This is code. This article (linked in my left column) about Elizabeth Warren, the real deal, a government official who actually wants to help people and enforce fair regulations on industry, is designed to enlighten the Republican guard while sailing over the heads of the average tax-payer, mortgage-owner, working stiff. Boehner will get it. James Dobson will get it. Someone will explain it to Sarah Palin. George Bush will see it and say to himself, “one of these days we should really do something for the little guy. Well, maybe next time.” People in the Pentagon, Homeland Security, the FBI will get it. Obama is now a genuine threat.
What Elizabeth Warren is doing is standing in the way of this continual process of extracting maximum wealth from working people and transferring it to wealthy investors and executives with large corporations and banks. This process has been going very, very smoothly since 1975. It’s not a conspiracy really: just a lot of smart people who are quite astute about how their interests are served. They are not served by interfering with the bank’s abilities to extort as much money as possible from mortgage owners who have already been nearly bled dry the last round of bamboozlement.
So the banks have long known that credit cards, with their virtually unregulated systems of fees, charges, usurious interest rates, obfuscation and confusion, are a massive profit center, while sober, serious, thoughtful mortgages are merely profitable. What if you could apply the same kind of skullduggery used the suck consumers dry on credit cards to mortgages? Extraneous fees? Check. Hidden charges? Check. Bait and switch interest rates? Check.
It’s not a conspiracy in a formal sense. It’s really very simple: if you are a banker or investor or businessman (no no — I’m an entrepreneur!) , you just call your congressman, inform him that as a civic-minded individual you’d like to make a contribution to his re-election campaign, his PAC, or his “leadership foundation” or whatever it’s disguised as, and you’d like to have lunch some time to chat about some issues that “are important to Americans”, that are “related to prosperity and a healthy business environment”, that will “encourage investment”, and “strengthen our democracy”.
You talk about excessive government regulation, like, say, some crazy bill that makes it difficult for banks to offer low cost mortgages to people without the wherewithal to sustain a mortgage of outsized proportions. This bill will deprive tens of thousands of lower-income families of the thrill of owning a home– and indentured servanthood!
You might even suggest the language to put into the bill. Why not? You’re paying for it. Have lawyers come up with a few phrases.
But now you have Elizabeth Warren, who is on to you. And who asks, why are the large corporations and banks allowed to prey on unwitting consumers with impunity? The Republicans say, why not? Warren says, an average reasonable person should be able to understand a contract he or she is signing. You’ve tricked people. You’ve ruined lives.
The Republicans will not be shy or tentative about defending these exposed necks, these arteries. They understand fully that if you give even one millimeter, people might think there is something to the implication that they are being cheated. In fact, the Republican strategy has been to respond to challenges by demanding– screeching, really– even more, and wailing about the collapse of American democracy if they don’t get it.
They must look at the concessions made by the unions in Wisconsin– before they were even threatened with decertification– and chortle: that was the big mistake. You might as well have bitten off your own scrotum and offered it to them on a saucer– the Republicans will demand your kneecaps as well.
Is it working? Does it look like Obama is going to offer any bold initiatives anytime soon?
Other than Elizabeth Warren, not much. And she will be gone soon as well. The vampires are circling looking for the slightest weakens. Unfortunately, they will probably find what they need. She is doomed.
It will start with op-ed pieces like the one in the Wall Street Journal. Then there will be sniping from the Fox weasels. Then some “scandal” of sorts, maybe some unhappy underlings reporting that she is bigoted or irrational. She is thin-skinned. She has an agenda.
The most important step will be to delegitamize her by casting her as some kind of “fanatic” or “extremist”. You want to drive her a little crazy first with constant irrational attacks and then hope she loses it for a moment in public. Then you appear, calm, rational, measured, and declare that consumer protection is too important to be entrusted to unbalanced individuals.
No, you don’t want to shoot anybody. That’s not nearly as effective.
2011-09-13 How come I was right? Geez– sometimes I scare myself. The Obama administration has given up trying to give Warren the position she deserves and she is now running for the Senate instead.
With all due respect for Senators, this is a step down, a concession to the ruthless determination of the moneyed classes to have their way with the American consumer. Here she can safely propose as many new regulations and policies as she likes: they will all be killed in committee.
PBS on Elizabeth Warren (Frontline)
The last person to seriously take on the banking / mortgage industry?
Eliot Spitzer.
I predict that Elizabeth Warren will not last out the year.
This just in (March 19):
And thus the real purpose of the hearing: to allow the Republicans who now run the House to box Ms. Warren about the ears. The big banks loathe Ms. Warren, who has made a career out of pointing out all the ways they gouge financial consumers — and whose primary goal is to make such gouging more difficult. So, naturally, the Republicans loathe her too. That she might someday run this bureau terrifies the banks. So, naturally, it terrifies the Republicans.
NY Times, March 19, 2011
He who shrieks loudest:
How is it done?
Look at NPR’s Vivian Schiller. Why on earth did she resign over the alleged scandal of a fund-raiser who had already resigned expressing his own personal opinions (which he was clear about) about the Tea Party? Why do the Republican’s get hysterical about an NPR fund-raiser having strong opinions about the Republicans while they constantly demonize Democrats, compare Obama to Hitler, and question the legitimacy of his birth? And get away with it? Because they scream louder, more hysterically than anyone else?
Why on earth? What the hell kind of insane country is this?