Elizabeth Warren Announces Her Bid for Senate

This is hilarious..!

Elizabeth Warren talks about why she's running for the United States Senate.

Starring: Molly Erdman
Directed by: Brian Shortall
Written/Produced by: Eddie Geller
Edited by: Richard Klopfenstein

In "Dangerous World", Unions Fight "Assault" on Middle Class Families, Elizabeth Warren Says

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The standoff between Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and public-sector employees comes to a head today as the Governor’s ultimatum runs out for the 14 state senate democrats who fled to Illinois to avoid a budget vote .

If the Senators do not return home and vote on Walker's budget -- which includes ending public unions' right to bargain collectively on pension and health-care benefits -- the state will face dire consequences.

Most Americans agree that time for austerity has arrived in the U.S. at all levels of government: state, local and federal. But, the majority of Americans do not agree that weakening labor unions is the right way to achieve this goal.

Elizabeth Warren, special adviser to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and fervent supporter of America’s middle class, agrees.

When Tech Ticker’s Aaron Task sat down with Warren in Washington last week, he asked about our recent interview with the president of the International Fire Fighters’ Association Harold Schaitberger. The union chief finds it galling that some Wall Street “single-year bonuses exceed the average life time benefits” of the average firefighter and paramedic. (See:"This is All About the Money": Pension Fund 'Crisis' a Red Herring, Union Chief Says)

Her response: “The middle class has been under assault now, really, for a generation.”

The 1-2 Punch

The middle class got hit by a "one-two punch" of rising daily living expenses plus flat wages, Warren tells Aaron in the accompanying clip. The world became a “far more dangerous” for American families when Congress “deregulated credit and turned the lender loose," starting in the 1990s, she continues.

As more people turned to buying the necessities with plastic -- including health-care, college tuition and groceries -- Americans became inundated with debt and “more of them started falling over the cliff financially,” she says. “We’ve got a middle class that is under assault from multiple directions.”

Union critics blame the public-sector for ballooning state deficits and lack of jobs. But, Warren says those arguments are simply not supported by the facts.

Unions are one of the few institutions trying to strengthen America’s middle class by fighting for fair wages, she says. “We should be in a world in which we all are a little better off when this country produces more, not that the part left over for those who work for a living keeps shrinking, while those who manage investments get an ever bigger piece.” (From 1976 to 2007, the top 1% of U.S. earners received 58% of all real income growth, according to economics professor Raghuramu Rajan of the University of Chicago's Booth School.)

Madison Showdown

What happens in Wisconsin is likely to set the stage for other bitter labor battles across the country.

What’s at stake? $165 million of taxpayers' money, which could be saved if the state refinanced its debt. If the standoff persists, 1500 jobs will be lost by July and up to 12,000 jobs are eventually at stake.

Gov. Walker says the goal of his budget plan is to close Wisconsin's $3.6 billion shortfall this year while AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says this is all about politics. (See: Gov. Walker Is "Playing Politics With People's Lives," AFL-CIO's Trumka Says)

Whether or not you agree with Walker’s methods, he's like almost every other Governor in the country trying to figure out how to push his or her state’s finances out of the red in the face of growing public-employee pension and health-care benefits.

If labor unions lose this fight, the very fabric of this country will be unrecognizable, says Warren. “If as a country we don’t concentrate on rebuilding that middle class what we knew as America just doesn’t exist anymore."

Elizabeth Warren's Greatest Hits by Daniel Mintz - MoveOn.org

Elizabeth Warren's Greatest Hits from Daniel Mintz on Vimeo.


Populist hero Elizabeth Warren was recently nominated to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by President Obama. Check out her greatest hits to see why she's going to be such an amazing advocate for consumers.

New Consumer Agency is Frightfully Necessary — and Late - Op/Ed by Prof Elizabeth Warren - MiamiHerald.com

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No one has missed the headlines: Haphazard and possibly illegal practices at mortgage-servicing companies have called into question home foreclosures across the nation.

The latest disclosures are deeply troubling, but they should not come as a big surprise. For years, both individual homeowners and consumer advocates sounded alarms that foreclosure processes were riddled with problems.

While federal and state investigators are still examining exactly what has gone wrong and why, two things are clear.

First, several financial services companies have already admitted that they used “robo-signers,” false declarations, and other workarounds to cut corners, creating a legal nightmare that will waste time and money that could have been better spent to help this economy recover. Mortgage lenders will spend millions of dollars retracing their steps, often with the same result that families who cannot pay will lose their homes.

Second, this mess might well have been avoided if the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had been in place just a few years ago.

The new consumer agency is one of the signature accomplishments of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act signed into law by President Obama this summer.

The new agency will take on oversight responsibilities that had been scattered among several federal agencies, and it will be a new cop on the beat that will end big loopholes in the regulatory system.

For the first time, banks and non-bank lenders (such as payday lenders, check cashers and mortgage brokers) will be subject to the same federal oversight to ensure that they are all playing by the same rules-no more turning sideways and slipping through the regulatory cracks.

Lost in much of the back-and-forth over wrongful foreclosures is the question of whether the scandal could have been prevented. The answer is yes.

The practices now under investigation took root and grew because there was no single federal regulator with both the responsibility and the tools to look out for consumers.

Had it existed, the new consumer agency could have stopped these problems before they multiplied. Many of the failures already admitted were not sophisticated scams that had been carefully concealed. By enforcing existing laws and involving state authorities early on, the agency could have made sure that the law was respected. No one would need to wonder whether the world of borrowing and lending works only one way: Families have to follow the legal rules, but the rules are optional for big banks.

Once it is fully operational, the new consumer agency will have supervisory authority over all large mortgage servicers. It will be able to examine them on a regular basis to make sure they follow the rules. If those servicers decide it is cheaper or faster to circumvent federal law, the consumer agency will have the tools to hold them accountable.

No one will be allowed to break the rules without triggering a strong and prompt federal response.

Currently, the federal interagency foreclosure task force, including the members of the Financial Services Oversight Council, is working along with the state Attorneys General to get to the bottom of these problems. The implementation team for the new consumer agency is also working to assemble and coordinate teams to deal with servicing and other issues.

These efforts are critical, but there is more work to do: We must ensure this kind of scandal-or some close cousin-does not happen again.

A mortgage is the biggest financial commitment most Americans will make in a lifetime, and the toll on Florida has been especially heavy and the need for oversight particularly apparent. A few weeks ago, I watched proceedings in a Fort Lauderdale foreclosure court and saw firsthand the painful outcomes for numerous families.

Unfair servicing practices can worsen a family’s already difficult economic situation, and the injury echoes from the family to the community and ultimately throughout the economy. Cops on the beat can stop problems before the damage spreads. If there ever was any doubt that the new consumer agency is necessary, the latest foreclosure developments should put that to rest.

Elizabeth Warren is the special advisor to the secretary of the Treasury for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and an assistant to the president.

Elizabeth Warren: Held to Account - Culture - Vogue

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Photographed by Norman Jean Roy

If Elizabeth Warren offers you a cup of tea, don’t accept. I’ve been known to pinch a penny myself, but when President Obama’s choice to run the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau pulls a rumpled gray object with a tail out of her desk drawer, even I blanch. It looks more like a dead mouse than a used tea bag.

“I know,” she says, laughing, when I express surprise. “But I just can’t stand the waste of throwing out a tea bag after one use. It’s like a knife in the gut for me.”

If you happen to be the CEO of a bank that took federal bailout money or used what she’s called “a trick” or “trap” to charge 30 percent interest for a late credit-card payment, Elizabeth Warren, a petite 61-year-old grandmother with big blue eyes, soft blonde hair, and the honeyed accent of the Oklahoma plains, is herself something of a knife in the gut. With the passage of the historic Dodd-Frank financial-reform bill creating a new agency to regulate the credit industry, that knife finally got a sharp point.

Consumer advocates tend to be somewhat glum and shaggy—think Ralph Nader in his shiny suits—but after her breakout role as chair of the oversight committee investigating the TARP bailout, Warren has emerged as an unlikely star in the Washington firmament. Her odyssey began two years ago, when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called her at home out of the blue with the request that changed her life. “There was no short list; I had no idea it was coming,” says Warren, who was hosting a barbecue for her students from Harvard Law School at the time. Within the university, Warren was a beloved but slightly feared teacher. “She changed my life,” says Katie Porter, now a professor at the University of Iowa, who can still remember the first time Warren called on her in class. “When I didn’t get the answer right,” says Porter, “she didn’t simply move on. She said, ‘Come on, Miss Porter, think! Think!’ It was enormously empowering. As she likes to say, her classes are like a contact sport. You’re going to get bruised, but you’re going to have fun.”

Until Senator Reid’s phone call, Warren’s national profile stemmed mainly from the two books she had coauthored with her daughter, a former McKinsey consultant who now runs an employment business in Los Angeles. Both books drew heavily on Warren’s academic work about the underlying causes of personal bankruptcy and were best-sellers that landed her on the Dr. Phil show, but Reid’s offer changed the stage altogether. “I’d always been on the outside, shouting warnings,” she explains. “So when Senator Reid said, ‘Come inside and tell us what you think,’ I didn’t hesitate for a minute.” Her family, on the other hand, was shocked. “I don’t think anyone saw it coming,” says her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi. “Growing up, I never saw an appetite for politics. Even now, I don’t think she really likes Washington or politics. She’s just there to do this one thing.”

Typically, an appointment to an oversight committee means sitting behind a microphone, asking polite questions, then generating a brick of a report that nobody reads. Warren did not play by those rules. Instead of making nice, she challenged the Secretary of the Treasury to explain exactly where the $700 billion in bailout money went and why the U.S. government had to pay 100 cents on the dollar for all those bad AIG investments. Thanks to the wonders of YouTube, those testy exchanges landed on the Internet, where every American pissed off over the bailout could delight in watching Timothy Geithner squirm.

Now technically Warren’s boss, Geithner has publicly praised Warren and even gave her a police hat the day she assumed her new role, but in Washington it was widely rumored that he preferred someone else for the job. Some enmity seems to linger—not long after her appointment, a series of blind items quoting Treasury sources landed on the Web site Politico, accusing her of being more concerned with decorating her office and media appearances than with substantive work. On the charge of overfriendliness to the media, Warren pleads guilty. “Talking to the American people is part of the job. The best way to do that is to go on television. It’s not about me; it’s about the opportunity to let Americans hear about important work.”

Her own aides worried that her aggressive questioning might have meant career suicide in Washington, but Warren hit a chord with the public precisely because she wasn’t concerned with getting ahead. “Elizabeth has never been a calculating person,” says her husband, fellow Harvard Law professor Bruce Mann. “She came to Washington late in life from the very secure position of being tenured at Harvard. She’s not running for anything. I do feel sorry about the videos of her questioning Geithner, but she was just doing her job. She doesn’t personalize things. After it’s over, she’s friendly and she means it.”

Warren herself finds it hard to believe that people are so taken aback by the way she speaks. Sitting in her sparsely decorated new office, where the tags are still on the Aeron chairs, she rejects the idea that her mode of discourse is anything special. “I am glad to be useful, but I don’t think I have anything that remarkable to say. Maybe it’s just the nakedness that comes from clarity that is frightening, but if you are going to do work in the public interest”—she pauses as she searches for the right words. “Just the idea that you talk as long as you can and say as little as possible. . . .” She makes a dismissive gesture, then brings the conversation to the heart of her work, which is about the struggling middle class.

“I think it’s about having a moral compass,” she concludes. “I get how deeply wrong so much of what has happened is. I don’t do library research; I talk to families who have worked hard and just slammed into a wall. Sometimes it’s from bad decisions, but sometimes it’s from medical problems, job losses, death. Bankruptcy is about trying to scramble your way back. Maybe you won’t ride so high in the water, but you can stop those 25 calls from collection agencies every night.”

As she speaks, her eyes suddenly tear up—a reminder that her own childhood, in a small Oklahoma town where her father worked as a janitor and nobody in her immediate family graduated from college, was fraught with financial hardship. A bright student who excelled in debate, Warren was thirteen when her father had a heart attack that drastically altered the family’s financial stability. When he recovered, his new job paid half of what he once earned. The family kept their house but lost the car, and life became a juggling act. In order to pay application fees to college, Warren used baby-sitting earnings. Years later, tragedy would strike again when her older brother’s wife died of breast cancer shortly after he lost his business and their home. “She didn’t smoke; she wasn’t overweight. You know what her biggest risk factor was?” Warren asks, her voice thick with emotion. “She didn’t have health insurance. She didn’t have regular screenings, and she didn’t go to a doctor early. And I know how many times my brother has wondered whether his business failing was part of that, and I know that story repeats all over America today with its own variations.”

Those experiences created a deep determination to make a difference. “She knew people who really struggled when she was growing up,” says her daughter. “She had a profound compassion for them.” In fact, that early adversity may be the very thing that hardened her resolve. “You either develop coping strategies or you wallow,” says her husband. “Elizabeth has never wallowed in anything.” Katie Porter thinks the most effective strategy she learned was how to move on. “Look, she’s human,” Porter says. “She’s on her second marriage. She went through a lot of assistants before she found the right one, but she doesn’t brood. She’s able to refocus on the big picture.”

Warren married her high school sweetheart at nineteen, moved to New Jersey with her then husband, an engineer who worked at NASA, and had two children. The expectation for women back then was to stay home and take care of the kids, but Warren knew she’d never be happy doing that. “I love children, but I needed a job,” she says. “Otherwise, I would have driven my kids crazy. I just had too much energy.”

Last fall, I accompanied Warren to a party given in her honor by Americans for Financial Reform, an umbrella group of progressive organizations that worked to pass the Dodd-Frank bill. Looking around the room, I felt as if I’d been transported from Washington, D.C., to some left-leaning village where the men all wear tweed jackets and the women favor Merrells over Manolos. These are the kind of people who have been so disappointed in Barack Obama for not ending the war in Afghanistan or providing universal health care, but on the issue of consumer finance, American progressives are pinching themselves over their good fortune in having Warren on their side. “Anything other than incremental change is incredibly hard in Washington,” says Ed Mierzwinski, another consumer advocate. “We have been working on this a long time, but she was able to close the sale.”

The credit-card industry is not quite so happy. “Some bank lobbyists say terrible things about me,” she acknowledges, telling a story of one who actually stuck his tongue out at her after the bankruptcy bill she fought against was passed. (“Ah,” one bank lawyer said to me, “Elizabeth Warren—our demon.”) If they could tar her personally they would, but there’s not much you can pin on a frugal former Sunday school teacher who has now been married to the same man for 30 years and spends her holidays visiting the grandchildren. Though she is adored by liberals, for the majority of her life she has voted Republican. “I believe in markets,” she says. “The appropriate role of government is to support markets so they can function, but the consumer-credit market is broken.” Her unpopularity with the business community kept her from being appointed the official head of the new agency. After looking at the number of votes they could count on in a Senate confirmation, both the president and Warren concluded a vote would have ended in defeat. Instead, Obama gave her the job without the title, a move The Wall Street Journal called “chutzpah to behold.”

Becoming a public figure with a 24/7 portfolio has its ups and downs. Once she got the call from the president last September, she left Cambridge and basically hasn’t been back. “It’s almost like she died,” says Katie Porter. “I miss her. I think her husband, her kids, and her grandkids miss her. Elizabeth has always been a hard worker, but her life was not all about work.” In the past, she and her husband enjoyed traveling, and she once raised African violets as a hobby—an anonymous admirer had sent her one the day I visited her office. Now her life is pretty much all work, all the time. Not that she’s complaining. “Saturday is the worst day for me,” she says, “because I wake up and think, Why aren’t we working on this?”

Being a media darling means having to pay more attention to ordinary concerns like how one looks. Porter says Warren chose her hairdresser because she was the first not to yell at her for typing on her laptop while getting her hair cut, but Warren does care about her appearance and even follows some fashion designers. When we run into Isaac Mizrahi backstage at The View, I am surprised to see her squeal like a teenager. “I love your clothes!” she gushes. “I am not against spending money on clothes,” she says. “As long as you are straight on your fixed expenses [housing, food, utilities, et cetera] and you have put aside 20 percent in savings, go ahead and buy those $400 shoes. That doesn’t make you a bad person. I want to live my life with color. People who can’t enjoy their money are missing the colors in life.”

Nevertheless, clothes are a source of constant struggle. “This is the one area where I really envy men,” she says. “And yet, I simply cannot dress like a man. It would mean losing who I am.” She can’t bear to watch herself on TV but will occasionally TiVo a performance so she can later watch (on mute) to see whether an outfit looked OK. “Some days I feel just right. Other times, I’ll be sitting in a meeting and I’ll look down at some frilly collar and think, Oh, Lord, what was I thinking?”

She shouldn’t worry so much. On television, she exudes an intense, winning sincerity with a dash of humor, which may explain Jon Stewart’s crush on her. “When you say it like that, when you look at me like that,” the comedian once murmured, following one of her impassioned pleas for government reform, “and I know your husband is backstage—but I still want to make out with you.” Her husband, who was indeed backstage, says the comment made him fall out of his chair laughing. “How could I be mad at him?” Mann asks. “When I listen to her, I have the same response."

Opinion: Giving Small Banks a Chance to Thrive - Elizabeth Warren - POLITICO.com

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The bankers I have talked with are not looking to Washington to solve their problems. But they are looking for a market that allows them to compete. They are looking for a regulatory structure that doesn’t require an army of lawyers, and a level playing field that lets customers see the true cost of a product -- so lenders do not need to compete against a phantom price.

We are only at the beginning of our work and most of the consumer agency’s authorities have yet to phase in. But the direction of the agency is coming into focus. We want to level the playing field by streamlining regulations and eliminating outdated or ineffective rules. We want to make it easy for banks—large and small—to meet their obligations to their customers and to make the costs and risks of credit clear.ntinue Reading

My first week here, the agency’s implementation team launched a mortgage disclosure project with the ultimate goal of giving consumers better information while reducing the number of redundant federal forms. It is only a start -- but a good one.

We want to build outreach to small providers into this new agency’s DNA. Whether in Washington or outside the beltway, we are aiming to maintain a continuing conversation with community bankers and credit unions to make certain that they are included from the beginning in all initiatives.

This effort is critical not only because of the instructions of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, but also because it is the right thing to do.

A generation of flat wages and rising basic expenses has hammered families. Too many middle class families have spent all their income and all their savings, and they have taken on debt to pay for college, to cover serious medical problems or just to stay afloat a little while longer.

Too often that debt is poorly understood, and terms buried in the fine print have cost customers dearly. The new consumer agency can serve families by making credit easier to understand and making markets more competitive.

But families can’t benefit over the long run if only a handful of banks are left standing. Families will be protected only if they can count on a robust, diversified banking industry. To serve American families, the new consumer agency needs to work with America’s community banks to make sure that there are a range of services and options available -- now and in the future.

Elizabeth Warren is an assistant to the president and a special advisor to the Treasury secretary for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Photo by Tony Rinaldo

Demand Your Mortgage Note..!!

Wheres the Note.org


The big banks' BS is starting to catch up to them.

Last week, JPMorgan Chase announced they were halting foreclosures in 23 states. Turns out, the bankers in charge of approving the foreclosure paperwork weren't even reading what they were signing. Now, one by one, foreclosures at America's biggest banks are grinding to a halt. It's gotten so bad, several states are taking the banks to court - calling for an immediate freeze on all foreclosures.

The banks created this mess, it's on them to clean it up. You have a right to know if your mortgage is affected.


Wall Street has bought and sold our mortgages so many times, they've lost track of who owns what. And now they're getting caught red handed. In one state, two banks tried to foreclose on the same home. In another state, BofA tried to take a house away from a man who'd never even had a mortgage. The more we learn, the worse it gets.

Banks are calling these "technical glitches." These are more than technical glitches. These are monumental screw-ups that are forcing families out of their homes. The banks raise our rates and change our terms - and if we make one mistake, we pay with our homes.

Don't have a mortgage? Pass this on to someone who does. Every single homeowner needs to know if their bank still holds their mortgage note.

Go to: Where's the Note.org


SEIU.org

Elizabeth Warren Rap Video- Got A New Sheriff

h/t: crooksandliars.com



Directed by: Rachel McDonald
Produced by: Bonnie Abaunza, Tiffany Bordenave, and Rachel McDonald
Director of Photography: Ross Riege
Editor: Jason Beattie
Starring: Ryan Anthony Lumas and Satnam S Ramgotra
Music Produced by:Lorne Balfe
Music Mixed by: Satoshi Noguchi
Recorded by: Chuck Choi
Music Programmer: Andrew Kawczynski
Backing Vocals: Michael Levine, Aleksey Igudesman, Lorne Balfe


Backing Track provided by Extreme Music, called Dirty Dollars off of album labeled XCD065.

Talking Business - Consumers Are Clamoring for Elizabeth Warren - NYTimes.com

Elizabeth Warren proposed the financial reform agency in an article in the summer of 2007.

So it turns out that the Elizabeth Warren rap video that went “viral” this week is actually a made-in-Hollywood production.

You know the video, don’t you? The one in which a struggling comedian named Ryan Anthony Lumas, dressed in a cowboy outfit, high-steps his way through two minutes of catchy, if ersatz, rap, with lyrics like Sheriff Warren’s what we need-o/ She’s not about the money and the green-o... /She wants to expose the banks and all the greed/ and get rid of unnecessary fees/Which means more money in my pocket?

The group behind the video is the Main Street Brigade. But when you call the Main Street Brigade, you get the Santa Monica office of Hans Zimmer, a prolific Hollywood composer. The two women listed as the Brigade’s contacts run Mr. Zimmer’s new philanthropic/activist arm.

They are also the ones who recruited Mr. Lumas to write and star in the video — he actually makes his living selling televisions at Best Buy — then spent an all-nighter editing it, and e-mailed it to the Elizabeth Warren-obsessed Huffington Post, where it had its premiere a week ago Friday.

“We’re Trojan-horsing people with the messaging,” said Bonnie Abaunza, one of the Brigadettes. In addition to Mr. Zimmer, supporters of the Main Street Brigade include the directors James Brooks and Ron Howard as well as other Hollywood celebrities. Its purpose is to back the work of Americans for Financial Reform, a large coalition of organizations pushing for financial reform. The coalition’s Web site lists the subjects it follows, including foreclosure, derivatives and mortgage reform.

And, of course, Elizabeth Warren.

The group desperately wants President Obama to name her to run the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a key part of the recently signed financial reform legislation. “Tell President Obama: Nominate Elizabeth to Head the C.F.P.B,” reads the coalition’shome page. When you click through, you get the text of a message that can be e-mailed directly to the White House, which points out, among other things, that the new bureau was her idea.

But why, I asked Ms. Abaunza, is it so important that Ms. Warren lead the new agency? Isn’t it enough that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau got passed — especially since the banks were so intent on killing it?

“She’s the people’s choice,” Ms. Abaunza replied. She said she was blown away when she watched a video of a speech by Ms. Warren that outlined all the ways a new consumer bureau could make things better for borrowers.

“The best way to explain it is that she speaks truth to power,” Ms. Abaunza continued. “She speaks about how people have been ripped off in a way that everybody understands. Although she is a Harvard professor, she doesn’t speak in an elitist way. She is a grandmother. She is from Oklahoma. I like the fact that she says ‘golly.’ She engenders this trust immediately. Because she is very honest.”

Also, she walks on water.

O.K., so she doesn’t walk on water. Which isn’t to say that Ms. Abaunza isn’t right. Indeed, the incredible groundswell around Ms. Warren’s candidacy appears to be putting President Obama in a tough spot.

His Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, by all accounts, would prefer to see Michael S. Barr, the assistant secretary for financial institutions, get the job. Others in the administration worry that she will impose tough new rules on the banks that will make it harder for them to nurse themselves back to health and hence the economy. But it is going to be awfully hard for him to turn his back on Ms. Warren.

With the president on vacation, nobody expects him to make this appointment until he returns at the end of August. But if he chooses anyone but her, he will be widely seen as helping the banks at the expense of the rest of us — something the government has been accused of doing far too often since those grim days of September 2008. With the midterm elections fast approaching, such accusations are not going to be terribly helpful to Democrats. Just a few days ago, 41 Democratic members of Congress sent Mr. Obama a letter pleading with him to appoint Ms. Warren.

How did this happen? How did a once-obscure Harvard Law professor become such a powerful touchstone?

Partly, it is because she really did come up with the idea. Ms. Warren’s views about banks and borrowers were largely formed early in her career when she and two colleagues, Teresa A. Sullivan, now the president of the University of Virginia, and Jay Lawrence Westbrook, a law professor at the University of Texas, conducted two seminal studies about people who file for bankruptcy.

In the late 1980s, when the first study was unveiled in a book the three of them wrote, “As We Forgive Our Debtors,” the root causes of bankruptcy weren’t well understood. The bank lobby routinely complained that Americans with the means to pay their debts were taking “the easy way out” by filing for bankruptcy. The empirical work done by the Warren-Sullivan-Westbrook team proved those claims false.

People who filed for bankruptcy were genuinely in over their heads, the researchers found. They had accumulated debt they couldn’t repay because they had lost their jobs or had some other life event that robbed them of their ability to earn a decent paycheck. They were often middle class, homeowners even. They filed for bankruptcy because they were desperate. Looking through thousands of bankruptcy filings, Mr. Westbrook said a few days ago, “you got a sense of human beings in real trouble.” He added, “All of us were very much affected by what we found in those files.”

By the summer of 2007, when Ms. Warren proposed the consumer agency, she was a well-known advocate for financial consumers — and the scourge of the credit card industry. She coined the term “tricks and traps” to describe how the banks lulled people into agreeing to credit card terms they weren’t even aware of when they signed up for the card. She had testified before Congress many times.

In the article where she proposed the new agency — she called it the financial product safety commission — she began with an analogy to toasters. (Ms. Warren has a thing for toaster analogies.) “It is impossible to buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of bursting into flames and burning down your house,” she wrote. “But it is possible to refinance an existing home with a mortgage that has the same one-in-five chance of putting the family out on the street.” Her timing could not have been better, she wrote the article at the exact moment the subprime bubble was reaching its peak.

What struck me, when I reread that article recently, was the bluntness of her language. She used words like “tricks,” “fleece,” and “bribe” to describe the actions of mortgage and credit card lenders. And I think a lot of her appeal stems from that simple fact: she describes abuses — predatory lending, hidden fees, bewildering “disclosures” that hide more than they disclose — in precisely the way most Americans have experienced them. She conveys a powerful sense that she understands what we’ve been through this last decade.

Her critics have complained that in her quest to avenge the downtrodden consumer, she could endanger the safety and soundness of banks, by writing rules that would strip them of billions in profits. Her essential position is that if taking advantage of borrowers is necessary to save the banks, then there is something deeply wrong with the banking system in America. The American Bankers Association may not agree with that, but that is unquestionably what most Americans believe. And they are right.

Ms. Warren also conveys a powerful sense of optimism about the good the new agency can do. I saw this for myself just a few days after President Obama signed the new law, when she was part of a panel discussion by the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal policy research organization that focuses on financial issues. I was also part of that panel, but after listening to Ms. Warren speak, I felt a little like Ms. Abaunza. I was bowled over.

That afternoon, Ms. Warren conveyed a great deal of passion, energy and historical knowledge about consumer lending practices. She gave a minitutorial about the history of usury laws, and about how credit card disclosures had become a tool for gouging customers.

Ms. Warren said that the new agency would have the power to make a rule, for instance, that credit card companies would have to disclose all their contract terms in two pages — in English simple enough for anyone with a 10th-grade education to understand. That one change, she said, would help end the practice of “cheating by contract.” (Another lovely Elizabeth Warren phrase, by the way.) When she had finished speaking, the audience gave her an ovation.

In 1934, Franklin D. Roosevelt had to choose a chairman to head a new agency aimed at protecting financial consumers — in this case investors. The agency was the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the man Roosevelt picked was Joe Kennedy, the legendary investor (and father of the Kennedy clan). When Roosevelt was asked why he had turned to a “crook” to run the S.E.C., he famously replied, “Takes one to catch one.”

This time, the president is facing a different choice. The people who want Elizabeth Warren to run the new consumer agency are rooting for her precisely because she is not one of them. She’s one of us.

Presidential Reunion from SNL Veterans for a Consumer Financial Protection Agency - FunnyOrDie.com

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Barack Obama gets a surprise visit in the night from ex-Presidents Bush Sr., Bush Jr., Clinton, Ford, Reagan and Carter to get a few pointers about the Consumer Financial Protection Agency and why it's so important.

Funny or Die's Presidential Reunion from Will Ferrell

Credits:
Actor --	Chevy Chase
Director --	Ron Howard
Actor --	Jim Carrey
Actor --	Fred Armisen
Actor --	Darrell Hammond
Actor --	Dan Aykroyd
Actor --	Maya Rudolph
Actor --	Dana Carvey
Uploader --	FOD Team
Director --	Jake
Cinematographer --	Antonio Scarlata

Additional credits:

Starring: Will Ferrell, Jim Carrey, Dana Carvey, Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Darrell Hammond, Fred Armisen & Maya Rudolph
Directed by: Ron Howard
FoD Director: Jake Szymanski
Written by: Al Jean, Adam McKay, Tom Gammill, Max Pross, Dan Greaney & Michael Price
Produced by: Mike Farah
Director of Photography: Antonio ... more >

Starring: Will Ferrell, Jim Carrey, Dana Carvey, Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Darrell Hammond, Fred Armisen & Maya Rudolph
Directed by: Ron Howard
FoD Director: Jake Szymanski
Written by: Al Jean, Adam McKay, Tom Gammill, Max Pross, Dan Greaney & Michael Price
Produced by: Mike Farah
Director of Photography: Antonio Scarlata
Production Design: Alexi Gomez, Rachael Ferrara & Katie Byron
Edited by: Jake Szymanski & Neil Mahoney
Production Coordinators: Christin Trogan, Michelle Fox, & Sean Boyle
1st AD: Shadie Elnashai
2nd AD: Richard Robinson
2nd 2nd Asst. Director: Reza Lackey
Additional 2nd 2nd Asst Director: Chandra Alexander
A-Cam 1st AC: Scott Johnson
B-Cam Op: David Jones
B-Cam 1st AC: Dylan Johnson
C-Cam Op: Ben Berman
C-Cam 1st AC: Tony Oberstar
Set Production Assistants: Mara Beckman, Andrew Grissom & Rachel Hastings
Key Set Production Assistant: Elliot Ryan Dickerhoof
DIT: Chris Hoyle
Media Manager: Neil Mahoney
Dolly Grip: Geoff Knight
Gaffer: Kevin Stewart
Best Boy: Ricky Fosheim
Electrician: David Cronin
Grip: Jordan Downey
Swing: Brad Schulz
Sound Mixer: BoTown Sound
Lead Boom Operator: Brandon Conley
Sound Utility: Danny Carpenter
Script Supervisor: Kristin Owings
Construction: Paul Gorman
Lead Man: Michael Jasorka
Set Dresser: Yuki Miura
Make-Up Dept. Heads: Shauna O'Toole & Kat Bardot
Mr. Carrey's Make-Up FX Artist: Alexei O'Brien
Mr. Farrell & Mr. Carrey's Wigs: Jennifer Aspinall
Mr. Carvey's Make-Up & Hair: Kevin Yagher
Mr. Aykroyd's, Ms. Rudolph's, Mr. Armisen's, & Mr. Hammond's Wigs: Tena Parker
Assistant to Tena Parker: Becca Gardner
Make-Up Assistant: Ellen Vieria
Make-Up Assistant: Kira von Sutra
Costume Designer: Janicza Bravo
Tailor: Laurel Pochucha
Assistant Costumer: Diane Herlofsky
Additional Editing by: Justin Donaldson & Brad Schulz
Behind the Scenes Directors and Editors: Matt Villines & Osmany Rodriguez
Still Photographers: Pete Snell & Jason Mordah
Special Thanks to Elizabeth Warren, Hans Zimmer, James Brooks, Bonnie Abaunza, Mark Kvamme, Dick Glover, Andrew Steele, Jimmy Miller, Ken Aymong, Andrew Zack, Jessica Elbaum, Fred Specktor, Louisa Velis, Linda Hill, Martin Lesak, Lauryn Kahn, Tiffany Bordenave, Owen Burke, Seth Morris, Al Franken, Chad Carter, Samantha Cruz and Avenue Six Studios
Wardrobe thanks to H+M, Hugo Boss and French Connection
Camera cranes, dollies, remote and stabilized camera systems by Chapman/Leonard Studio Equipment, Inc. <>

Web Series: Web Series: Funny or Die's Presidential Reunion (1 of 3)