Wall St. Journal: Wall Street’s “Worst Nightmare” was Elected in Massachusetts

“in a nightmare scenario for Wall Street CEOs, Ms. Warren is a frontrunner to take a seat on the Senate Banking Committee”

Given how Wall Street crashed our economy, contributed to jaw-dropping American inequality and continue to act with impunity… one might just said, “Good.”

From Wall Street Journal – In Massachusetts, Ohio, California and elsewhere, the industry and its accompanying ideology were soundly beaten back. Candidates who built their resumes as industry scourges were able to leverage that experience to defeat opponents who they successfully labeled as too friendly to big financial interests.

Wall Street, as usual, spent an enormous amount of money—more than $400 million in 2012—and didn’t emerge with much to show for it.

The most obvious of the defeats came in Massachusetts, where Elizabeth Warren reclaimed the U.S. Senate seat once held by Edward Kennedy by beating Republican Scott Brown.

This was no fluke. Ms. Warren beat Mr. Brown handily, capturing 53.8% of the vote to Mr. Brown’s 46.2%, a margin bigger than any of the slew of last-minute polls suggested.

Associated PressUntil 2008, Ms. Warren was a little-known, wonkish professor at Harvard who studied the economics of bankruptcy. But her appointment as a special Senate watchdog for the bank bailouts, her clashes with administration officials and the embrace of her Consumer Financial Protection Bureau catapulted her into the political limelight.

Mr. Brown, by contrast, was criticized for stalling and weakening key parts of the regulatory overhaul of Wall Street. It was an abrupt turnabout for a rising star in the party whose victory in a special election in early 2010 was a harbinger of the Republican surge to take the House later that year.

Now, in a nightmare scenario for Wall Street CEOs, Ms. Warren is a frontrunner to take a seat on the Senate Banking Committee.

Read the rest: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324073504578105433706996720.html

The Core of Liberalism: Opportunity for All, Not for Just Some

from huffpo – Elizabeth Warren won her campaign for Senate in Massachusetts by reaffirming the social contract and standing up for the “core of liberalism,” she told The Huffington Post Wednesday morning.

Warren, energized by her victory but running on precious little sleep, is rare among Democrats in her willingness to talk about economic policies in terms of core values, and to defend liberalism — even to use the dreaded term — rather than run from it. The message has struck a chord, not just among self-described liberals, but among independent voters who feel that the system is rigged against regular people. It has also made her a lightning rod for conservative anger, and earned her the hostility of Wall Street.

Strong liberals who have gone to the Senate in recent years, such as Minnesota’s Al Franken or New York’s Hillary Clinton, put their heads down and focused on the internal workings of the upper chamber, which can fully occupy a freshman senator’s time and largely remove him or her from the national conversation.

Warren, however, said she plans to continue making her case.

“The Senate should be a place to talk about the issues that are important to people’s lives. It’s just that straightforward,”

she said in her first one-on-one print interview after her victory.

The heart of Warren’s appeal is her insistence that politics is a contest of competing values. “We said this election is about whose side you’re on,” Warren said, summing up her campaign’s message.

“I think of this as an election where we stuck to our values: Make sure Social Security and Medicare benefits are protected, and millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share. To me, that’s the heart of it. That’s really where the basic social contract is reaffirmed. We said, ‘We’re gonna end subsidies for Big Oil and we’re gonna make sure there’s equal pay for equal work. Those were big issues here.

Or, at least, I talked about them all the time.”

Warren’s commitment to protect the social contract will be put immediately to the test, as President Barack Obama and congressional negotiators go to work crafting a bargain to avert the so-called fiscal cliff: the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, as well as automatic cuts to defense and social spending.

The election saw a wave of liberal victories that signals a shift in direction toward the core values Warren argues for.

In Maine, Minnesota and Maryland, voters for the first time approved marriage equality, which Warren said is part of liberalism’s promise of equal opportunity and dignity for all people.

“This election was about making sure the United States, the federal government, honors equal marriage. This election was about opportunity, not for some, but for all, and that’s the core of liberalism,” she said.

The Harvard law professor and consumer advocate had narrowly been favored in recent days, as polls showed her with a slight lead over the incumbent senator. Her ultimate eight-point win bordered on a landslide, and makes her the first woman elected to the Senate from Massachusetts.

Warren was the intellectual godmother of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and was its first head. She was denied a permanent appointment due to objections from within the Treasury Department and from congressional Republicans.

Asked her plan for the first day after her historic victory, she said she’s taking a moment to breathe. “I’m spending the day with family. Then I’m going to bed,” she said.

Read at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/07/elizabeth-warren_n_2088073.html

John Lewis: “She will never give up and never let you down”

From the Boston Herald – In a 400-year-old church at the center of Springfield, a wooden sanctuary that once ushered slaves to freedom along the Underground Railroad, Elizabeth Warren was not merely endorsed, but blessed by an icon of America’s contemporary struggle for civil rights.

“I went to jail 40 times,” said Georgia’s veteran Congressman John Lewis. The man who almost died crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge with Martin Luther King Jr. nearly 50 years ago sounded more like the preacher he once longed to be. “I never gave up, and I never gave in,” he said as his voice swelled.

“And I believe with every fiber of my being that this woman, this smart, gifted woman will never give up, and will never let you down. She’s a fighter, a warrior,” Lewis said, as he turned to enfold Warren in a bear hug.

The capacity throng inside the Old First Church literally jumped out of the ancient wooden pews. There are routine campaign stops. And then there are inspired political events that have a vibe which seems to transcend even the smartest orchestration.

Rudy Giuliani munching a cannoli in Mike’s Pastry with U.S. Sen. Scott Brown is a photo op. What happened here yesterday inspired people to leave the church and fan out across Springfield, knocking on doors. That’s the difference.

Read more: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1061172242

 

Needham Letter: Warren Upright, Champion for Economic Justice (Edith and Gordon Swan)

Letter to Needham Times – Elizabeth Warren as our senator would fill us with pride and excitement; she is so capable and well qualified! Her policies would work to restore tax fairness, to end special tax breaks for hedge fund managers and subsides for Big Oil. Elizabeth stands up to Wall Street to protect consumers, to hold big banks and other financial institutions accountable and to level the playing field for consumers on mortgages, credit cards, bank fees, and student loans. She supports job bills, and streamlining regulations, so small-business owners don’t get tied up in red tape or strangled by hidden tricks and traps.

In contrast, one who thinks he can ascertain the racial heritage of a person by the color of her skin is not a viable candidate for the U.S. Senate. It is incomprehensible that Scott Brown would sneer at Elizabeth Warren’s family story and try to make it untrue. Bewildering too, is his staff’s involvement in a degrading mockery of American Indians. The Senator said he could not condone the ‘Tomahawk Chop’. The fact that he didn’t instead condemn it, is shameful.

Scott Brown’s claim to be for the ordinary person is completely fabricated. Like so many  Republicans, he favors the wealthiest having huge tax breaks, justified by the misguided and deceitful notion that these already so very prosperous will use the extra money to create jobs. However, history has shown that lowering taxes for the affluent has not increased jobs. Instead, many of these millionaires and billionaires greedily garnish for themselves more obscene profits, often by investing in off-shore (tax free!) bank accounts. Meanwhile, the income gap between the richest and the middle class continues to skyrocket. Scott Brown’s boast of being independent and bipartisan is also a sham. He blocked the Buffet Rule, voted to allow oil companies to continue to have billions of dollars in tax subsidies and to give big banks $19 billion in tax breaks. He voted against job bills and legislation for equal pay for equal work. Scott Brown continues to demean Elizabeth’s highly respected profession of scholarship and teaching, in which she is greatly esteemed by her colleagues and loved by her students.

Elizabeth Warren is upright and honest. She genuinely strives for the promotion and protection of the poor, those who need it most, and those who suffer discrimination. As our senator she will give us pride, excitement, and progress.

Edith and Gordon Swan

Read more: Needham Letter: Choose Elizabeth Warren – Needham, Massachusetts – Needham Times

Elizabeth Warren champion for transparency and accountability

Remember this?– Watch the video portion (which we cannot embed here)

Elizabeth Warren was appointed to oversee TARP, and she did not give a pass to the administration. For those who think she would be a rubber stamp for the President, they either forgot or  never knew her history as a principled advocate for Wall Street accountability and government/banking transparency.

What’s at Stake

Elizabeth Warren on What It Means to Stand Up for Women and Girls

Scott Brown’s Union Lies

It’s only in garbage time when he’s trying to pad his record that he votes with Democrats on the easy ones.

Massachusetts working families need their elected officials to be there when it’s hard.

Challenges of a Female Candidate (especially in Massachusetts)

To be clear, this isn’t the main thing supporters of Elizabeth Warren need to be worried about. However, we should be aware of the “special” obstacles faced by women candidates–and maybe especially women candidates in Massachusetts, where we’ve never had a woman Senator. From Robert Kuttner/Huffington Post:

Warren is in the classic dilemma of a female candidate. If she tries to keep the focus on the issues, as she did in the first debate, she runs the risk of failing to respond to Brown’s charges and looking weak.

If she hits back, she risks looking “strident,” (a charge seldom applied to male candidates.) And if she says “Shame on you, Senator” for his more outrageous lies, she risks playing into the “school-marm” stereotype.

For more reading/analysis on women in politics, see the “Name It Change It” campaign :

Who do Big Corporations want to see win the Senate race?

It’s hard to overstate how much Wall Street has come to despise Warren. She was a Harvard professor who didn’t just talk and write about consumer protection ideas.

She actually wanted to tell bankers how they can and can’t do business.

from the Boston Globe— Seriously: Who do you think big business wants to win the Massachusetts US Senate race, Scott Brown or Elizabeth Warren?

I pose this seemingly lame-brain question because the Senate campaign has recently managed to produce an especially warped image of Warren as a greedy corporate tool.

Brown has focused attention on two legal cases Warren worked on the past. She represented Travelers Insurance Co. in asbestos litigation and LTV Steel in a case involving employee health benefits. The complicated Travelers case, covered in great detail by the Globe’s Noah Bierman, is not nearly as damning as Brown insists. But in the more odious LTV case, Warren appears to have had more a significant — albeit small — role.

Brown is trying to cast Warren in two incongruous roles: corporate villain stomping on the little guy and lefty scold who believes in nothing more than Big Government.

How can that be right? Of course, it can’t.

But the conflicts between the interests of big companies and average people make for a really good campaign issue. The catch: A better example in this race is Brown himself as an advocate for the financial services industry.

Brown quickly became a favorite of big financial companies after his election, and the senator clearly advocated for some of their interests in Washington. Last week, The New York Times detailed how Brown and his staff had lobbied the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve behind the scenes to chip away at the Volcker Rule, intended to restrict banks from making risky financial bets and investing in hedge funds.