Elizabeth Warren's Crusade Against Corruption

[BlueMTexpat]

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/elizabeth-warrens-crusade-against-corruption

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Warren’s speech took place just as the Democratic-primary campaign is entering a new, more serious phase: the field of candidates has winnowed, and the debates have become less unwieldy. Warren has crept steadily up in the polls, hovering in many of them in second place, behind Joe Biden. The morning of the speech, the Warren campaign announced an endorsement from the Working Families Party, which was a coup for the campaign, and a disappointment to Bernie Sanders, who has been vying with Warren for second place and earned the Party’s endorsement when he ran for the Democratic nomination in 2015. The combination of events has created a sense of momentum around Warren that will be tested in the coming months, as primary voters and competitors begin focussing more narrowly on the candidates left in the race.

Voters are unaccustomed to hearing politicians speak so directly and frequently about corruption, perhaps because the system they’re participating in is an example of the depth of the problem. But, from the early days of her campaign, Warren has pointed to corruption as the root cause of most of the country’s problems. She lists tax laws that favor corporations, spiralling health-care costs and pharmaceutical prices, rising temperatures, and declining public-school systems as symptoms of the influence that the wealthy have over the policymaking process. In 2018, she introduced the Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act in the Senate, which proposed a lifetime ban on most lawmakers going into lobbying and the creation of a new public-integrity office, among other things. (The House passed its own, less drastic anti-corruption bill that addressed some of the same issues earlier this year.) Warren describes her bill as the “biggest anti-corruption plan since Watergate.” During one of her first campaign stops in Iowa, which I attended, she told a crowd, “We have a Washington that works great for the rich, the powerful, the well-connected. And here’s the deal: when a government works for the rich, the powerful, and the well-connected and isn’t working for anyone else, that’s corruption, plain and simple, and we need to call it out.” The lines resonated.
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