On Christmas, or thereabouts, I got a couple hits from searches for Elizabeth Warren, whom I mentioned in passing
when talking about ads on facebook.
It seems like I should say more about
her. If someone is coming here looking for Elizabeth Warren info
there ought to be more here for them than the fact that facebook
thinks I have money to donate to her.
As I said before, I would donate to her
enthusiastically if I had the money.
It's difficult to know how much of a
difference one senator can make in an age when everything gets
filibustered, but unless we're going to give up on the idea of
democracy we still have to try to get the best people in office.
That means electing Warren and people like her.
It seems like anything that I can say
about her has already been said better by someone else, and honestly
I think the best thing you can do is just listen to her speak.
Listen to her talk about the causes of the financial crisis, or what
we need to do to fix things. Listen to her address the talking point
that people get rich all on their own with no help from anyone.
Listen to her talk about predatory credit practices. Listen to her
talk about more or less anything.
This, for example, is her speaking on
the debt and the idea that asking rich people to pay their fair share
is class warfare. It seems like pretty simple straightforward stuff,
but for some reason very few people seem to be be saying it. Roads,
for example. Roads are paid for by taxes, anyone who makes money
using roads, be it directly or indirectly, is getting government
help. They should give back so that the roads can be maintained.
For some reason many politicians fail to understand this. Elizabeth
Warren gets that. More importantly, she's willing to make the
argument instead of backing down the moment someone tries to relabel
common sense as class warfare.
I think she speaks better when she's
not trying to stick to a speech, as in the thing I just linked to,
but she can do speeches well. I once came across, on a channel I
didn't know I had, a lecture she gave at UC Berkeley. I decided to
watch it and then immediately looked up to see if it would be playing
again because I wanted to catch the beginning.
The lecture was largely on the new
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau she fought to create but I think
that what she says there shows a lot about how she thinks and what
she stands for beyond that agency. The lecture is available on youtube. Around 42 minutes into the video she says she feels like
it's a boring speech, I disagree, but I'm certainty willing to give
some highlights.
Of particular note is when she talks
about what government does right.
That needs to be said more often. I think a part of the problem is
that people don't make that argument. When government works right
people ignore it and it becomes invisible as a result. When it
doesn't work people shout it from the rooftops. As a result the
message ends up being entirely negative. If we only talk about what
government does wrong and never about what it does right then it's
unsurprising people assume that government is always the problem and
never the solution.
Someone needs to argue on behalf of
government. Warren is willing to do it. That shouldn't be notable,
anyone who wants to work in government should be willing to do it,
but it is notable because right now almost no one is and someone
needs to.
She talks about the problems of the middle class this past generation. This is important because you can't fix the problems if you don't
understand them or worse insist on pretending they don't exist at
all. This present crisis was decades in the making, and if people
pretend it's only a temporary aberration, that it began in 2008 or
thereabout, then they will not offer real solutions because they
won't be addressing the real problem.
At the end she takes questions:
Asked about the possibility of
reinstating usury laws she briefly describes the history of credit and how credit has changed, the games played, and how she hopes the
CFPB will work better than usury laws
would.
Asked about what she thinks will happen
when the Republicans take power (this was in 2010 before the midterm
elections) and how she plans to keep the agency from being captured she speaks of her plans.
Asked about whether it is really
possible to eliminate the fine print in credit offers she talks about the problems with how things stand and says that she believes that
contracts should involve both sides understanding the deal.
Asked about the responsibilities of
consumers she points out that the fine print is written with the goal of the
consumer not understanding. She includes and anecdote about class of
people who have almost graduated Harvard law trying to work out what
a single credit card agreement actually says. Also the wonderful
line, “If toasters were exploding we would not say, 'People need
better engineering degrees.'”
When the product is broken in a way
that destroys people's lives, the problem is the product. This, need
to be said more often. There's personal responsibility, yes, but it
is the responsibility of the seller to make sure their product isn't
hideously flawed. That sellers can make things that are
intentionally hideously flawed but designed in such a way as to hide
the flaw is not a sign consumers need to to go to law school before
getting a credit card, it is a sign there's something wrong with the
latitude we give to sellers.
Asked “Will you have a website to
receive information from consumers and will someone read the
information?” She talks about the plans for the website,
and then when talking about the fact that we can't forget the human
stories behind data she talked about a study she once did that
involved families that filed for bankruptcy.
If you're like me you'll cry when she talks about reading their
stories.
For some people how she responded to those people's stories would
be a disqualifier. I know that one of the reasons Ed Muskie never
got a shot at the presidency is that he might have cried in public
one time. I know that there are those who think that anyone who
files for unemployment is parasite not worthy of our respect. I know
that empathy has become a dirty word in some circles.
For me it's a sign of what's right
about Warren. Politicians in both parties have a tendency to forget
that the people they're having an effect upon are people. They
become numbers, statistics, lines in the budget, ways to score
political points. They can be treated with a scorn and hate because
they're not real to the ones doing it. Or, if they are, they're
firmly on the side of Them instead of Us.
To be a politician one has to be
successful. Someone who is currently bankrupt after spending all of
their money and more money that they didn't have to try to save their
child is unlikely to seek or gain the nomination for office, much
less the office itself. It is important, and unfortunately rare,
that politicians remember that those who aren't as successful as they
are are still people worthy of just as much respect as everyone else.
That Warren even thought to ask why
people went bankrupt instead of just assuming that they brought it on
themselves through stupidity or greed already sets her apart from
many of the people currently in government. That she cared to ask
does as well. But how she responded is just as important. She
didn't recoil from the stories and try to convince herself that it
could never happen to her by claiming that they all deserved it, she
didn't push away their experiences or try to other them. She
accepted them for what they were and reacted with empathy.
She cares about those people. The
least amoung us. And that, that caring, is such a big part of why I
believe that she will do good. I hope she will do well; I am
convinced that given the chance she will do good.
She understands our problems, and
that's important. She understands what needs to be done to fix them,
and that is likewise important. But neither of those things means
much of anything if a person doesn't care. Fixing things will
require fighting tooth an nail against those who are perfectly happy
with the way things are broken. That fight is going to drag on for a
long time, it will be difficult, and at every step there will be
incentives, financial and otherwise, to give up. Refusing to to see
those who are affected by the fight as anything less than people
isn't just a powerful motivation to keep going, it's also at the
heart of good governance regardless.
All I've really done here is link to
two youtube videos, and Warren deserves more support than that.
Greater praises should be sung. The myriad reasons Warren would be
good for America cannot be addressed in one post and all I've done is
pick some things out of the videos I had closest at hand.
Still, I think that if one looks for
themselves, they'll find all the reason to elect Warren that they
need.
My only reservation about the idea of
Senator Warren is that I was hoping for President Warren. I don't
mean a primary challenge to Obama, I just mean that in 2016 I'd like
to be able to vote for Elizabeth Warren for president. It's not
unheard of for someone to have a successful run for president four years after a
successful run for the Senate (see Obama himself) but I think it's
pretty rare.
Still, she's running now, and given
that the best thing we can do is elect her. Unfortunately she's
running in Massachusetts and I happen to live in Maine (hence the
Muskie reference above) so I'm not going to have a lot of say in
whether or not she's elected.
More information about Elizabeth Warren
can be found on her website.
The written version of the lecture I
linked to (which isn't exactly the same as the actual one because she
didn't stick to entirely and it doesn't include the questions) is available at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau website.
No comments:
Post a Comment