Awesome MotherJones Write-up on Elizabeth Warren: Bank Buster

[Ruby the Liberal]

I am becoming her largest fan. :patriot:

~snip~

Six years later, Warren is applying that people-first philosophy by simultaneously running the Congressional Oversight Panel, which monitors the $700 billion TARP bailout program on behalf of the taxpayers, and pushing for a new agency to protect consumers from predatory lenders. Now, as Congress seriously considers her proposal (and lobbyists maneuver to kill it), the question is: Can a middle-class populist in Ivy League garb change the world—or at least Big Finance?

Warren, 60, grew up in Oklahoma in what she terms "modest circumstances." Her father was a maintenance man; her mother worked for Sears. After graduating early from high school, she headed to college on a debate scholarship. Eventually she landed at Rutgers' law school, where she admits starting out somewhat clueless: When a fellow student asked if she would try out for the law review, she didn't know if he meant a magazine or a theatrical show. "All I knew was, if the smart kids were doing it, count me in."

She graduated in 1976, with no job lined up and nine months pregnant with her second child. Soon she'd started her own practice, handling wills, real estate closings, and the like. Later she taught nights at Rutgers, and then found a position at the University of Houston's law school—one of the first women ever hired there, she says, and the first who was not married to a faculty member. She began teaching bankruptcy law. "Bankruptcy," she says, "is about economic death and rebirth, a story of failure but survival, how people come back, how businesses come back. It's an American story."

~snip~

... a Warren colleague at Harvard (who admires her) notes that Summers—who as Harvard president speculated that women may not have the same innate math and science ability as men—might share the sentiments of fellow Harvard economists who dismiss Warren as insufficiently theoretical. "They think she shouldn't be talking about bankruptcy except as someone in the economics department would—that is, with formulas and theorems, not about how it affects real people." In Washington, though, that skill—explaining how grand financial concepts affect real-world families—may prove Warren's greatest asset. As she once put it on The Rachel Maddow Show, her rule for financial products is very basic: "If you can't explain it so the person on the other side can understand it, then you shouldn't sell it to them."

Full article: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/11/bank-buster-elizabeth-warren

[SoCalDem]

1. I was SO hoping Obama would pick her as Sec of Treas

She is amazing, and she has the ability to speak in REAL language..

[Ruby the Liberal]

2. She would be incredible in that role.

To the un-rec'r - fuck you. She is an American Treasure.

[CTyankee]

3. I absolutely adore this woman and I've never met her.

But she is so passionate and so completely right on everything and has such a wonderful demeanor, it's difficult not to like her. Every time she speaks, she is so forceful and so GOOD at explaining everything that it is a delight to watch and listen to her.

[Ruby the Liberal]

4. I think it is her middle class roots we are seeing shining through

She thinks and talks like people like us, not like Wall Street playing populist.

This lady is the real deal.

[valerief]

5. She's great but it seems she's just shoveling shit against the tide like the rest of us. nt

[Ruby the Liberal]

6. No doubt, but her voice is louder than mine

so I cheer her from my couch.

:)

[redqueen]

7. K&R

It really is strange to see this unrec'd. LOL WTF?