President Biden and congressional Democrats are necessarily focused on getting the Covid relief bill (the American Rescue Plan) passed in the next two weeks. They also need to get the rest of Biden’s team in place. But after that, how long will they allow a soulless senator from Kentucky the ability to veto so much other vital legislation?
Tag Archives: Senator Elizabeth Warren
The Professor Got Educated
I wish every voter in the country would read this article. Okay, relatively few will, but I’m convinced she’ll be our next president anyway. From “The Education of Elizabeth Warren” in the New York Times, here’s a much shorter version:
By 1981, Ms. Warren and her husband had secured temporary teaching posts at the University of Texas, where she agreed to teach bankruptcy law. She quickly earned a reputation for lively lectures, putting students on the spot and peppering them with questions and follow-up questions…
Even visitors to her class got the treatment. One of them was Stefan A. Riesenfeld, a renowned bankruptcy professor who had come to lecture on the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978. The law, which had expanded bankruptcy protection for consumers, was already under attack by the credit industry, which argued that it made personal bankruptcy too attractive.
Even so, Mr. Riesenfeld explained to Ms. Warrenâs class, those who filed personal bankruptcy were âmostly day laborers and housemaids who had lived at the economic margins and always would,â she wrote in her 2014 memoir.
âI asked the obvious follow-up question: âHow did he know?ââ Ms. Warren wrote. After more questioning, it became clear that not only did Mr. Riesenfeld have no real answer, he was irritated by Ms. Warrenâs probing.
The subject struck close to home. When she was growing up in Oklahoma, her fatherâs heart attack had thrown their household into precarious financial territory, forcing her mother to take a minimum-wage job answering telephones at Sears.
She remembers being fearful as she lay in bed at night listening to her mother cry. âShe thought I had gone to sleep. I didnât know for sure the details of why she was crying, but I knew it was bad and that we could lose everything,â Ms. Warren said.
(Later, the oil glut of the 1980s would destroy her brother Davidâs once-thriving business delivering supplies to oil rigs. Her brother John, a construction worker, would also struggle after the oil market collapsed….)
She wanted answers, more than Professor Riesenfeld could provide….
Dozens of people would eventually be involved in the … analysis of a quarter million pieces of data gathered from bankruptcy cases filed from 1981 through 1985.
Among the researchers was Kimberly S. Winick, then a University of Texas law student … While Ms. Warren didnât talk a lot about her views, Ms. Winick said she believed that the projectâs initial theory was that, âIf you filed bankruptcy, you must be cheating.â
âLiz was from a more conservative place,â Ms. Winick said. âAnd she was somebody who had worked very, very, very hard all her life. And she had never walked away from a debt. And I think she kind of started with the view â letâs see what people are doing and how theyâre cadging on their debts and screwing their creditors.â
That was the conventional thinking of the day….
While the [bankruptcy files] did not tell the whole story, they provided enough evidence for Mr. Warren and her co-authors to write, âRepeatedly, we have been surprised by the data and forced to rethink our own understanding of bankruptcyâ.
… Over the years, the research elevated Ms. Warrenâs status, from little-known Texas professor to sought-after lecturer, writer and consultant in bankruptcy law. It also set the stage for her career in politics.
In 1995, Mike Synar, a former Democratic congressman from her home state, asked Ms. Warren, by then a Harvard professor, to advise a special commission reviewing the bankruptcy system….
It was during that period, in 1996, that she switched her party affiliation from Republican to Democrat, though she insists that her essential conversion was from ânot politicalâ to âpolitical”.
âI didnât come from a political family,â she said. âI hadnât been political as an adult. I was raising a family, teaching school and doing my research,â she said.
Then she went to Capitol Hill.
âI quickly discovered that every single Republican was on the side of the banks and half the Democrats were,â she said. âBut whenever there was someone who would stand up for working families, it was a Democrat.â
She added, âI picked sides, got in the fight, and Iâve been in the fight ever since”.
University of Texas, 1985.
Our Next President
12,000 people showed up on a Monday night in Minneapolis to see Sen. Elizabeth Warren, seven months before the Minnesota primary election. After she spoke, she spent three hours taking selfies with anyone who wanted one. I think it’s time to put the “Nevertheless She Persisted” bumper stickers on the cars.
Correction:Â It was at Macalester College in St. Paul, the other Twin City. Still very impressive, of course.
Facebook, Google, Twitter: You Are “Crime Scenes”
British journalist Carole Cadwalladr has taken fifteen important minutes to explain how the tech giants are damaging democracy.
One excellent point she makes is that these massive corporations refuse to divulge which misleading political advertisements are being directed at which voters, and who is behind those advertisements, and how much money is being spent on them. As a result, the British laws that limit campaign spending and have been in effect for 100 years no longer work, thanks to the “gods of Silicon Valley”. She addresses Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and others directly:
Liberal democracy is broken. And you broke it. This is not democracy. Spreading lies in darkness paid for with illegal cash from God knows where. It’s subversion. And you are accessories to it.
Of the Democrats seeking the presidency, Senator Elizabeth Warren is the one who has offered a plan to rein in the tech giants. You might consider donating to her campaign.
Meanwhile, give Carole Cadwalladr fifteen minutes of your time. She is worth listening to.
A Clear and Present Danger
The title of this post might have been “Ignoring the Next Six Months – Day 21”, except for two things. Our Presidential election is a little more than five months away and my plan to ignore the campaign has been a complete failure.
In fact, I’ve paid so much attention to the campaign that I haven’t gotten around to doing a few other things, like updating this blog. Instead, I’ve spent a lot of time reading political news and commentary. I’ve left a few of my comments here and there (actually, all of them have been there). I’ve sent a few emails to a New York Times reporter who is assigned to cover Hillary Clinton. For heaven’s sake, I’ve even tweeted (@SomeGuyFromNJ).Â
In case you missed it, Donald Trump now has all the delegates he needs to become the Republican nominee for President on the first ballot at their July convention. I’ll repeat that for emphasis: Unless he drops out or drops dead, Donald Trump will be the Republican’s 2016 nominee for President of the United States of America.
That means the question before us is: What should each of us do to stop this person from becoming President?
I don’t know the answer to that, but I do know this: There is no sense in filling a blog with random thoughts and commentary when we’re this close to a disaster.
For now, I’ll leave you with the photograph at the top of this page, a few words from Senator Elizabeth Warren, and my favorite quote from the past few weeks. First, Senator Warren:
Letâs be honest â Donald Trump is a loser. Count all his failed businesses. See how he kept his fatherâs empire afloat by cheating people with scams like Trump University and by using strategic corporate bankruptcy (excuse me, bankruptcies) to skip out on debt. Listen to the experts whoâve concluded heâs so bad at business that he might have more money today if heâd put his entire inheritance into an index fund and just left it alone.
Trump seems to know heâs a loser. His embarrassing insecurities are on parade: petty bullying, attacks on women, cheap racism, and flagrant narcissism. But just because Trump is a loser everywhere else doesnât mean heâll lose this election. People have been underestimating his campaign for nearly a year â and itâs time to wake up.
People talk about how “this is the most important election” in our lifetime every four years, and it gets stale. But consider what hangs in the balance. Affordable college. Accountability for Wall Street. Healthcare for millions of Americans. The Supreme Court. Big corporations and billionaires paying their fair share of taxes. Expanded Social Security. Investments in infrastructure and medical research and jobs right here in America. The chance to turn our back on the ugliness of hatred, sexism, racism and xenophobia. The chance to be a better people.
More than anyone weâve seen before come within reach of the presidency, Donald Trump stands ready to tear apart an America that was built on values like decency, community, and concern for our neighbors. Many of historyâs worst authoritarians started out as losers â and Trump is a serious threat. The way I see it, itâs our job to make sure he ends this campaign every bit the loser that he started it.
I wouldn’t say that America was only built on values like decency and community. America was also built on greed and inhumanity. Senator Warren would certainly agree. But her main point is unassailable: In the 228 years that we have been holding elections, Trump is the absolute worst person who has ever come this close to becoming President of the United States. The worst ever.
And lastly, a quote from Michael Vlock, a rich Connecticut investor who has given a lot of money to Republican candidates, but who says he won’t support you know who. Why?
Heâs an ignorant, amoral, dishonest and manipulative, misogynistic, philandering, hyper-litigious, isolationist, protectionist blowhard…I really believe our republic will survive Hillary.
Vlock left out “narcissistic” and “authoritarian”, but it’s not bad for a Republican.
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