Elizabeth Warren 2020

[Hank Kingsley 20923]

 

[WhatTheBuck 28777]

1 hour ago, Bama Chick said:

If you feel defensive and a need to type many, many words when someone WHO IS NOT YOU gets accused of racism, ya might want to think about why that is.

And if you do it every time it happens to SOMEONE ELSE and you have to contort basic logic to construct a defense, ya might want to cogitate on that too.

I’m prone to be defensive for and get into wars of words on the internet when someone says something mean about Harry Styles.

Because I’m a Harry Styles fan girl and I adore him and he’s perfect and anyone saying anything bad about him is DEFINITELY WRONG AND BAD AND I WON’T HAVE IT!

If you react that way about racism getting called out.........

I don't know who Harry Styles is so I don't get that part but, other than that, great post. 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

 

[Bat Guano 359]

On 2/9/2019 at 4:40 PM, Pokemon said:

Trump should be a prison inmate. Or an Indian casino floor manager.

I've always thought if Trump hadn't had a rich daddy his natural station in life would have been a bouncer at some shiny-shirt-douchebag club in Queens or the Bronx. But as things turned out he should definitely be doing hard time in the pen.

[troph 24785]

I've always thought if Trump hadn't had a rich daddy his natural station in life would have been a bouncer at some shiny-shirt-douchebag club in Queens or the Bronx. But as things turned out he should definitely be doing hard time in the pen.

Nah he’d be a low time sleazy sales guy. The guy that’s always talking about how this is the deal that will make him and any investor lucky enough to ride with him rich. Meanwhile his check for apartment rent continues to bounce. Kind of a Frye fraud type thing with more Bronx/queens bluster and less manhattan bling.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

 

[gmr548 16576]

On 2/12/2019 at 12:17 PM, Hugo Stiglitz said:

 

 

Hard pressed to find a more convincing endorsement. The financial industry is shady as fuck.

[Doc Sam Beckett 5793]

1 hour ago, gmr548 said:

 

Hard pressed to find a more convincing endorsement. The financial industry is shady as fuck.

Yeah, she's amazing. She's also about as exciting as watching paint dry. I wish she had a little more swagger or whatever, cause that's what's gonna sink her.... 

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

9 minutes ago, Doc Sam Beckett said:

Yeah, she's amazing. She's also about as exciting as watching paint dry. I wish she had a little more swagger or whatever, cause that's what's gonna sink her.... 

Dude she busted out a brewski in her first video, what more do ya want ?  I like her message, but I don't think she has the chops to create presidential charisma.

[bad_teammate 13195]

On 2/12/2019 at 12:17 PM, Hugo Stiglitz said:

 

Can't wait for it to be Warren vs. Sanders at the end of the primary and they just scream increasingly violent threats at billionaires in an attempt to outpace each other.

(Warren wins in the end by promising to build the beheading wall from Caligula)

[gmr548 16576]

Yeah, she's amazing. She's also about as exciting as watching paint dry. I wish she had a little more swagger or whatever, cause that's what's gonna sink her.... 

Dude she busted out a brewski in her first video, what more do ya want ?  I like her message, but I don't think she has the chops to create presidential charisma.

 

Unfortunately I think you're both correct. Reagan, Bush (lol dukakis), Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump. Plenty of ideological variation there, the theme is that the biggest personality, for better or worse, wins Presidential elections these days. I will still most likely be voting for her in the primary though.

 

Sent from my SM-G920V using Tapatalk

 

 

 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

 

Edited March 3, 2019 by Hugo Stiglitz

[bad_teammate 13195]

Get 'em, Liz!

[bad_teammate 13195]

God damnit.

 

[Guest Lobo]

How are some of you guys still online and not already in line for her talk here in Austin?  

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

12 minutes ago, Lobo said:

How are some of you guys still online and not already in line for her talk here in Austin?  

How do you know we’re not online while waiting in line?

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

On 2/28/2019 at 12:26 PM, Hugo Stiglitz said:

 

See now if she'd fired up a big ol' doobie or took a bong hit instead of that lame attempt at being an average JOE with her let me go grab a brewski moment I'd be truly..........onboard.

Edited March 4, 2019 by Onboard 2.0

[Guest Lobo]

8 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

How do you know we’re not online while waiting in line?

'Cause it's too cold.  Even she couldn't stand these elements.  There's a really impressive gathering of Democrat hopefuls rolling into town this week between EDU and Interactive.  This is a great moment for Austin.  One I'm sure we'll manage to fuck up when it's reported that an errant scooter operated by George Soros "accidentally" kneecaps Gabbard.  

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

 

[Biff Tannen 45677]

Preach on anti-corruption lady.  I just hope your ideas aren't buried under a trite meme.

[troph 24785]

Yeah, she's amazing. She's also about as exciting as watching paint dry. I wish she had a little more swagger or whatever, cause that's what's gonna sink her.... 

She’s actually got swagger in spades, she’s just an old grandmother with a higher pitched voice than Harris. so she’s marginalized from the get go.

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

1 hour ago, troph said:

She’s actually got swagger in spades, she’s just an old grandmother with a higher pitched voice than Harris. so she’s marginalized from the get go.

Old white lady................. Racism and agesim...  and sexism.... the trifecta.

Edited March 6, 2019 by Onboard 2.0

[bad_teammate 13195]

26 minutes ago, troph said:

She’s actually got swagger in spades, she’s just an old grandmother with a higher pitched voice than Harris. so she’s marginalized from the get go.

She needs good surrogates. If you watch Bernie's first two rallies (Brooklyn & Chicago), Nina Turner is on right before him and she gets the crowd hyped as hell. She does her "WITH THESE HANDS" bit and the audience is ready to go behead some capitalists, so Bernie walks up to a warm crowd.

 

[RomaVicta 29907]

On 2/25/2019 at 8:39 PM, Doc Sam Beckett said:

Yeah, she's amazing. She's also about as exciting as watching paint dry. I wish she had a little more swagger or whatever, cause that's what's gonna sink her.... 

That's a(nother) sad commentary on the electorate, but I believe you're right. Actually, I wouldn't say she's boring; I'd say she's not presidential in the most superficial ways. She should use consultants for her look and even her speaking style. Just a tweak here or there would do it.

I only have the shallowest knowledge of the candidates, but she is my favorite at the moment. She does not have Clinton's portfolio, but she is certainly qualified and more palatable.

[Pam Cummings 9640]

On 2/11/2019 at 9:51 AM, Bama Chick said:

If you feel defensive and a need to type many, many words when someone WHO IS NOT YOU gets accused of racism, ya might want to think about why that is.

And if you do it every time it happens to SOMEONE ELSE and you have to contort basic logic to construct a defense, ya might want to cogitate on that too.

I’m prone to be defensive for and get into wars of words on the internet when someone says something mean about Harry Styles.

Because I’m a Harry Styles fan girl and I adore him and he’s perfect and anyone saying anything bad about him is DEFINITELY WRONG AND BAD AND I WON’T HAVE IT!

If you react that way about racism getting called out.........

Spot on as usual

[RomaVicta 29907]

On 2/25/2019 at 8:50 PM, Onboard 2.0 said:

 I like her message

That's actually nice to read, Onboard.

[RomaVicta 29907]

Having read to the end of the thread, I'm getting that sick election feeling. 

Elizabeth Warren shows all the little traits of a pioneer feminist from the 70's. The early part of the decade was all natural with a determination to peel away all signs of non feminisism which meant abandoning cultural femininity. Vanity was out within that movement. In most, maybe all, important ways that was likely necessary and good for the cause. The cause is surely just.

Unfortunately for a national candidacy, you need some vanity. Male candidates generally preen to present themselves in refined, dynamic masculinity. Ann Richards is a notable example of a woman who carried the feminist banner but presented herself in a visually refined, dynamic feminine way.

Warren's cornball song and cornball cavorting with her grandkids presents us with a fun, active Gammy who the grandkids adore. None of that has anything to do with why I, at the moment, support her run. She's smarter than most people in a room of smart people. She's articulate. I don't see her getting pushed around. She will be a pleasure to watch in debate. 

I hope she's smart enough to look hard at how she's running. She's not someone who needs softening of her image. She needs sharpness.

Now, I'll go throw up because this appearance shit is so important. She should, too, and then start addressing it.

[DigglerontheHoof 21194]

23 minutes ago, RomaVicta said:

That's a(nother) sad commentary on the electorate, but I believe you're right. Actually, I wouldn't say she's boring; I'd say she's not presidential in the most superficial ways. She should use consultants for her look and even her speaking style. Just a tweak here or there would do it.

I only have the shallowest knowledge of the candidates, but she is my favorite at the moment. She does not have Clinton's portfolio, but she is certainly qualified and more palatable.

True, but "style points" is nothing new.  And it's been especially apparent since the 1960 election.  I'm sure someone much better read on the subject will condescendingly correct me but the Kennedy/Nixon TV debates seemed to really change the game, as far as POTUS elections go. 

[TwiceHorn 31452]

17 minutes ago, RomaVicta said:

She does not have Clinton's portfolio, but she is certainly qualified and more palatable.

She has a vastly better portfolio than Clinton.  Firstly, it was on her own merit; she is much more accomplished than Hillary.  It isn't politics, but it involved policy.  I like her ideas quite a bit as they are a departure from tax and spend and they tend to be practical in that they address specific problems in tangible ways rather than general promotion of idealistic ideological goals (AOC).

She has a bit of schoolmarm/church lady to her, understandably, I suppose, given her career.

I also wish she had a better record of reaching across the aisle here and there.  On the other hand, she doesn't grandstand much.

If we had the election tomorrow, she'd get my vote.

[TwiceHorn 31452]

nm

Edited March 6, 2019 by TwiceHorn
Shit's borked

[TwiceHorn 31452]

nm

Edited March 6, 2019 by TwiceHorn
Shit is borked

[bad_teammate 13195]

Elizabeth Warren has enough charisma and charm. You don't have to be Obama to win, you just have to not be John Kerry.

 

[TwiceHorn 31452]

Also, she has either changed or deliberately tried to change herself.  In the Senate, she's something of a ballcutter, at least in public, and now she's going for "Gammy."  By most accounts of her as a teacher, she was tough, demanding, but warm and courteous at all times.  https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/10/13/elizabeth-warren-known-harvard-law-school-tough-but-fair/9adfuU4jXPPSEfO8XyturM/story.html

I think Roma is right, she has some 70s feminist in her, but that was not her rep as a teacher.  Maybe she's been playing roles so long she doesn't know who she is.  That's a shame, because I think she's probably one of the better candidates we've had in quite a while.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

Elizabeth Warren Is Not Afraid of the Democrats

The 2020 presidential candidate has a long track record of opposing lobbyists, billionaires, the Republicans—and her own party.

https://www.thenation.com/article/warren-democrats-obama-president/

When Senator Elizabeth Warren declared that she was running for president in February, she described Donald Trump’s administration as “the most corrupt in living memory.” But she didn’t stop there: “Even after Trump is gone, it won’t be enough to do a better job of running a broken system,” she said.

Warren’s speech was centered around the notion that political corruption is not a uniquely Republican problem. “To protect their economic advantages, the rich and powerful have rigged our political system as well,” she continued. “They’ve bought off or bullied politicians in both parties to make sure Washington is always on their side.”

Anyone who’s followed Warren’s career knows she’s been making statements like this for years. But her position is suddenly mainstream: Almost every major contender for the Democratic presidential nomination is rejecting corporate PAC money and decrying the influence of the financial sector, albeit with varying degrees of sincerity. These are all implicit criticisms of the Democratic Party. Barack Obama, for example, collected more money from Wall Street in 2008 than any candidate in history, failed to prosecute any bankers for the financial crisis, and appointed officials with Wall Street ties to key financial regulatory positions in its wake.

Warren was Obama’s biggest critic on the left. She opposed major pieces of legislation that benefited Wall Street or pharmaceutical interests; tore into some of Obama’s cabinet members in public hearings; and even blocked an Obama nominee to a high-ranking Treasury position. The question now is whether these battles against a man whom 95 percent of Democrats view favorably will harm Warren, or whether the party’s leftward turn on economic issues in particular will ultimately carry her to the White House.

Elizabeth Warren was teaching at Harvard Law School when, in 2008, then–Senate majority leader Harry Reid selected her for the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which had written America’s biggest banks a $700 billion check with precious few strings attached. Warren, a bankruptcy expert, was then elected as the panel’s chair. “The role of congressional oversight is to ask the tough questions, to push back on the decisions, to request additional information, and to recheck the numbers,” Warren said in an interview at the time. “It’s our job to be cranky.”

And cranky she was. She pushed Treasury officials under both Bush and Obama for more transparency over where the TARP money was going and asked loudly why homeowners weren’t receiving enough of it. Warren did more than simply oversee what TARP authorized; she raised larger questions about how the economy was structured and whom it was designed to benefit.

 

One of the reports she presided over argued for government reorganization of the banks or even full-on nationalization. It highlighted international examples of past financial crises and said that ousting management and selling bank assets was the way to go.

Not surprisingly, Warren’s agitating didn’t endear her to many Democrats in Congress. Nor did it please Obama’s Treasury Department. “Some Democrats complain that Warren’s role as a constant Cassandra could undermine already tenuous public support for the bank, auto industry and other financial rescue programs,” Politico reported, paraphrasing anonymous officials. Neil Barofsky, TARP’s inspector general, later wrote in his book Bailout that an Obama Treasury official tried to create a split between him and Warren by falsely telling him “how much Elizabeth Warren hated me, was jealous of me, and was plotting my demise.”

Warren acknowledged in her own book, A Fighting Chance, that she wasn’t exactly popular inside the Beltway. “I started hearing that many Washington insiders were surprised (and some were aggravated) that we were going just as hard on the Democratic administration as we had on the Republicans,” she wrote, “but I wasn’t going to stop and worry about that.”

What’s more, her haters hadn’t seen the half of it. The pivotal moment of Warren’s tenure on the Congressional Oversight Panel came in June 2010, when then–Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner testified at a hearing. At the time, the Obama administration was preparing to get the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau off the ground. It was a bureau that Warren had designed to police financial-services companies offering consumer products (no single government agency was doing that at the time), and progressive activists were pressuring Obama to put Warren in charge.

Before the hearing, “I had thought [Warren] might go lightly on [Geithner] with the [CFPB] job still up in the air,” Barofsky wrote. “After all, she was making no secret of her desire for the job, and the White House had to be watching her every move.”

Warren did not go lightly on Geithner. In response to a question about the Home Affordable Modification Program, Geithner was dismissive of criticism “from people who had hoped that the program would be designed to keep a much larger fraction of Americans in their homes.” Warren laid into him, pointing out that HAMP didn’t make payments to homeowners directly, but instead sent the money to mortgage servicers, who make profits from interest payments and have no incentive to bail people out. They wouldn’t even lose money on most foreclosures.

“I had not intended to ask you about this, but I want to go back,” Warren told Geithner. “The early modification programs actually got people into more trouble, raised their overall payments, had them owing more principal than they had started out with…. You set aside $50 billion, and what do you have to show for it?”

The exchange went viral on YouTube, and Warren was ultimately vindicated: Servicers simply delayed seizing clients’ homes and collected some extra payments and late fees before foreclosing on them anyway. In fact, according to the TARP inspector general, a full 70 percent of borrowers who applied for the program were ultimately denied a permanent modification. At the time of the hearing, as Warren pointed out, only 347,000 homeowners out of a projected 3 to 4 million had received a permanent modification to help avoid foreclosure. Overall, only about a million ended up getting help.

“I thought it was a remarkably principled act,” Barofsky later wrote, “the exact opposite of what any other person in Washington angling for a high-profile job would have done.”

Though this public altercation raised Warren’s profile, she wasn’t banished from the CFPB. Still, the nascent bureau would have no real enforcement power until Obama and the Senate agreed on a permanent director. Progressives rallied in her favor—they even made a music video rapping, “Sheriff Warren, she’s what we need, yo”—and White House advisers Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod were reportedly backing her too. But Geithner and his allies were dead set against giving her the job. Facing heavy opposition from congressional Republicans as well, Obama ultimately chose not to nominate her.

Warren wrote in her book that she was “disappointed, but not surprised…. It was pretty clear from the beginning that [Obama] wasn’t itching to give me the post.” But there seems to be no animosity in their relationship. Warren spoke warmly of the president and posted a smiling selfie with him on his last day in office; Obama even encouraged Warren to run for her Senate seat in 2012.

This is all despite the fact that Warren kept coming at Obama from his left and rode a wave of progressive anger over the disproportionate wealth and power of Wall Street after the collapse. An early flare-up on this front involved the year-end omnibus spending bill in 2014. One provision of the Dodd-Frank financial-reform legislation withheld government insurance for banks that traded derivative swaps, complicated financial products that often disguise and disperse serious liabilities. The goal was to discourage the risky behavior that had so recently led to calamity, but the GOP-controlled House had repealed that provision. Few Senate Democrats approved of the repeal, but said they’d still vote for the Republican spending bill to avoid a government shutdown. The Obama White House signaled that it, too, would support the bill, repeal and all.

Warren was left leading a lonely charge to kill it. She didn’t spare her Democratic colleagues. “Who does Congress work for?” she asked in a speech on the Senate floor. “Does it work for the millionaires, the billionaires, the giant companies with their armies of lobbyists and lawyers?” A bill passed the Senate three days later. But Warren wasn’t done.

Earlier that year, Obama had nominated Antonio Weiss—a veteran investment banker and Obama bundler who enjoyed broad support from most of the party—to serve as under secretary for domestic finance at the Treasury. But Warren wasn’t a fan: She saw Weiss as a poor fit for a high-ranking regulatory job, not least because he’d recently helped Burger King complete a complicated tax-inversion deal to lessen its US tax burden. After losing the spending-bill fight, Warren took to the Senate floor to denounce his nomination. “Enough is enough with Wall Street insiders getting key position after key position and the kind of cronyism that we have seen in the executive branch,” she declared.

The scene, captured in another video, also went viral—apparently, taking on Obama over Wall Street struck a nerve—and Warren became the icon for a successful activist push to stop Weiss’s nomination. The pressure kept the Senate from acting before the end of the 115th Congress, and Weiss wrote to Obama and asked not to be renominated.

Wall Street financier Steven Rattner, a former colleague of Weiss’s, lamented to The Washington Post that “poor Antonio” had “become a pawn in the struggle for the heart of the Democratic Party.” Meanwhile, a Warren source told the paper that it was indeed a struggle—one that Warren was winning. “I think there’s a finite amount they’re willing to bleed,” the adviser said. “Every time we attack them, they bleed.”

For Warren, no fight was bloodier than the battle over the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, which began when Congress passed fast-track trade authority in 2015. Warren was an early opponent of the bill, and she focused her criticism on provisions that opened a back door for international conglomerates to repeal important US regulations, including many enacted under Dodd-Frank. Obama’s advisers, meanwhile, were pushing the TPP as a legacy-building achievement.

That’s when Warren’s advocacy provoked a direct rebuke from the president. In an interview with Yahoo News, an “unusually irritated” Obama said that “the truth of the matter is that Elizabeth is, you know, a politician like everybody else…and you know, she’s got a voice that she wants to get out there. And I understand that.”

In trying to drop a bomb on Warren’s persona as an incorruptible crusader for the little guy, the president of the United States leveled probably the most damaging insult he could: She’s just a politician.

Fast-track trade authority narrowly got through Congress, but Warren still won the war: Hillary Clinton would oppose the doomed TPP in the Democratic primary. And a quick scan of the 2020 candidates—not to mention Warren’s prominent place among them—shows how quickly party leaders have adopted her position.

Warren kept up her fight through the final days of the Obama administration. In December 2016, only weeks before he left office, Obama, his staff, and many cabinet officials gathered in the Rose Garden to celebrate the passage of the 21st Century Cures Act, which aimed to accelerate medical research. The gathering was a chance for Obama to mark one last major accomplishment before leaving office—but Warren didn’t think it deserved the time of day. She’d already shredded the bill on the Senate floor days prior for its “huge giveaways” to the pharmaceutical industry, explaining that “when American voters say Congress is owned by big companies, this bill is exactly what they are talking about.”

As Warren now campaigns for the nomination on her increasingly popular yet decades-old positions, her opponents on Wall Street—and their friends in the Democratic Party—aren’t changing their tune either.

Steven Rattner said recently on MSNBC that Warren was too “anti-capitalist” and “anti-rich” to beat Trump (never mind that Warren, who is not a socialist by any stretch, has critics to her left who complain that she isn’t anti-capitalist enough). After Warren took a DNA test last October to “prove” her Native American heritage, Jim Messina, Obama’s former campaign manager, rushed onto MSNBC to call her “cynical” and bad for the Democrats. (After leaving the Obama orbit, Messina went on to work for the UK’s Conservative Party.)

Warren’s fellow presidential contenders may also use her departures from party orthodoxy against her, just as Clinton used Sanders’s critiques of Obama to score points during a 2016 debate in Milwaukee, saying: “The kind of criticism that we’ve heard from Senator Sanders about our president, I expect from Republicans.” (Sanders called Clinton’s remark a “low blow” and said, “Last I heard, a United States senator had the right to disagree with the president.”)

What Elizabeth Warren has going for her is the fact that Democratic voters have never particularly liked Wall Street bailouts or big international “free-trade” deals. She, for one, won’t have to renounce her record to appeal to their beliefs. Her presidential campaign is a bet that someone who has been a strong critic of the political system and the Democratic Party can become the leader of both by being consistent, credible, and right. This is the bet that Obama made in 2008, when his strong opposition to the Iraq War was shared by a majority of voters but far from a majority of elected Democrats. It worked for him, and it may just work for her.

Edited March 6, 2019 by Hugo Stiglitz

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

3 hours ago, RomaVicta said:

Having read to the end of the thread, I'm getting that sick election feeling. 

Elizabeth Warren shows all the little traits of a pioneer feminist from the 70's. The early part of the decade was all natural with a determination to peel away all signs of non feminisism which meant abandoning cultural femininity. Vanity was out within that movement. In most, maybe all, important ways that was likely necessary and good for the cause. The cause is surely just.

Unfortunately for a national candidacy, you need some vanity. Male candidates generally preen to present themselves in refined, dynamic masculinity. Ann Richards is a notable example of a woman who carried the feminist banner but presented herself in a visually refined, dynamic feminine way.

Warren's cornball song and cornball cavorting with her grandkids presents us with a fun, active Gammy who the grandkids adore. None of that has anything to do with why I, at the moment, support her run. She's smarter than most people in a room of smart people. She's articulate. I don't see her getting pushed around. She will be a pleasure to watch in debate. 

I hope she's smart enough to look hard at how she's running. She's not someone who needs softening of her image. She needs sharpness.

Now, I'll go throw up because this appearance shit is so important. She should, too, and then start addressing it.

Yeah she needs to ditch that folksy BS. Be professional and hitman like.  She needs to show she's tough. I still cringe at that beerfomercial.  

If her platform is reform and going after the Wall Street types she's gonna have a tough road to hoe getting big donations, but the right message could resonate with voters. A very strong and simple platform of talking points that Joe blow on the street can relate to is gonna be key. She's got a hard task getting blue collar dems to vote for her though IMO.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

16 minutes ago, Onboard 2.0 said:

Yeah she needs to ditch that folksy BS.

I thought the same thing but after looking at some responses, the folksy grandmother stuff does resonate with some people.  She can’t be a hard ass all the time and expect to broaden her support. 

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

4 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

I thought the same thing but after looking at some responses, the folksy grandmother stuff does resonate with some people.  She can’t be a hard ass all the time and expect to broaden her support. 

No, but you need a consistent look, and that looks a bit staged IMO.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

Just now, Onboard 2.0 said:

No, but you need a consistent look, and that looks a bit staged IMO.

To you and me yes. But to the voters she needs to persuade?  Not necessarily.

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

Just now, Hugo Stiglitz said:

To you and me yes. But to the voters she needs to persuade?  Not necessarily.

Yeah, fair point.  It takes a whole village ?

[Bama Chick 28596]

We’re getting awfully close to the “Elizabeth Warren needs to update her hair and makeup and wear more fashion forward clothing” conversation and fair warning, I’m getting preemptively bitchy about it.

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

Just now, Bama Chick said:

We’re getting awfully close to the “Elizabeth Warren needs to update her hair and makeup and wear more fashion forward clothing” conversation and fair warning, I’m getting preemptively bitchy about it.

Sounds like a personal problem to me.

[TwiceHorn 31452]

1 hour ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

Elizabeth Warren Is Not Afraid of the Democrats

The 2020 presidential candidate has a long track record of opposing lobbyists, billionaires, the Republicans—and her own party.

https://www.thenation.com/article/warren-democrats-obama-president/

When Senator Elizabeth Warren declared that she was running for president in February, she described Donald Trump’s administration as “the most corrupt in living memory.” But she didn’t stop there: “Even after Trump is gone, it won’t be enough to do a better job of running a broken system,” she said.

Warren’s speech was centered around the notion that political corruption is not a uniquely Republican problem. “To protect their economic advantages, the rich and powerful have rigged our political system as well,” she continued. “They’ve bought off or bullied politicians in both parties to make sure Washington is always on their side.”

Anyone who’s followed Warren’s career knows she’s been making statements like this for years. But her position is suddenly mainstream: Almost every major contender for the Democratic presidential nomination is rejecting corporate PAC money and decrying the influence of the financial sector, albeit with varying degrees of sincerity. These are all implicit criticisms of the Democratic Party. Barack Obama, for example, collected more money from Wall Street in 2008 than any candidate in history, failed to prosecute any bankers for the financial crisis, and appointed officials with Wall Street ties to key financial regulatory positions in its wake.

Warren was Obama’s biggest critic on the left. She opposed major pieces of legislation that benefited Wall Street or pharmaceutical interests; tore into some of Obama’s cabinet members in public hearings; and even blocked an Obama nominee to a high-ranking Treasury position. The question now is whether these battles against a man whom 95 percent of Democrats view favorably will harm Warren, or whether the party’s leftward turn on economic issues in particular will ultimately carry her to the White House.

Elizabeth Warren was teaching at Harvard Law School when, in 2008, then–Senate majority leader Harry Reid selected her for the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which had written America’s biggest banks a $700 billion check with precious few strings attached. Warren, a bankruptcy expert, was then elected as the panel’s chair. “The role of congressional oversight is to ask the tough questions, to push back on the decisions, to request additional information, and to recheck the numbers,” Warren said in an interview at the time. “It’s our job to be cranky.”

And cranky she was. She pushed Treasury officials under both Bush and Obama for more transparency over where the TARP money was going and asked loudly why homeowners weren’t receiving enough of it. Warren did more than simply oversee what TARP authorized; she raised larger questions about how the economy was structured and whom it was designed to benefit.

  Hide contents

One of the reports she presided over argued for government reorganization of the banks or even full-on nationalization. It highlighted international examples of past financial crises and said that ousting management and selling bank assets was the way to go.

Not surprisingly, Warren’s agitating didn’t endear her to many Democrats in Congress. Nor did it please Obama’s Treasury Department. “Some Democrats complain that Warren’s role as a constant Cassandra could undermine already tenuous public support for the bank, auto industry and other financial rescue programs,” Politico reported, paraphrasing anonymous officials. Neil Barofsky, TARP’s inspector general, later wrote in his book Bailout that an Obama Treasury official tried to create a split between him and Warren by falsely telling him “how much Elizabeth Warren hated me, was jealous of me, and was plotting my demise.”

Warren acknowledged in her own book, A Fighting Chance, that she wasn’t exactly popular inside the Beltway. “I started hearing that many Washington insiders were surprised (and some were aggravated) that we were going just as hard on the Democratic administration as we had on the Republicans,” she wrote, “but I wasn’t going to stop and worry about that.”

What’s more, her haters hadn’t seen the half of it. The pivotal moment of Warren’s tenure on the Congressional Oversight Panel came in June 2010, when then–Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner testified at a hearing. At the time, the Obama administration was preparing to get the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau off the ground. It was a bureau that Warren had designed to police financial-services companies offering consumer products (no single government agency was doing that at the time), and progressive activists were pressuring Obama to put Warren in charge.

Before the hearing, “I had thought [Warren] might go lightly on [Geithner] with the [CFPB] job still up in the air,” Barofsky wrote. “After all, she was making no secret of her desire for the job, and the White House had to be watching her every move.”

Warren did not go lightly on Geithner. In response to a question about the Home Affordable Modification Program, Geithner was dismissive of criticism “from people who had hoped that the program would be designed to keep a much larger fraction of Americans in their homes.” Warren laid into him, pointing out that HAMP didn’t make payments to homeowners directly, but instead sent the money to mortgage servicers, who make profits from interest payments and have no incentive to bail people out. They wouldn’t even lose money on most foreclosures.

“I had not intended to ask you about this, but I want to go back,” Warren told Geithner. “The early modification programs actually got people into more trouble, raised their overall payments, had them owing more principal than they had started out with…. You set aside $50 billion, and what do you have to show for it?”

The exchange went viral on YouTube, and Warren was ultimately vindicated: Servicers simply delayed seizing clients’ homes and collected some extra payments and late fees before foreclosing on them anyway. In fact, according to the TARP inspector general, a full 70 percent of borrowers who applied for the program were ultimately denied a permanent modification. At the time of the hearing, as Warren pointed out, only 347,000 homeowners out of a projected 3 to 4 million had received a permanent modification to help avoid foreclosure. Overall, only about a million ended up getting help.

“I thought it was a remarkably principled act,” Barofsky later wrote, “the exact opposite of what any other person in Washington angling for a high-profile job would have done.”

Though this public altercation raised Warren’s profile, she wasn’t banished from the CFPB. Still, the nascent bureau would have no real enforcement power until Obama and the Senate agreed on a permanent director. Progressives rallied in her favor—they even made a music video rapping, “Sheriff Warren, she’s what we need, yo”—and White House advisers Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod were reportedly backing her too. But Geithner and his allies were dead set against giving her the job. Facing heavy opposition from congressional Republicans as well, Obama ultimately chose not to nominate her.

Warren wrote in her book that she was “disappointed, but not surprised…. It was pretty clear from the beginning that [Obama] wasn’t itching to give me the post.” But there seems to be no animosity in their relationship. Warren spoke warmly of the president and posted a smiling selfie with him on his last day in office; Obama even encouraged Warren to run for her Senate seat in 2012.

This is all despite the fact that Warren kept coming at Obama from his left and rode a wave of progressive anger over the disproportionate wealth and power of Wall Street after the collapse. An early flare-up on this front involved the year-end omnibus spending bill in 2014. One provision of the Dodd-Frank financial-reform legislation withheld government insurance for banks that traded derivative swaps, complicated financial products that often disguise and disperse serious liabilities. The goal was to discourage the risky behavior that had so recently led to calamity, but the GOP-controlled House had repealed that provision. Few Senate Democrats approved of the repeal, but said they’d still vote for the Republican spending bill to avoid a government shutdown. The Obama White House signaled that it, too, would support the bill, repeal and all.

Warren was left leading a lonely charge to kill it. She didn’t spare her Democratic colleagues. “Who does Congress work for?” she asked in a speech on the Senate floor. “Does it work for the millionaires, the billionaires, the giant companies with their armies of lobbyists and lawyers?” A bill passed the Senate three days later. But Warren wasn’t done.

Earlier that year, Obama had nominated Antonio Weiss—a veteran investment banker and Obama bundler who enjoyed broad support from most of the party—to serve as under secretary for domestic finance at the Treasury. But Warren wasn’t a fan: She saw Weiss as a poor fit for a high-ranking regulatory job, not least because he’d recently helped Burger King complete a complicated tax-inversion deal to lessen its US tax burden. After losing the spending-bill fight, Warren took to the Senate floor to denounce his nomination. “Enough is enough with Wall Street insiders getting key position after key position and the kind of cronyism that we have seen in the executive branch,” she declared.

The scene, captured in another video, also went viral—apparently, taking on Obama over Wall Street struck a nerve—and Warren became the icon for a successful activist push to stop Weiss’s nomination. The pressure kept the Senate from acting before the end of the 115th Congress, and Weiss wrote to Obama and asked not to be renominated.

Wall Street financier Steven Rattner, a former colleague of Weiss’s, lamented to The Washington Post that “poor Antonio” had “become a pawn in the struggle for the heart of the Democratic Party.” Meanwhile, a Warren source told the paper that it was indeed a struggle—one that Warren was winning. “I think there’s a finite amount they’re willing to bleed,” the adviser said. “Every time we attack them, they bleed.”

For Warren, no fight was bloodier than the battle over the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, which began when Congress passed fast-track trade authority in 2015. Warren was an early opponent of the bill, and she focused her criticism on provisions that opened a back door for international conglomerates to repeal important US regulations, including many enacted under Dodd-Frank. Obama’s advisers, meanwhile, were pushing the TPP as a legacy-building achievement.

That’s when Warren’s advocacy provoked a direct rebuke from the president. In an interview with Yahoo News, an “unusually irritated” Obama said that “the truth of the matter is that Elizabeth is, you know, a politician like everybody else…and you know, she’s got a voice that she wants to get out there. And I understand that.”

In trying to drop a bomb on Warren’s persona as an incorruptible crusader for the little guy, the president of the United States leveled probably the most damaging insult he could: She’s just a politician.

Fast-track trade authority narrowly got through Congress, but Warren still won the war: Hillary Clinton would oppose the doomed TPP in the Democratic primary. And a quick scan of the 2020 candidates—not to mention Warren’s prominent place among them—shows how quickly party leaders have adopted her position.

Warren kept up her fight through the final days of the Obama administration. In December 2016, only weeks before he left office, Obama, his staff, and many cabinet officials gathered in the Rose Garden to celebrate the passage of the 21st Century Cures Act, which aimed to accelerate medical research. The gathering was a chance for Obama to mark one last major accomplishment before leaving office—but Warren didn’t think it deserved the time of day. She’d already shredded the bill on the Senate floor days prior for its “huge giveaways” to the pharmaceutical industry, explaining that “when American voters say Congress is owned by big companies, this bill is exactly what they are talking about.”

As Warren now campaigns for the nomination on her increasingly popular yet decades-old positions, her opponents on Wall Street—and their friends in the Democratic Party—aren’t changing their tune either.

Steven Rattner said recently on MSNBC that Warren was too “anti-capitalist” and “anti-rich” to beat Trump (never mind that Warren, who is not a socialist by any stretch, has critics to her left who complain that she isn’t anti-capitalist enough). After Warren took a DNA test last October to “prove” her Native American heritage, Jim Messina, Obama’s former campaign manager, rushed onto MSNBC to call her “cynical” and bad for the Democrats. (After leaving the Obama orbit, Messina went on to work for the UK’s Conservative Party.)

Warren’s fellow presidential contenders may also use her departures from party orthodoxy against her, just as Clinton used Sanders’s critiques of Obama to score points during a 2016 debate in Milwaukee, saying: “The kind of criticism that we’ve heard from Senator Sanders about our president, I expect from Republicans.” (Sanders called Clinton’s remark a “low blow” and said, “Last I heard, a United States senator had the right to disagree with the president.”)

What Elizabeth Warren has going for her is the fact that Democratic voters have never particularly liked Wall Street bailouts or big international “free-trade” deals. She, for one, won’t have to renounce her record to appeal to their beliefs. Her presidential campaign is a bet that someone who has been a strong critic of the political system and the Democratic Party can become the leader of both by being consistent, credible, and right. This is the bet that Obama made in 2008, when his strong opposition to the Iraq War was shared by a majority of voters but far from a majority of elected Democrats. It worked for him, and it may just work for her.

I find it amusing that that article says she "came at Obama from the left."  Maybe she was just trying to do the right thing.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

12 minutes ago, Bama Chick said:

We’re getting awfully close to the “Elizabeth Warren needs to update her hair and makeup and wear more fashion forward clothing” conversation and fair warning, I’m getting preemptively bitchy about it.

It sucks but it’s part of the game.  She needs to do whatever works on the optics level while keeping her messaging consistent and strong.

[bad_teammate 13195]

A champion of the working class can win. If she focuses on constantly naming the enemy (the billionaires, Wall Street, and DC) then nothing about her hair or makeup or tone matters.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

 

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

1 minute ago, bad_teammate said:

A champion of the working class can win. If she focuses on constantly naming the enemy (the billionaires, Wall Street, and DC) then nothing about her hair or makeup or tone matters.

She does not have an image of a champion of the working class.  She has a platform that speaks to that, but a north eastern millionaire is not going to be considered a champion of the working class.  That is a hard mantle to grab for her.

[bad_teammate 13195]

2 minutes ago, Onboard 2.0 said:

She does not have an image of a champion of the working class.  She has a platform that speaks to that, but a north eastern millionaire is not going to be considered a champion of the working class.  That is a hard mantle to grab for her.

Donald

Trump

Is

The

President

Turn on your monitor.