Author: Elizabeth Warren
Title: “A Fighting Chance”
Publication: 2014, Metropolitan Books, ISBN
978-1-62779-052-9, 366 pages, hardcover, heavily endnoted and indexed
Amazon link:
On the Washington DC Metro, Sunday afternoon, going in to
see an independent film, boarding at Ballston in Arlington, I was fortunate
enough to sit by (in a crowded car) an attractive young man who noticed the
book I was reading, and said, “that’s who should become president, rather than
Hillary Clinton”. It turned out he had
been interning for another Democratic Senator and was about to look for real
jobs on the Hill.
There are always two sides to the question of inequality
question. (Warren insists that nobdoy makes it completely on his own.) One side (as does Warren in
most of the book) advances policy changes to level the playing field – and
Warren argues quite persuasively in this book that it is much harder for
“average people” to maintain traction on the treadmill than it was for my or
her generation (I am six years older than her). Policy changes often include rolling back tax
shelters and breaks for the rich, and particularly more regulations on
corporate America (especially, in this book, banks and financial institutions)
to prevent deceiving ordinary consumers and tricking them into “irresponsible”
personal financial decisions and investments (like overpriced homes with
subprime loans).
The other side says that helping the poor is an
individualized, personal responsibility, part of one’s karma. Volunteer more. Sacrifice.
Take turns in the soup kitchens.
Or make it personal. Adopt
disadvantaged children. Get real. And some of the more conservative churches
(especially LDS) are very good with resilience, and with helping everyone after
real disasters (like Hurricane Katrina in 2005). Warren’s coverage of the personal
vulnerability of many families – to one illness, natural disaster, or even
crime victimization, would seem to underscore this view. All of this melds with the view of equality
of opportunity and collective resilience as moral imperatives.
Warren goes through her early like quickly. But when he dad had heart trouble, the family
care was repossessed and mom had to work.
She won a scholarship at George Washington University (from which I
graduated in 1966) but dropped out after two years to get married. Fantastically, while a mom, she finished her
degree in Houston, went to graduate school, and eventually (and rather quickly)
became a law professor. That simply
shows to me old fashioned ambition and hard work – a conservative virtue. She notes that when she taught bankruptcy,
she actually had students who didn’t take the subject seriously and flunked the
course. She gives a lot of personal
anecdotes, like vomiting from nerves before going onto television.
She explains what led to the 2008 bust well. It’s true, it was a vicious cycle. The banks had won the deregulation they
wanted, and Wall Street went wild with securitizing loans (and inventing
default swaps). With looser regulation,
buyers could be approved with subprime interest rates and weak credit. When the introductory rates expired, they
couldn’t make payments. Anyone with any
sense would see this couldn’t be sustained.
But there was a whole system.
Because houses were temporarily overpriced, buyers had to go for
it. Mortgage salesmen had to make cheesy
pitches to make quotas. But were the
individual homonwners “personally responsible” for trying to get something for
nothing? Should they have known better,
if they thought ahead five years? Oh,
yes, real estate would go up forever, right?
Warren makes some comparisons to the SL crisis at the end of
the 80s, which was regulated more closely with a lot more prosecutions and
lawsuits.
She talks about her work with COP (the Congressional
Oversight Panel) and the creation of a CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection
Board). She makes the point that
financial arrangements should be regulated as “consumer products” rather than
as “contracts”, buried in legalese.
The last part of the book concerns her run for the US
Senate. As a “pundit” or amateur
journalist, I personally find it very difficult to contemplate volunteering for
any particular partisan candidate. Yet,
it was with campaigns, volunteers, and solidarity that policy, collectively,
used to get changed. Would Warren really run for president?
No comments:
Post a Comment