Frank Marshall - Quotable Elizabeth Warren

Copyright 2014 by Skyhorse Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or .

Skyhorse and Skyhorse Publishing are registered trademarks of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc., a Delaware corporation.

Visit our website at www.skyhorsepublishing.com.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Quotable Elizabeth Warren / edited by Frank Marshall.

pages cm

Summary: US Senator Elizabeth Warren has long been an original thinker and a powerful voice for the common man. She has been a strong advocate for consumer protection; her work has led to the creation of the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Discover in her own words the woman who has been called a New Sheriff of Wall Street by TIME magazine, and the plainspoken voice of people getting crushed by so many predatory lenders and under regulated banks by the Boston Globe Provided by publisher.

ISBN 978-1-62914-418-4 (paperback)

1. Warren, ElizabethPolitical and social views. 2. Women legislatorsUnited StatesQuotations. 3. LegislatorsUnited StatesQuotations. I. Marshall, Frank.

E901.1.W37Q67 2014

081dc23

2014024864

Cover design by Liz Driesbach

Cover photo credit: US Treasury Department

Print ISBN: 978-1-62914-418-4

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63220-100-3

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

I NTRODUCTION

Elizabeth Warren, best known for her roles in politics and academia, is a Democratic US senator from Massachusetts. Prior to her entrance into the political arena, she was a Professor of Law at Harvard University, specializing in bankruptcy and commercial law. Warren has written numerous books and given countless lectures about the current economic climate and what it means for American middleclass families. In her books and lectures, Warren highlights her working class roots and stresses her reluctance to enter the political arena. In A Fighting Chance , she writes, I guess I really cant say that [I am a teacher] anymore. Now Id have to introduce myself as a United States senator, though I feel a small jolt of surprise whenever I say that. While it is impossible to know how much of Warrens sentiment is hyperbole, she presents herself as a politician out of necessity, passion, and a genuine concern for the American people, not a chosen career path.

The following collection of quotes offers a wide spectrum of the positions Elizabeth Warren has taken during her short tenure as a politician. While she is often criticized and condemned for being too liberal or unwavering on her positions, this compilation shows that her wide-ranging ideas actually coalesce into a consistent argument in support of the American middleclass. Surprisingly, Warren supported the Republican Party many years before her political career began, believing that it supported financial growth and independence better than the Democratic alternatives. However, as her interest and knowledge grew in finance, law, and politics, Warrens politics shifted as she came to better understand the reasons behind the exponential financial increase in disparity between rich and poor Americans.

Warrens words shed a clear light on Americas past and present, and her ideas for the future offer hope that it is not too late for America to save itself from corporations, corrupt government, and the countless pitfalls that plague this nation.

F RANK M ARSHALL

O N G OVERNMENT T RANSPARENCY

There are a lot of regulatory successes, and a lot of people are alive today because of those regulations. But there are still too many places where the world remains complicated and opaque. There are still too many places where armies of lobbyists are fighting to rig the system so that the public remains in the dark.

Consumer Federation of America, March 2013

Putting down rules here and there can be like putting down fence posts on the prairie: They can be too easy to run around. And when the lawyers show everyone how to jog around the fence posts, the regulator responds with more rules. Pretty soon, there are so many rules that it is hard to move.

Testimony before the House Financial Services Committee, March 2011

The boogey man government is like the boogey man under the bed. It is not real. It doesnt exist. What is real and what does exist are all the specific important things we as Americans have chosen to do together through our government.

Remarks on the Senate Floor, October 2013

If there is a lesson from the past five years, its this: We all lose when consumers cannot readily determine whether they can afford to pay back their loans, and when lenders sell credit in ways that make it hard to see the risks and costsin other words, when the system is in some ways fundamentally broken.

Testimony before the House Financial Services Committee, March 2011

Government agencies work for us, not for the companies they regulate. That means agencies should not be able to cut bad deals and then hide the embarrassing details. The public deserves to know whats going on.

Blog post, January 2014

When risk and cost arent disclosed, and when market data and information are not made publicly available, its bad for families, its bad for markets, and its bad for our country.

Consumer Federation of America, March 2013

Markets work. Capitalism works with a set of rules. We can make the system work with regulation. Im not somebody who believes its time to throw the whole thing out. But regulation has got to support it. And the way it supports it, is it increases transparency in this system, it increases honesty in the system. It increases accountability in the system. When you get those things theres plenty of room to make profits. Theres plenty of room to be rich, Im all for that. But its got to be profits that were made honestly.

NWO Economics Series, April 2010

By the time the financial crisis hit, a different form of pricing had emerged. Lenders began to use a low advertised price on the front end to entice customers, and then made their real money with fees and charges and penalties and re-pricing in the fine print. Buyers became less and less able to evaluate the risks of a financial product, comparison shopping became almost impossible, and the market became less efficient.

Americans for Financial Reform and the Roosevelt Institute speech, November 2013

I have heard the argument that transparency would undermine the Trade Representatives policy to complete the trade agreement because public opposition would be significant.

In other words, if people knew what was going on, they would stop it. This argument is exactly backwards. If transparency would lead to widespread public opposition to a trade agreement, then that trade agreement should not be the policy of the United States.