard Oil and railroad holding companies — in the name of increasing competition. She thinks that today that model would increase hiring and productivity. Warren, who has called herself “a capitalist to my bones,” appreciated Roosevelt’s argument that trustbusting was helpful, not hostile, to the functioning of the market and the government. She brought up his warning that monopolies can use their wealth and power to strangle democracy. “If you go back and read his stuff, it’s not only about the economic dominance; it’s the political influence,” she said.

What’s crucial, Roosevelt believed, is to make the market serve “the public good.” Warren puts it like this: “It’s structural change that interests me. And when I say structural, the point is to say if you get the structures right, then the markets start to work to produce value across the board, not just sucking it all up to the top.”

(snip) Warren is often serious and doesn’t hesitate to convey her moral outrage. “I’ll own it,” she told me about her anger. She talked about women expressing to her their distress about sexual harassment and assault. “Well, yeah,” Warren said. “No kidding that a woman might be angry about that. Women have a right to be angry about being treated badly.”