Memoirists From The United States

"She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted."

"Consider this description of an economic system: The economy is collectively managed by employers, workers and state officials by formal mechanisms at the national level. This non-elected form of state officializing of every interest will reduce the marginalization of singular interests. The system will recognize every divergent interest into the state organically, not meaning a coercive system but without coercion. It recognizes the real needs which gave rise to trade unionism, giving them due weight in the system in which divergent interests are coordinated and harmonized.” We’ll return to historical sourcing and labeling of that system shortly. Now Senator Warren’s proposed charter for large businesses in order for them to get government permission to operate: “Company directors would be explicitly instructed to consider the interests of all relevant stakeholders — shareholders, but also customers, employees, and the communities in which the company operates — when making decisions.“40 percent of the directors would be elected by the company’s workforce, with the other 60 percent elected by shareholders.“Corporate political activity would require the specific authorization of both 75 percent of shareholders and 75 percent of board members." Now the original excerpt in full context: Italian Fascism involved a corporatist political system in which the economy was collectively managed by employers, workers and state officials by formal mechanisms at the national level. This non-elected form of state officializing of every interest into the state was professed to reduce the marginalization of singular interests (as would allegedly happen by the unilateral end condition inherent in the democratic voting process). Corporatism would instead better recognize or ‘incorporate’ every divergent interest into the state organically, according to its supporters, thus being the inspiration for their use of the term ‘totalitarian’, perceivable to them as not meaning a coercive system but described distinctly as without coercion in the 1932 Doctrine of Fascism as thus: “When brought within the orbit of the State, Fascism recognizes the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which divergent interests are coordinated and harmonized in the unity of the State.”"

"Argue the substance all you want, but why 22 days before a crucial election where we MUST win house and senate to save America, why did @SenWarren have to do her announcement now? Why can’t Dems ever stay focused???"

"“Doulos: In ancient Greece, a slave (δοῦλος).” In the above translation of Plato’s text, doulos is translated as either child or slave. Thus we have an argument for paternalism and slavery: Socrates, his ancestors, and presumably his descendants, are creatures and chattels of the State. Is Warren’s position that different? Perhaps hers is not meant as a serious argument, though, and only as red meat thrown to the “Tax the rich!” political base. But what if Warren is serious?"

"1. On the seriousness of the economic justice claim: If we’re to conclude that the factory owner (let’s call her Jill) has unpaid debts, are we to (a) estimate how much benefit Jill the factory builder has received from others, (b) determine how much she has paid for those benefits (since presumably she paid her employees, truckers, and taxes), so that (c) we can determine whether she has paid too much, too little, or the right amount? Are we to make that serious accounting effort, or is this argument meant to generate an unspecified debt claim and a blank check for politicians and the IRS to fill in as they judge best? 2. On the transfer of debt: Warren points out that, for example, many of the factory’s employees were educated in government schools. The government has taxed its citizens and used that money to educate, say, Jack. Interestingly, Warren does not say that Jack now has a debt to society that he should pay. Instead, the debt seems to shift to Jill when she hires Jack. How does that work? 3. On disingenuous application: Warren targets her argument only against the prosperous. Yet middle and low income people also receive the same benefits as the factory builder—they use the roads, enjoy police and fire protection, use the services of those educated in public schools, and so on. Why is Warren not also hectoring middle and low income people for apparently violating the social contract? 4. On the compatibility of the economic justice principle with the rest of Warren’s political philosophy: Warren here suggests strongly that Jill the factory builder has freeloaded on unpaid benefits from the rest of society and that justice requires that she pay for what she received from others. Does Warren therefore favor abolishing the welfare state? I rather doubt it. So we end up in an odd position: Those who live on or profit from government welfare get a pass in Warren’s system, while those who build factories are considered freeloaders."

"For years, when I was the culture editor at Indian Country Today Media Network, we requested interviews with Warren, but not once did she accept our numerous invitations for comment or explanation regarding her alleged ancestry. She simply ignored us."

"Although we have a representative in Congress who they say was here a long time ago. They call her Pocahontas."

"[Warren's Native American] ancestry is so remote — six to ten generations removed — that she could not plausibly claim Native American status in any job application. It would constitute résumé fraud. And she could not plausibly claim membership in a Native American tribe. In fact, at the far end of the range — if her Native American ancestor is ten generations removed — then she is only 1/1024 Native American. By that measure, “white” Americans are also commonly black, and black American are also commonly white. It turns out that at least some mixing is routine in American racial groups. In 2014, the New York Times reported on the results of a massive DNA study and found that “European-Americans had genomes that were on average 98.6 percent European, .19 percent African, and .18 Native American.” Black Americans were “73.2 percent African. European genes accounted for 24 percent of their DNA, while .8 percent came from Native Americans.” In other words, Elizabeth Warren isn’t a Cherokee. She’s a relatively normal White American — a person with some bit of mixing somewhere in their distant past. How distant? If you move to the older end of the generation range, her Native American ancestor could predate the founding of the country. She had no business holding herself out as Native American in faculty directories, in a book, or in her personal narrative."

"The Democratic senator from Massachusetts, who's seeking the Democratic nomination for president, laid out her proposal in a Medium post entitled "Here's How We Can Break Up Big Tech." In the post, Warren argued that it's essential to crack down on the unfair market advantage enjoyed by Amazon, Facebook, and Google in order to boost competition and fuel innovation."

"Earlier today, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren released DNA test results that confirmed that she misled employers, students, and the public about her Native American heritage for years. Bizarrely, all too many members of the media treated the results as vindicating her. Down is up. Black is white. The imperatives of the resistance apparently dictate propping up a liar — as long as she might be able to beat President Trump in 2020. Here are the facts. For an extended period of time — at a key point in her professional life — Warren identified herself as a Native American woman. She listed herself as Native American on a key legal directory reviewed by deans and hiring committees. Former employers — such as the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Law School — listed Warren as a minority faculty member. Harvard Law School even trumpeted her as the school’s first tenured “woman of color.” Warren contributed to a Native American recipe book called — I kid you not — “Pow Wow Chow.” She has told people that her parents eloped because her father’s parents said he couldn’t marry her mother “because she is part Cherokee and part Delaware.”[...]"

"Sen. Warren’s proposal rightly recognizes that digital platforms have become the core infrastructure of our economy," said Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and author of multiple deep-dives into Amazon's threats to an open market. "If we're going to restore competition and protect the free exchange of goods and ideas, then we cannot allow Amazon and other big tech companies to continue to use their control of this infrastructure to privilege their own goods and services at the expense of their competitors."

"I might agree or disagree with some of Elizabeth Warren’s zillions of policy proposals, but at least they’re proposals. At least they are attempts to ground our politics in real situations with actual plans, not just overwrought bellowing about the monster in the closet"

"Elizabeth Warren has quite a story to tell. For many years, she was a professor at Harvard Law School. Inside the worlds of academia and Washington policymaking, she was known for her research into the causes and effects of bankruptcy, and for her ultimately futile campaign to block a Republican-driven effort to rewrite the bankruptcy law in favor of big banks and other lenders. Until the 2008 financial crisis, however, Warren was largely unknown to the American public. Then, following the subprime mortgage meltdown, she emerged as a vocal and stinging critic of Wall Street and its political enablers. Today, at the age of sixty-four, Warren holds Ted Kennedy’s seat in the Senate. She’s perhaps the most recognizable leader of what has been called a resurgent progressive movement, and some of her supporters are urging her to jump into the 2016 presidential race."

"Calling Warren's proposal "smart and practical," Open Markets Institute fellow Matt Stoller said it also showed that it's been a "good week for anti-monopolists.""

"In October, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) released a DNA test that showed she is as little as 1/1,024 Native American in an attempt to prove that she has Native American ancestry. Now, she is apologizing to the Cherokee Nation for having done so."

"Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s corporate responsibility bill could help destroy capitalism, Harvard University economics professor Jeffrey Miron told CNBC on Wednesday. Warren’s proposal “will create a whole set of new rules that the federal government will enforce. Those rules will not be clean, explicit or simple. They’ll be messy, they’ll be complicated. [It will create a] huge ability for companies to evade and avoid,” Miron said on CNBC’s “Power Lunch.” “It’s just a recipe for more crony capitalism, not for more productive capitalism,” he added."

"While the new corporate culture afforded America's plutocrats an obscenely decadent existence, for middle-class Americans life became an increasingly-intolerable struggle- both at the office and at home, what little time was spent there. A study by Harvard Law School Professor Elizabeth Warren showed that even though the average two-income middle-class family earns more than the single-breadwinner from a generation ago, given mortgage costs, car payments, taxes, health insurance, day-care bills, tuition costs, the need to move into an area with a good school district (due to the increasingly unbearable competition among kids), and so on, the average two-earner family has actually less discretionary income today than single-income families a generation ago."

"The one overlap between Sanders and Warren is their relative appeal to young people. This stands in contrast to Biden, for whom the greatest predictor of support is age. The older you are, the more likely you are to be ridin’ with Biden. This suggests that the progressive tussle between Warren and Sanders is about more than a competition for Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) endorsement; it’s really about the future of the party... Already, progressives are setting the pace for new and popular policy ideas. Reformer, or revolutionary? The policies may be similar, but the results could be dramatically different."

"Elizabeth Warren made her reputation with her bold challenges of our nation's economic inequality and corporate greed, and has slowly started to stake out her foreign policy positions. Her campaign website says that she supports "cutting our bloated defense budget and ending the stranglehold of defense contractors on our military policy."...Her website also says, "It’s time to bring the troops home," and that she supports "reinvesting in diplomacy." She has come out in favor of the U.S. rejoining the Iran nuclear agreement and has also proposed legislation that would prevent the United States from using nuclear weapons as a first-strike option, saying she wants to "reduce the chances of a nuclear miscalculation."... She opposed a bill to criminalize boycotting Israel and condemned Israel's use of deadly force against peaceful Gaza protesters in 2018."

"Elizabeth Warren has been a champion for working people. She has been a champion for Native people. She has been a champion for education and all of the things that we should care about in this country. And I expressed my support of her when she came out with that test, because I felt that she found out something about her family that she didn’t previously know, and I felt that was important to her."

"Now that her claims of being of Indian heritage have turned out to be a scam and a lie, Elizabeth Warren should apologize for perpetrating this fraud against the American Public."

"However you feel about Trump’s rhetoric or Warren’s claims [of Native American ancestry], the rebuke [of Warren's ancestry claims by the Cherokee Nation in 2018] is a significant political moment. This is the very nation to which Warren claims a connection saying that she is “undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal heritage.” They’re effectively saying her claims and efforts to prove her heritage are no longer helpful and even harmful. Individual Native Americans have denounced Warren before; now the Cherokee Nation has taken a pretty firm stand against her, thanks to the DNA test. And just as important as the tone of the statement is its trajectory — something of a reversal of course for the Nation, which back in 2012 declined to criticize Warren and even defended her."

"Sanders’ message of political revolution lands with a thud among those who are comfortable. Warren, Biden, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg and “not sure” all outperform Sanders among those earning more than $100,000... It makes sense, though, that those who have struggled the most under our system would be the most receptive to revolutionary change. Why maintain the rules of the current order when those rules have made your life a struggle?"

"I wish I’d been wrong. But on Friday, S.V.B. executives were busy paying out congratulatory bonuses hours before the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation‌‌ rushed in to take over their failing institution — leaving countless businesses and non‌profits with accounts at the bank alarmed that they wouldn’t be able to pay their bills and employees. S.V.B. suffered from a toxic mix of risky management and weak supervision. For one, the bank relied on a concentrated group of tech companies with big deposits, driving an abnormally large ratio of uninsured deposits‌. This meant that weakness in a single sector of the economy could threaten the bank’s stability. Instead of managing that risk, S.V.B. funneled these deposits into long-term bonds, making it hard for the bank to respond to a drawdown. S.V.B. apparently failed to hedge against the obvious risk of rising interest rates. This business model was great for S.V.B.’s short-term profits, which shot up by nearly 40 ‌percent over the last three years‌ — but now we know its cost. S.V.B.’s collapse set off looming contagion that regulators felt forced to stanch, leading to their decision to dissolve Signature Bank. Signature had touted its F.D.I.C. insurance as it whipped up a customer base tilted toward risky cryptocurrency firms. Had Congress and the Federal Reserve not rolled back the stricter oversight, S.V.B. and Signature would have been subject to stronger liquidity and capital requirements to withstand financial shocks. They would have been required to conduct regular stress tests to expose their vulnerabilities and shore up their businesses. But because those requirements were repealed, when an old-fashioned bank run hit S.V.B‌., the‌ bank couldn’t withstand the pressure — and Signature’s collapse was close behind."

"On Sunday night, regulators announced they would ensure that all deposits at S.V.B. and Signature would be repaid 100 cents on the dollar. Not just small businesses and nonprofits, but also billion-dollar companies, crypto investors and the very venture capital firms that triggered the bank run on S.V.B. in the first place — all in the name of preventing further contagion. Regulators have said that banks, rather than taxpayers, will bear the cost of the federal backstop required to protect deposits. We’ll see if that’s true. But it’s no wonder the American people are skeptical of a system that holds millions of struggling student loan borrowers in limbo but steps in overnight to ensure that billion-dollar crypto firms won’t lose a dime in deposits. These threats never should have been allowed to materialize. We must act to prevent them from occurring again. First, Congress, the White House‌ and banking regulators should reverse the dangerous bank deregulation of the Trump era. Repealing the 2018 legislation that weakened the rules for banks like S.V.B. must be an immediate priority for Congress. Similarly, ‌Mr. Powell’s disastrous “tailoring” of these rules has put our economy at risk, and it needs to end — ‌now. ‌ Bank regulators must also take a careful look under the hood at our financial institutions to see where other dangers may be lurking. Elected officials, including the Senate Republicans who, just days before S.V.B.’s collapse, pressed Mr. Powell to stave off higher capital standards, must now demand stronger — not weaker — oversight. Second, regulators should reform deposit insurance so that both during this crisis and in the future, businesses that are trying to make payroll and otherwise conduct ordinary financial transactions are fully covered — while ensuring the cost of protecting outsized depositors is borne by those financial institutions that pose the greatest risk. Never again should large companies with billions in unsecured deposits expect, or receive, free support from the government. Finally, if we are to deter this kind of risky behavior from happening again, it’s critical that those responsible not be rewarded. S.V.B. and Signature shareholders will be wiped out, but their executives must also be held accountable. Mr. Becker of S.V.B. took home $9.9 million in compensation last year, including a $1.5 million bonus for boosting bank profitability — and its riskiness. Joseph DePaolo of Signature got $8.6 million. We should claw all of that back, along with bonuses for other executives at these banks. Where needed, Congress should empower regulators to recover pay and bonuses. Prosecutors and regulators should investigate whether any executives engaged in insider trading ‌or broke other civil or criminal laws. These bank failures were entirely avoidable if Congress and the Fed had done their jobs and kept strong banking regulations in place since 2018. S.V.B. and Signature are gone, and now Washington must act quickly to prevent the next crisis."

"I fought against these changes. On the eve of the Senate vote in 2018, I warned‌, “Washington is about to make it easier for the banks to run up risk, make it easier to put our constituents at risk, make it easier to put American families in danger, just so the C.E.O.s of these banks can get a new corporate jet and add another floor to their new corporate headquarters.”"

"[While talking to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] You are putting American babies’ health at risk, American seniors’ health at risk, all Americans' health at risk and you should resign."

"End the filibuster. Codify #RoeVWade with a national law protecting abortion rights. Expand the Supreme Court. Stop this horrifying injustice in its tracks"

"No one should be mistaken about what unfolded over the past few days in the U.S. banking system: These recent bank failures are the direct result of leaders in Washington weakening the financial rules. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act to protect consumers and ensure that big banks could never again take down the economy and destroy millions of lives. Wall Street chief executives and their armies of lawyers and lobbyists hated this law. They spent millions trying to defeat it, and, when they lost, spent millions more trying to weaken it. Greg Becker, the chief executive of Silicon Valley Bank, was one of the ‌many high-powered executives who lobbied Congress to weaken the law. In 2018, the big banks won. With support from both parties, President Donald Trump signed a law to roll back critical parts of Dodd-Frank. Regulators, including the Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, then made a bad situation worse, ‌‌letting financial institutions load up on risk."

"If the Republicans disarm, all is well and good. If they refuse to disarm, we shall disarm them ourselves."

"Banks like S.V.B. ‌— which had become the 16th largest bank in the country before regulators shut it down on Friday ‌—‌ got relief from stringent requirements, basing their claim on the laughable assertion that banks like them weren’t actually “big” ‌and therefore didn’t need strong oversight. ‌"

"Donald Trump is a loud, nasty, thin-skinned fraud who has never risked anything for anyone and who serves no one but himself, and that is just one of the many reasons he will never be president of the United States, unfortunately just like Hillary Clinton"

"over time realities are bearing down on Israel, demographic realities, births and deaths. What the region looks like."

"I was a Republican because I thought that those were the people who best supported markets."

"Today's big tech companies have too much power — too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy. They've bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else. With fewer competitors entering the market, the big tech companies do not have to compete as aggressively in key areas like protecting our privacy. And some of these companies have grown so powerful that they can bully cities and states into showering them with massive taxpayer handouts in exchange for doing business, and can act—in the words of [Facebook CEO] Mark Zuckerberg—"more like a government than a traditional company.""

"If women need to be raped by Muslims to prove our tolerance, so be it — then thank goodness for Planned Parenthood."

"There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along."

"The American people deserve a Congress that worries less about helping big banks, and more about helping regular people who have been cheated on mortgages, on credit cards, on student loans and on credit reports."

"I am not a person of color, I am not a citizen of a tribe, and I have apologized for confusion I've caused on tribal citizenship, tribal sovereignty, and for any harm that I've caused."

"The media largely have portrayed the dynamic... as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) rises, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) must fall... If you’re scouring campaign white papers you’re going to have trouble clearly laying out the difference between these two candidates, except by matters of degree. One is all in on “Medicare for all” and the other is all in on universal coverage, with Medicare for all as one of a range of good options. One wants to cancel all student debt; the other wants to cancel most student debt. You’ve got to look bigger-picture at their fundamental approach to politics and philosophy of political change. To state it simply: Sanders is a revolutionary and Warren is a reformer... Warren has been unequivocal that she is a capitalist and believes in markets. She identifies this as the most significant ideological split between her and Sanders."

"Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has one-upped socialists Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: She proposes to nationalize every major business in the United States of America. If successful, it would constitute the largest seizure of private property in human history."

"To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion: to he worthy, not respectable; and wealthy, not rich; to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly; to have an oratory in my own heart, and present spotless sacrifices of dignified kindness in the temple of humanity; to spread no opinions glaringly out like show-plants, and yet leave the garden gate ever open for the chosen friend and the chance acquaintance: to make no pretenses to greatness; to seek no notoriety; to attempt no wide influence; to have no ambitious projects; to let my writings be the daily bubbling spring flowing through constancy, swelled by experiences, into the full, deep river of wisdom; to listen to stars and buds, to babes and sages, with open heart; to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never; … in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common. This is to be my symphony."

"As far as the allegations of the CIA hacking into Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth, ... We wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s just beyond the, you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we do."

"Our strategy is also shaped by a deeper understanding of al-Qa’ida’s goals, strategy, and tactics. I’m not talking about al-Qa’ida’s grandiose vision of global domination through a violent Islamic caliphate. That vision is absurd, and we are not going to organize our counterterrorism policies against a feckless delusion that is never going to happen. We are not going to elevate these thugs and their murderous aspirations into something larger than they are."

"As to the issues on which we part ways with the Committee, I have already stated that our reviews indicate that the detention and interrogation program produced useful intelligence that helped the United States thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives. But let me be clear. We have not concluded that it was the use of EITs (Enhanced interrogation techniques) within that program that allowed us to obtain useful information from detainees subjected to them. The cause and effect relationship between the use of EITs and useful information subsequently provided by the detainee is, in my view, unknowable."

"John Brennan made the first official public admission about the targeted killing program: "[T]he United States government conducts targeted strikes against specific Al Qaeda terrorists, sometimes using remotely piloted aircraft, often referred to publicly as drones. And I'm here today because President Obama has instructed us to be more open with the American people about these efforts." As usual, Medea Benjamin was there. She spoke out, declaring, "How many people are you willing to sacrifice? Why are you lying to the American people and not saying how many innocents have been killed? I speak out on behalf of Tariq Aziz, a sixteen-year-old in Pakistan, who was killed because he wanted to document the drone strikes. I speak out on behalf of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a sixteen-year-old born in Denver, killed in Yemen, just because his father was someone we don't like. I speak out on behalf of the Constitution, on behalf of the rule of law. I love the rule of law. I love my country. You are making us less safe by killing so many innocent people.""

"For the very first time, I understood what mi papá had been telling me all these years about his very own father, the great Don Juan, straight from Spain, and how he’d only liked and loved his blue-eyed children, the ones like himself, and had never even recognized his dark Indian-looking children like my dad."

"Oh, I loved Mr. Moffet! He was WONDERFUL! He’d given me hope! I felt fearless once again, and I could clearly see it had always been fear that had kept me dammed up all these years. Fear of sin, fear of hell, fear of what people might think of me, fear of … of … I didn’t quite know how to say or even think all these thoughts I was having, and yet… it was like I was now so excited with all these thoughts racing around inside my brain that I was on fire. Maybe I wasn’t really stupid after all. Maybe I’d just been misled all these years from the very beginning. OH, A FIRE FOR WANTING TO LEARN ALL I COULD LEARN WAS NOW BURNING INSIDE ME!"

"My father’s mother, a pure-blooded Indian from Oaxaca, had been a gifted fifteen-year-old when Benito Juárez won Mexico’s independence from France. They’d taken her to the Academy of blah-blah-blah in Mexico City, and she’d astonished her European professors by learning French in six weeks."

"In the last three months I hadn’t lost one single game of chess. It was crazyloco, but sometimes I thought that I was so brilliant because I could see what other people couldn’t see or understand even after I’d explain it to them. Playing chess wasn’t about making single moves. It was about seeing patterns, then backing up inside your mind and seeing the last five and six moves of your opponent, then flashing forward real fast. And bingo, the whole chessboard became alive in living patterns."