MoveOn.org Queens Council Movie Event - "Plunder" with Director Danny Schechter on Wednesday May 4th

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Protesters to Bank of America: Pay Your Taxes

On April 15, in the run up to this year's Tax Day, hundreds of protesters descended on a Bank of America branch in Union Square, New York City. They demanded that big banks start paying their fair share of taxes and stop foreclosures, and they also called for the government to break up banks that are "too big to fail." Around fifty people entered the lobby of a nearby Bank of America branch with signs reading, "Stop Foreclosures! People Before Profits!" and "We pay our taxes. Why doesn't Bank of America?"

New and Notes from NYC Council Member Ruben Wills - Council District 38

COUNCIL MEMBERS RUBEN WILLS AND LEROY COMRIE JOIN NON-PROFIT HOUSING ORGANIZATIONS TO ANNOUNCE HOMEOWNER PRESERVATION EVENTS

DISTRICT-WIDE EVENTS WILL HELP RESIDENTS BETTER NEGOTIATE THROUGH MORTGAGE DELINQUENCY

Council Member Ruben Wills and City Council Deputy Majority Leader Leroy Comrie join advocates from the Center for New York City Neighborhoods, CHANGER, Inc., and residents to announce two upcoming homeowner preservation seminars on Saturday, April 16 in the 28th district. Free services and homeowner access will be available on Saturday, April 23 at the 4th Rise Up & Stay Put! Home Rescue Fair at York College. (Photo credit: Office of Council Member Ruben Wills)

Council Member Ruben Wills and City Council Deputy Majority Leader Leroy Comrie, were joined today by Mike Hickey, Executive Director for the Center for New York City Neighborhoods (CNYCN); Yeneika Puran, Executive Director of CHANGER, Inc.; Connect Queens Campaign Coordinator, Rick Echevarria, and residents to announce two upcoming homeowner preservation events in the 28^th district that are designed to assist residents at risk of losing their homes to foreclosure or mortgage delinquency, as well as a homeowner rescue fair at York College to connect homeowners with services and information.

On Saturday, April 16, from 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. at New Haven Ministries in Richmond Hill, and again from 5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. at Praise Tabernacle in Jamaica, homeownership preservation events will take place to educate residents about successful strategies and negotiations through mortgage delinquency.

“While the country has shifted its attention to other pressing matters, the neighborhoods that I represent are still struggling with escalating foreclosures, bad mortgage modifications and greedy predatory lenders,” said Wills. “The foreclosure epidemic in Southeast Queens threatens to upset our efforts to improve our quality of life and our chances of owning a piece of the American dream. I am determined to ensure that struggling homeowners in Southeast Queens are educated and no longer vulnerable consumers that continue to lose their wealth as a result of gluttonous lending institutions.”

“I want to encourage Queens homeowners who find themselves in danger of foreclosure to attend the Home Rescue Fair on April 23,” stated New York City Council Deputy Majority Leader Leroy Comrie. “I am proud to join my colleague, Council Member Wills, in continuously raising awareness about this issue. The Southeast Queens community has been disproportionately affected by the foreclosure crisis, due to the increasing number of defaults on subprime mortgages that require homeowners to use a higher ratio of their income. Jamaica, Hollis, St. Albans, Woodhaven, Richmond Hill and Ozone Park- primarily communities of color –are consistently among the top neighborhoods in New York City leading in new foreclosure actions and foreclosure auctions. My office has partnered with organizations like the Center for New York City Neighborhoods, Queens Legal Services and Neighborhood Housing Services of Jamaica to offer free foreclosure counseling in community-wide events and in my district office every Friday afternoon. No one should suffer in silence as they lose their home when there is free assistance available.”

“We recognize Council Member Wills as a local leader who has invested his talent and passion to fight the foreclosure crisis in New York City, especially in Southeast Queens, which remains hard hit by this epidemic,” said Michael Hickey, Executive Director of CNYCN. “Currently, there are 30,000 pending foreclosure actions in New York City and we expect things to worsen in 2011 as general economic conditions remain weak. We are pleased to work with Council Member Wills and other elected officials to offer NYC homeowners access to free services from lenders and housing experts at events like the Rise Up & Stay Put! Home Rescue Fair.”

“South East Queens is a community built around the institutions of church and family,” said Yeneika Puran, Executive Director of CHANGER, INC. “We have organized these homeowner events and designed the CONNECT QUEENS campaign with distraught homeowners in mind. Homeowners who have been wrongfully denied loan modifications, homeowners scammed by fraudulent loan modification consultants, and homeowners who are overwhelmed by the experience.”

Jamaica is considered the epicenter of the foreclosure crisis in New York City. CNYCN and its nonprofit and city agency partners are hosting the 4^th Rise Up & Stay Put! Home Rescue Fair on April 23 at York College in Jamaica, Queens. This fair will provide a platform for homeowners to meet with their lenders and housing experts to seek loan modifications and other financial solutions in order to avoid foreclosure. To date, more than 2,300 homeowners have attended these fairs in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, and 40 percent of the attendees were processed for new HAMP or non-HAMP loan modification applications, while 30 percent of the participants received help on existing applications.

For more information on Center for New York City Neighborhoods, www.cnycn.org

For more information on CHANGER, Inc., www.changernyc.org

For more information on CONNECT QUEENS, please call (718) 596-2010.

Saturday, April 16

1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. New Haven Ministries, Starlite Pavilion

130-05 101^st Ave., Richmond Hill

5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. Praise Tabernacle

108-11 Sutphin Blvd., Jamaica

Saturday, April 23

10:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m. Rise-Up & Stay Put! Home Rescue Fair

York College

160-02 Liberty Ave., Jamaica

COMMUNITY MEETING ON SITING OF HOMELESS SHELTERS

Council Member Ruben Wills will join representatives from the Department of Homeless Services, Skyway shelter provider, Basics, and residents at a follow up community meeting to address the growing concerns caused by the lack of proper notification for the conversion of the Skyway shelter in to an adult male-only homeless shelter. It has also come to the attention of the community that more than one convicted sexual predator will now be living at Skyway which is near a public school and park. Basics will discuss the implementation of a new safety plan to further safeguard the community.

Earlier in the day, Council Member Wills will join Council Member Brad Lander, chair of the Subcommittee on Landmarks, Public Siting & Maritime Uses, at a City Council public hearing, regarding the city's "Criteria for the Location of City Facilities" also known as "Fair Share Criteria."

In 1989, voters across the city adopted a City Charter change that attempted to equally distribute city facilities, like homeless shelters, across all neighborhoods. However, after more than 20 years, Council Member Wills and other elected officials claim that certain communities, particularly those in outer borough, urban neighborhoods, are bearing the brunt of an over-abundance of these facilities, with fewer resources and without proper notification to residents.

COUNCIL MEMBER RUBEN WILLS INTRODUCES LEGISLATION TO CODIFY CITY LAW TO PROHIBIT THE SALE OF EXPIRED OVER-THE-COUNTER MEDICATIONS

LEGISLATION IS FIRST FOR WILLS; LAW WILL PROTECT RESIDENTS FROM CROOKED STREET VENDORS

Council Member Ruben Wills plans to introduce his first piece of legislation on Wednesday that will codify the ban on the sale of expired over-the-counter medications.

Currently, New York State law prohibits the sale of expired over-the-counter medications by retailers such as Duane Reade or CVS. However, vendors and other licensees of the city have easily skirted the law by selling expired medications like Theraflu, Tylenol, Nyquil and Robitussin at street fairs and vendors’ markets.

“The sale of expired over-the-counter medications has serious health implications,” said Council Member Wills. “Residents who are purchasing these medications at neighborhood flea markets are unaware that they are ingesting expired medications. The potency of medication decreases over time and using medication after its expiration creates a greater likelihood that a person will take more in order to increase its effectiveness.”

Council Member Wills’ legislation closes this loophole and broadens the law to include “persons” so that there is no distinction between a vendor and a retailer. Passage of this legislation will make the distribution of expired over-the-counter medication by any individual a class B misdemeanor punishable by a fine of no more than $250, a maximum of 3 months of in jail, or both.

In November of 2009, then Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced an $875,000 settlement with the national retail pharmacy chain CVS to end its sale of expired products - including over-the-counter drugs, baby formula, milk, and eggs - at stores across New York State.

“This legislation will help prevent the distribution and flow of expired medications,” said Council Member Wills. “It is the responsibility of anyone who is selling over-the-counter medications to put the health and safety of consumers ahead of profits and sales.”

Backyards Not Bonuses - New York Communities for Change

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New York Communities for Change

Not the Way Forward: Jumaane Williams from New York Communities for Change on Vimeo.

Despite the fact the only a fraction of homeowners who sought help received a permanent mortgage modification from JP Morgan Chase, the bank's CEO, Jamie Dimon, just received a $17 million dollar bonus.
Clearly, Chase is out of touch with the consequences the financial industry's reckless practices continue to have in our communities.


Yesterday, NYC Council Member Jumaane Williams kicked off a campaign by New York Communities for Change in rockstar fashion!


Cheered on by fellow Council Members and dozens of NYCC protesters, Williams stormed JP Morgan Chase’s Park Avenue branch. Protesting the bank's awful record on helping families who are facing foreclosure and haven't received assistance with their mortgages, Williams closed his Chase account.

Can you continue our fight against Chase and pitch in $17? That's just 1/1,000,000 of Jamie Dimon's bonus.

In the coming weeks, many other elected officials, clergy members and unions will follow suit, drawing attention to Chase’s terrible record on modifying mortgages of distressed homeowners in New York.

Council Members Williams, Melissa Mark-Viverito, Mathieu Eugene and James Sanders were the first on the scene, but this is only the beginning.

Just 6 percent of NY homeowners who sought help have received a permanent mortgage modification from JP Morgan Chase - the other 94 percent have been denied or are in limbo. 


That’s a shocking number when their CEO just received a $17 million bonus!
Please help us take this campaign to the next level by contributing $17 dollars.


It might seem like a small amount (just 1/1,000,000th of Jamie Dimon’s bonus!), but it will go a long way in helping us make sure that everyone who googles Chase will see the truth about their lending practices.

Click here to chip in.

Launch of New Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Website

A quick video introduction to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) -featuring narration by Ron Howard
 .

The central mission of the CFPB is to make markets for consumer financial products and services work for Americans—whether they are applying for a mortgage, choosing among credit cards, or using any number of other consumer financial products.

In July 2010, Congress created a new federal agency to protect American consumers. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will be a cop on the beat, working to make consumer financial markets work better for American families. As the first new consumer agency of the 21^st century, we can communicate directly with the people we serve. Today, that work is just beginning. We’re moving quickly—building a terrific team, finding office space, and unpacking a lot of boxes.

Things aren’t all in place yet, but we don’t want to delay reaching out to the people who care about this agency. We’re excited to announce the launch of our website, ConsumerFinance.gov, for one very important reason – to start a conversation with you. With the launch of our site, we will be Open for Suggestions.

We hope you are eager to learn what this new agency will do and how it might affect you. In turn, we are definitely eager to hear what you have to say. Starting today, you can use the Internet to send us your best suggestions and questions for the bureau:

• If you have a video camera, record a YouTube video and upload it as a response to our welcome video athttp://www.youtube.com/CFPB.
• If you like Twitter, tweet your suggestion using the hashtag #CFPB. You can also follow us at http://www.twitter.com/CFPB.
• If you are on Facebook, you can “Like” us at http://www.facebook.com/CFPB, and post your suggestion on our wall.
• If you want to use our website, you can post suggestions at http://www.consumerfinance.gov/openforsuggestions.

In the coming days and weeks, staff who are building this new agency will record direct video responses to some of the most frequent questions and most interesting suggestions. You’ll see the faces and meet the people who come to work every day to make a difference for the American people. We look forward to getting to know a little more about you, too. More is coming, so be sure to check back athttp://www.consumerfinance.gov/openforsuggestions throughout the coming weeks.

Open for Suggestions is just one way that we plan to keep our conversation going with you. Be funny! Be creative! Most of all, be real about what matters to you. This is a great chance to go into your community with a camera, laptop, or mobile phone, or just a pen and paper, and help others participate. Involve your friends, your family, your colleagues and classmates, your faith community, and anyone you know who might be counting on this agency for information and help. If you aren’t ready with a specific comment, that’s OK. Just let us know you are there—and stay in touch.

We can’t do it without you.

Thanks,

Elizabeth Warren

Watch Elizabeth Warren on the Tavis Smiley Show - January 12, 2011 | PBS

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Time named Elizabeth Warren one of the world's 100 most influential people and President Obama selected her to launch the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She's devoted much of her career to studying the economics of middle class families and is also a best-selling author of books on credit and economic stress. On leave from teaching law at Harvard, Warren previously taught at Texas, Michigan and Penn and is credited with groundbreaking research on the U.S. bankruptcy system. She formerly chaired the Congressional Oversight Panel.

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."

Elizabeth Warren - Person of the Year 2010 - TIME

Elizabeth Warren has been one of my heroes for a long time now. This is well-deserved recognition for someone who works hard for working class Americans every day...

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Elizabeth Warren

Presidential Adviser, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Highs: Few people have had as good a financial crisis as Elizabeth Warren. In early 2010, the Harvard Law Professor emerged on The Daily Show and on the cover of TIME, as one of the experts leading the charge for financial reform. In mid-July, the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill passed along with a provision to create a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an idea Warren first proposed three years earlier.

Lows: Despite Warren's urging, the CFPB becomes part of the Federal Reserve, instead of its own separate agency. Critics say the Fed, which has a poor track record on consumer protection, may try to limit the CFPB's power. Warren has insisted that this is not a legitimate concern. Also in 2010, Warren's chilly relationship with the financial industry, which she has long called predatory, came back to haunt her. Bank executives effectively blocked Obama from naming Warren the official head of the CFPB. Instead, in September, Warren got the post of special adviser to the President in charge of setting up the agency with a permanent director to be named later.

—Stephen Gande

Elizabeth Warren Helped Shoot Down Bill That Would Have Sped Foreclosures, Calendar Shows by Shahien Nasiripour - The Huffington Post

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Elizabeth Warren was the first senior Obama administration official to recognize the potentially incendiary impact of a bill that would have made it significantly easier for mortgage companies to foreclose on homes, and her subsequent warnings played a crucial role in persuading the President to veto the measure, according to freshly released documents and people familiar with the deliberations.

The disclosure that Warren was instrumental in halting a bill that would have streamlined the foreclosure process comes as she confrontsfierce criticism from Republicans on Capitol Hill for the way she was appointed to construct a new consumer financial protection bureau, and characterizations that she is inclined to take an overly punitive tack with Wall Street.

A long-time advocate for greater regulation of the financial system and a prominent critic of predatory lending, Warren now finds herself at the center of an intensifying debate over the relationship between the Obama administration and the business world.

For consumer advocates, who have long decried what they portray as Wall Street's outsized influence in Washington, Warren represents their greatest hope that big banks will be more tightly supervised following the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. For a vocal group of business leaders and their Republican allies, Warren has become Exhibit A in their case that the Obama administration is anti-business.

The decisive way in which she labored behind the scenes to stymie a bill that would have eased requirements for documentation in the foreclosure process underscores how her arrival has altered the administration's relationship with major banks.

The bill, which passed both houses of Congress and awaited President Obama's signature to become law, essentially would have compelled notaries to accept out-of-state notarizations, regardless of the rules in those states.

State officials across the country--who have been pursuing probes looking into wrongdoing within the foreclosure process-- feared that those jurisdictions with lax standards could have become hotbeds for foreclosure documentation fraud. Lenders and mortgage companies could have used those states as central clearing houses to produce bogus foreclosure paperwork, and then export those documents to other states with more stringent regulations--an expedient bypass around the strictures.

Obama ultimately declined to sign the law, and the House of Representatives failed to override the veto.

Officials said Warren was among the first federal officials to recognize the significance of the notary bill, titled the Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act of 2010. She met with authorities from several states and then relayed their concerns to influential administration officials.

During the morning of Oct. 6, Warren's team at the Treasury Department wrote the first memos on the bill, raising questions about the possible consequences if it became law, these people said.

That evening, Warren met for 30 minutes with Peter Rouse, Obama's interim chief of staff, her calendar shows. She later spent an hour on the phone with Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, who once sued Countrywide Financial and exacted an $8.4 billion multi-state settlement.

The next day, Warren participated in an afternoon meeting on the bill, her calendar shows. During that meeting one of Obama's top spokesmen, Dan Pfeiffer, posted an entry on the White House Blog explaining why Obama would not sign the bill.

On Oct. 8, Obama declined to sign the bill into law, citing the need for "further deliberations about the possible unintended impact" of the bill on "consumer protections, including those for mortgages."

Documents released Wednesday show that Warren met or spoke with at least eight state officials leading a 50-state investigation into possibly-fraudulent mortgage documentation practices.

The state attorneys general, secretaries of state and bank supervisors are probing the way in which major mortgage companies have pushed through thousands of foreclosure cases at a time, as if on a factory assembly line, by short-cutting the required documentation process.

Recent weeks have featured a host of unsavory disclosures about how mortgage companies employed so-called robo-signers-- people whose sole job was to sign foreclosure documents without reading them or confirming basic facts, as required by law. The volume of cases and shoddy handling of paperwork is reflective of the messy and indiscriminate lending practices that characterized the nation's housing boom, as Wall Street eagerly handed mortgages to seemingly anyone willing to sign off.

The states' investigation and a parallel multi-agency federal probe are now roiling the mortgage industry, heightening the possibility that major lenders could face potentially huge fresh losses as bad loans continue to emerge. With legal and regulatory uncertainty now enshrouding the industry and public outrage trained on foreclosures, the banks could have trouble limiting those losses by selling off the homes pledged against bad mortgages.

The nation's biggest lender, Bank of America, has seen its share price drop 18 percent through yesterday's market close since the day before the states announced their joint inquiry.

Warren serves as an assistant to Obama and a special adviser to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner as she leads the effort to create the new Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, a watchdog designed to protect borrowers from abusive lenders. Her calendar from Sept. 20 to Nov. 2 was released per a Freedom of Information Act request.

The longtime Harvard Law School professor and consumer advocate met or spoke with the state attorneys general from Iowa, Illinois, Texas, North Carolina, Massachusetts and Ohio, her calendar shows. She also met with Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, and spoke with New York's top banking regulator, Richard H. Neiman. They are among the leaders of the combined state probe.

Warren has long chided federal regulators for their lax oversight of the financial industry and slipshod protection of consumers. She's championed state regulators, however, who have often been ahead of their federal counterparts when it comes to consumer finance issues.

Warren's calendar also shows numerous meetings with bankers and their representatives. Financial executives and lobbyists have noted that Warren was reaching out to them more than they initially expected. The calendar confirms her outreach.

On Sept. 20, the same day she took a photo for her Treasury Department badge, Warren spent an hour and a half meeting with bankers from Oklahoma, her calendar shows. She spent an hour having lunch with Geithner that day as well.

Since then she's met with the chief executives of the nation's largest banks, including Vikram Pandit of Citigroup; Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase; John Stumpf of Wells Fargo; James Gorman of Morgan Stanley; Richard Davis of U.S. Bancorp; W. Edmund Clark of TD Bank Financial Group; David Nelms of Discover Financial Services; Niall Booker of HSBC North America Holdings; and Kenneth Chenault of American Express.

The calendar entry for Chenault's one-hour meeting on Oct. 13 notes that "He's flying here for us."

Warren also met with officials from Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank, Germany's biggest lender and one of the world's biggest financial institutions.

Notably absent from Warren's calendar are officials from Bank of America, the biggest bank in the U.S. by assets and branches, including its chief executive, Brian Moynihan.

Warren's calendar includes meetings with investors and trade groups, like the Consumer Bankers Association, the Independent Community Bankers of America, the Financial Services Roundtable and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.

Though Warren is known for her vigorous advocacy on behalf of consumers, she's spent more time with bankers and their lobbyists than with consumer groups and advocates during her roughly two months on the job.

Warren's 2007 journal article calling for the creation of a dedicated consumer agency inspired policymakers to enact it into law. Big banks opposed it.

Warren has also met with nearly two dozen members of Congress from both sides of the aisle, including the likely incoming chair of the House Financial Services Committee, Rep. Spencer Bachus, and the top Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, Richard Shelby. The Alabama Republicans have been particularly critical of Warren and her new agency.

Warren's calendar features numerous White House meetings, like a two-hour dinner on Sept. 23 with top Obama adviser David Axelrod and breakfasts and lunches with another top Obama counselor, Valerie Jarrett. She's also met with the heads of all the major federal financial regulatory agencies, including Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.

Among Warren's early initiatives are efforts to make credit card disclosure forms shorter and easier to read, and simplifying mortgage documents. Her first major speech since joining the administration was a Sept. 29 address to the Financial Services Roundtable, a Washington trade group representing firms like JPMorgan Chase, BlackRock and State Farm. She asked the assembled executives to work with her to create a new system of consumer regulation focused on core principles rather than a mountain of specific rules.