Elizabeth Warren and fellow guest, Robert Reich, faced some interesting -- and sometimes angry -- questions this morning on WBUR during a discussion about "Creating Jobs in a Jobless Recovery." Warren got a little warmed up when she was addressing the kinds of regulations needed to prevent another collapse of the banking system.
This is the astonishing question of this moment. When Enron collapsed and we looked around and WorldCom was right behind it and we said, "Boy! We at least need to change some of the accounting rules and get some transparency in here on how these businesses represent their financial circumstances." Nobody invited Enron into the room to design the legislation.
And yet we've recognized that the very institutions that brought us to this collapse are the very institutions that turned to the American taxpayer and said, in effect, "Give me hundreds of billions of dollars so that I don't have to close my doors tomorrow." They are the institutions that are still wielding enormous power in Washington. I have to say I find this astonishing. Maybe you'll just explain to me that this is because I'm a teacher -- I'm not somebody who spends much time in Washington -- and that this is the embedded nature of lobbying. But I'm astonished because my sense is -- whenever I'm not in Washington, DC -- that the rest of the country is furious over this aspect of where we are in trying to right the ship and get ourselves back into a decent financial place.
