Elizabeth Warren: My Mission Is to Restore America's Great Middle Class

AlterNet / By Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren: My Mission Is to Restore America's Great Middle Class
At Netroots Nation, Elizabeth Warren spoke about how to make the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau help protect the U.S. economy.

August 1, 2010 |


Editor's note: The following is a speech delivered by Elizabeth Warren at Netroots Nation 2010. Check out AlterNet's petition at Change.org urging President Obama to appoint Warren to lead the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

My grandmother, when she was a teenager, drove a wagon in the land rush that settled Oklahoma. Her mother was dead, and her little brothers and sisters were in the back of the wagon. Her father had ridden ahead and tried to find a piece of land that might be somewhere near water--a hard task in Oklahoma. She grew up in that part of the world, she met my grandfather, they got married, they started building one-room schoolhouses and little modest homes across the prairie. They had kids, they stretched, they scratched, they worked hard, they made a little money, and they put it aside, put it in the bank. It got completely wiped out in 1907 in an economic panic. But like many American families, they came back. They started scratching and stretching again, and having more babies--and then the Depression came. And they got wiped out one more time.

You see, my grandmother was born into the world of boom and bust, boom and bust, as it had been from 1794 until the Great Depression. But my grandmother also lived in a world of economic transformation. Because coming out of the Great Depression, just three laws fundamentally altered the course of America's history.

The first one, FDIC insurance, made it safe to put money in banks. The second one, Glass-Steagal, tried to separate the risk-taking on Wall Street from your local community bank. And the third one, SEC regulations, provide some cops to watch the robbers. And so, out of that, what we got was 50 years of economic peace. No financial panics, no meltdowns. And during that 50 years, we built a strong and prosperous middle class in America.

Now, my grandmother, when she died in 1970 at the age of 94, had been part of that. She owned a little house, she had plenty of groceries in the cupboard, and she had some cash in the bank. She was part of the growth of middle-class America. As were her children and her grandchildren. But shortly after my grandmother died, within a few years, we began unraveling that. Part of it was on the regulatory side. We hadn't been clever about regulations. They stayed ossified. The regulations put in place in the 1930s had not been updated. They had not adapted to a new world. And along came a new group of people who said, "Let's just get rid of the regulations. What are they there for anyway? They just cost money. Dump the regulations." And so the regulatory framework, or the "cops," who were on the beat began to disappear. They lost their effectiveness. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/economy/147699/elizabeth_warren%3A_my_mission_is_to_restore_america%27s_great_middle_class/

:thumbsup:

Elizabeth Warren is the best person even NEAR our government right now. President Obama's worst mistake has been his consistent support of Summers and Geitner. Obama should throw both these corporate clowns out immediately and he should put Ms. Warren in her designated position at once! The problem is that Obama himself is way too corporate in his governing style, and I am quite afraid that not only is he making an economic mess with his support of the wrong side in this case, but his chances for a second term keep slowly slipping away because of it.

why not read this too?

4 Bogus Attacks Bankers and Their Political Puppets Are Using to Attack Elizabeth Warren


No reformers question whether Elizabeth Warren is the best candidate to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She's a lauded scholar, an inspiring advocate who will draw talented and dedicated reformers to the new agency and she came up with the whole idea for creating the CFPB in the first place. Nominating a dedicated reformer like Warren will send a clear signal to the entire world that the U.S. government is serious about regulating the banks that drove the global economy off a cliff. Nominating anybody else will send a clear signal that bankers still have veto power over key political appointments.

By contrast, there are no compelling arguments against appointing Warren. Four have basically been offered, and they are all so weak that it's hard to view them as anything but bad-faith excuses to block somebody the bank lobby simply doesn't like. There's a perfectly rational reason for the bank lobby not to like Elizabeth Warren: she's spent much of her career explaining how elite bankers rip off American families, and there is every reason to believe she will crack down on this behavior if she's given the CFPB post. That's not a knock against Warren—that's what the CFPB director is supposed to do.

Read more at:

http://www.alternet.org/economy/147667/4_bogus_attacks_bankers_and_their_political_puppets_are_using_to_attack_elizabeth_warren

Be sure to e-mail Obama and ask him to appoint Elizabeth Warren to the top position on the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact

In case you missed that:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact

And thanks for posting the link.

K&R Thanks for posting this, marmar!

it would be the last straw, as far as I'm concerned, if some insider gets it instead of her.

Elizabeth Warren gets it. She should have a position high up the administration...high, high up in the administration.

K&R

:toast:

nominated, never confirmed: such will never be allowed in present-day America awash in corporatism. :P

Always an Okie
Warren attended grade school in Norman, then skipped sixth grade when her family moved to Oklahoma City. Living on NW 25 Street, she learned to drive the family Studebaker in the parking lot of the brand new Shepherd Mall.
She graduated from Northwest Classen at 16 as a debate champ, which earned her a college scholarship.

She became a teacher to brain-injured children, but felt stifled by the administrative constraints of the New Jersey public school where she worked. During a Christmas visit to Oklahoma City, her former high school debate classmates urged her to attend law school.

After operating a private law practice, Warren returned to her first love of teaching.

"As a teacher at that level, you do research — that's just part of the job,” she said. "The area where I was teaching were all the money courses — commercial law, contract law, bankruptcy law. That's where my research was, and that's when I started doing research on families that went broke.”

It's a topic she knows something about. Before Warren was born, her parents lost most of their savings when a partner in a planned car dealership in Seminole absconded with their money.

Her father, a self-taught pilot who was a flight instructor in Muskogee during World War II, worked as a traveling salesman and in Oklahoma City, at Montgomery Ward. He was demoted after suffering a heart attack, and later took a job as a maintenance worker at an apartment house. The working-class family couldn't afford to send Warren to kindergarten, which at the time was offered only at private schools.

"Sure it was partly about my family, but it was about millions of other families,” the Harvard law professor said of her research. "That was the work I started doing. That's how I ended up where I am today.”

Warren has written numerous books and academic articles. Her work uncovered the fact that most American consumer bankruptcies are not filed by financial freeloaders, but by people whose finances have unraveled due to divorce, death or health crises.

.......more

http://newsok.com/an-okie-in-washington-riles-big-players-on-wall-street/article/3481347

Oops, I mean 2016!

K & R !!!

:kick:

Thats my mission too!

by bending over and nixing Elizabeth Warren for the corporations who do not want the wonderful Ms. Warren, who will oversee & expose corporate corruption slime & crimes. Corporate heads know Ms. Warren can not be bought corporations do not like people with integrity & scruples because 99% of greedy corporate execs have neither!

:applause:

but we'd all be talking about how many seats we'd be gaining in the House and Senate.

Among other things.

...which makes it unlikely that she'll get the job.