Warren’s focus, speaking at the University of Pennsylvania, was on the seventy per cent of college students who have to take out loans: “The interest rate on these student loans makes billions and billions of dollars for the United States government,” she said. But her real point was, more mundanely, the refusal of more than three Republicans to support a bill she had sponsored that would have allowed student debtors to refinance their loans at forgiving rates. It was the “Republican philosophy in a nutshell,” she said, to favor those seeking to preserve their capital over ordinary people who wanted to get ahead. “The game is rigged,” Warren said, “and the Republicans rigged it.”
.. The image of the rigged game was, after the 2008 financial crisis, Warren’s more than anyone’s, and there was a specificity to it: she was talking about the protections that the banks enjoyed. But in the 2016 Democratic Presidential primary, Bernie Sanders adopted it, more abstractly, to refer to the ways in which life is made difficult for ordinary people, and then Donald Trump began to use it, often to hint that the election was about to be stolen from him.
.. no comedian has developed a convincing caricature of Warren
.. Warren is not a utopian but a leveller, a soldier of comeuppance and retribution.
.. The G.O.P. establishment’s case is that if voters are discontented with their lot, economically and socially, then they should blame liberals and Democrats, who have held cultural and Presidential power for most of the past quarter century. The Democratic response in recent years has been a version of Warren’s response—that the problem was a profoundly rigged economic system that progressive politics have only begun to correct.
Elizabeth Warren: What Apple Teaches Us About Taxes
The European Commission is investigating Luxembourg’s tax arrangements for Amazon and McDonald’s
.. Multinational corporations are especially worried about losing access to Cayman Island-style tax rates in European countries where they can also get rule of law, political stability and an educated professional class of attorneys and consultants.
.. In the 1950s, corporations contributed about $3 out of every $10 in federal revenue. Today they contribute $1 out of every $10
.. The National Science Foundation helped fund some of the initial work of Google’s founders. Apple’s consumer products still rely on technology that originated in federally funded research.
.. Preferential tax treatment, either through special rates or deferred due dates, creates a huge financial incentive for American companies to build businesses and create jobs abroad rather than in the United States.
.. This puts small businesses at a competitive disadvantage as they end up shouldering more of the burden of paying for education, infrastructure, research, the military and everything else our nation relies on to succeed.
For Warren and her allies, a fight over Clinton’s hires
Warren’s coalition is developing a hit list of the types of people they’ll oppose — what one source called ‘hell no’ appointments — in a Clinton administration.
Warren’s coalition is developing a hit list of the types of people they’ll oppose — what one source called “hell no” appointments — in a Clinton administration. They’re vowing to fight nominees with ties to big banks, and warn against corporate executives assuming government roles in regulating the industries that made them rich. Warren has a mantra — “personnel is policy” — and behind the scenes, Warren, her allies and a left-leaning think tank affiliated with her have fanned out to try to influence the Clinton hiring process long before the election results come in.
.. “Our big point to the Clinton transition people will be that when it comes to positions with power over Wall Street, it is important to appoint people with a proven track record of challenging corporate power,” said Adam Green
.. Rubin’s influence in the Obama administration is what Warren’s supporters are trying to prevent this time.
They point to Michael Froman, a former chief of staff for Rubin at Treasury, who was still getting paid by Citigroup while working as a senior official on Obama’s 2008 transition team. Froman went on to work in Obama’s White House, where he is U.S. trade representative.
Clinton unleashes Democratic dream team
A handful of high-wattage surrogates are being dispatched as part of the anti-Trump effort.
The vice president’s presence on the trail is the one that’s most telling to Democrats close to the Clinton campaign, who have been waiting for months for the triumvirate of Obama, Biden, and Warren to take to the battleground states and amplify the former secretary of state’s anti-Trump barrage. To them, it signals the arrival of a new phase of the campaign in which the highest-profile Democrats imaginable, likely including former President Bill Clinton and possibly Michelle Obama and Bernie Sanders, join Hillary Clinton in making the case against the presumptive GOP nominee — and for her.
.. “The Republicans also have a lot of talent, but they don’t want to be associated with Donald Trump.”
.. Sending him into Scranton, his hometown (and the city where Clinton’s father grew up), gives Biden the chance to help defend Pennsylvania for Democrats after Trump has promised to put it into play with his appeal to blue collar and middle-class white men whose industries have been hit hard by multinational trade deals.
.. Painting Trump as a threat to laborers’ way of life, the materials directly echo the message that party officials expect to hear from Biden.
“That’s what he did in ’08 and ’12. He’s reprising that role,” said former Pennsylvania Gov. and Democratic National Committee Chairman Ed Rendell. “Where surrogates have an effect is not necessarily in persuasion. It’s about turnout. Joe can remind the blue collar, white working class guys of all the things that the Republican Party has done to deny them help.”