Charles Pierce: Elizabeth Warren Is the Teacher

[muriel_volestrangler]

By request, from GD:

She has come to remind us who we are, or at least who we once were. She is the only one warning that conditions in the financial sector are in some ways worse now than before the collapse of 2008. Her message has gained her many powerful enemies. And it has a lot of people very eager for Elizabeth Warren to run for president.


The best teachers are the ones who remain students at heart, the ones who keep learning from their students, and from the world around them, and from their own drive to know even more about even more things, and who then are able to transmit that knowledge—and more important, the drive to know more—to their students. That's how great teachers echo through time. That's how great teachers become immortal.
...
You cannot understand how she became a senator—hell, you can't even understand how she became a public person—unless you understand the fact that, first and foremost, she is a teacher, having taught at Rutgers, and having been a professor of law at the University of Houston, the University of Texas, the University of Pennsylvania, and ultimately at Harvard Law School, where she was teaching bankruptcy and contracts in the fall of 2008, just as the global financial system collapsed and threatened the economy of the entire world. Her first great project as a young law professor in Texas had been to learn about how bankruptcy worked in this country, and more important, it was to learn about the people who found themselves in the process. It challenged her assumptions; she had thought she was going out to study the schemers who were working the system and the moochers who were cheating the people to whom they owed money. She learned from the people in the courtrooms that everything she knew about them was wrong, and then she set out to teach the country that everything it thought about those people was wrong. "It was," she tells me later, "so much like being in church, quiet and hushed. They were in little groups, talking among themselves. Nobody wanted to look at anybody else."

That led her to her first book, and thence into the study of how these people came to be in all these courtrooms, the way the great American middle class was being tricked out of its wealth and scammed out of its birthright and crushed by the tectonic forces of underregulated capitalism and money-drenched politics. She saw the dangers of subprime mortgages because she'd seen the damage of what she called the "tricks and traps" of the mortgage lenders, seen what it did to families unaware of the deliberate obfuscation of what they'd signed, only to have the teaser rate of the mortgage run out and find themselves underwater. She inveighed against the fine-print piracy of the credit-card companies; she often said that the conditions on a credit card should be as simple as the instructions on a toaster. She brought these lessons back to Harvard, and she was teaching them to her students in September of 2008, when the roof caved in. And she went right on teaching. She had been warning official Washington for months that disaster was coming.
...
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/elizabeth-warren-teacher-0514

[Autumn]

1. She knows the choices that Washington makes don't reflect our values.

Values that she shares with us. I hope she says enough, and decides to run. Thanks for cross posting this.

[pscot]

2. There's no further place to back up."

"We're down to the short strokes. Either we pull this out now or the game is truly over," she says. "So, optimistic? You bet I am, because I can see victories, recent victories, victories even after the fire hose of money has been poured upon the system. But that doesn't mean I know we're going to beat it. It just means I know we can, because I've seen those victories. We've got to beat it. We don't have any choice here. We truly are—we're backed up. We've got nothing behind us. There's no further place to back up."


.... People are drawn to her not necessarily by her intelligence or by her willingness to speak truth to greed but by an ineffable feeling that she is reminding them of something they already knew. .....

But the choices Washington makes right now don't reflect our values. The idea that billions of dollars would be left with billionaires through tax loopholes rather than spending that money on repairing roads and bridges? Rather than spending that money on helping our kids get through college? Rather than spending that money on NIH? And rather than a better future for all of our kids? That's the debate we're on the cusp of having."

There already are forces, even within the Democratic party, gathering themselves to squash that debate. Larry Summers, her old bête noire, whose hands Warren was instrumental in keeping off the Federal Reserve system last year, already is giving interviews about "setting class against class" in anticipation of Democratic losses in this fall's midterm elections. If those losses occur, there will be a fearsome momentum for the party to move back toward the more corporate-friendly Democratic party that elected Bill Clinton, who repealed the Glass-Steagall Act and signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which exempted credit-default swaps from regulation and generally set the tone for the Democratic complicity in the economic catastrophe that hit in 2008. And Elizabeth Warren has come to teach us the greatest lesson the country needs to learn: who we are. Or at least who we once were.

[Autumn]

3. She is so right. "There's no further place to back up."

[pscot]

4. If not now, when?

If not us, who?

[blue14u]

5. The nswer is US

The time is now...

Otherwise.... we're f^$^%&....



Warren POTUS 2016

VOTE 2014