While running for the Senate, Elizabeth Warren informed Lawrence O’Donnell and his MSNBC audience that she didn’t understand how Congressfolk could keep playing the stock market while in office. She trotted out the notion of stock management via blind trusts.
She and O’Donnell understand that members of Congress have apparently irresistible opportunity to leverage for their private benefit insider information and their power to change policy. It’s no secret: many a pol enters Congress as moderately upper middle class only to leave lining his coffin in gold.
“I realize there are some wealthy individuals — I’m not one of them — but some wealthy individuals who have a lot of stock portfolios,” she insisted.
Her clumsy, folksy “lot of stock portfolios” statement let her pretend not to be rich, when, in truth, she’s a multimillionaire living in a $5 million house . . . but with stock only in one company.
Politic precision.
In the Washington Examiner recently, Byron York explained her nuanced answer to the question of whether she was “going to run for president”:
Warren’s response was, “I’m not running for president.”
That’s the oldest lawyerly evasion in the book. Warren, a former law professor, did not say, “I am not going to run for president.” Instead, she said she is “not running,” which could, in some sense, be true when she spoke the words but no longer true by, say, later this year.
How Clintonian. She pretends not to be wealthy while running on “inequality,” and then — while pitching a campaign book — pretends not to be running for the presidency at all.
And misses the obvious anti-corruption planks: complete, minute-by-minute Web-based congressional investment transparency. And term limits.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
6 replies on “Politic Precision”
I don’t agree with most of Warren’s politics but i have to say, she is one of the few trying to break up the Wall St “Too big to fail” banks.
She estimates that Federal Reserve interest rate policies give the biggest banks an $85BILLION/yr subsidy from the taxpayer over the smaller local & regional banks.
She is right on banking legislation and banks are at the very root of our country’s economic problems. Along with the medical lobby, insurance lobby, unions and the military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about.
William Black at Ted:
“How to Rob a Bank…From the Inside”
If you can steal with impunity, as soon as you devastate regulation, you devastate the ability to prosecute. And as soon as that happens, in our jargon, in criminology, you make it a criminogenic environment. It just means an environment where the incentives are so perverse that they are going to produce widespread crime. In this context, it is going to be widespread accounting control fraud. And we see how few ethical restraints remain in the most elite banks.
You are looking at an underlying economic dynamic where fraud is a sure thing that will make people fabulously wealthy and where you select by your hiring, by your promotion, and by your firing for the ethically worst people at these firms that are committing the frauds. And so you have one of the largest banks in the world, HSBC, being the key ally to the most violent Mexican drug cartel, where they actually did so much business together that the drug cartel designed special boxes to put the cash in that they were laundering that fit exactly into the teller windows so that there would be no delay. This is the efficiency principle of drug laundering.
So these banks figuratively have the blood of over a thousand people on their hands. They are willing to fund people that murder and torture and behead folks. And they are willing to do that year after year, despite warnings from the regulators that they are doing this. And the regulators are not willing to actually take serious action until there has been “true devastation.”
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-05-25/bill-black-robbing-banks-inside-weapon-choice-accounting
Warren sounds like a typical DC politician.
Rick,
You forgot the SECOND PART OF PRESIDENT EISENHOWER’S SPEECH. BEWARE OF GOVERNMENT FUNDING OF SCIENCE. THE SCIENTISTS WILL COME UP WITH THE RESULTS THE GOVERNMENT WANTS.
Now global warming; when I was in college, it was global cooling; also a ‘shortage forever” of fertilizer- ( and rising prices) and less then a year later, a surplus and prices crashing. (The last was a joint effort of government scientists and economists–mid 1970’s as I recall).
Don’t forget- Warren is an Indian-I mean native American- 1/32nd as I recall–and used that for affirmative action positions. And, being from a tribe in OKLAHOMA, SHE USED HER GRANDMOTHER’S RECIPE FOR SOME TYPE OF SEAFOOD (I believe lobster or something of that nature- and Oklahoma IS NOT–FOR GEOGRAPHICALLY CHALLENGED PEOPLE- NEAR AN OCEAN).
Why are you bad mouthing Warren? She is one of
the few politicians trying to expose the crooks.
Her methods are necessary to get elected to
accomplish these goals.
Go after the 1% that continue to steal our wealth not
the ones trying to preserve it.