Posted on 12/19/2014 10:21:31 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
The word on Elizabeth Warren - the Democratic Massachusetts senator who fomented the opposition last week to a rollback of financial regulations in the bill funding the government - is that she's the left's answer to shut-'em-down Ted Cruz. In a recent Washington Post column, Dana Milbank concluded that Warren is more like former South Carolina senator Jim DeMint, the Republican ideologue who left his elective office to better lead the far right to glory.
These assessments miss one crucial difference between Warren and the right-wingers: She has crossover appeal. More importantly, so does Warrenism.
Cruz and DeMint can claim no allies within what remains of moderate Republican ranks. Warren's war on Wall Street, by contrast, has enlisted colleagues on the right flank of the Democratic Party.
Although 20 Democratic senators joined Warren last weekend in voting against the funding bill as a way to protest its allowing publicly insured banks to trade risky derivatives, five colleagues joined her in the more emphatic gesture of voting against the cloture motion that brought the bill to a vote. They were three staunch progressives - Ohio's Sherrod Brown, Minnesota's Al Franken and Vermont's Bernie Sanders (an independent) - and two senators generally considered among the party's more conservative lawmakers: West Virginia's Joe Manchin III and Missouri's Claire McCaskill.
By the metric of social issues, the "more conservative" label fits those two. Unlike his Democratic colleagues, Manchin voted Monday against confirming Vivek Murthy as surgeon general to register his displeasure with Murthy's advocacy of stricter gun control, a position that runs counter not just to Manchin's beliefs but also to those of his West Virginia constituents. But when it came to rescinding regulations on Wall Street, Manchin and McCaskill were among Warren's firmest allies.
At a time when Democrats are still dissecting the double disaster of last month's midterm elections - losing working-class whites to Republicans in record numbers, and failing to motivate sufficient numbers of young and minority voters, the party's base, to go to the polls - the Warren-Manchin concord suggests that there's a way to reassemble the elusive emerging Democratic majority. Manchin represents the state with one of the nation's highest share of working-class whites. Economic populism is alive and well in such states, as evidenced by the enthusiastic receptions that Warren received when she campaigned for Senate candidates in Southern states.
The breadth of support for the populist critique of the American economy is apparent in a range of surveys. In a Washington Post/ABC poll conducted just before the midterms, 71 percent of Americans said that our economic system generally favors the wealthy - a figure that included 59 percent of conservatives and 56 percent of Republicans. Andrew Levison's book "The White Working Class Today" includes an analysis of a 2011 poll by the Pew Research Center showing that 54 percent of working-class whites "strongly" believed that "corporations make too much profit," while just 28 percent believed that those profits were "fair and reasonable." By a margin of better than 2 to 1, those respondents also said that Wall Street hurts the economy more than it helps it.
Economic populism is not a niche ideology, and here's why:
At the request of some trade union officials, the Economic Policy Institute recently conducted an unpublished analysis of research on the past 100 years of income tax data compiled by University of California at Berkeley economics professor Emmanuel Saez. Looking at income growth (excluding government payments and benefits) from 1935 through 1980 - the years of the New Deal economy and high union membership - the institute found that the bottom 90 percent of households claimed 70 percent of the income growth. The 90th to 95th percentiles claimed 11 percent; the 95th to 99th, 12 percent; and the wealthiest 1 percent claimed 7 percent.
Looking at the United States we live in now, however - from 1997 through 2012 - the institute found that the 90th to 95th percentile claimed 9 percent of all income growth and that the 95th to 99th claimed 19 percent. The wealthiest 1 percent saw its share balloon to 72 percent. Do the addition, and you'll see that adds up to 100 percent. The bottom 90 percent of American households got none of the income growth of the past 15 years, as income from work declined and income from investment soared.
That's why Warren has legs - and why Democrats need her brand of populism.
*******
Harold Meyerson is editor-at-large of The American Prospect. He wrote this for the Washington Post.
I hope they actually believe this and are stupid enough to nominate her.
She couldn’t rewrite the “Inspected by” tag on her underwear.
Pathetic joke.
This is Jarrett’s horse in 2016. One by one, the media hacks are falling in line. Get used to it. She’s been chosen.
work is a commodity and it will flow worldwide to the lowest bidder.
These are the Droids that we have been looking for.
The person responsible for inserting language into the bill allowing publicly insured banks to trade risky derivatives should be identified and hung by the neck from a lamp post.
If the banks want to gamble with their own money, and be responsible for the losses when they lose, then fine.
But to let banks gamble with depositor’s money, and be insured by the feds, to be bailed out by the taxpayer? To hell with that! I want to know the sombich responsible for that.
why not call her a Marxist? She rants just like good ole Joe Stalin.
Populism to a Marxist is very different than to us.
How could any sane person say an inexperienced first term leftist senator and former Ivy League ethnic cheat be considered a ‘populist?” Words mean nothing to these people.
The person responsible was Senator Phil Gramm. Read below:
The Cause of the Economic Collapse
I believe it was years of irresponsible legislative tinkering that turned the banking system into a structure so fragile that was ready to fall with smallest jolt. It was this weakened economic structure that was not able to support the huge amount of activity in the derivatives market which amplified the impact of the faltering housing market.
I see it as those who would tinker with something like the I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis. It would be like replacing its one inch gusset plates with half inch plates. This design mistake is what contributed to its collapse. It was not the fault of the thirteen people killed and 145 injured that the bridge collapsed. It was not the fault of the Head of the Minnesota State Transportation Dept. It was the fault of those who live off the public money who design things (or in this case, tinker) without considering the unintended consequences.
The Obama Administration has ignored the cause of the economic failure and has used it to justify a spending spree that will cause further economic turmoil due to inflation and increased taxation. When the Democrats blame the economic collapse on the Bush Administration, tax cuts for the rich and greedy Capitalists they are purposely ignoring the true cause. All we hear is the continuous mantra that it was President Bush’s fault. However, as you read below, you will be convinced that there is a deeper fault with our economy that needs to be addressed.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the little guy who wanted to trade stocks usually did it in a bucket shop rather than through a stockbroker. Bucket shops were set up in all sorts of premises, such as drug stores, hotels, cafés, etc. A bucket shop is a brokerage firm that books retail customer orders without actually having them executed on an exchange. Basically they were places where people could place bets on the performance of Wall Street. Joseph Kennedy made his fortune in Bucket Shops.
The bank panic of 1907 ended when J.P. Morgan forced all the bankers to stay in a room until they agreed to contribute to fixing the crisis. What has been forgotten is the major cause of the crisis ¬was the unregulated speculation on the prices of securities by people who did not own them. These betting parlors, or fake exchanges, were called bucket shops because the bets were literally placed in buckets. The states responded in 1908 by passing anti-bucket shop and gambling laws. Lawmakers ended this activity that helped ruin the economy.
Since then, Bucket Shop laws were passed essentially prohibiting the making or offering of a purchase or sale of security, commodity, debt, property, options, bonds, etc., upon credit or margin, without intending a bona fide purchase or sale of the security, commodity, debt, property, options, bonds, etc.
What has that got to do with today’s crisis? Credit default swaps are the rocket fuel that turned the subprime mortgage fire into a conflagration. They were the major cause of AIG’s – and by extension the banks’ – financial collapse. AIG Financial Products, the unit that sold almost $500 billion of them, may therefore be viewed as the biggest bucket shop in history. Billions suddenly became worthless and the largest economic catastrophe in history began.
New York State Insurance Commissioner Eric Dinallo’s testimony shocked the Senate Agriculture committee October 14, 2008 when he called the credit default swap markets Bucket Shops.
Who made the Bucket Shop activity legal? It was Senator Phil Gramm who came up with his 262-page amendment called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, in December of 2000. This amendment, stuck in a government re-authorization bill, gave birth to the $62 trillion market for credit default swaps (CDSs). It was one of the last bills that President Clinton was to sign. Gramm’s amendment freed financial institutions from the risks and oversight of their CDS transactions which before they were solely responsible. This opened up the hedge fund and derivatives trade market which became the Achilles heel to our economic system. We should have known from history that it caused a similar world economic collapse in the Panic of 1907. What this tells us is that back in 1909, 100 years ago, people understood the risks and potential instability that comes from gambling on securities prices.
People who forget history repeat it. Wall Street firms like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, etc. started selling what they called derivatives, which were bets on how the market would do. Would it go up or down? One type of derivative was created which would bet on whether mortgage owners would pay or default. So, when the mortgage crises hit, the credit markets went upside down because there were a huge number of derivatives that bet on mortgage payments. The people who bet on mortgages would not get paid. These were people who were supposed to be paid off when a default occurred. Many of these people were banks who had huge amounts of money betting on these derivatives. But the folks who invented these derivatives had not set aside enough money to do that, and so it all came crumbling down like a house of cards.
For a good look into Gramm’s destabilization of the US economy, here is this post by Peter Cohan, President of Peter S. Cohan & Associates:
Also, during the Clinton Administration, the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act which repealed parts of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act. This bill was signed November 12, 1999 by Bill Clinton. Specifically, provisions in the 1933 Glass-Steagall act that prohibit a bank holding company from owning other financial companies were repealed. Economists Robert Ekelund and Mark Thornton have criticized the Act as contributing to the 2007 subprime mortgage financial crisis.
warren has never created a single job and in fact has destroyed thousands of high paying job in financial services...she is a cypher and a loud mouth loaf who no more looks like an indian than an irish immigrant....she is so attackable but not from “babyface Boehner”, the house coward
Her entire academic career was based upon willful fraud and chicanery. She’s the perfect Communist Democrat.
I think the public is stupid enough to elect her, if she’s nominated.
Commodities flow to the highest bidder, but yeah, you are right, labor is a commodity. Governments regulate the snot out of ALL commodities, and labor is one of the most highly regulated commodities. All sorts of barriers to import and export of labor.
I just realized we may be saying the same thing, from opposite sides. I was viewing your remark from the point of view of the seller, and you may be speaking from the point of view of the buyer.
Warren’s Indian name = Dances with Lies
This article is just another example of the Progressive plan to offer her as a viable alternative to Hillary by using waves of small boat push-pieces from all over the country (at least that part of the country that is leftist).
To mention Cruz and DeMint as two examples of how Cruz is marginalized from “moderate Republicans” is ludicrous. Marginalize by association. That ‘wave’ that swept over this country in November is not going to be very happy with appeasement Republicanism come November 2016.
The truth is that they (Progressives and establishment Republicans) are scared sh!tless of Cruz, as well they should be. There is a reason why Obama referred to a “President Cruz” recently.
Warren is an academic who has used every means to advance and enrich herself, all the while creating booga boos to blame. She’s a harsh-mouthed liberal and easily identified as such.
There is nothing “populist” about her. The only recognizable and widely held perception she may have with the common man is the visage of the “ex-mother-in-law from hell.”
Warren is fingernails on a blackboard.
Bring her on...
We used to discourage communism.
Now my neighbors elect them.
We are so screwed.
She is just what we need to follow our lying commander I chief. ANOTHER LYING HYPOCRITE FOR PRESIDENT. DAMN!
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