Replay: Bailout Watchdog Elizabeth Warren addresses an enthusiastic crowd at the Netroots Nation

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For those who may have missed this...

Elizabeth Warren Says Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, That She Might Head, Is Obama’s "Strongest Financial Reform"

As a battle rages behind the scenes over who will head the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, we play a speech by bailout watchdog Elizabeth Warren, who has emerged as a frontrunner for the position.

AMY GOODMAN: Harvard Law School professor, bankruptcy expert, Elizabeth Warren, is frontrunner to lead the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The bureau’s director will be the most powerful new banking regulator in decades and the first with the exclusive mission of focusing on consumers. She chaired the Congressional Oversight Panel over the bank bailout and is an outspoken consumer advocate.

Big banks are strongly opposed to Warren’s nomination. According to a New York Times editorial from earlier this summer, quote, "The banks don’t oppose Ms. Warren because she doesn’t get it. They oppose her because she does."

Well, the idea for an independent federal agency to protect ordinary borrowers from abuses by lenders was largely her idea, based on an article she wrote three years ago. In July, Congress made her idea a reality as part of the financial reform legislation.

Elizabeth Warren addressed an enthusiastic crowd at the Netroots Nation convention in Las Vegas earlier this summer. This is a part of what she said.

ELIZABETH WARREN: I thought of four things that we should think about as we begin to build a new bureau. The first one is: It must stand for families. We’ve had long enough where there’s been no one to stand for families. Now, what does that mean? It means, in part, in the case of the credit agreements that we’ve been talking about, a level playing field again. It means that there’s someone there to make sure that both families and lenders understand the terms of the credit agreement; that it is as obvious to one side as the other; that when they come together, they get what this transaction is, the cost; that we create competitive markets so that the products are products that not only are priced so that consumers can understand them, but they’re priced well in the marketplace. (...)

~snip~

So, that’s why I came here today. I bought a plane ticket and showed up here, because I have a specific “ask.” I wanted to talk to people who have a voice, and that’s why I came to talk to you. There are three things I want to ask you to do with your voice. I want to ask you to use your voice on behalf of economic security for middle-class Americans. In a world in which so many people face so much insecurity, I want you to give them voice. I also want to ask you to use your voice for ideas. This is the place to let ideas be born, to let them bounce around, to let them get tougher, to let the bad ones die out and the good ones advance. This is where ideas should come from. And the third is, I want to ask you to use your voice as a voice of conscience, in a world that sorely needs more conscience. You are our collective conversation on conscience.

Video and transcript at link:

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/9/7/elizabeth_warren_says_consumer_financial_protection