The more she’s written about, the more I admire Professor Warren. Today, she visited the Borg collective at its hive:
She never actually uttered “I come in peace,” but Elizabeth Warren, the Obama administration aide charged with setting up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, might have felt like an alien visiting an anxious planet Wednesday when she went to the United States Chamber of Commerce.
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“I do not consider myself in hostile territory right now because I believe we share a point of principle: competitive markets are good for consumers and for businesses,” Ms. Warren told about 300 executives at the chamber’s annual conference on capital markets. But, she added, “Markets don’t work in the way they are supposed to unless there are some well-enforced rules.” …
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Regulation and competition are not, she said, mutually exclusive. “In fact, when done right, they support each other,” Ms. Warren said. “Are the Chamber’s members, as citizens or business owners and executives, in a better place today because the F.A.A. regulates air safety, because the states regulate insurance companies, because the federal government enforces antitrust statutes? Of course they are. And so is this country.”
The Borg and its servants, needless to say, were not impressed:
The disagreements between Ms. Warren and one of her chief critics, Representative Spencer Bachus, Republican of Alabama and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, grew more heated hours after her address…
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On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Bachus released a seven-page document titled “Perspectives on Settlement Alternatives in Mortgage Servicing,” which, in a letter to Ms. Warren, he said demonstrated that she had a larger role than she had indicated to the committee. The letter was co-signed by Representative Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia and chairwoman of the subcommittee on financial institutions and consumer credit.
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Mr. Bachus, a consistent critic of both the consumer agency and Ms. Warren, filled that role again Wednesday when he addressed the Chamber of Commerce conference immediately before she spoke. Noting that he has introduced a bill to change the governance of the consumer bureau from a single director to a five-person, bipartisan commission, he characterized the powers given to the head of the consumer agency as unmatched in government.
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Ms. Warren was followed by Thomas J. Donohue, president and chief executive of the chamber, who warned that the consumer agency could choke off economic growth in the United States. “If not used carefully, the C.F.P.B.’s tremendous power to go after bad actors could cause serious collateral damage to America’s job creators,” he said.
Professor Warren may show admirable discipline in reiterating her “cop on the beat” meme, but her Robber Baron Republican opponents prefer their market-tested “OMG socialist finance-industry death panels!!!” approach. Last week’s hissy-fit from Mary Kissel, ex-Goldman Sachs, at the WSJ:
… Everyone knows that Ms. Warren and a handful of state attorneys general are driving this settlement to punish the banks and reward voters with mortgage principal writedowns, despite profound doubts among bank regulators at the Fed and the Comptroller of the Currency. Ms. Warren’s weak-little-bureau routine is belied by the fact that she is rolling over other regulators even before the bureau is formally up and running…
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Ms. Warren’s media idolators are trying to shield her from Congressional oversight precisely because they understand her lack of accountability. They, too, want to punish the banks one more time and grab another $20 billion to redistribute to voters before 2012. The banks and clutch of AGs are right to resist, and Congress ought to put Ms. Warren’s unaccountable bureau under Treasury with an annual budget—or, better, put it entirely out of business.
Punishing banks and rewarding voters! Just imagine! Perhaps the squid-clouds of butt-hurt emanating from these weasels may finally choke even the Very Serious Persons given the authority to discuss the range of acceptable opinion (center-right to far-right, but not extremely far right). Timothy Noah, at Slate, on how the Republicans cleared Elizabeth Warren’s path:
I have no idea whether President Obama plans to nominate Elizabeth Warren as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. If you’d asked me a year ago whether he should, I’d have probably said no, on the grounds that she was too much of a lightning rod. Better to install somebody with a lower profile who can get confirmed, I’d have argued. And, besides (as I wrote in September), she had no real management experience.
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Now I think Obama should nominate Warren. Partly that’s because Warren, in her six months as de facto CFPB director (ahem, I mean “special adviser to the secretary of the treasury and assistant to the president”) has demonstrated sufficient political and managerial skills (inasmuch as anyone can demonstrate such skills while running an agency that hasn’t actually done anything yet). But mostly it’s because Republicans have talked me into it…
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Last week’s House oversight hearing was not unlike a Senate confirmation hearing; you might say it was a kind of dress rehearsal for Warren. I thought she handled the steady stream of Republican attacks with grace and common sense. Other coverage of the hearing reached the same conclusion. Warren has established herself as a known quantity and a capable administrator. It wouldn’t just be unfortunate for Obama to pass her over for director. It would be strategically unsound.
Today’s shenanigans reminded me very much of the stern, yet kindly, grandma telling a couple of spoilt five-year-olds that they could choose between chicken fingers or a hamburger with their salad, because “both cheese puffs and gummy bears” did not qualify as a balanced meal. To which the five-year-olds respond by throwing themselves into a full-metal tantrum, screaming they’re gonna call 911 and tell the policeman that the boo-boo where they hit the floor means she touched them inna bad place. The only way the five-year-olds win that argument is if some well-meaning third party gets nervous and offers a trip to Chuck E. Cheese as an alternative, because Grandma knows better than to take parenting lessons from five-year-olds.
John Cole
Test.
Comrade Mary
@John Cole:
Oh man, I didn’t study!
#melts down#
Yeah, AL, Warren is looking more and more awesome these days.
Mark S.
Would it be too much to ask our idiot Congress to investigate that robo-signing scandal? That seemed like a pretty big deal to me, but it might be quaint thinking on my part because I don’t think banks should be allowed to unilaterally change 400 years of property law.
mikefromArlington
And, Obama, being just like Bush, nominated her. Because we all know Bush would have nominated her, right? Right?
Just Some Fuckhead
@mikefromArlington:
This is the Obot Pre-Strike, right? The remedy to the Joe Beeses?
Lolis
Liz is pretty awesome. My friend who lives in DC ran into her on the street with another man. My friend went into full flattery, adoration mode. He said Liz seemed shocked. The man she was with was just laughing. But Liz is kind of every progressive’s hero.
JITC
Take note that Republicans and teabaggers NEVER use the words “business” or “corporation” anymore. They only refer to “job creators.” Not an accident.
It should be no accident that the rest of us call them, accurately, “wealth hoarders.”
PeakVT
Today, she visited the Borg collective at its hive:
Our CEO class is the anti-Borg. It seeks to eject as many people from its midst so that the result will be a small, uniformly conservative group of rich old white male assholes.
Janus Daniels
If nothing else, Elizabeth Warren has a superb sense of humor and irony.
sukabi
@Janus Daniels: and it could be that she’s using that humor and irony to talk to the few executives that may still have a spec of conscience left… we know she wasn’t addressing Thomas Donohue, he’s made himself really clear… but maybe there were some in the room that will stand up and challenge the direction the CoC is going.
RosiesDad
She has that AND an incredibly well grounded sense of right and wrong.
And sort of on the same topic, I was surprised (and maybe I missed it panning through today’s posts too quickly) that no one mentioned Neil Barofsky’s Op-Ed in today’s Times. There was clearly some bile burning the back of Barofsky’s throat but this started my day on a depressing note:
In the final analysis, it has been Treasury’s broken promises that have turned TARP — which was instrumental in saving the financial system at a relatively modest cost to taxpayers — into a program commonly viewed as little more than a giveaway to Wall Street executives.
Sly
I hope she’s just saying as much for the press in attendance, because anyone who has studied American business history will tell you that the business class is anything but pro-competition. We’ve simply gone from the overt monopolism of the 19th century to smiley-face-monopolism in the form of business associationalism, of which the Chamber of Commerce has been the chief advocate, in the 20th.
Mnemosyne
Wait, sorry, I seem to have missed something: when were the banks punished the first time? You can’t be punished “one more time” if you were never punished in the first place.
Assholes.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@Mnemosyne: We punished them by keeping them afloat and shoveling money to them. We really aren’t good at this.
sneezy
“The more she’s written about, the more I admire Professor Warren.”
She’s smart as a whip, well-informed, and as far as I can tell, unimpressed by and fearless in the face of money. It’s this last that brings the vitriol out of the finance community. Unlike, say, Congress, she’s not going to roll over for anyone just because they’re rich and the Wall St. Boyz won’t stand for that if they don’t have to.
Sly
I have little doubt that arsonists feel the same way about firefighters.
patrick II
Thomas J. Donohue, president and chief executive of the chamber:
Yeah, there really is nothing quite so awful as an agency that actually goes after bad actors.
wag
This post needs a link to some Pogues. Dirty Old Town on the OGWT
Resident Firebagger
My money’s on Breitbart making a Warren vid, and Obama firing her over it. Should happen within the next Friedman Unit…
TooManyJens
@patrick II: Can’t these people STFU about being “America’s job creators” until they actually create some motherfucking American jobs?
Short Bus Bully
Fucking. Awesome.
Made my whole day right there. Thanks for that.
cat48
I really like Elizabeth Warren. However, since she spoke to the CoC, I thought everyone might be consistent. Progressive blogs flamed the prez & railed endlessly the day that the he spoke there earlier this year. Elizabeth Warren speaks there and it’s the bestest thing that ever happened! Very odd.
rickstersherpa
First, regarding the Chamber of Commerce and the Bankers Association, Adam Smith’s comment about the old Guild System in 18th century Britain is appropriately applied.
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
(Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations: B.I, Ch.10, Of Wages and Profit in the Different Employments of Labour and Stock in paragraph I.10.82)
As Yves Smith has tirelessly documented, the Banks have shamelessly and repeatedly broken the law. But the WSJ editorial board, Ms. Kissel, Mr. Donahoe, and Congressman Bacchus essentially state, the law only applies to little people, and that asking the Banks and other finanical institutions not to rip off the little people would just cause OMG something terrible to happen, as opposed to the worse recession since the 1930s, probably 10 million foreclosures (1/8th of all U.S. housing stock), 25 million unemployed, underemployed, or just dropped out workers, and incipient Government Fiscal crisis because of the collapse in growth and revenue. Yep, ol’ Bacchus is looking out for the working people and small business of Alabama and ol’Capito is looking out for the working people and small business folks of West Virginia, NOT!
With a few notable exceptions, Republican policies have never enriched just a few to the cost of the many.
russell
Yay!
Double yay!
The chamber of commerce are a bunch of entitled whiny ass babies. They want all the cookies, they want to be responsible and accountable to no-one for anything they do, and the rest of us can go fuck ourselves.
I hope Warren kicks them in the nuts.
debbie
Bachus reminds me of what Phil Graham did to Brookslie Born regarding derivatives. I hope Democrats point that out to their colleagues.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
I can only conclude that according to Thomas J. Donohue America’s job creators are crooks and capitalism is a criminal enterprise. Nice to hear that from the horse’s mouth.
Dr.BDH
…punish the banks and reward the voters…
What a nice change from punishing the voters and rewarding the banks! Jeebus, are all these people that tone deaf and isolated?
Hungry Joe
Saw her in person last week, and she’s way beyond impressive.
I want my Warren ’16 bumper sticker NOW.
uptown
@rickstersherpa:
The CoC should just change their name to “Monopolies are Us”.