Elizabeth Warren Explains It All

I've been interested in the work of Elizabeth Warren, professor of law at Harvard, since I saw her on Now with Bill Moyers back in 2003 or so. They were discussing the then-pending bankruptcy bill (you know, the one that made it harder for regular people to declare bankruptcy). She explained how Hillary Clinton had completely changed her position on the bill from being against it when she was First Lady to being for it once she was in the Senate, receiving campaign contributions from the big banking interests.

After that interview, I read and liked Warren's book, The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke. Since then, she's been keeping busy, most recently as chair of the congressional committee that's attempting to oversee the Toxic Assets Recovery Program.

Because of that role, she was on the Daily Show a couple of days ago talking about the TARP, and explaining how deregulation got us into this mess. This four-and-a-half minute video is both a good intro to Elizabeth Warren and the current situation.

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Elizabeth Warren Pt. 2
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(In case the embedded video doesn't work for you, here's a link to the same thing on the Daily Show site.)

One of the pieces of defunct regulation Warren mentions in the video, the Glass-Steagell Act, was originally passed during the Depression, only to be repealed in 1999 (the vote was 90 to 8 in the Senate). As this article from the Nov. 5, 1999 New York Times makes clear, not everyone agreed that Glass-Steagell was no longer needed (thank you, Paul Wellstone!):

The decision to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 provoked dire warnings from a handful of dissenters that the deregulation of Wall Street would someday wreak havoc on the nation's financial system. The original idea behind Glass-Steagall was that separation between bankers and brokers would reduce the potential conflicts of interest that were thought to have contributed to the speculative stock frenzy before the Depression....

Senator Paul Wellstone, Democrat of Minnesota, said that Congress had ''seemed determined to unlearn the lessons from our past mistakes.''

Reading the Times article is like being slapped in the face over and over. And given the year it passed and the broad majority that supported it, clearly it was a fine example of a bipartisan blunder.