I direct you here. It is a long interview, but well worth your while. The interviewee is Elizabeth Warren, chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel "charged with the job of reviewing the state of the markets, current regulatory system, and the Treasury Department's management of the Troubled Asset Relief Program" (as per Wikipedia). Ms. Warren is a law professor at Harvard University. For over three decades she has researched the shifting landscape of our economy and its effects on the middle-class, written several books and authored dozens of academic papers. The interviewer is Adam Davidson, co-host of NPR's Planet Money, a nifty show that aims to demystify some of the more technical and esoteric concepts in the financial industry such as complex derivatives and credit spreads for the lay person.
The interview begins well enough as Davidson lets Warren explain what her panel does and how it came about. Perhaps five minutes in, he begins breaking the cardinal rule of interviewing and makes the interview about himself and his views. It's not bad to pose challenging questions to the subject of your interview, but he starts attacking the very existence of her committee. From there Davidson adopts an adversarial posture throughout the rest of the interview. He thinks her viewpoint (which both agree is not a centrist one) is invalid. He does not consider her "serious."
Mr. Davidson's tone even deteriorates into condescension at times. Despite his claim that he's projecting his anger at Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi on Warren and that she is not the true target of his ire, it is quite clear that he does not respect her as an intellectual. A number of times Warren attempts to bring a calmer tone, but Davidson insists on ratcheting things up further at one point stating "I want to make you madder." (Ms. Warren would have been well within her right to defenestrate Mr. Davidson at that point if it were possible.) Warren to her immense credit responds passionately but keeps her arguments both lucid and cogent. (That's the trick you see: make your opponent seem unhinged and irrational so that their views can be discounted.) Here is a key exchange a bit past the hour mark:
DAVIDSON: The American families are not -- These issues of crucial, the essential need for credit intermediation are as close to accepted principles among every serious thinker on this topic. The view that the American family, that you hold very powerfully, is fully under assault and that there is -- and we can get into that -- that is not accepted broad wisdom.
ELIZABETH WARREN: Whoa--wait, wait. Remind me who it is who thinks that wages have not stagnated, that unemployment is not up, that debt levels are not up, that savings are not down, that the net worth of the American household just in the last eighteen months has shrunk by twenty percent. I'm sorry those are Federal Reserve numbers. This is not a question of 'your numbers, my numbers'. We're not making this up. We didn't get these out of a Cracker Jack box. These are numbers that anyone who reads the numbers, they're there.
DAVIDSON: We're in a severe recession.
WARREN: Well so what is the part that is controversial? Everybody thinks, that means it's good? That you can make your payments? I don't know what world you live in here. The default rates are rising. That means the income is not there. The credit will not work in a system like that. We have to think about all of the parts.
DAVIDSON: But that view is--I talk to a lot a lot a lot of left, right, center, neutral economists [and] you are the only person I've talked to in a year-and-a-half of covering this crisis who has a view that we have two equally acute crises: a financial markets crisis and a household debt crisis that is equally acute in the same timing way. I literally don't know who else I can talk to support that view.
WARREN: You know I don't know what to say at that point. The numbers are the numbers. The fun--
DAVIDSON [interrupting]: And you are uniquely right.
WARREN: The fun stuff is to look at the big banks and how we've moved around billions of dollars there.
DAVIDSON: Nobody's trying to have fun. What are you talking about? We are talking about a system that the basic plumbing is dying. And maybe they approached it right. A lot of people, probably more people, think they've approached it wrong, the administration. This isn't about the administration actually what I'm saying. I literally don't know anyone other than you who has that view, and you are the person [snicker] who went to Congress to oversee it and you are presenting a very, very narrow view to the American people.
WARREN: I'm sorry. That is not a narrow view. What you are saying is that it is the broad view to think only about trying to save the banks [Davidson sputters] and say Hey! the American economy will recover at some point and we'll worry about the families [Davidson talking over]. I think that is the narrow view and I think I have the broad view. The broad view is that these two things are connected to each other. And the notion [DAVIDSON: And are equally acute? And are equally acute?] that you can save the banking system while the American economy goes down the tubes is just foolish.
Davidson continues to pursue his "serious people aren't advocating such a position"-argument, implying that Professor Warren doesn't deserve a seat at the table. The gist of his argument is that this financial crisis is so acute that the focus should be squarely on the banks. He completely divorces any real-world implications in the way the bailout is undertaken. At one point he says, "nobody cares about this." I suppose the 8.9% of unemployed Americans, the 40 or so million without any health insurance, the majority of the workforce that have seen their wages stagnate for the past two decades, those on the wrong end of the ever-widening wealth gap, I suppose their voices don't matter in any "serious" conversation.
The idea that somehow people outside of banking and finance should have no say, as Warren points out, is absolutely ludicrous. Yet this is how our media tends to think. When the red lights are flashing, there is no time for introspection. Just get out of the way and let the professionals handle it. There was no serious push-back against the war in Iraq because the country was in a state of emergency; no push-back against torture because we were in crisis-mode; no push-back against the egregious erosion of the civil liberties of our own citizens because these were (and continue to be one assumes) desperate times. And anyone who tries to slow that train, obviously has an agenda. Obviously.
I encourage people to listen to the full interview. It is perfectly illustrative of how our media operates. Everything must be viewed through the lens of partisanship. Meanwhile the media is the objective centrist that never takes sides. Everything comes down to how one can be categorized and their opinion subsequently marginalized. Oh she can't be taken seriously because she has such liberal-partisan views! There is no way we should question how the TARP is being utilized or what the banks are doing, we're in a crisis people! Oh we can't listen to people asking for the rule of law to be upheld and torture-architects to be punished because they're on a partisan witch-hunt. We can't criminalize policies that were, uh, criminal. We can't ask our rulers, I mean politicians and CEOs, to explain themselves or hold themselves to the same laws that we do. That's just comical.
People like Davidson whether consciously or not see themselves as elites. They see the world as divided into the serious and the unreasonable who ask for things like "transparency" and "accountability." They look at people arguing for such things as a source of theater but nothing more. The elite don't have an agenda other than preserving the status quo. They believe they always know what's best even if they go about things haphazardly. Davidson believes that Paulson, Geithner, et al, despite mistakes they may have made are really the smartest guys in the room with the best intentions. So what if tens of billions may have been misappropriated or some of the money can't be accounted for at all or if the American public got a raw deal or that the individuals most responsible for creating this mess are cloistered away behind closed doors making the decisions for all of us. Just hand us the check and keep your mouth shut. These people know what's best for us and if you question that, you are not serious.
