Elizabeth Warren Explains Why The Economy Is Screwed And How To Fix It

Elizabeth Warren is Congress' TARP Overseer; damn I wish she was in charge of the whole economic recovery program. Unlike Geithner and Summers she doesn't come off like some kind of a character straddling the Dark Side. She doesn't apologize for thinking that government's job is to assist citizens rather than enrich banksters and other campaign "donors."

Friday night she sat down with Bill Maher for ten minutes and put up with his pointless interruptions while she explained how the banksters and their bought-off politicians systematically went about gaming the economy for their own benefit. After FDR and the New Dealers of the 1930s succeeded in reigning in the greed and selfishness driven sociopaths, who are often celebrated as "captains of industry" by the media outlets they own, with rational regulation that created a reasonable balance to protect consumers and society at large from powerful corporate predators. That wasn't just about lifting us out of the Depression. It protected the country from the boundless greed of a class of people who think they are entitled to own the rest of us.

Warren explains that the unraveling of FDR's regulatory protections started step by step in the early 1980s when Reagan got to Washington and then accelerated under Bush I, Clinton and Bush II. The collapse of the savings and loan industry saw over 700 savings and loans fail at a cost of $160 billion, almost all of it a transfer of wealth from the taxpayers to the banksters (and their political puppets). Ideological Republican deregulatory mania-- primarily a pseudo-intellectual justification of a return to right-wing Law of the Jungle economics-- in the middle of Reagan's terms was only just beginning. Deregulation was fast-tracked.

Warren tried her best to avoid Maher's desire for a psychobabble session by sticking to history and economics. She pointed out the strong usury laws that the U.S. had in place until 1979 when the Burger Court "quietly" changed the interpretation of a law "and the whole game came unraveled from that point." She explains how the model for the credit card industry changed to a method to trick people and trap them in order to boost unconscionable profits. Over the last few weeks we watched as so many of our elected representatives took the side of the banksters against the rest of us. Last week when Bernie Sanders offered an amendment in the Senate to get usury under control only 32 Democrats plus one Republican voted in favor. Every Republican besides Chuck Grassley (IA) and a shocking number of corrupt, bribed Democrats-- led by Max Baucus (D-MT- $4,633,243), Evan Bayh (D-IN- $3,987,896), Arlen Specter (D-PA- $5,753,310), Tom Carper (D-DE- $2,160,628), Ben Nelson (D-NE- $2,667,406), Mary Landrieu (D-LA- $2,399,134), and Blanche Lincoln (D-AR- $1,671,292)-- voted for usury. Rank and file Republicans in the House-- as well as the corrupt Blue Dogs-- were too frightened to vote against credit card reform and a bill passed 357-70, with more than half the Republican members abandoning their corrupt leadership, leaving the worst of the bankster pawns in Congress-- Spencer Bachus (R-AL- $3,789,474), Eric Cantor (R-VA- $3,121,188), John Boehner (R-OH- $3,045,809), Pete Sessions (R-TX- $2,730,126), David Dreier (R-CA- $2,118,538), Jeb Hensarling (R-TX- $2,111,371), Paul Ryan (R-WI- $1,555,321), Randy Neugebauer (R-TX- $1,253,775) and Scott Garrett (R-NJ- $1,156,599)-- exposed for what they are.

Like so much that is wrong with our political system, the roots can be traced directly to the cash. Listen to this lecture by Change Congress co-founder Lawrence Lessig and you'll have an ever clearer understanding about what has to happen to revitalize American democracy:



Warren got to the political root problem while Maher was trying to lead her down some airy-fairy pop-psychology path. "Every game," she patiently explained to him, "has rules... The role of government is to write those rules. This is really about if we have a government that just recedes and says, in effect, 'the strong can take from everybody; they can write these [rules] any way they want.' ...We can have a totally broken market that makes a few people very rich and robs the rest of them." The alternative, she says, is for the government to write rules that keeps the playing field level. We need the same kinds of basic safety regulations for consumer credit products that we have for food, air, water, everything we consume.