Elizabeth Warren May Not Be Ready to Run for President, But Her Book Is

By John Nichols, The Nation

24 April 14

he measures of books written by politicians are never simply literary.

Books written by the women and men who might, maybe, just possibly run for president are invariably judged by electoral standards.

So it is that Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s fine new book, A Fighting Chance, will be assessed both for its composition and for its potential to spark the popular uprising that might make a reasonably populist Democrat a contender for the presidency, the vice presidency or a top cabinet post in a next administration.

Warren says she is not running for president in the 2016 Democratic nomination contest that too many pundits have already decided will be won by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—just as they had already decided the 2008 nomination fight for Clinton. Warren’s statements have been consistent in that regard. On the CBS Sunday Morning program this week, she was pressed repeatedly on the issue. “I’m not running for president,” Warren reiterated, cutting her interviewer off with a warning that “you can ask it lots of different ways” and still get the same answer.

Warren has a reputation as a straight shooter. But even straight shooters have been known to resist entreaties to seek the presidency, or to accept an invitation to join a national ticket, right up to the point at which they hear the siren call.

Candidates and potential candidates write books for two reasons. At their worst, they seek merely to advance their own ambitions. At their best, they seek to frame the debate—not necessarily with a precise platform; often with an ably developed premise, as was the case with the two best-selling books that a young Barack Obama wrote before launching a presidential bid that in its early stages was grounded at least in part on a stack of favorable reviews.

But reviews, and even sales, do not necessarily translate into votes. The finest “idea” book written by a political figure who was angling for a presidential run, Wendell Willkie’s 1943 text One World, got him precisely nowhere in his 1944 run for the Republican nod. Folks showed up at Willkie events seeking autographs on their copies of the enormously popular book and then voted for Tom Dewey or Franklin Roosevelt.

It was different with John Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, the Pulitzer Prize–winning 1957 book that positioned a very young Massachusetts senator as both an intellectual and as something of a bipartisan prospect for the presidency. And his impressive collection of foreign policy observations, 1960’s Strategy for Peace, helped Americans to imagine how the Democratic nominee would chart a course through Cold War politics. The first book was critical to getting Kennedy into the 1960 race as a serious contender, the second provided him with foreign-policy credibility for a contest with Vice President Richard Nixon.

Warren’s text is a relatively standard political book, as least in comparison with those by Willkie, Kennedy and Obama. But it strikes the right ideological tone for a moment in which Warren’s long-term issues—income inequality, middle-class misery, Wall Street excess and accountability—have finally gotten notice from a traditionally neglectful media, and from a Democratic Party that is in need of a new playbook.

It is with all of these understandings that the professor-turned-senator’s tenth book enters the long list of political tomes that will be read not only for their ideological insights but for hints about practical politics.

Let’s begin by stipulating that, apart from any political calculus, Warren has written a good book. It’s appropriately biographical, relatively frank and quite strong with regard to the pathologies of our politics and our economics. The book is at its best when it explores those pathologies, as when Warren recounts her effort to establish and lead what would become the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Recalling a meeting with Congressman Michael Grimm, R-NY, she writes: “When I launched into an enthusiastic description of what we were trying to get done at the agency, the congressman looked surprised. After a bit, he cut me off so he could make one thing clear: He didn’t believe in government.” Warren wryly observes that Grimm believed in a lot of government—including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, for which he worked before embarking on a political career, and the “government-paid health insurance [he got] when he joined Congress”—“but not other forms of ‘big government’ and certainly not a consumer protection agency.”

Warren’s book is tougher on Republicans than Democrats, despite the fact that Democrats were responsible for many policies and approaches she opposed as a crusading Harvard Law School professor and ally of the late Senator Paul Wellstone. She generally goes easy on the Clintons and is gentle with Barack Obama—though she does do some damage to Larry Summers, whose Diet Coke–drenched seminar on how to be an insider Warren recounts to devastating effect.

The senator seems most comfortable in the realm of ideas and debate, especially when she goes after those who would have the government stand down as a regulator and enforcer of the rules.

“We can’t bury our heads in the sand and pretend that if ‘big government’ disappears, so will society’s toughest problems,” she writes. “That’s just magical thinking—and it’s also dangerous thinking. Our problems are getting bigger by the day and we need to develop some hardheaded, realistic responses. Instead of trying to starve the government or drown it in the bathtub, we need to tackle our problems head-on, and that will require better government.”

With knowing references to right-wing dogma, those lines are being read as a shot at Tea Partisans such as Ted Cruz and sort-of-libertarians like Rand Paul. But Warren goes a good deal deeper, pressing the point that government is needed. It’s a personal message, rooted in her experience as a girl growing up in a working-class Oklahoma family.

The biographical sections of the book are the most poignant, especially as the senator recalls her mother, shaken after Warren’s father suffered a heart attack and afraid about losing the family home, pulling on a best dress and heading out to take a low-wage job. Warren makes the right connections, arguing in conversations about this story that, “we came right to the edge of losing our home. My mother saved our home with a minimum wage job. But in the 1960s, a minimum wage job would support a family of three above the poverty line. Not today. Not even close.”

The reasons why it is “not even close” are highlighted throughout Warren’s book, in which one chapter is titled “Bailing Out the Wrong People.” But the real heart of the matter was summed up in the working title of this book, Rigged—“It refers to how the economic system’s too often rigged against families who work hard and play by the rules—and how it’s loaded in favor of those with money and power,” she told an interviewer last year.

Book titles change for a lot of reasons.

But no one should miss the point of the title change for this book. Warren and her publisher decided that Americans don’t need another bummer book about a broken economy. They need some hope that a rigged system can be fixed so that it doesn’t always favor “those with money and power.”

A knowing optimism is better for book sales.

It is, as well, better for presidential bids.

There is little reason to disbelieve Elizabeth Warren when she says that “right now” she is focused on electing populist Democrats like Iowa’s Bruce Braley and South Dakota’s Tim Weiland to the US Senate, and on keeping that chamber in Democratic hands. But should Democrats find themselves casting about for a populist in 2016—either because a front-runner stands down or because economic justice issues take precedence—there is good reason to believe that they might be drawn to a potential candidate whose book announces, “I’m here to fight for something that I believe is worth absolutely everything: to give each one of our kids a fighting chance to build a future full of promise and discovery.”

'Indigenous People's Day' Will Be the Day We Regain Our Lands

By Marta Molina, Waging Nonviolence

24 April 14

n Brazil, April 19 is “the Day of the Indian,” a commemoration imposed by whites in Brazil to supposedly remember the importance of indigenous cultures for the country. But the indigenous Guaraní people of Brazil have nothing to celebrate.

“That was the day we got used to being deceived,” said members of various Guaraní communities living in and around São Paulo.

“Every April 19, the government promotes celebrations for indigenous people and tries to get people to commemorate something when there really isn’t any reason to celebrate.”

In São Paulo, Guaraní communities are fighting displacement and resisting the theft of their land so that they can continue to live in their way, peacefully, within their culture. Despite being close to the large city, they say, “Many citizens in the metropolis do not know what is happening with us and our lands.”

As a result, this month the communities launched the “Guaraní Resistance” campaign to demand the demarcation of their traditional lands and to demand that the current Minister of Justice, José Eduardo Cardozo, comply with his constitutional obligations and guarantee the return of their lands.

“For us, ‘the Day of the Indian’ will be the day in which Minister Cardozo signs the demarcation for our traditional lands,” one member of the resistance campaign explained.

Nearly 2,000 indigenous Guaraní live in São Paulo, distributed throughout a city where the lack of space and lack of respect for indigenous land rights makes it impossible for them to develop their culture.

Although in the 1980s the government formally recognized three traditional land zones belonging to the Guaraní in São Paulo, the land the communities were offered was never enough for them to support daily life and traditional culture. Two of these three demarcated zones are each one-tenth of a square mile, and one is even smaller.

“We have to keep working for the sake of our culture, even though our land has been extremely reduced, even though we can’t hunt or fish, and there are more than 1,000 of us on 26 hectares of land,” said Jera Poty, an indigenous Guaraní Mbyá who lives in the Tenondé Porã community. (Twenty-six hectares is roughly equivalent to one-tenth of a square mile.)

She explains that the population of Guaraní in her community has been increasing — even as the size of their recognized land has shrunken. “We have seen very high population growth in the last 30 years. From the 20 families that used to be here in Tenondé, there are now 200.”

At the beginning of April, the indigenous communities from Tenondé Porã and Jaraguá in São Paulo began to speak out and pressure Justice Minister Cardozo to recognize the Guaraní’s traditional territories so that they may be returned.

They began collecting signatures through an online petition and they sent a pen as a gift to the minister, decorated with traditional Guaraní designs. Furthermore, for each signature collected, they sent a pen to his offices in Brasilia, Brazil’s capital. As of today, the Ministry has received more than 2,500 pens.

“It has been some time since Minister Cardozo has used his pen to help any indigenous community,” said Poty. “That’s why we sent him this gift, in case his pens aren’t working or they ran out of ink.”

On April 16, representatives from various Guaraní communities peacefully occupied a building in downtown São Paulo called “Pátio do Colégio.” In 1554, it was the first building built by the instruction Portuguese Jesuits in the city of São Paulo. The building’s goal was to convert indigenous people in the area to Christianity. The structure itself was built largely by indigenous and African slave labor.

The peaceful occupation on April 16 was a symbolic occupation to give visibility to the Guaraní’s demands — and the long history of land theft and colonialism in Brazil.

“It is not about revenge or deceit as they did with us,” one participant declared during the action. “They already robbed the space from us a long time ago, and we are not going to ask that they return it, since these lands are no longer the ones that are now in the center of the city.” Today, the indigenous people live on the margins of the city where there is still some of the forest where they once lived.

The following day, Guaraní participants reconvened in front of the Pátio do Colegio to speak about the current struggle for land in the city and to strengthen ties with other social movements in São Paulo. Members of the Passe Livre movement, which fights for free public transport; members of the Copa SP Popular Committee, who speak out against the impacts and human rights violations resulting from the 2014 World Cup; and members of the Movement for Landless Rural Workers and the Justice and Peace Commission of São Paulo were all in attendance.

On April 24, members of Guaraní communities plan to march peacefully through the city’s downtown to demonstrate once more that the Day of the Indian is one of struggle rather than celebration, and that the communities demand the land be returned to them so they can continue their way of life.