Where is the flaw in what Elizabeth Warren is saying?

I can’t listen right now cause I am at the ref desk, but if you agree with her, maybe you should phrase the question as, “Is there a flaw in what Elizabeth Warren is saying?”

In my opinion, there isn’t much being said in this small clip. However, I don’t see anything wrong with what she did say, except maybe the fact that she’s speaking as a candidate rather than senator elect.

The flaw is that Washington ought to be doing favors for somebody.
Her position is that Washington is simply doing favors for the wrong group.
She believes Washington should be doing favors for the people in her audience instead of some of the folks that currently receive perks.
Thus Washington remains as corrupt as ever, but a different constituency gets to enjoy a temporary upside to the corruption.
Washington should not be doing favors for it’s current special group of favorite best friends and making sure the people on the current shit list pay for the favors.
Washington should be an administrative center for the federal legal system, the means of national defense, and the general public interest in the most abstract fashion that public interest can be interpreted. Everything else is just a form of whoring for votes from people who want personal shelter from the law, and/ or personal access to the treasury.

@janbb Too late to edit. It’ll have to stand as is.

@tom_g Agreed.

@saint We tried pure free-market capitalism and it was a disaster. Government rightly provides for the general welfare of ALL the people. That’s the job the Founding Fathers charged it with in the Constitution. That requires that government act in the interest of all the people. What’s happening now is government acts in the interest of corporations, billionaires and organizations with enough lobbying clout to buy government favor. We have government of the people by the corporations and for the corporations. I do not at all agree that ending that inequity and restoring true democracy instead of corporatocracy is unfairly picking winners.

@ETpro isn’t that what I said?

Personally, I like Elizabeth Warren & I hope that she succeeds in her election bid. I have listened to this piece & several other speeches she has made & to me she makes sense. No politician is ever going to be “perfect” but her attitude & the programs she supports, make a great deal more sense than do the Tea Party Republicans who seem bound & determined to eliminate ALL of America’s social programs & to eliminate women’s rights over our own bodies. Another up & coming Democrat that also sounds good is Alan Grayson.

I love her; I think she makes terrific sense. I wish there were two or three dozen or her in Congress right now.

@saint It doesn’t seem like your post means the same thing as @ETpro‘s reply. You seem to want the government to do less, while I think @ETpro would like the government to stop serving corporations and get to serving regular folk. So perhaps there is agreement that government should stop doing favors for corporations. But I get the impression that @ETpro
would like the government “to work” for the people as Ms. Warren repeatedly inidicates.

Favors does not mean “works for” it implies a frivolous or not-useful or undesirable use of government resources. Your use of the word “favors” seems to indicate that you don’t want government serving anyone beyond the bare essentials.

Personally I agree with Ms. Warren and (I think) @ETpro that the government should serve regular citizens as much as is useful. Corporations aren’t going to do it. And there are a lot of areas where citizens cannot do things they need as individuals (education system, water supply).

@saint No I think we are on different pages unless I am grossly misunderstanding what you meant in your response. You said, “The flaw is that Washington ought to be doing favors for somebody.” I say that Washington’s job is to server everybody. And that is what Ms. Warren was saying as well.

This isn’t just theoretical, either. Washington and all government served only the robber barons and the trusts during the Gilded Age and the Roaring 20s. We got vast income and wealth inequality, and had virtually no middle class. The fabulously wealthy brazenly bough off public officials to do their bidding. Eventually, the lack of a consumer base led to the Great Depression.

At the depth of the Depression in 1933, FDR took office and changed policies. For nearly 50 years, we had government that served all, both businesses and individuals. All economic groups from the poorest to the very wealthy gained under that set of policies, and gained in equal proportion. We went from having virtually no middle class to having the world’s largest and most prosperous middle class. Our GDP grew at its fastest rate ever in that period. Corporations and the rich did just fine. We created plenty of new millionaires and an all-time record number of jobs.

Things began to fall apart in 1980 with the Conservative Revolution. We dismantled barriers to unfair trade and changed our tax policies to make the tax code far more regressive than it had been. We saw money begin to corrupt both Republican and Democratic politics. I have to admit that too many of the changes that hurt us in trade policy were pushed by Corporate Democrats right alongside their Corporate Republican brothers. Right now, I am more concerned about recognizing the damage these changes brought, and fixing them, rather than fixing blame. Our middle class peaked in size in 1980, when 65% of Americans were solidly members of it. In the next three decades, that number shrank till it’s now just 46%. Jobs flew offshore, and Corporations reaped tax benefits for off-shoring them. The GDP doubled, but worker pay stayed almost flat while management and financial sector pay went through the roof. In 2006, we hit income inequality that actually outstripped that before the Great Depression, and then predictably in 2007, the Great Recession hit.

What Elizabeth Warren is saying is let’s go back to what worked for all of us, rich and poor, small businesses and huge corporations alike. And I totally agree with her on that.

@Linda_Owl I like both of them too.

@janbb I’m glad you were able to listen to the video.

@dabbler Thanks.

@ETpro On the contrary, I’d say that’s an example of the market regulating itself. It has been demonstrated now that by behaving foolishly we lob a spanner into the economy, that there are limits to what you can do safely. It’s like a bike. You can do a lot with a bike, but if your center of gravity isn’t countered by sufficient momentum, you fall over. The trick is keeping that lesson in peoples’ minds.

@Nullo We are fast on our way to becoing a banana republic and you celebrate that. Making the economy work for all it “lobbing a spanner into it, and turning America into a thrid world nation is the greatedt good.” What sore of thinking concludes that/

@ETpro The kind that shovels words into other people’s mouths. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.

@ETpro I don’t really think it does, but if it does, it beats shoveling words off the topic because it’s one you don’t wish to deal with.

@Nullo “On the contrary, I’d say that’s an example of the market regulating itself. It has been demonstrated now that by behaving foolishly we lob a spanner into the economy, that there are limits to what you can do safely.”

Market regulating itself? No markets have ever shown themselves to be self regulating to the benefit of the general economy. Markets do “self”-regulate well within the bounds of well-designed boundaries.
Prior to the regulations put in place in the 1930’s the US economy repeatedly, seriously, crashed itself while individual players extracted what they could. “The market”, as if that were some sentient phenomenon, sat there and got fleeced over and over again.

“Behaving foolishly we lob a spanner” Well you got that right. The stability we enjoyed from the 1930’s into the 1980’s was clearly attributable to boundaries placed on the financial industry in particular. Getting rid of those constraints (e.g. Glass-Steagall), and failing to establish oversight on new financial instruments and practices (derivatives, high-frequency trading just for starters), are clear examples of behaving foolishly that persist today, and yes each has lobbed another spanner into an economy that used to work for most of us, turning it into an economy that works just for the folks with big spanners, and is desperate for everyone else.

@dabbler That’s exactly right. Bring back Glass-Steagall.