With the release of her long-anticipated memoir, "A Fighting Chance," Senator Elizabeth Warren's detractors are once again raising the issue of her Native American heritage, which was used against her in the 2012 senate race with Republican Scott Brown. But Thursday night did not belong to Warren's detractors. Warren took the stage to tremendous applause from her progressive-liberal base, as she used the book launch as a platform to address what has become her issue de jour: rising income inequality in the United States.
"The game is rigged," she said to an audience of 350, and she talked about a time in America when her parents struggled to put food on the table, and put their kids through school but could also could rely on various government programs to help out.
Calling out wealthy Republicans and their corporate lobbyists, Warren reinforced one of her most famous campaign assertions: "The rich and the powerful have lobbyists, and lawyers, and plenty of friends in Congress. The rest of the folks? Not so much." She explained that her book is a more personal way of joining the conversation "we can whine about this," she says, "we can whimper about this, or we can fight back."
It’s clear Warren’s book, which dwells on her own family as a portrait of the American working class, is aimed at the banks and financial institutions that, she feels, stole so much from the American people. According to Warren, the banks “cheated American families, they crashed the economy, they got bailed out" and now they are somehow "bigger than they were back in 2008." Her frustration is clear as she discusses the way these institutions figure into her job on the Hill. "They still swagger through Washington, blocking reforms and pushing around agencies." To put in in perspective she notes that "a kid gets caught with a few ounces of pot, and goes to jail, but a big bank breaks the law on laundering drug money or manipulating currency, and no one even gets arrested."
Elizabeth Warren's is perhaps best known for leading the fight in Washington to create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau– established to protect Americans from predatory bank policies and practices. In her mind, one of her greatest achievements, the Bureau "has already returned more than $33 billion directly into the pockets of people who got cheated by big financial institutions." This notion gives her hope that "we can make something work in Washington! We can do it."
Despite her history and involvement in national income equality and banking reform, Senator Warren's book is not only about economics. “I wrote this book out of gratitude, “ she says, “gratitude to my mother, and my Daddy who worked so hard all their lives and ended up with so little, except that they knew that their kids were gonna do better than they did.”
Over the course of the hour long launch, Senator Warren also defended social security, lauded another bestselling book – Thomas Piketty's Capital In The Twenty-First Century , and ruled out, for the umpteenth time, any possibility that she will run for President in 2016.
Find more on the book launch here .
Watch Warren's speech - skip to 26:30:
