Who Does Scott Brown Want To See Suffer?

There's a reason Elizabeth Warren is concerned that Scott Brown is trying to make a comeback-- no matter how far fetched by running against centrist Democrat Jeanne Shaheen, who is up in every single poll so far. Warren's antipathy for Brown goes back far before she ran against him and defeated him when he was still claiming to be from Massachusetts.

In her new book, A Fighting Chance, Warren gives the reader a fascinating behind the curtain look at the battle for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was nearly derailed by Brown's surprise election.

Even before Brown's triumph at the polls against Martha Coakley, when Warren was told that the Senate was going to quietly kill the entire project, she showed what she is made of and why so many people want to see her run for president. That not enough people have her attitude, sums up nicely what is wrong among our political elite. "The way I saw it," she wrote, "we had nothing to lose. I didn't want a job in the Capitol, so what did I care if I ticked off a lot of people in Washington? This was our last chance to get this agency into law. If we lost now, we lost forever.

The Senate did not want a tough vote on this issue. Dan explained what that meant: the consumer agency was popular, and, to a lot of senators, a vote on the new agency meant having to choose between angering the public and angering the banks-- and they didn't want to anger either. They preferred a quiet and slightly mysterious death.

…[A] newly energized Republican Party [had] the leverage to block-- or at least rewrite-- legislation they did not like. To those of us fighting for the consumer agency, it looked like another nail in the coffin…The Democrats had lost their sixty-seat majority in January, and now the bill needed the support of Massachusetts' newest senator, Republican Scott Brown. Suddently the senator found himself sitting in the catbird seat. Wasting no time, he threatened to hold up the financial bill unless the Democrats agreed to reopen the nearly completed package to add one more provision: a financial break for the big banks.

Ever since the United States began writing rules for financial institutions, the banks have always paid the costs of regulation. The price tag for enforcing the new bank reforms was estimated to be about 19 billion, and the current version of the reform bill specifically said that the biggest financial institutions would pay for it.

Now Senator Brown threatened to hold up the bill unless that provision was changed. He insisted that the taxpayers, not the bill banks, pick up the tab. Barney Frank was furious, but he didn't have much choice: this last change was the price of making financial reform a reality. The deal was cut, the final bill was passed by both the House and the Senate, and the legislation was sent to the president for his signature.

Why would Scott Brown screw over the taxpayers to save the crooked banks, who had just nearly destroyed the entire economy-- and certainly wrecks the lives of millions of people? A better question might be to ask why the Financial Sector gave more campaign cash to Scott Brown last cycle than to any other member of Congress. Here's a graphic from OpenSecrets.org showing the half dozen top recipients of legalized bribery from the financial sector for 2012.

In the video below, Chris Hayes asks, Scott Hagerstrom, the Koch brothers top Michigan political operative, "Who do you want to see suffer?" That's an easy question for Republicans like Hagerstrom and Scott Brown. They want to see ordinary working families suffer… a lot.