This goes beyond class warriors Darrell Issa and Patrick McHenry using a Wall Street lobbyist disguised as a "staffer" to sabotage Elizabeth Warren's testimony in Congress. Keep in mind that Wall Street has showered Scott Brown with cash. His biggest single source of campaign "contributions" comes from the financial predators Elizabeth Warren has been urging government to protect consumers from. So far the financial sector has donated over $1.8 million to Brown's short career in federal politics. This year alone, he's taken in more money than any other Republican senator other than Bob Corker (TN) of the Banking Committee and, more to the point, the Subcommittee of Securities, Insurance and Investment. The crooks who run the big players in this sector will pay anything to keep Corker and Brown in office and in Brown's case-- to keep Elizabeth Warren out of office. The idea of her in the Senate drives the banksters insane.
Elizabeth Warren’s combative history with Wall Street could create a fundraising dilemma for her burgeoning Senate campaign.
Her ardent grassroots following on the left-- forged during stints as TARP watchdog and as mastermind of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau-- would likely make her a formidable Senate candidate in Massachusetts.
But her reputation as sheriff to Wall Street could also be a liability against Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.), a popular Republican who has been stockpiling campaign cash in anticipation of a tight 2012 race.
..."I think it's pretty clear she's going to run the classic, grassroots campaign here in Massachusetts," said Mary Anne Marsh, a longtime Democratic operative in the state. "That means she's going to rely on folks here to give low-dollar donations here a number of times."
But without the support of heavy-hitting donors in Massachusetts, many of whom work at hedge funds and other financial firms, Warren might find it difficult to keep up with Brown’s fundraising juggernaut.
Dubbed “Wall Street’s Favorite Congressman” in a Forbes article last year, Brown reported having more than $9.6 million in the bank at the end of June. A good portion of that money came from the financial-services sector, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.
Employees of the Boston-based Fidelity Investments are the single biggest group of donors to Brown’s campaign committee, contributing more than $85,000 since 2007, according to the watchdog’s data. Employees at Goldman Sachs, Bank of New York Mellon, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America are also top donors.
Warren, on the other hand, is going to have to depend on... Americans who want to take back their government from the avaricious banksters. Last week, Paul Krugman made it clear just what that means: Finally, Someone to Run Against Wall Street
One of the truly amazing things about American politics in the Lesser Depression is that nobody in political life has been willing to run as the champion of ordinary Americans against the financial wheeler-dealers who brought this disaster on us. Republicans won’t, of course, because their worldview says that greed is good and government the only source of evil. But Obama has also been almost weirdly unwilling to express even the slightest populism.
So I’m glad to hear that Elizabeth Warren will apparently run for Senate. She’s no Huey Long-- her manner is more schoolteacher than rabble-rouser-- but that makes her more credible. And she’s got the best credentials on the financial crisis of any prominent figure in American life.
This should be edifying.
Yes, edifying... and expensive. Can you chip in? Blue America has only endorsed two candidates for the Senate this year, Warren and Bernie Sanders. We want to see both of them working together for regular American families... somewhat of a rarity in the good ole boys club that is the U.S. Senate. Hard to say exactly what will happen this early in the cycle but my guess is that Blue America may endorse one or possible two more Senate candidates this year. That's it. We want THE BEST, not "better than the horrible alternative."
Elizabeth Warren just made it official-- or official enough for ActBlue to open up a contribution slot for her-- which means she filed with the FEC. So... we added her to the Blue America Senate page, a page with two candidates-- her and Bernie.
If we collect $2,000 for her over the weekend, one random lucky donor will win a gorgeous RIAA Lenny Kravitz platinum award for his Greatest Hits album (above).
Last Sunday I posted about the likelihood that she would run for the Massachusetts Senate seat currently occupied by Tea Party flip-flopper Scott Brown. It seemed all but certain. Disappointed and disallusioned progressives in at least one state will sure have a reason to flock to the polls in November of 2012! At the time she said "I spent years working against special interests and have the battle scars to show it-- and I have no intention of stopping now. It is time for me to think hard about what role I can play next to help rebuild a middle class that has been hacked at, chipped at, and pulled at for more than a generation-- and that that is under greater strain every day." Music to all of our ears. Let's encourage her-- and imagine her and Bernie Sanders working together for ordinary American families... in the U.S. Senate, that hideous, hidebound bastion of privilege and entitlement.
So, again, contribute any amount before midnight and if we reach $2,000 for her, one donor will be thanked by Blue America with the beautiful Lenny Kravitz triple platinum award.
Thursday Elizabeth Warren did a guest post for Blue Mass Group, which has led a lot of people to assume she's running for the Massachusetts Senate seat currently held by wish-washy GOP flip-flopper Scott Brown. You'll know for sure the day Elizabeth Warren makes her decision because it will be trumpeted widely-- far more widely than when any "normal" candidate announces. That's because she's a symbol for Hope and Change... but the real thing this time. You'll also know that she's running because she'll be joining Bernie Sanders-- and only Bernie Sanders-- on this page. Barack Obama never made it onto any Blue America page ever. We knew what his version of Hope and Change was all about. Elizabeth:
Growing up, every decision for my family involved a careful calculation about how we could pay for it-- a visit to the doctor, a tank of gas to drive to my grandparents’ house, a new pair of school shoes.
My Aunt Bert cut everyone’s hair, my Aunt Bee bought my Easter dress every year, and my brother David paid for his school clothes with money from his paper route. There were plenty of ups and downs. When my father had a heart attack, the store where he worked changed his job and cut his pay. We lost our car, and my mother went to work answering phones at Sears so we could make the mortgage payments.
My parents worked hard all their lives. My three older brothers carved out their own futures-- one was career air force, one worked heavy construction, and one started his own business. I went to college on a scholarship, got married, and started teaching in an elementary school. But I never shook off the worry: did we have enough money to cover basic expenses, enough money to help our parents retire, enough money to build secure futures for our children?
After I graduated law school, I started focusing on what was happening to other hard working families like ours. The story isn’t good. For a generation now, incomes have been flat, while basic expenses like housing, health care, and child care have risen sharply. Families have turned more and more to debt to finance education, to pay medical bills, to cover a cutback in hours or a job loss-- or just to make it to the end of the month. With each passing year, families have found themselves with less economic cushion to absorb a major health care crisis, a job loss, or a divorce. What it means to be middle class in this country-- having a good job, owning a home, putting together the money to pay for college-- seems to be slipping out of reach.
Today, it’s harder than ever for middle class families in Massachusetts and across the country to get by. Each day, more families find themselves deeply worried about money. They wake up to news about wild swings in the stock market and a government that seems unable to exercise even the most basic common sense. They see shuttered windows on Main Street and hear about the latest neighbor to lose a job or a home. They wonder what will be the next shoe to drop in their communities or in their own families.
A few years ago, I decided to tackle one part of the problem-- big banks that drained billions of dollars out of families’ pockets by hiding costs in fine print and selling predatory loans. I started to work on an idea for a new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) because I believed it could help make a real difference in the lives of middle class families. The concept is simple: in a world where debt has become so common and necessary, families need to be able to understand and to compare loan products like mortgages and credit cards so they can make good financial decisions. The costs and risks of financial deals should be clear and transparent-- no tricks, no traps.
After Congress enacted the new CFPB last year, President Obama asked me to help set it up. Starting from our first weeks, we were determined to make things better for American families. We worked to make federal mortgage paperwork shorter and easier to understand, we set-up an Office of Servicemember Affairs to help military families navigate the financial repercussions of deployments and frequent moves, and we developed systems to make sure that even trillion-dollar banks comply with the law. We put in place the building blocks for an agency that will make credit markets safer and fairer for families.
Last week, my role setting up the consumer agency ended. My husband and I packed up the car and made it back to our home of 17 years in Massachusetts.
I left Washington, but I don’t plan to stop fighting for middle class families. I spent years working against special interests and have the battle scars to show it-- and I have no intention of stopping now. It is time for me to think hard about what role I can play next to help rebuild a middle class that has been hacked at, chipped at, and pulled at for more than a generation-- and that that is under greater strain every day.
In the weeks ahead, I want to hear from you about the challenges we face and how we get our economy growing again. I also want to hear your ideas about how we can fix what all of us-- regardless of party-- know is a badly broken political system. In Washington, I saw up close and personal how much influence special interests have over our law-making, and I saw just how hard it is for families to be heard. I want to hear your thoughts about how we can make sure that our voices –our families, our friends, and our neighbors-- are heard again.
We have a lot of work to do in our commonwealth and our country. We need to rebuild our economy family by family and block by block. We need to create new jobs and to fix our broken housing market. We need to make sure that there is real accountability over Wall Street and that the greed and recklessness that created the last financial crisis do not create the next one. We need to restore the hope of a secure retirement and the promise of a good education. We need to stop measuring our economy by profits and executive compensation at our largest companies and start measuring it by how many families can stand securely in the middle class.
I am glad to be back home. And I’m looking forward to discussing with you what we can accomplish together.
This week Darrell Issa's inept and cartoonish committee tried, unsuccessfully, to terrorize Elizabeth Warren-- to the point where even Blue Dog Jim Cooper was so embarrassed and exasperated by his right-wing colleagues that he said "Some of us come here and we get so used to the food fight that we want it to continue. And you'll probably score brownie points if you make your partisan hit. You might even get on a better committee. Well, congratulations. You will not have solved a problem." The video above is of blatant corporate whore Dennis Ross from Florida who is pushing legislation to repeal the Dodd-Frank Act and prevent the regulation of the investment and banking industry. Short attention span, presumably.
The day after, someone in the White House-- presumably a Tiny Tim Geithner ally-- leaked to the media that Obama had decided to name someone other than Warren to head the consumer protection bureau that Wall Street and their allies are so scared of. Presumably he'll name either ex-banker Raj Date or Rich Cordray, neither of whom makes Wall Street banksters fear that they're criminal behavior is going to land them in prison cells.
The bureau’s director requires confirmation by the Senate. After 44 Republican senators announced in May that they wouldn’t vote to approve any candidate to run the bureau without changes in its structure, analysts said the White House might have to resort to a temporary appointment during a congressional recess. Sixty of the 100 senators are effectively required to vote for a nomination due to procedural rules.
In 1986 President Reagan nominated Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III to the US District Court for the Southern District of Alabama. When the Senate Judiciary Committee was confronted with incontrovertible evidence that Sessions is a dedicated and vicious racist and even a KKK "sympathizer" he was rejected as unfit for the judgeship and Reagan reluctantly withdrew the nomination. Alabama racists were outraged and Sessions' rejection led to him being elected Attorney General of the state and then to the U.S. Senate. He's the first Republican in history to be reelected to a Senate seat from Alabama.
Clearly Sessions was never going to vote to confirm Warren. And, in all likelihood, the Republicans would have been able to filibuster her nomination so that it would never have even been voted on. We'll never know for sure because Obama raised the white flag and wimped out-- depriving one of America's most gifted and dedicated civil servants with the opportunity to go before the people and make her case, an opportunity that could have done her as much good with the voters of Massachusetts and it did Sessions with the voters of Alabama 2 decades ago. And many in Massachusetts thinks she will be a candidate for the U.S. Senate, the only Democrat likely to beat Republican tight-rope walker Scott Brown.
From the lips of Washington’s top Democrats to the ears of Massachusetts party leaders, all systems are go for a US Senate run by Elizabeth Warren-- if she wants it... Warren is being touted as a Democratic star worthy of taking on Republican Senator Scott Brown. It’s a combination consolation prize and rescue mission.
“Elizabeth Warren is still in the running for the consumer protection job. I hope she gets that job,’’ said Massachusetts Democratic Party chairman John Walsh. But if it doesn’t come through, “I would love it if she were interested in joining the race. I would talk to her and encourage her in a heartbeat,’’ said Walsh, officially embracing the buzz that began with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senator Patty Murray of Washington, who also chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
John Kerry says he isn't endorsing anyone in the primary, even though another Warren, Setti, is a declared candidate and a former aide. The Wall Street Journal on the other hand, delighted to see her out of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, called for her, perhaps sardonically, to run for the Senate in a snide OpEd Thursday.
Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren has become a great liberal hero as the architect of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and now she may be contemplating a run for the Senate in Massachusetts. Our advice: Go for it... By running for the Senate, the Harvard law professor could test her views against popular opinion. It's true she'd have to take on Republican Scott Brown, and a March survey showed he would beat her by 17 percentage points. But 59% said they hadn't heard of Mrs. Warren, and a famously liberal state like Massachusetts would surely give her a hearing. Step out of the shadows, professor, and embrace a little democratic legitimacy.
UPDATE: Obama Picks Cordray To Head The CFPB
Obama will announce tomorrow that Cordray, the former Attorney General of Ohio, is his pick for the top job at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He's currently the director of enforcement for the bureau.
By picking Cordray, Obama hopes to avoid a bruising Senate confirmation battle that would have occurred had he selected Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard law professor who came up with the idea and ultimately helped to set up the agency.
"Richard Cordray has spent his career advocating for middle class families, from his tenure as Ohio's Attorney General, to his most recent role as heading up the enforcement division at the (bureau) and looking out for ordinary people in our financial system," Obama said.
Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, called the selection of Cordray a "great move. There's no question of Rich's qualifications."
He predicted the Senate will likely confirm Cordray for the post "unless they get to be hyper-partisan. My only fear is Republicans don't think we should have consumer protection rules."
The Cordray selection places pressure on Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, who has voiced objections about some of the powers of a new agency. Brown said, "I fully expect Rob Portman to support Rich Cordray."
Obama acknowledged Warren's leadership in a statement announcing Cordray's nomination, thanking Warren "not only for her extraordinary work standing up the new agency over the past year, but also for her many years of impassioned leadership, and her fierce defense of a simple idea: ordinary people deserve to be treated fairly and honestly in their financial dealings.
"This agency was Elizabeth's idea, and through sheer force of will, intelligence, and a bottomless well of energy, she has made, and will continue to make, a profound and positive difference for our country," he said.
Warren, who hand-picked Cordray to serve in the agency shortly after his loss in last November's elections, expressed support for his selection.
"Rich has always had my strong support because he is tough and he is smart-and that's exactly the combination this new agency needs," she said. "He was one of the first senior leaders I recruited for the agency, and his work and commitment have made it clear that he will make a stellar director."
UPDATE II: Elizabeth Warren's Statement
"Last year, when President Obama and Secretary Geithner asked me to help them stand up the consumer bureau, I enthusiastically accepted the position and got to work because I believe firmly that the CFPB can make the consumer finance markets work better for American families - eliminating fine print, making costs, benefits, and risk clearer, and holding those who break the law accountable. In the time since, we have been hard at work building an agency to do just that.
"Today, the President announced his intent to nominate Richard Cordray to serve as the first Director of the CFPB. Rich has a proven track record of fighting for families during his time as head of the CFPB enforcement division, as Attorney General of Ohio, and throughout his career. He was one of the first senior executives I recruited for the agency, and his hard work and deep commitment make it clear that he can make many important contributions in leading this agency. He will make a stellar director. I am very pleased for Rich and very pleased for the CFPB.
"In May, forty-four Republican Senators wrote a letter saying that they will block anyone from serving as CFPB Director. Many of them don't like either the agency or the ideas that led to its creation. They lost that fight last summer in a straight up vote, but they have said they will use a filibuster over nomination to undercut the agency and its effectiveness.
"I remain hopeful that those who want to cripple this consumer bureau will think again and remember that the financial crisis-- and the recession and job losses that it sparked-- began one lousy mortgage at a time. I also hope that when those Senators next go home, they ask their constituents how they feel about fine print, about signing contracts with terms that are incomprehensible, and about learning the true costs of a financial transaction only later when fees are piled on or interest rates are reset. I hope they will ask the people in their districts if they are opposed to an agency that is working to make prices clear or if they think budgets should be cut for an agency that is trying to make sure that trillion-dollar banks follow the law. I hope they will ask their constituents if they are opposed to the confirmation of someone who saved $2 billion for retirees, investors, and business owners as Ohio Attorney General and who has worked hard on the front lines fighting against fraudulent foreclosures and abusive lending practices.
"Partisanship may be the most important thing in Washington, but in the rest of the country, people expect their public servants to work together to learn from past regulatory failures and to put our energy into solving problems, not scoring political points. In visiting with people and business leaders across the country-- including community bankers and credit unions in all 50 states-- I see a real eagerness to move forward, to work together to repair a broken credit market. I hope that Republicans in the Senate take notice and stop their fight to preserve a regulatory system that failed us.
"Prior to the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act, the President and I fought side by side to make the new agency possible. And, if we need to, I know we will continue to fight side by side, to keep it strong and independent and to make sure it has the tools it needs to serve the American people."
