Progressives, Trust Your Gut: Elizabeth Warren Is Not One Of Us

An excellent and deeply important article. We need to be informed and know what we are supporting. I also feel sad about these facts illuminated here and wish it weren’t true. But it is.

I also need to acknowledge that many years ago when I first heard Elizabeth Warren interviewed by Bill Moyers, I was so impressed and drawn to her. Then, in recent years and as I learned more, my heart fell. And when she endorsed Clinton over Sanders four years ago, it felt like a stab to my heart.

I’m aware today that I cannot trust Warren, something I continue to feel very sad about. I yearn for the day when a woman will run for the presidency who has the integrity, courage, vision, authenticity, and commitment to truth, justice, and the highest good that Bernie Sanders embodies. I truly do.

Until then, the imperative is that we embrace a profound commitment to true, inform ourselves and follow the money, and — again and again and again — place principles over personalities. Everything we love and cherish is at stake. — Molly
 

 Warren loves to antagonize the super-rich – but her campaign seems suspiciously designed to stave off revolution

  

By Nathan Robinson

From the beginning, there were good reasons for progressive leftists not to trust that Elizabeth Warren was on their side. For one thing, she had spent much of her career as a Republican, and only recently become a champion of progressive causes. Warren worked at Harvard Law School training generations of elite corporate lawyers; did legal work for big corporations accused of wrongdoing; collected donations from billionaires; held secret meetings with investment bankers and major Democratic party donors; and stood up and applauded when Donald Trump vowed that America would “never become a socialist country”. Even at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, her most prominent initiative on behalf of ordinary borrowers, Warren brought in former Wall Street bankers, tasking financial foxes with guarding the henhouse.

Yet Warren’s campaign debuted with a populist note. She chose to make her kick-off speech in Lawrence, Massachusetts, site of the famous 1912 Bread and Roses textile industry strike, and she explicitly invoked the spirit of organized labor in her campaign announcement. Warren unveiled a series of ambitious social policy plans designed to please leftists, and some of us praised her promises to levy new taxes on wealth, expand childcare and give workers new power within their companies. In debates, the more centrist candidates accused both Warren and Sanders of being too radical. Warren memorably snapped back at those who ran for president to tell the country that change was impossible.

It’s been difficult for progressives to know what to make of Warren. She’s been antagonizing the super-rich, but some of them also seem fond of her, perhaps because they recognize that her regulatory proposals are actually a modest and pragmatic way of staving off a populist revolution. She has long been attacked for supporting Medicare for All, but she has also been troublingly vague about the details in ways that left single-payer proponents unsure whether she was with them or against them. (Harry Reid, having been Warren’s colleague in the Senate, said she would probably ditch single-payer when she was actually in office, in favor of something more “pragmatic”.)

But lately, Warren has finally begun to make her true feelings clear, and progressives no longer need to wonder whether she’s with us or not. She’s not. Warren released a Medicare for All plan that called it a “long-term” plan, which leftwing political analyst Ben Studebaker pointed out is “code to rich people for ‘this is all pretend’”.

A few weeks later, Warren confirmed that while in theory she supported single-payer healthcare, it would not be one of her primary initiatives, and she would initially push for a more moderate proposal similar to those advocated by Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg. Political analysts quickly saw Warren’s statement for what it was: an admission that she did not really intend to pass single-payer at all. Doug Henwood noted that Barclays bank put out an analysis assuring Wall Street that Warren’s plan to put off Medicare for All until late in the first term “decreases the likelihood that this plan comes to fruition”. So much for big structural change.

Please continue this article here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/24/elizabeth-warren-not-progressive?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other&fbclid=IwAR1eTI1X2YPqPL7Qxl0iDJ0h9AKP_769Z7T_OIItE-_g_TMqGhRq79xIUCg