Who is Elizabeth Warren

"You know, arrogance is exactly the right word, because what we're really talking about is not just people who can get it, they are in the legal position where they can get it until someone like the pay czar smacks them and tells them no. We're talking about people who think they deserve it. And think they deserve it after they effectively bankrupted their companies and nearly bankrupted the country. Had it not been for taxpayer bailouts, these people would be on the streets. They wouldn't have their CEOs and keys to the fancy jets and perks...The first word is arrogance, the second watch word in understanding this crisis is cozy, and that is, who did you get on the board, you got your buds on the board. And then what did you do? You sat on their boards."

"I do not understand how it is that financial institutions could think that they could take taxpayer money and then turn around and act like it's business as usual. I don't understand how they can't see that the world has changed in a fundamental way, that it is not business as usual when you take taxpayer dollars."

"Has the game truly become...the business model for a large financial institution: 'Come investors, give me your money and I'll take it to Las Vegas. I'll put it all on 22 red, and if it pays off, we'll be rich...and if not, we'll talk to our friends the taxpayers.' I mean, that can not be the business model."

"...I began to see that there were a lot of people who really just didn't care one way of another who the people were who were in bankruptcy. They'd taken a lot of money from the banks and the banks had said, the credit card companies had said, "This is the piece of legislation we want, we find it helpful." Well, in a democratically elected Congress how on earth are you going to pass legislation to benefit two dozen already powerful multi-billion dollar corporations at the expense of all the people who are your constituents? Because this is straight wealth transfer. Is it going to go to the credit card companies or is the money going to stay with these million and a half little families that are filing for bankruptcy every year?

So, they would make these assertions about who these people were, and at first I believed these were assertions made out of ignorance because frankly, I'd made the same assertions ten years earlier, before I'd studied, before I'd worked on this. And so, I'd come in with the data and say, "Well, actually, let me show you how this works," and "Here's a random sample of 1,250 families and here's how they were chosen and here's what we know about them, and look at what happened to them." And people just didn't want to hear it.

Finally, it was senators themselves who said, "Professor, you don't understand. So-and-so over here has taken $300,000 from credit card companies and financial services industry over the last so many years and this is something that industry wants, they hire lobbyists, I see two lobbyists in here a day from the financial services industry to make this happen." And so, the reality of these families' lives had to be reshaped to tell a politically acceptable story. "We need to pass this legislation." All the arrows run the wrong way. Right? It's that the credit card companies wanted a piece of legislation to cut their losses and boost their profits. And so, the story had to be told that this is the fault of these families who are in financial trouble. And you know, I wish that story were true, but the data are not just close on this question, the data are just overwhelming on this question, that that is just simply not the truth.

It's part of a whole larger story of "we don't have to provide health insurance for folks because decent people who worked hard and got an education and therefore got good jobs already have health insurance," and there's an undertone that those who don't have it probably either made the choice not to spend the money on it or have made other bad life choices that caused them to be in a place where they don't get it. If that means they don't get much health service, or they lose their homes if they get sick, it's all their choices, it's all them. I sure don't need to tax myself to build a social safety net for things that may go wrong to any of us because it didn't happen to me, it's their fault. We all have a lot of control over this."

"... That's right. Very technical, very hard for the popular press to write about. The changes to the bankruptcy bill, to take that example (but there have been other changes) -- the bill was 1,100 pages long of impenetrable text, and it was deliberately written in a way that if you weren't a specialist -- look, I'm a professor of law at Harvard, I've taught this stuff now for more than twenty years. I couldn't read the thing! I had to keep one finger in the statute and one finger on the amendment. And the bill ultimately passed in 2005. I wrote -- adjusted, readjusted my case book, so I've written a book about the changes, and to this day I'm still finding surprises in it. Someone will call me about something and I'll pull the provision out and I'll look at it and I'll say, "Oh, my gosh, when did that one slip in?" This is a case in which literally, the lobbyists wrote the bill. I'm not being metaphoric here. They, in fact, have bragged about it in the American Bankers Association newsletter. The lobbyists wrote the bill, the credit industry paid for it, the campaign contributions then paved the highway for the bill to get passed, and ordinary families just lost out."