During an interview with the Vox’s Ezra Klein, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren said the following about a speech then President Obama gave in 2016: “he got it wrong.”
President Obama had said in the speech that “the system isn’t as rigged as you think.” Senator Warren, however insists he got it wrong. “No, President Obama, the system is as rigged as we think,” she said. “In fact, it’s worse than most Americans realize.”
“Money slithers through Washington like a snake, and it’s quiet, but the influence is everywhere.”
“But it’s so much more,” she said.
“It’s bought-and-paid-for experts who testify before Congress and are quoted in the press,” Warren continued. “It’s think tanks that are funded by shadowy money and always have a particular point of view that just seems to help the rich and the powerful get richer and more powerful.”
She wrote in her new book, “The Fight is Our Fight,” of the “revolving door” of executives who work on Wall Street for 20 years, then work in the Treasury for a bit, and then head right back to Wall Street. “The giant payouts that they give to people to go work in government are just stunning. I mean, millions of dollars,”
But she wasn’t finished. “Money pervades. It’s whose phone calls do you take. It’s who you see in the evenings. It’s who are your old friends,” Warren told Klein. “It’s every part of it, so that the rich and the powerful are incredibly well-represented, not just at the top in the White House but all the way through government in this town.”
Now, everything she said is incontrovertible truth, and I believe that she says these things because she knows, and believes them to be true, which brings the question of why she consistently does things that contradict her words and beliefs when it comes time to act?
It’s a known fact that Senator Warren spoke up against President Obama’s policies with some regularity during the Obama administration, but she never once voted against any of these policies, and did absolutely nothing to try and bring the Wall Street bankers she always railed against to justice.
Most notable was her fight against the TPP as it was being pushed by Obama, when she actively pushed her senate colleagues to vote against the passage. “I hope Congress will use its constitutional authority to stop this deal before it makes things even worse and even more dangerous for America’s hardest-working families,” she said at the time. Adding that the agreement “would tilt the playing field even more in favor of big multinational corporations and against working families.”
Yet, It’ll be recalled that during the last Democratic party presidential primaries, Senator Warren chose and endorsed Hillary Clinton, a staunch ally of Wall Street and a firm supporter of the same system the senator rails against, over Senator Bernie Sanders whose political beliefs, actions and utterances fit in perfectly with those espoused by Senator Warren. This was at a critical time when an endorsement from her to popular candidate Sanders could have gone a long way to legitimizing Senator Sanders, who although wildly popular and loved by most of the party’s followers, was still looking for legitimacy due to the fact that the party’s higher ups were clearly against his candidacy, and in favor of Secretary Clinton.
Most recently, Senator Warren came out again to criticize former President Obama for taking the sum of $400,000 as payment for a speech he was about to give to a Wall Street conference this fall. The senator said it troubled her that the former president was getting that money from Wall Street during an interview with the SiriusXM show “Alter Family Politics” on Radio Andy.
It is this perceived gap between her avowed beliefs and her practical actions, or inaction, that has left many of her supporters confused and angry, and seeking answers as to why she always seems to say the right things while consistently doing the wrong things every time the opportunity to act presents itself.
Warren, the Harvard bankruptcy law professor elected to the Senate in 2012, is worth between $3.7 million and $10 million.
That’s not including the three-story Victorian home in Cambridge, Mass., that she owns with her husband and fellow Harvard law professor, Bruce Mann. It’s now assessed at $1.9 million, according to city property records.
While she’s not in the uppermost wealth echelon of Congress, she’s not doing too badly either. Roll Call recently ranked her the 76th wealthiest out of 541 senators and representatives, based on her minimum net worth in 2013.
Might her wealth and the fact that she’s personally a part of the one percent be the reason she only seems to pay lip service to change? You decide.
