Elizabeth Warren, Pope Francis and Adam Smith

July 7, 2014

By Joe Rothstein
Editor, EINNews.com

I haven’t shared my opinions with you in this space for a couple of weeks now. It’s summer, you know. At the beach, with extended family, the problems of the world tend to narrow down to choices between hamburgers or hot dogs, whether to walk to town or stay half-comatose under the umbrella, whether to play Monopoly or Life.

Life, of course, goes on. But for me, for a while, the common elements have given way to the personal. I’ve been tuned in to grandkids and others I spend too little time with during most days of the year. They are my “news,” and a welcome relief from so much of the mindless jabbering that passes for it.

I did manage a look at the front page of the Washington Post the other day. Big mistake. A major interference with tranquility.

The Post’s main headline, top of the front page, right hand corner, led with a manufactured article that divined some type of “pivot” by President Obama from a focus on inequality to one of middle class issues. Here’s an excerpt:

“During the first half of this year, Obama shifted from income inequality to the more politically palatable theme of lifting the middle class, focusing on issues such as the minimum wage and the gender pay gap that are thought to resonate with a broader group of voters. The pivot is striking for a president who identified inequality as one of his top concerns after his reelection, calling it “a fundamental threat to the American Dream, our way of life and what we stand for around the globe.”

No one on the Washington Post editorial desk seems to have connected with the reality that the minimum wage and the gender pay gap are inequality issues. Highlighting their importance can hardly be considered a “pivot” for a President who has supported them throughout his tenure.

And true to form the article’s focus was not the issues themselves, but rather on how these issues affect political campaigns. The article’s by-line author, Zachary Goldfarb, covers the White House for the Post. And from the perspective of the White House press corps, it’s all politics, all the time.

I’m particularly sensitive to this point because I’ve been reading Elizabeth Warren’s latest book, “A Fighting Chance.” (Okay, so that’s not what a person reads when the point of vacation, among other things, is to take time off from politics).

In Zachary Goldfarb’s Washington Post article, Senator Warren is referred to as follows: “Many liberal Democrats, represented most prominently by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), have been pushing an increasingly populist economic agenda.”

Warren is most prominently known for her adversarial position on the nation’s biggest banks and greedy Wall Streeters in general. Her views on reining in the excesses of extreme wealth align closely with the patron saint of capitalism, Adam Smith and Pope Francis. Her views also are shared by the vast majority of Americans as expressed in public opinion surveys. Yet, in current political-speak, Warren is not just a “liberal,” but she’s the marker that defines the far left of the Democratic Party.

It’s instructive that Eric Cantor just lost his Republican Party primary to an opponent who shares the same political turf on these matters as Elizabeth Warren. He’s considered a tea-party right winger. She’s considered an extreme liberal. So much of for the media’s system of political indexing.

Warren actually is a fairy conventional lifelong academic who has spent decades researching and teaching the arcane subject of bankruptcy law. What really separates Warren from most elected politicians is not just her views but her background and experience.

For decades in academia, Warren did deep diving where few had been before. She and her research partners interviewed thousands of people who had filed for bankruptcy to try to understand its causes.

It turns out that if you look at the research, not the politics, the main reasons for bankruptcy are medical bills, job losses, and family traumas such as divorce. Warren’s research identified most of the losers in life’s lottery not as personal deadbeats but unlucky middle income families who fell onto hard times by drawing the wrong health card, or working for the wrong company or marrying the wrong person.

Most of those in her database were hard-working people, many with multiple jobs, trying desperately to stave off the collapse of the economic pillars that propped them up and the Scarlet B that came with a trip to bankruptcy court.

And unlike the stick figure portraits of the bankrupt as irresponsible gorgers on fancy Nikes and credit-bought frills, Warren demonstrated that over the past decades most of those who hit the bankruptcy courts had actually spent less on food, clothing and hot cars than those in the generation that had come earlier.

These are the people most often left to the tender mercies of pay day lenders and credit card collectors. Many of them are victims of outright mortgage fraud and abuse by some of the world's largest banks.

Warren begins her book with the flat-out assertion that the economic game is rigged for those with power and money. She seems threatening to the establishment elite because she knows the game through research and won’t shut up about it. Giving voice to the voiceless when it questions the cozy relationship between big wealth and big government is considered an “extreme” act by those doing well by that system.

If someone were to run for President with Warren’s knowledge, confidence, guts and plain language, he or she would probably be unstoppable. Maybe even Warren herself

I’ll have to think more about that when beach time is over. But right now I’m on a vacation from politics.

(Joe Rothstein can be contacted at joe@einnews.com)