Elizabeth Warren: a force
in the left, but can she reach the White House?
Americans Warm to Warren: the 'Anti-Hillary' (Cicero, Germany)
"New York's largest bookstore is filled to the brim. Many
arrived hours before the reading. While Elizabeth Warren speaks, questions written on
pieces of cardboard are collected. What's the most common question, the
moderator wants to know. 'Whether or not I’m running for president,' the senator
says. In response, a woman in the audience shouts, 'Run, Liz, run!' and
applause breaks out. Warren smiles and shakes her head. 'No, I'm not running,'
she says. The audience responds in unison, 'Awww!'"
She
looks a little like a school teacher - trustworthy, honest, intellectual. Not
at all like the radical-left critic of capitalism she is made out to be. Elizabeth
Warren, Democratic senator from Massachusetts, has published her biography, A
Fighting Chance. It's a play on words that means "a slim chance,"
but also "there’s a chance if you fight." Along with Thomas Piketty’sCapital in the
Twenty-First Century, it's at the very top of U.S. Best Seller lists. Mind
you, Warren is no working class advocate, but rather a defender of the middle
class. But in the U.S., where the middle class is sinking into poverty, where
millions have lost their homes, their jobs, and their health insurance, she
sounds like Rosa
Luxemburg.
"The
game is rigged - rigged in favor of those who have money and who have power,"
she writes in Fighting Chance. Furthermore, "Big corporations hire armies
of lobbyists to get billion-dollar loopholes into the tax system and persuade
their friends in Congress to support laws that keep the playing field tilted in
their favor."
Run Liz, Run
A
week ago at Barnes & Noble in New York's Union Square: The city’s largest
bookstore is filled to the brim. Many arrived hours before the reading. While
Warren speaks, questions written on pieces of cardboard are collected. What's
the most common question, the moderator wants to know. "Whether or not I’m
running for president," the senator says. In response, a woman in the
audience shouts, "Run, Liz, run!" and applause breaks out. Warren
smiles and shakes her head. "No, I’m not running," she says. The
audience responds in unison, "Awww!"
Elizabeth
Warren, a 64 year-old university professor and lawyer who taught at Harvard, is
the anti-Hillary. She is the Democrat that the party's left hopes will run when
the 2016 presidential election begins. Whether Warren has a fighting chance in
a party always anxiously eyeing its right is another question.She obviously isn’t openly positioning
herself today. In American politics, however, one cannot begin soon enough. Leftist
groups like "Progressive Change
Campaign Committee" or "Americans
for Financial Reform" are already banging the drum for Warren or are
selling her book.The same goes for MoveOn.org, the liberal platform funded by
George Soros, universities and women’s groups like EMILY's List, a
political action committee that supports liberal women - and in any case, her
book reads like a campaign manifesto.
Warren's
late-blooming career is a product of the 2008 crisis, when Wall Street, after
decades of wild, unbridled speculation, collapsed, and was bailed out with
billions of tax dollars, while the middle class was left behind. Even today, the
labor market hasn't recovered, while the thin layer of ultra-rich has become
even richer.At the time, Warren was a
consultant to Congress. She was a lawyer specializing in bankruptcy law for
private individuals. As a child in Oklahoma, she had already been touched [by hardship], when after
suffering a heart attack her father lost his job, and the family nearly went
bankrupt. At the time after school, she had to work as a waitress. In November
2008, Democratic majority leader Harry Reid called on Warren to chair the "Congressional
Oversight Panel," the supervisory body that oversees TARP, the "Troubled
Asses Relief Program," which distributed "favors" to bankers.
Initially,
she was considered a moderate, and has one even been close to the Republicans. But
then she appeared in Michael Moore’s films and on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. She became a harsh critic of
Wall Street and a consumer advocate. She wasn’t always successful: She couldn’t
stop developments that made it more difficult for private individuals in debt
to file for bankruptcy, but she didn’t give up. She advocated the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,
an agency for the protection of citizens in financial matters. The issues
involved were American credit card debts that are snowballing exponentially,
huge student loan debt, and, of course, mortgages. During the financial crisis,
banks had increased interest rates while many properties lost value, which
brought financial ruin to many families. The agency was in fact created, but
Obama didn't appoint Warren as director - Republicans voiced a storm of
opposition. The GOP, however, didn’t do itself any favors. Warren now decided
to go into active politics and run for the Senate.
Posted By Worldmeets.US
And
of all states, she did it in one that Republicans had finally conquered:
Massachusetts, where Scott Brown had succeeded longtime Democratic incumbent Senator
Ted Kennedy.The election campaign was
expensive - almost $40 million - and vicious: Brown accused Warren of obtaining
her Harvard professorship only because she claimed she was 1/32 Cherokee. And when
it was plain for all to see that the blond, blue-eyed woman was White. It was
an argument that could only occur in America. Warren said it was just family
folklore (practically every American family thinks it is part Cherokee). Ultimately,
it was apparently Harvard which used Warren to fill an affirmative action
position, and not Warren who had applied on the basis of affirmative action. When
Brown sympathizers appeared in "red face" and waving tomahawks, Brown
even had to apologize to the Cherokee Nation. Brown subsequently attempted to
denounce Warren as a class fighter, since she had come out in favor of tax
increases for the rich. But she reminded people that America’s wealth is based
on the infrastructure, roads, railways, and ports. Brown lost.
In
2011, she was back in Washington as a senator.Now she was on the Banking Committee, which oversees Wall Street. Her
first bill, together with Social Democrat Bernie Sanders, was intended to give
students access to government loans at the same favorable rates as those
enjoyed by banks. Needless to say, the bill wasn't adopted. However a nerve
have already been touched. Many students are hundreds of thousands of dollars
in debt, but there are fewer and fewer good jobs. And Hillary, according to
many, is too close to Wall Street to change anything.
*Dr. Eva C. Swietzer is a Die Zeit columnist and founder of publishing company Berlinica.
