Elizabeth Warren Will Make Things Happen

Warren has an almost supernatural ability to identify problems before anyone else, and to work relentlessly to solve them.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/opinion/elizabeth-warren-2020.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Back in 2006 when I first became alarmed about the debt crisis and its impending global impact, there were a few people who were ahead of me. One was Elizabeth Warren who at the time was the Leo Gottleib Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She also sat on the steering committee of the Tobin Project. She was the coauthor (with Amelia Warren Tyagi) of The Two-Income Trap and All Your Worth.

In the summer of 2007 she wrote an article that explained in detail how the financial industry was putting nearly all Americans at risk and she proposed the establishment of a Consumer Financial Product Agency that would regulate financial products the same way that safety regulations are in place to prevent consumers from buying exploding toasters. Her perception was simple: Wall Street was selling exploding loans.

see 2007 Article by Elizabeth Warren Predicting 2008 Crash

Part of the problem is that disclosure has become a way to obfuscate rather than to inform. According to the Wall Street Journal, in the early 1980s, the typical credit card contract was a page long; by the early 2000s, that contract had grown to more than 30 pages of incomprehensible text. 

for a growing number of families who are steered into over-priced credit products, risky subprime mortgages, and misleading insurance plans, trust in a creditor turns out to be costly. And for families who get tangled up with truly dangerous financial products, the result can be wiped-out savings, lost homes, higher costs for car insurance, denial of jobs, troubled marriages, bleak retirements, and broken lives.

The difference between Elizabeth Warren and anyone else is that she knew the problem before anyone else did, and then she did something about it as the person who fought for and obtained legislation that created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — an agency that the banks, through their paid agents in Congress and now in the White House, have been stripping piece by piece (and yet it survives). She got it done. She built the actual agency.

To be blunt I don’t think any current candidate for office understands the depth of her knowledge about lending, consumer fraud, bankruptcy, or foreclosure. She does not need a primer. If you ask even Bernie Sanders he will most likely say that what the the banks did with derivatives should have been illegal. Warren understands that it was illegal and that what was missing was an apparatus for enforcing the laws apart from the minimal resources of each consumer who contested what had happened to them.

I don’t think that any of the needed corrections in the marketplace, government or business will occur without Warren.

Her approach to everything is to get the facts, analyze, and prepare a method for addressing the issues presented. She does not pretend to address issues that don’t really exist like other candidates. While she is a fighter, she is a far less polarizing figure than Bernie Sanders whom I like.

I think that Bernie is the real deal and is totally authentic, but I can’t imagine a scenario in which he would carry enough of a majority in Congress to make anything happen that will relieve consumers of their debt burdens except increasing the minimum wage. His other proposals seem likely to die on the vine in Congress and thus will not become law.

The race for minority voters does not address the issues of minorities. It is unwise to vote for a perceived friend of the African American or Latino communities when the candidate has a track record of perpetuating bad policy through action or inaction. Warren represents a change in policy that is clearly based on equality. It is color blind. Her perception and policy proposals are more likely to favorably impact minority voters than any declaration of loyalty to those  voters.

I think if you really want to see someone who prioritizes our constitutional imperative to treat all people equally and protect them equally, if you really want to see corporate governance change, if you really want to see Wall Street made accountable like any manufacturer of a toaster, and if you really want to see a decrease in pandemic corruption in Washington, Elizabeth Warren is the candidate best suited to do that because she has a long track record of making the impossible happen in the real world.

see for example: Zimmer_Sharp-as-a-tack_When-mortgage-fraud-becomes-elder-abuse_Plaintiff-magazine

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