Enlivened by a principled, charismatic one term Senator, in 2008 America elected a one-term Senator to inaugurate a bold, new era of progressive government to remedy eight years of Republican cronyism, corporate favoritism, and “endless” warmongering against an emotional state.
What we got, of course, wasn’t quite what many of us expected. Instead of staking out progressive territory and then finding middle ground with an increasingly intransigent and arguably racist right wing, President Obama went to the middle as a starting position and then was forced further right for even modest legislative and policy goals.
In short, with a compromiser-in-cheif we got a deadlocked government.
So, I firmly believe that in 2016 we need to elect another one term senator. One who has already proven herself to be as much the anti-Obama as Obama was the anti-Bush.
Senator Warren (hot damn, that feels good to say) has, not just supporters, but fans. That base of support for her ceaseless championing of the American consumer has earned her a place on the Senate Banking Committee, where she has asked the questions nobody else dared to during the financial crisis. For her, the enormous crime committed against the American people by our economic and political leaders is not just a piece of unfortunate history. She recognizes that the actors and set-pieces for this tragedy are still around, and we can still rewrite the script before there’s a repeat performance.
Now, she has sponsored legislation to take President Obama’s move to cut out the middlemen for college loans one further. She has proposed extending the lowest interest rates–the kinds the Fed gives to, you know, banks–to students.
The logic of Warren’s plan is astonishing only in that we, as a society, have been so conditioned to the capitalist status quo that we hadn’t all thought of it before. If economic activity is important enough to our society that we must foster it by offering lean interest rates to the banks, then the same must be true about education for our future leaders–surely that is as important as short term economic stimulus?
Elizabeth Warren cuts through the smoke of our current breed of capitalism. She calls it like it is and, more importantly, points to real action that would improve our system. When I first explained to my son why I once voted for the Green Party and their 2000 candidate Ralph Nader’s lifetime of work advocating consumer rights and calling for fairness and transparency in the government and economy, he said right away, “Well, that sounds like somebody we would actually want to be president.”
Yes, son, that’s right.
We do want somebody like that to be president.
www.helmling.com 