Senator Elizabeth Warren takes exception to Capitol Hill testimony in February. / Photograph by Ron Sachs/CNP/MediaPunch/IPX

“I am a capitalist to my bones” - Sen. Elizabeth Warren

One of the greatest cons on Capital Hill is Elizabeth Warren, which is certainly something in that notorious hive of scum and villainy.

News item after news item consistently and constantly place this alleged progressive champion in the same sentence as Bernie Sanders. We are told Wall Street is afraid of Sanders and Warren! We are told the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is led by Sanders and Warren! We are told a lot by our propagandizing corporate media.

But that’s not exactly what Robert Wolf said after their rendezvous this summer. “I think Senator Warren’s views are more pragmatic; I think she is very different in a conversation than when she’s on the stump,” he told the New York Times. (source)

That’s Robert “Wolf of Wall Street” Wolf, bankster patron of popular neoliberals Obama and Hillary, who held a fundraiser for Warren in 2017. By his admission it sure sounds like Warren has taken to Hillary Clinton’s infamous public and private stances, doesn’t it?

Warren didn’t just beseech Wolf for his blessing, she also had an audience with Obama’s favorite fat cat Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase.

Warren met privately with Dimon in Washington, D.C., early this summer and attended a Democratic fundraiser held at the summer home of a former UBS executive in July, according to The New York Times. While the purpose of Warren’s meeting with Dimon remains unclear, her recent engagement with Wall Street represents a surprising departure from the oppositional stance she has long maintained toward financial executives generally, and Dimon specifically. (source)

Wait, what’s Warren doing palling around with financial terrorists in 2017?

By Wolf’s account, it sure sounds like Warren is courting potential donors to back her bid for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2020, a group that will almost inevitably include powerful actors in the financial sector. (source)

Politics these days is all about the Benjamins, so lets talk money. It is, hands down, they best way to know where a politician’s loyalties lie.

Let’s go back to 2014, when Hillary was telling people her political machine would shank them if they dared to derail her coronation. If you remember, the progressive left was pushing for Warren to run for president since they correctly understood that 2016 was an anti-establishment election.

“If Elizabeth called me up and said, ‘I am thinking of running for president,’ I would say, ‘Elizabeth, are you out of your goddamn mind?’” said one New York-based donor who has hosted Warren in his living room. “I really like Elizabeth, but if Hillary is in the race it just makes no sense.”



This conversation was echoed again and again in more than a dozen interviews with big-ticket Democratic donors in Warren’s hometown of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in cities that operate as ATMs for the Democratic money machine, like New York, Washington, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Over and over again, the message was the same: Stay in the Senate, Liz, stay in the Senate. (source)

So Warren played it safe by staying on the Clinton machine’s good side and refused to endorse Sanders (itself a big red flag that she truly does not share Sanders’ values). What that move did was preserve a nice rolodex full of names that she can call for cash-for-favors. And what a haul she took in…

In 2017:

Although she will not appear on the ballot until 2018, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has already collected more than 8 million for her re-election bid since January — bringing her campaign balance to just over $11 million, officials reported Friday. (source)

In 2018:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is sitting on a mountain of campaign cash for 2020, Politico reports, which is larger than any other senatorial war chest at this distance from Election Day. Warren presently has $12.8 million banked, a near-record for a senator at this point in the campaign. (source)

Since Warren has announced she is running for the Democratic nomination, she’s sworn off swank dinner parties and PAC money. But that’s only for show, because if she obtains the nomination it’s right back to the usual quid-pro-quo practices of Washington using the tired neoliberal excuse that corruption is essential to “democracy.”

She clarified to Uygur that her proposal to reject big money is, “…for primaries. Look, I do not believe in unilateral disarmament. We need to win. We need to win in 2020. When we hit 2020 and we’re in a race against Donald Trump…we play by the same rules and in that one I say, we got to be all in because we have to beat the Republicans.” (source)

Yeah we heard that shit a lot in 2016…

I’m not too clear on election rules, but it looks to me like she front-loaded her campaign with big money, will use that to run for the nomination and then if nominated will resume taking money from her big donors, including the ones inherited from Hillary. What a con.

Saving Capitalism From Progress

Bernie Sanders is a New Deal Democrat. FDR is widely credited for saving capitalism from itself. By softening the hard craven edges of profit at any cost, people enjoyed a more widely shared prosperity. Yet, when the New Deal passed, Wall Street and the corporate classes freaked the fuck out and founded think tanks, societies and organizations to weaken and destroy it. In their eyes the Gilded Age of the 1800s should be the world’s default position. It took several decades, but they have all but succeeded in shaping their perfect dystopia.

Unsurprisingly, the population of this new world order is discovering they have no place at all in it. Which has led to Brexit, Trump, Guillet Jaunes, and other uprisings against elite class that cares only for itself.

So what is the Big Con that Warren is playing? Simply this: Warren is carving out a mushy incrementalist stance in the wide gulf that exists between Democratic Socialism and Neoliberalism and branding that as an acceptable level of progress for public consumption.

“Bernie has to speak to what Democratic Socialism is,” replied Warren, who represents Massachusetts in the Senate. “And you are not one?” Giridharadas asked. “I am not. And the centrists have to speak to whatever they are doing. What I can speak is to is how I am doing,” Warren said. She continued: “All I can tell you is what I believe. And that is there is an enormous amount to be gained from markets. That markets create opportunities.” (source)

Warren is not a New Deal Democrat. Her policies so far are tinkering with the existing system: an “Ultra-Millionaire Tax,” Accountable Capitalism Act, Child Care, breaking up Big Tech (I’m sure the CIA and NSA will have some huge objections to that) and even a vague assent to an undefined reparations for African Americans. None of this is systemically transformative.

In the six years since she won her Senate seat, Warren has established herself as a credible, progressive Democrat. But her background hints at the difference between her more wonkish approach — seeking to construct better policy but not an alternative politics — and the class-struggle, worker-centric approach of Sanders. Not surprisingly, Warren has been keen to assure business interests that she believes that “strong, healthy markets are the key to a strong healthy America” and that she “is a capitalist”. (source)

Alongside tracking who buys whom in politics to see the real picture, it’s also worth noting who boosts those politicians.

Warren does have significant support among the Netroots Nation crowd, but it’s telling that she also appears to be getting traction among prominent Democratic party policy types: Anita Dunn, Brian Fallon, John Podesta, Neera Tanden and Matt Yglesias, among others, have had positive things to say about her in the media lately. Sanders — an outsider without ties to many prominent in the liberal politics during the Obama years — gets no such love. (source)

That’s a lot of neoliberal love for a supposed progressive, and a lot of Team Hillary members. So what does the center-right establishment love about Warren’s policies. Maybe because it’s the same shtick they've been trying to sell for decades. It’s currently called “Inclusive Capitalism” — and like Compassionate Conservatism, the Clear Skies Act and the Patriot Act it’s a total pile of bunk designed to mask a more sinister agenda.

As a not-for-profit organization, the Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism engages leaders across business, government, and civil society in their efforts to make capitalism more dynamic, sustainable, and inclusive. (source)

And there is why the Clintons and their parasitic cadre are on board. Inclusive Capitalism is the brain worm of Hillary BFF Lady Lynne de Rothschild, one of the more public of a generally reclusive oligarch family. There isn’t anything specifically noteworthy of inclusive capitalism, it’s just one in a long line of re-branding of the same pro-corporate policies that have decimated the lower and middle classes.

Yglesias, in particular, has showed interest in Warren’s Accountable Capitalism Act, a plan that, to her credit, is far more ambitious than that of her other Democratic colleagues. It would require the largest businesses to engage in “codetermination” with their employees, giving workers more say in management, and limit corporate political activity and what executives could do with their company shares. But it relies on notions of “corporate citizenship”, and it’s clear in her Wall Street Journal op-ed promoting the act that Warren sees neoliberalism as an ideological shift that can be corrected while retaining many of the existing parameters of capitalism. For Warren, US capitalism used to be good: “Corporations sought to succeed in the marketplace, but they also recognized their obligations to employees, customers and the community.” But then something changed in the 1980s: “Building on work by conservative economist Milton Friedman, a new theory emerged that corporate directors had only one obligation: to maximize shareholder returns.” (source)

Warren may be on a mission to save capitalism from eating itself, but it is a hollow effort without systemic and truly inter-sectional reforms. She’s attempting to put in place policies that neoliberalism is designed to smash and feed on.

There is a case to be made that Warren is simply running to siphon votes from Bernie from people on the left who still believe they hype she is a progressive. There is a case to be made that she is sheepdogging for whatever Clinton clone the DNC will rig the primary for.

Whatever her endgame is, Elizabeth Warren has been signaling for a long time she is not with us.