Warren takes swipe at Reagan, trickle-down economics

[n2doc]

Sen. Elizabeth Warren savaged trickle-down economics and took a swipe at President Ronald Reagan on Wednesday, blaming both parties for policies she said have devastated U.S. workers while propping up the wealthy.
The Massachusetts Democrat, who many on the left are pressing to run for president as an alternative to Hillary Clinton, also praised President Barack Obama for efforts she said were aiding the economic recovery, but said most Americans still weren’t seeing their lives improve.

“The trickle-down experiment that began in the Reagan years failed America’s middle class,” Warren said in her fiery keynote address to an AFL-CIO conference on raising wages.

“Pretty much the whole Republican Party, and if we’re going to be honest, too many Democrats, are overly cozy with the financial industry and make decisions that benefit the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans while leaving others to struggle, she said. Over the past 32 years, she added, every penny of America’s economic growth has benefited the top 10 percent of earners, while the bottom 90 percent has been squeezed.

“We know that democracy does not work when congressmen and regulators bow down to Wall Street’s political power,” she said. “And that means it’s time to break up the Wall Street banks and remind politicians they don’t work for the big banks, they work for us.”


Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/elizabeth-warren-criticism-trickle-down-economics-114032.html

[NYC_SKP]

1. GO WARREN GO!

[Autumn]

2. "to be honest, too many Democrats, are overly cozy with the financial industry

and make decisions that benefit the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans while leaving others to struggle" The truth right there. Time for this Democrat to run for President and look out for those who are struggling, she is just what we need.

[Scuba]

3. + Eighty Gazillion

[progressoid]

4. Yep. Most Democrats have either embraced or enabled it.

The handful that are fighting it are too often drowned out.

[RiverLover]

5. Great post n2doc!

Again. Thanks for the link!!!

[cascadiance]

6. So, do people still want to criticize her for being a Republican earlier?...

... as if she still has "good feelings" about Reagan from those times?

The right is smart enough to realize that Michele Bachman is no longer a fan of Jimmy Carter like she was when she went a step further than just being a Democrat in earlier days and actively campaigned for Carter then. Surely now, most of us can be smart enough to see through the criticism the stealth corporatists that try to call themselves Democrats are trying to put on to Warren now, and are brighter than the right is in being more able to assess where Warren is now than they are able to assess Bachman's current stances.

[eridani]

7. She didn’t call out Obama directly, but--

00based her speech around a December Politico magazine article titled “Everything is Awesome!” (When a politician spends thirty minutes publicly fisking a Politico article, that’s a pretty big clue he or she is trying to rattle the Beltway narrative.)

The author, Michael Grunwald, points to a lot of positive economic indicators like GDP growth, the falling unemployment rate, cheap gas prices, low inflation and reduced deficits. He acknowledges that “many Americans are still hurting” and mentions “stark inequality” in passing, but the article is basically a big hand-wave to those issues. As he dings “chronic complainers” on the left and right, Grunwald concludes that, at the end of the day, “things in the U.S. do look rather awesome.”

Warren politely agreed with the broad points, and gave the Obama administration “credit for the steps they’ve taken to get us here.” Then she went on to dismantle the article’s entire premise. “Despite these cheery numbers, America’s middle class is in deep trouble,” she said.

Her argument was that while individual indicators are looking up, there is a structural problem in the American economy that’s only getting worse. “When I look at the data here—and this includes years of research I conducted myself—I see evidence everywhere about the pounding that working people are taking. Instead of building an economy for all Americans, for the past generation this country has grown an economy that works for some Americans.”


http://www.thenation.com/blog/194361/elizabeth-warren-just-gave-really-important-and-revealing-speech