Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s decided to transition from defending her stance on the Weiss nomination as undersecretary for domestic finance at the Treasury Department to criticizing those who have built and maintained the revolving door to Wall Street — Democrats included. “Time after time in government,” Warren said, “the Wall Street view prevails.” After blaming this epistemic closure on the way Wall Street and fellow-traveling Democrats make it so Wall Street’s critics are “crowded out,” Warren then tied the dynamic to recent Dem-supported policies that, she believes, benefited the 1 percent at the expense of everyone else. As recent experience has shown, it doesn’t matter how liberal a president is if the rest of his party is still in big money’s pocket. In broad strokes, the division is between neoliberals, who want minimal regulations on Wall Street, and populists, who believe Wall Street has become a threat to the middle class. Warren is, by far, the most recognizable member of the latter group, while the neoliberals, lacking a star of their own, have had to settle for Andrew Ross Sorkin, the wunderkind Wall Street reporter who’s repeatedly criticized Warren in the New York Times. Recently, these two sides have been battling over whether President Obama, who is a member of the neoliberal contingent, should withdraw his nomination of Antonio Weiss to be the next undersecretary for domestic finance at the Treasury Department (which is the bureaucracy’s third-most-powerful slot). “We’d all scratch our heads if the president nominated a theoretical physicist to be surgeon general just because she had a background in science,” Warren said to the conference audience. “It’s no less puzzling to nominate an international mergers specialist to handle largely domestic issues at Treasury because he has a background in finance.”
Posted on: Fri, 12 Dec 2014 14:53:08 +0000
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