Elizabeth Warren Goes On Bill Moyers Show To Tell The Truth

Every time I see some clueless DIY pundit say something about the "Elizabeth Warren-Bill De Blasio wing of the Democratic Party," it's like fingernails on a chalkboard. Bill De Blasio? He has a record, which is why Blue America never endorsed him and why DWT never had any editorial comment on him beyond him being better than the even worse character that EMILY's List ran, Christine Quinn. A Wall Street Democrat, he took on the highly dubious persona of "the liberal," an undiscerning media bought it, was endorsed by The Nation, George Soros, Howard Dean, Jerry Nadler, Al Sharpton, Harry Belafonte, Sarah Jessica Parker and Alec Baldwin, and the imagination of the voting public was caught. As one wag put it on twitter this morning, "Bill De Blasio is aesthetically liberal-ish, but this pretense of him being a progressive leader was always silly… De Blasio is just a Wall Street Democrat who wants to give a bit more to the poor. His wife was a Citigroup exec." It's why we saw him stand with conservative corporate Democrat Wendy Greuel in L.A. against the progressive candidates and why we see him standing with grotesque fake Democrats like Andrew Cuomo, Kathy Hochul and Jeffrey Klein in New York now. If there's a "left wing" of the Democratic Party, the only role Bill De Blasio would have, would be undermining it. Putting him in the same sentence as Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Alan Grayson is, at best, counterproductive.

This week Liz Warren was Bill Moyers' guest on his TV show and the whole show is embedded below. Up top, however, is the "web extra" that didn't make it onto the show. Moyers, playing off her must-read new book, A Fighting Chance, asked her about a now infamous dinner she had with notorious Wall Street whore Larry Summers.

I'm not yet in the Senate-- I'm not even thinking about running for public office. It's why I can cause so much trouble, right? I’m out there, causing trouble. And Larry was working in the White House as economic advisor. And so we had a long conversation about a lot of issues, argued about a lot of things, agreed on some things.

And finally, Larry said to me that there are two kinds of people in Washington. There are-- and you're going to have to make a choice here about what you want to be. You can be an outsider and criticize all you want, but nobody's going to listen to you. Or you can be an insider, and we'll listen. But the first rule is, insiders don't criticize other insiders.

You know, Larry's statement just amazed me. The idea that you can be an outsider, say everything you want, but we're not going to listen to you. Or you can be an insider. But insiders never criticize insiders. And it's why I'll never be an insider. It's-- I just can't.

Later on Moyers followed up by asking her about frustration with the hidebound process in Washington. "You were so effective as an outsider," he said, "as an activist, I have to wonder if you aren't frustrated by the pace at which nothing happens in Washington."

You know, frustrated-- that is a word that would barely contain how I feel about this. But yet, we have to remember-- when we talk about Washington, what's happening about trying to get things done. I think that this is about two pieces in terms of how we make change. One is that we make change by planting our flag on what we believe in. I think that is the most effective way to do it. We say, "We are the folks who are going to stand up for minimum wage." And that was every single Democrat. And you look around and say, "How 'bout you, Republicans? Where are you?"

And you draw this difference. You know, one of the easiest ways on the bankruptcy bill and other places, was so long as you can keep all of that blurry, then everyone can keep writing the rules for the rich and the powerful. So I think the most affirmative part of it is we've got to lay out what we stand for, and then we've got to be willing to fight for it. But the second part is we're going to have to tackle straight on money in politics. We've got to do it. Our democracy depends on this.

And then Moyers gets to where a real progressive like Warren-- or Grayson or Sanders-- differs from the New York fakers like De Blasio, Schumer, Gillibrand, Cuomo… throw Hillary in there if you want to… he sure does.

BILL MOYERS: There's a new study coming out by two noted political scientists who say that-- they've studied 1,700 or so bills over the last several years and they conclude that when it comes to public policy decisions, that the affluent, the wealthy, the organized interests have far more influence. In fact…

SENATOR ELIZABETH WARREN: It's true.

BILL MOYERS: …ordinary people, have almost no impact on public policy decisions in Washington.

SENATOR ELIZABETH WARREN: Well, the point right now is that we've got to make some changes. And we got to be focused on what the difference is. I don’t know if you saw it but there’s a study that DEMOS put together.

BILL MOYERS: I did see it.

SENATOR ELIZABETH WARREN: Did you see this.

BILL MOYERS: A think tank, yes.

SENATOR ELIZABETH WARREN: Where they talk about what it is that most Americans want, but what it is that very well-to-do Americans want. And very well-to-do Americans have a very different view of the minimum age. They’re not enthusiastic about raising the minimum wage. Of course it’s very removed from their lives.

BILL MOYERS: 70 percent of Americans say they favor raising the minimum wage.

SENATOR ELIZABETH WARREN: Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: Ralph Nader points out at a really good piece this morning that $7.25 is what minimum age is paying. That's poverty-level wages, while members of Congress are making, 40-hour work week, $83 an hour, plus benefits, health benefits, retirement pensions. This disconnect between what members of Congress, how they live, and how these ordinary people are living, how do you overcome that? Why is it? Why is that disconnect there?

SENATOR ELIZABETH WARREN: So, you know, for me the whole question around minimum wage is very personal. I grew up in a family that had a lot of financial ups and downs. When I was 12 my mom was a stay-at-home mom, my dad was selling carpet, all three of my older brother off in the military. And my daddy had a heart attack. And you know, it was a period of time, no money coming in, the bills pile up. We lost the family station wagon.

We came about that close to losing our home. And I start the book “A Fighting Chance” with the day I walked into my mother's bedroom. And she was pulling on her black dress, the one that was her best dress, hung in the closet for funerals, special occasions, not just church, but extra special. And she pulls this dress on, and she's crying, she blows her nose, puts on her lipstick, pulls on her high heels, and walks to the Sears and gets a minimum-wage job.

And that minimum-wage job saved us. It saved our house, it saved our little family of three. Because in the 1960s, a full-time, minimum-wage job would keep a family afloat. Today, a full-time minimum-wage job won't keep a mama and a baby out of poverty. And that's-- goes back to the question of who is Washington working for?

You know, the American people are ready for a raise in the minimum wage. But the Republicans have voted, "No, no, no," on this. For me, this now gets down to the question of how we get people involved so there's real accountability. It's time for everybody across this country to ask of their senators, to ask of their congressman or congresswoman: whose side are you on? Are you there for the folks who are out there trying to work for a living? Or are you just there for the millionaires and billionaires?

BILL MOYERS: So me play something you said recently to the Netroots Conference, a grassroots advocate. You're talking there about the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau enacted by Congress against enormous Wall Street and corporate pressure. Here it is.

SENATOR ELIZABETH WARREN AT NETROOTS NATION CONFERENCE: We won because you and a zillion other people across this country got in the fight. We won because you got out there, you broke news, you wrote opinion pieces, you organized petitions, you built coalitions, you kept that idea alive. You called out sleazy lobbyists and cowardly politicians. You said, "We, we the people will have this agency." And you are the ones who won. You won this fight.

BILL MOYERS: And they won because you won because you led that fight. You won that fight.

But look at the recent story in the Washington Examiner. Quote, "Revolving Door at Regulator CFBP Enables Former Bureaucrats to Cash In at Taxpayers' Expense,” in other words, employees of the agency you helped create to protect consumers for which you were justly taking, giving credit to the activists behind you are going to work now representing the very industry that they were regulating. That's the old revolving door. It happens in every department of government. How can you overcome that?

SENATOR ELIZABETH WARREN: So the revolving door, I mean, Eric Cantor just showed us how fast the revolving door can spin just in the last few days. This is really, this has got to be stopped in Washington. We have got to have rules that say you can't leave your job regulating an industry, you can't leave your job writing the rules for an industry and then turn right around and go to work for the industry.

You know, it's, it has become-- this is the part that is distributing. It's not just that they're doing. It's that everyone expects them to do it. It's now the culture of doing it which has the impact of infecting the whole process. We have got...

BILL MOYERS: Changing the culture.

SENATOR ELIZABETH WARREN: …to put a stop to this. Change the culture. This has got to be stopped.

BILL MOYERS: How?

SENATOR ELIZABETH WARREN: It has got to be stopped. It's rules.

BILL MOYERS: Democrats and Republicans alike do it as you know.

SENATOR ELIZABETH WARREN: But the Senate and the House of Representatives write these rules. And right now the rules in effect say, "Have at it, boys."

BILL MOYERS: That's what you mean when you say the insiders write the rules to benefit themselves.

SENATOR ELIZABETH WARREN: That's right. That's exactly right. Although, we cannot leave the subject of that little Consumer Financial Protection Bureau without talking about another aspect of it. That is it's making enormous change. It is doing such a fabulous job.

Do you know that it has now recovered-- it's only been up in operation, what, for just a little over two years. It has already returned more than $4 billion to American families who got cheated by credit companies and mortgage companies. It has set up a consumer complaint hotline where people can go online, file a complaint, it gets forwarded to the company.

And they're getting results. Not in every case. But they're starting to get results. Tens of thousands of people are logging on and having their voices heard. It's working. And here's how I know for sure it's working. The Republicans in Congress are determined to try to muzzle it.

They're determined to try to pull the teeth out of the watchdog. They want to make sure that they pull this agency down. Mitch McConnell in that, one of the secret recordings that has come out in recent days, Mitch McConnell said one of the first things he would do if the Republicans take over the Senate is they would cut back on Dodd-Frank, all those financial reforms. That's our little Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. So we've got this fight lined up again. Whose side are you on? The consumer agency who's out there fighting for people just so they won't get cheated on credit cards and mortgages and payday loans or the big financial companies that want to be able to make a profit off those folks and their Republican friends in Congress who are willing to help them?

Moyers should invite Bill De Blasio onto his show so people can see the difference between a faker and a real progressive. Watch the whole show, particularly how she deals with Moyers' incisive questions about the unfitness of Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic nominee. It's pretty amazing.