via AlterNet:
Posted by kos at 1:50 pm
July 28, 2010
Corporatists in Democratic Caucus Are Terrified of Elizabeth WarrenPosted by kos on @ 1:50 pm
This post first appeared on Daily Kos.Michael Hirsh:
There has been, in recent days, a groundswell of support for Elizabeth Warren, one of the top candidates to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. One less-noted reason for all this outspoken fervor is that, for many liberal critics, Barack Obama’s economic team is something of an intellectual cabal. Starting with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and chief economic adviser Larry Summers, the senior members of this team are all people “who have Bob Rubin on their speed dial,” as one of these critics told me. They are, in other words, part of the deregulatory brigade led by then–treasury secretary Rubin in the 1990s who helped set the stage for the financial disaster by giving Wall Street most of what it wanted, whether it was Glass-Steagall repeal or reduced regulatory oversight of derivatives trading (...)
Hence the enthusiasm among the losers in this debate for Elizabeth Warren, the fiery Harvard Law professor who largely sided with the Volcker-Lincoln camp and who first came up with the idea for a consumer-protection agency. Warren is most definitely not a Rubin acolyte. She’s more likely to be the sort of person who reveals to the public just how many administration speed dials Rubin occupies. Warren has long abhorred the sort of inside-the-box thinking that led a lot of smart people in Washington to conclude for more than two decades that Wall Street could be left to sort things out on its own.
That clubby insider’s mentality has given us and the world disaster after disaster. They can’t and won’t regulate themselves. The only hope is an outsider, someone who has already proven her mettle by aggressively overseeing the TARP program, and proving that she’s independent and incorruptible. ...........(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/07/28/corporatists-in-democratic-caucus-are-terrified-of-elizabeth-warren/
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