kalikshama
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The Woman Who Knew Too Much
Millions of Americans hoped President Obama would nominate Elizabeth Warren to head the consumer financial watchdog agency she had created. Instead, she was pushed aside. As Warren kicks off her run for Scott Brown’s Senate seat in Massachusetts, Suzanna Andrews charts the Harvard professor’s emergence as a champion of the beleaguered middle class, and her fight against a powerful alliance of bankers, lobbyists, and politicians.
...In November 2008, Warren received a call from Senator Harry Reid. Lehman Brothers had collapsed two months before; A.I.G.’s bailout had just been upped to $150 billion, and Congress had passed TARP. Reid asked Warren to head the congressional panel overseeing the $700 billion bailout. The job was vague, with no clear goals, but Warren would turn it into a tough, prosecutorial committee. She did real investigations, grilled government officials, and issued blunt monthly reports demanding more accountability from banks and better returns for the taxpayer. She held public hearings that were televised, asking the questions that many taxpayers wanted asked—and questions that bankers and Treasury officials did not want to answer.
Perhaps the most widely watched hearing is the one that took place in September 2009. A video of part of that hearing can still be found on YouTube, under the title “Elizabeth Warren Makes Timmy Geithner Squirm.” It opens with Warren asking the question that was on the minds of many taxpayers: “A.I.G. has received about $70 billion in TARP money, about $100 billion in loans from the Fed. Do you know where the money went?” What followed during the rest of the hearing was the spectacle of the Treasury secretary tripping over his words, his eyes darting around the room as Warren, calm and prosecutorial, kept hammering him with questions. At another hearing, in December 2009, Geithner appeared to be barely able to contain his annoyance, at one point almost shouting at her. Warren’s questioning “was masterful,” says Neil Barofsky, who ran the TARP oversight for Treasury. “She eviscerated him.” But Warren would pay a price for those hearings.
“Geithner hated her,” says a former administration official. Part of it was seen as personal because she had scorched him in public. But the whole thrust of her work on the oversight panel—getting the facts out to the public—was at odds with Geithner’s perceived conviction, shared by the Wall Street establishment, that the details of the banks’ TARP rescue should be hidden from public scrutiny whenever possible in order to give the banks time to recover, an assessment that a Treasury spokesperson disputes, insisting that “Secretary Geithner initiated unprecedented disclosure requirements for financial institutions.”
According to Barofsky, however, “Treasury’s descriptions of what was happening were very skewed towards the positive and often incomprehensible. There was this reluctance towards transparency,” and Warren’s work on the oversight panel “helped bring light in a lot of dark areas.” As Treasury sought to cosset the banks, never requiring them, for example, as Barofsky points out, to explain what they were doing with their billions in TARP bailout money, Warren persisted. She went on television shows to criticize the government’s secrecy, the huge bank bonuses, the fact that even after the bailout the banks had escaped disciplinary measures. Obama’s top economic advisers, according to a former administration official, thought Warren was “a pain in the ass.” On Wall Street, Warren was regarded, says one bank vice-chairman, as “the Devil incarnate,” and, according to another executive, a “showboater,” who didn’t really know what she was talking about.
But her sin was actually quite the opposite: she knew what she was talking about.
Read more: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/11/elizabeth-warren-201111.print
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RE: Join Elizabeth's Call for Wall Street Accountability - 
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