A voice of reason amid the madness By Heather Digby Parton
26 Sep 2011
(Yes, THAT digby!)
"I hear all this, 'well, this is class warfare, this is whatever'. No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear:
You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did."
.....
"Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific? Or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along."
- Elizabeth Warren
Digby writes:
With those words, Elizabeth Warren cemented her reputation as a person who knows how to speak to Americans about progressive values in a way that seems to have eluded almost every other public figure in America. There's just something about the way she talks in plain prairie English that makes people listen - and scares even the most hardened businessman and compromised politician into paying attention.
.....
Her pitch is a modern day populism, aimed at the struggling middle class, the people who are dazed and confused by 30 years of conservative cant and free market policy that hasn't worked for them as its been put into practice. She's refined a story line about how this happened that's both erudite and approachable, using her own history and scholarly work to weave a narrative about America's economic crisis that speaks to people's yearning to understand what happened - and feel some optimism that it can be turned around.
.....
She points out that it was three specific laws that came out of the Great Depression that .... set the stage for the longest run of uninterrupted prosperity in the nation's history: FDIC Insurance, Glass-Steagel and the SEC.
And she points out that when those regulations began to erode, productivity and wages started their great divergence and the middle class began to fray around the edges. By 2011, that fraying has become a full blown unraveling.
.....
But Warren's message is a potent one, expressing progressive values in terms that are almost intoxicating to the base of the Democratic Party, hungry as they are for someone to take up the cause of the American middle class, workers and families who are being unbearably squeezed and yet asked to give even more - even as the wealthy fatuously declare themselves to be "job creators" and therefore absolved of any duty to pay their fair share.
.....
Ms. Warren's matter-of-fact rhetoric is what people hunger for now, as we struggle to understand what has happened to our country over the past thirty years of unchallenged conservative-driven devastation, and what it's going to take to turn it around. No one over the past several decades has yet used the bully pulpit to force these truths out into the light for people to understand.
The pulpit needs Ms. Warren.
We sorely need for her to bring her formidable communication skills to a Democratic presidential primary next year.
To give rabid conservatives 4 years to Koch-up a money-stuffed hatefest aimed at Ms. Warren's sterling character, in addition to the expected, incessant harping over a potentially unfinished Senate term if she is convinced to run for president in 2016, is not a direction we should go, imho.
Potentially in addition, Ms. Warren may, herself, be reluctant to abort a Senate 6-year term, as she may want to see it through to the end, which would leave us in an unfortunate position for hopes for her to run for president in 2016.
That scenario feels too remote at this time to envision working out.
In the meantime, people are suffering mightily.
Now. We need her to mount a presidential primary challenge now, imho. There is still time. Even if she is ultimately unsuccessful, she will zero in on the debates we should be having and language we should be hearing and discussing among ourselves as a nation.
She will help us break free from decades of repressive, extremist conservatism that has so diseased our once stable society over the past thirty years.
We yearn for this clear voice of reason in the highest position, in a time of great national need.