Elizabeth Warren: TARP Watchdog

Elizabeth Warren is a Harvard Professor specializing in bankruptcy, who has been tasked to be the head of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the government's financial bailout program or TARP. She has received accolades from Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and liberal economists like Dean Baker, who said, "She's done a great job calling attention to the Treasury's failing in ensuring that the taxpayers get a fair deal."

To the banks, the crony-capitalists, and the Wall Street crooks who broke the economy, but got a generous get-out-of-jail card from the government, she is Public Enemy Number One. As Stiglitz has said of her, "What she is doing is making a lot of people very uncomfortable." Indeed. During congressional hearings, she pronounced, "Today's [banking] business model is about making money through tricks and traps." She doesn't use the Greenspan-esque habit of mumbling in officialese and feeding the masses pre-packaged platitudes that invoke green-pastures of future growth. She is blunt in her prognosis of institutional corruption and even plainer in the necessity to rectify the imbalance of power and irresponsibility that currently passes for regulation.

MotherJones magazine has a short expose on her, written by David Corn. It outlines her modest origins and escalation through academia to her present position.

Warren focused on how financial policy and law affected folks at the kitchen-table level, and by 2005 she was testifying on the Hill against legislation sought by credit card companies and the financial sector—and eventually passed by Congress—that made it tougher to file for bankruptcy.

With respect to bank regulators, she believes they need to be stripped of their consumer protection roles, because as she says,"The regulators have turf to protect. They want to run big agencies with big budgets and lots of employees. The new agency would reduce some of their bureaucracy."

In a Reuters article,

Warren said banks are opposed to the creation of the new agency for two reasons: one, it would force real change upon their business practices, and two, it would compromise the cozy relationship banks often have with their primary regulators.

"They fear that the public may pay more attention to the consumer agency," she said. Warren said it is up to lawmakers to decide how quickly to pass legislation but said the financial system needs real change, and needs it soon.

"The bad news has been piling up for a year, but none of the rules have changed. Many of the same things that got us into trouble are still going on."

The greedheads and jackals of casino-capitalism are running scared, as McClatchy Newspapers reports, "The [US] Chamber [of Commerce] said it's spending about $2 million on ads, educational efforts and a grassroots campaign to kill the agency. It said that the grassroots effort has led to more than 23,000 letters sent to Congress to date." We all know how it will end again if effective reform is not instituted. The question is whether the President Obama and the spineless democratic stooges in congress will shake off the corporate lobbyists or merely play dead like a Virginia opossum when faced with the task of actually governing.