If OccupyWallStreet Was A Candidate For Senate, Her Name Would Be Elizabeth Warren

Scott Brown's place in history is simple. He was an unlikely Republican/Tea Party victor in one of the bluest states at a time when the electorate realized they'd been had by Obama with his fake promises of Hope and Change. The Democrats put up a weak machine candidate and Brown captured a sense of the zeitgeist. It's been all downhill for him since then. He's been a wishy-washy, mediocre senator-- easily portrayed as a bobblehead-- and probably won't even get Tea Party support for his reelection next year. Instead he'll have Wall Street support-- lots of it. Fortune dubbed him "Wall Street's favorite senator" and the banksters are spending unprecedented amounts of money to keep him in his seat. So far in his short career, the finance sector has handed over $2,611,715 in legalistic bribes ("contributions") to Brown, who has responded by supporting their entire predatory, anti-consumer agenda.

But virtually every Republican and more than a few Democrats support most of Wall Street's predatory, anti-consumer agenda. The reason why theye're lavishing to much of their energy and resources on Brown-- who's in a neck and neck race to retain his seat-- is because who his challenger is. If Scott Brown is Wall Street's favorite senator, Elizabeth Warren is the leader they fear the most. She's the sheriff who they know their bribes and blandishments won't corrupt-- and they're quaking in their Guccis. The new Vanity Fair features her as The Woman Who Knew Too Much where Suzanna Andrews "charts the Harvard professor’s emergence as a champion of the beleaguered middle class, and her fight against a powerful alliance of bankers, lobbyists, and politicians." Below are some excerpts from their coverage. Let me remind you first that Blue America has endorsed Elizabeth and that you can donate to her campaign at our lightly-populated Senate ActBlue page.

As she crisscrossed the country, spreading the word about the C.F.P.B., Warren became a familiar face to many, especially to those who had seen her on television-- on CNBC, Real Time with Bill Maher, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. She had gained millions of supporters. With her passionate defense of America’s beleaguered middle class, under assault today from seemingly every direction, she had become like a modern-day Mr. Smith, giving voice to regular citizens astonished at the failure of Washington to protect Main Street-- and what increasingly appeared to be its abandonment of middle-class America. By July, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.-- speaking for its 12 million members-- had called on Obama to name Warren to head the agency. So had scores of consumer groups. Eighty-nine Democrats in the House of Representatives had signed a letter, publicly urging him to choose Warren. Newspapers around the country editorialized on her behalf, as did hundreds of bloggers. By July 18, when Obama announced that he was passing Warren over, he did so after receiving petitions signed by several hundred thousand people and organizations urging him to appoint Warren as the country’s top consumer watchdog.

...Arrayed against Warren, and today against the very existence of the C.F.P.B., was the full force of what many, most notably Simon Johnson, the M.I.T. professor and former International Monetary Fund chief economist, have called the American financial oligarchy: Wall Street firms and banks supported mainly by Republican members of Congress, but also politicians on the other side of the aisle, along with members of Obama’s own inner circle.

At a time of record corporate profits, a time when 14 million Americans are out of work, when millions have lost their homes and, according to the Census Bureau, the ranks of those living in poverty has grown to one in six-- that Elizabeth Warren could be publicly kneecapped and an agency devoted to protecting American consumers could come under such intense attack is, ultimately, the story about who holds power in America today.

When the C.F.P.B. was first proposed to Congress, in early 2009, the Chamber of Commerce, the leading business lobbying group in the country, announced that it would “spend whatever it takes” to defeat the agency. According to the Center for Public Integrity, from 2009 through the beginning of 2010, it would be one of the biggest spenders among the more than 850 businesses and trade groups that together paid lobbyists $1.3 billion to fight financial reform.

Although a Gallup poll in the fall of 2010 would show that 61 percent of Americans supported Dodd-Frank-- which was designed to curb the risky bank activities that triggered the 2008 meltdown and the ensuing recession-- the financial establishment would continue to attack it even after it became law on July 21, 2010.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, in 2010 the financial industry flooded Congress with 2,565 lobbyists. They were financed by the likes of the Financial Services Roundtable, which, according to the Center, paid lobbyists $7.5 million, and is on its way to spending as much or more this year. The Chamber of Commerce spent $132 million on lobbying Washington in 2010. The American Bankers Association spent $7.8 million. As for individual banks: JPMorgan Chase, which received $25 billion in TARP funds from taxpayers, spent nearly $14 million on lobbying during the 2009–10 election cycle; Goldman Sachs, which received more than $10 billion from taxpayers, spent $7.4 million; Citigroup, which was teetering on the brink of insolvency and received a $45 billion infusion, has paid more than $14 million to lobbyists since 2009. And none of this money includes the direct campaign donations these organizations, and their surrogates, made to members of Congress.

The banks “do not like to lose,” says Ed Mierzwinski, of the National Association of State Public Interest Research Groups, which was part of the grossly outmatched consumer coalition that managed to scrape together a paltry $2 million to lobby in favor of reform.

...But while audiences applauded her, Warren’s opponents lacerated her. She was called incompetent, power-hungry, ignorant, a media whore, and, in a widely televised moment, a liar, by a Republican congressman [tiny and sleazy North Carolina closet queen and corporate suck-up Patrick McHenry] during a hearing in May. “It was like she was the Antichrist,” says Roger Beverage, the president of the Oklahoma Bankers Association and one of the few bankers who publicly supported her. She had become the lightning rod for the opposition to the C.F.P.B. Says Barney Frank, the Massachusetts congressman who is the “Frank” in “Dodd-Frank,” “It’s partly sore-losership. They are blaming her for something they all swore would never happen.” But it was also because she was eloquent and convincing, and relentlessly tough in her criticism of Wall Street and its enablers.

That bluntness was evident in an interview even in late May, when Warren, who learned only in July that she wouldn’t get the job, still believed that Obama might ask her to run the C.F.P.B. “It’s money and power, the only two things we are talking about here,” she said, speaking of the people who were trying to kill the C.F.P.B. “in the back alleys,” as she put it. “There are many who are rich and powerful who say the system works fine as it is,” she continued. “America had been a boom-and-bust economy going into the Great Depression-- just over and over and over, fortunes were wiped out, ordinary families were crushed under it. Coming out of the Great Depression we said, We can build a structure that makes us all safer. And notice, it’s from the end of the Great Depression to the 1980s that we built America’s middle class. That’s when we got stronger as a country. That’s when that big, solid, boring, hardworking, play-by-the-rules group in the middle emerged and defined what America was. You still had the ability to become a billionaire, but the center stayed strong and, notice, provided opportunity for growth, opportunity for getting ahead, opportunity that your kids were going to do better than you did. That was what defined America. And then we started, inch by inch, pulling the threads out of that regulatory fabric, starting in the 1980s.”

Today, Warren says, one “vision of how America works is that it’s an even game, that anybody can get started-- just roll those dice; that booms and busts will come and millions of people will lose their homes, millions more will lose their jobs, and trillions of dollars in savings retirement accounts will be wiped out. The question is, Do we have a different vision of what we can do? This agency is out here in a sense to try to hold accountable a financial-services industry that ran wild, that brought our economy to the edge of collapse,” she said. “There’s been such a sense that there’s one set of rules for trillion-dollar financial institutions and a different set for all the rest of us. It’s so pervasive that it’s not even hidden.”

...Perhaps the most widely watched hearing is the one that took place in September 2009. A video of part of that hearing can still be found on YouTube [video is up on the top of this page], under the title “Elizabeth Warren Makes Timmy Geithner Squirm.” It opens with Warren asking the question that was on the minds of many taxpayers: “A.I.G. has received about $70 billion in TARP money, about $100 billion in loans from the Fed. Do you know where the money went?” What followed during the rest of the hearing was the spectacle of the Treasury secretary tripping over his words, his eyes darting around the room as Warren, calm and prosecutorial, kept hammering him with questions. At another hearing, in December 2009, Geithner appeared to be barely able to contain his annoyance, at one point almost shouting at her. Warren’s questioning “was masterful,” says Neil Barofsky, who ran the TARP oversight for Treasury. “She eviscerated him.” But Warren would pay a price for those hearings.

“Geithner hated her,” says a former administration official. Part of it was seen as personal because she had scorched him in public. But the whole thrust of her work on the oversight panel-- getting the facts out to the public-- was at odds with Geithner’s perceived conviction, shared by the Wall Street establishment, that the details of the banks’ TARP rescue should be hidden from public scrutiny whenever possible in order to give the banks time to recover, an assessment that a Treasury spokesperson disputes, insisting that “Secretary Geithner initiated unprecedented disclosure requirements for financial institutions.”

According to Barofsky, however, “Treasury’s descriptions of what was happening were very skewed towards the positive and often incomprehensible. There was this reluctance towards transparency,” and Warren’s work on the oversight panel “helped bring light in a lot of dark areas.” As Treasury sought to cosset the banks, never requiring them, for example, as Barofsky points out, to explain what they were doing with their billions in TARP bailout money, Warren persisted. She went on television shows to criticize the government’s secrecy, the huge bank bonuses, the fact that even after the bailout the banks had escaped disciplinary measures. Obama’s top economic advisers, according to a former administration official, thought Warren was “a pain in the ass.” On Wall Street, Warren was regarded, says one bank vice-chairman, as “the Devil incarnate,” and, according to another executive, a “showboater,” who didn’t really know what she was talking about.

But her sin was actually quite the opposite: she knew what she was talking about. Wall Street’s power in Washington, says a former congressional staffer who worked on the Dodd-Frank bill, has been built partly on the fact that few people outside Wall Street understand the esoterica of finance-- the intricacies of C.D.O.’s and the labyrinthian structures of credit-default swaps. And that knowledge is used to control and confuse. But Warren did understand. Says Carolyn Maloney, a New York Democratic representative, “She understands the information as well as the top players in the business.” She knew the secret handshake, the secret language-- and she used it against “that tight little group,” as Warren would refer to Wall Street C.E.O.’s and Washington officials who basically controlled the terms of the bailout.

The corporate end of the Democratic Party are almost as unenthusiastic about Elizabeth as the Republicans and the Wall Street banksters are and, as Andrews reminds us in the close of her article, Brown has over $10 in his campaign war-chest "thanks in large part to the financial industry’s largesse. With Warren in the race, the Republican party and the nation’s corporatocracy is expected to flood Brown’s coffers with even more cash." Elizabeth has us-- and she doesn't have to match Brown dollar for dollar, just bring in enough money to stay competitive in Massachusett's expensive media market. So far, the progressive grassroots around the country is coming through for her. She's been taking in more grassroots-- as opposed to corporate-- money than any other candidate running for the Senate. You can help here if you'd like to be part of making history. Many progressives see Elizabeth as the first woman president-- and the first president on the peoples' side since FDR.