Who's Afraid of Elizabeth Warren?

By Samuel P. Jacobs, The Daily Beast

25 October 11

The Harvard professor has spooked the right. As she begins her high-profile Senate campaign against GOP star Scott Brown in Massachusetts, the consumer advocate tells Samuel P. Jacobs how she created 'much of the intellectual foundation' for the Occupy Wall Street movement. She also talks about her past life as a Republican and the challenges of being a woman on the campaign trail - and says she's no 'guileless Marxist.'

lizabeth Warren is running for office in the most high-profile race in the country not involving Barack Obama. It's a position that calls for some tact. So what does she think about the Occupy Wall Street protests that are roiling the country?

"I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do," she says. "I support what they do."

Warren's boast isn't bluster: As a professor of commercial law at Harvard and the force behind Obama's consumer-protection bureau, Warren has been one of the most articulate voices challenging the excesses of Wall Street. Still, she enjoys an outsize celebrity for an academic and bureaucrat: a favorite guest of Jon Stewart, Warren, 62, has become a hero to the left, a villain to the right, and a fascination for everyone in between. Now that she is challenging Massachusetts Republican Sen. Scott Brown, she has emerged this year as a poster child for what some of America loves, and an increasing swath of America hates, about the president.

No one else has Warren's gift to send the right into a sputtering frenzy.

She is, in the words of former Reagan operative Jeffrey Lord, "a guileless, fevered Marxist." George Will put it more primly, but with the same sense of trepidation. Warren, he wrote, "clarifies the liberal project and the stakes of contemporary politics. The project is to dilute the concept of individualism." Warren likely didn't calm those fears by attending a fundraiser hosted by George Soros - the billionaire bogeyman of the right - in Manhattan last week.

Thanks to her service in Washington, overseeing money distributed to woozy banks and creating a consumer financial protection agency, Warren is feared as somebody out to soak the rich and redistribute wealth. But a look at her biography reveals that she's not the hardened leftist some suspect. Here's Warren's challenge: Most first-time candidates for office struggle to create a compelling story about themselves. Warren has a different problem. She has to un-make one.

For all those quaking on the right at the sight of an ascendant Warren, rest easy. Warren's no lefty. In fact, Warren was a registered Republican into her 40s. When it comes to ideology, Warren makes for a rotten heir to Kennedy.

"I was a Republican because I thought that those were the people who best supported markets. I think that is not true anymore," Warren says. "I was a Republican at a time when I felt like there was a problem that the markets were under a lot more strain. It worried me whether or not the government played too activist a role."

Did she vote for Ronald Reagan, who ushered in much of the financial deregulation which Warren has devoted her life to stopping? "I'm not going to talk about who I voted for," she says.

It wasn't until later in life, when Warren was 46, that she had her political awakening. At the time, she was serving on a committee recommending changes to the nation's bankruptcy laws. Until then, Warren says, "I said, ‘No, no, no, not for me on the politics.' "

Warren decided then, in 1995, she could no longer retreat into the ivory tower. "I can't just leave this to people who are going to wreck the lives of millions of American families if they get the chance," she says. "I waded in."

Warren adds that she voted for both Republicans and Democrats and thought that neither party deserved to dominate. "There should be some Republicans and some Democrats," she says. Brown's campaign could make the same point. In a state dominated by Democrats, it might help to have a Republican providing some healthy opposition.

Warren's political sympathies are as much a product of upbringing as anything else. Born on the worn-down side of Norman, Oklahoma, young Betsy Herring grew up in a home that clung to the bottom of the middle class. She had pluck, taking her babysitting earnings to pay for application fees to two colleges where she thought she might have a chance at a debating scholarship. At 19, Herring married NASA engineer Jim Warren, her childhood sweetheart. A decade later, she was a divorced, mother of two, starting out a career as a junior law professor in Houston.

Starting in 1979, Warren embarked on influential, decades-long research of what causes families to go bankrupt. By 1992, Harvard Law School asked her to join the faculty. At that time, only five of 60 tenured professors were women. Three years later, Warren agreed to teach there permanently. The offer was a rich one. In 1996, Warren was the third-highest compensated employee at the university. Warren and her husband now live in a $1.7 million Cambridge home. The candidate who is accused of instigating class warfare seems like she has stepped out of a Horatio Alger story.

Still, you don't need to look at Warren's biography to realize that conservatives' fears are misplaced. Warren's studies have centered on debt, in particular the stress that the modern workplace puts on families. In The Two-Income Trap, her 2003 book, Warren argued that two-income families are less financially secure than families with a single earner. "Her complaints on behalf of the middle class sound positively Nixonian," Christopher Caldwell wrote this summer in the Weekly Standard (where "Nixonian" can be a compliment). Go ahead and find another Democrat, particularly one who makes liberals swoon, being called a "closet conservative" as a compliment.

For a proudly progressive state, Massachusetts has an embarrassing record of voting women into office. Only one of 10 members of the Massachusetts delegation in the House is a woman (and she was married to a U.S. senator). The commonwealth has never elected a woman governor or senator. It sits in the bottom half of states in terms of female representation in the state legislature. And then there was the epic 2010 flameout of Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, who lost Kennedy's Senate seat to Brown.

"The word's out: I'm a woman," Warren says, "and I'm going to have trouble backing off on that. I am what I am. I'll go out and talk to people about what's happening to their families, and when I do that, I'm a mother. I'm a grandmother." Visiting a toy store in Salem, Mass., earlier this month, Warren played up her femininity, gushing about her 11-month-old grandson, Atticus. "The hardest part of being around this kid," she said, "is that he has the most delicious-looking toes."

The collision of politics, gender, and sexuality can be a nasty one for female candidates. Just ask Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin. Warren's brother, David Herring, unprompted, told me, "She is not a lesbian. I think I read that. That was comical." (Warren is married to Harvard Law professor Bruce Mann.) The example of a female authority figure still seems to scramble the male brain.

Warren's looks are causing some men to pay extra attention - including Brown. When quizzed by a student at a candidates' debate in early October about how she paid for college, Warren grinned and said, "I kept my clothes on." Brown's response? "Thank God." Brown famously did take his clothes off to help pay his tuition, posing nude for Cosmopolitan in 1982. "She was joking. I was joking," Brown later said. Not everyone is so disparaging. One man who Warren encountered in Salem asked why she hadn't returned his email messages after an encounter on an airplane. "I was hitting on you," the man clarified.

For fans, Warren's charm offensive has risks too. They don't want her to stop hitting back.

"Maybe she should kick more sand in their eyes," says admirer Eliot Spitzer. "Maybe she should rough them up a little more."

How Did Our Oil Get Under Their Sand?

By Dylan Ratigan, Reader Supported News

24 October 11

t's somewhat rare to hear a Senator tell the truth about American foreign policy, but we did get a glimpse of reality last week when Senator Lindsey Graham lustily talked about the death of Gadhafi. He said, "There's a lot of money to be made in the future in Libya. There's a lot of oil to be produced. Let's get on the ground and help the Libya people establish a democracy and a functioning economy based on free market principles."

Though rare, this is not the first time a high profile American politician has accidentally told the truth about our foreign policy. In March, 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told a Senate appropriations committee that the war with Iraq would be paid for by Iraqi "frozen assets" and "oil revenues." This was not completely crazy - the first Gulf War had largely been financed by foreign countries who saw value in the oil supply lines we were protecting.

At the same time last week, the American solar industry filed a trade complaint against Chinese solar makers, who produce 55% of the world's solar panels. They allege that China is selling its solar panels below cost, which would be consistent with the Chinese industrial policy of preparing for a post-oil world. According to Stephen Leeb's new book "Red Alert," China spends over $350 billion a year on renewable energy infrastructure, locking up critical supplies of zinc, silver, gold, copper, and rare earth minerals. Meanwhile, America spends its money keeping sea lanes open for dwindling oil supplies.

The Chinese are improving their skill at making solar panels, whereas American policymakers are explicitly avoiding building a post-oil energy infrastructure. Chinese elites want to secure oil and coal, of course, but they are also rapidly preparing for the day when these resources cannot be profitably extracted and used. American elites are engaged in a more short-sighted strategy of destroying any possible bridge to a post-oil energy future to protect their status quo profits. Leeb believes that this is a choice that could mark the end, not just of American dominance, but of American civilization.

It isn't that this possible doomsday scenario is hard to grasp; promises of alternative energy and threats of higher oil prices have been around for decades. So why is it still going on? My suspicion is a mixture of greed and inertia.

We have an industrial policy driven by oil, which has been the case for nearly a century. Initially, when oil was cheap and we produced most of it, this made sense Our advantage in oil helped us win World War II. Our national highway system, our network of airports and gas stations, suburban sprawl and the associated property tax base was all funded by fossil fuels. These huge oil fortunes played a major role in organizing our political system. When America could produce more oil than anyone else, or had the military alliances to do so, this worked in our favor.

Starting in the 1970s, oil became a strategic drawback, which is why President Carter tried a logical plan - an infrastructure bank - to get us off oil. Yet, our politics is so entwined with oil that Carter was crushed, and no one has since been able to break our oil obsession.

Oil still drives our industrial policy, and now petro-politics is so routinely dominant that it's almost pointless to even think about politicians not funded by oil. Lindsay Graham, for instance, has received a little less than a million dollars from the energy sector over the course of his career, so his lust over Libya's energy profits isn't surprising. Republicans are the party of oil - both Bush and Cheney were knee deep in the oil industry before entering the White House. On the other side of the aisle, TransCanada, which is seeking to build an enormous oil pipeline to bring in shale oil from Canada that will pump as much carbon into the atmosphere as all the oil in Saudi Arabia, just bragged about 22 Democrats who signed a letter asking for approval of the pipeline. Both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama will likely boost the project. These are just the most recent examples of petro-politics; next month there will be different, equally odious examples.

Many Americans believe that oil is bad for us, and do want to invest in a non-oil infrastructure. Though our industrial policy remains consistent regardless of which party is in power. This doesn't make sense to most voters, because it cuts against the way we think about ourselves as a relatively just democratic society. Our politicians should work for us, but they don't. The traditional model for understanding power in American politics is polling and elections - will Democrats or Republicans win the ability to organize our cultural resources? But this has obvious problems, since we've seen through multiple administrations congruity in policy-making.

A better way to think about power is to follow the money, because money is how our society allocates resources. The money is in fossil fuels and finance, which opens the door to Congressional offices and sells political power to the highest bidders. The Koch Brothers recently held a retreat in Vail, where they thanked those who had given more than a million dollars to their political causes - the so-called "million dollar" club. Mother Jones magazine was able to get a list of those people. Eight finance tycoons and seven fossil fuel (coal, oil, natural gas) magnates were the majority of the twenty eight families listed (the others were in retail and housing). The Koch Brothers themselves make enormous sums from oil, chemical products, and finance.

While we have the illusion of choice in our politics, the only real consistency in policy-making is Washington's commitment to war and oil, and increasingly often, war for oil. Libya was the oil dealer to Western Europe, but the market for oil is global. And oil is the prize, not democracy. This is why John McCain praised Gadhafi in 2009 for his peacemaking efforts, and applauded his death last week. It's also why our military is increasingly extended across the world in oil-rich regions.

Our oil-drenched, defense-heavy industrial policy is increasingly creaky, but it is protected by the money that flows into the political system to wall off politicians from voters. We know that we must restructure our energy system, but it's not as simple as plugging in a new green battery to replace coal plants and gas stations. Just as we must restructure a financial system to ensure investment and value-creation, we must also restructure our industrial policy to get off oil, and our politics to get off oil money. This will require a new way that citizens relate to each other, more local production of goods and services, stronger community ties, and a politics that isn't dominated by big money, but instead by public spaces and deliberation. If you look at the Occupy Wall Street protesters in Zuccatti Square and the others across the world, they may not articulate this, but this is what they are asking for.

Without a reformation for new politics, and a different way of relating to one another, we will continue with the status quo. And we will have to keep finding countries and asking the question of how our oil got under their sand.