Elizabeth Warren Couldn’t Have Asked for a Better Campaign Ad Than This CNBC Segment

From Esquire

“We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering," President Franklin D. Roosevelt said at Madison Square Garden nearly 83 years ago. "They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”

Everything old is new again, including the rampaging forces of greed which have thoroughly destabilized our society in this Second Gilded Age. If we are to regain our senses, and lead the world's democracies back from the brink of a perilous slide into authoritarian kleptocracy, it will require leadership that welcomes fear and loathing from the wealthiest and most powerful people in society, those who have hoarded the resources and captured the government. The big money in politics must be drained out. The stranglehold of the monopoly power must be broken.

For all his rhetoric about swamps and elites, the current president is surely not the man for any of that, not least because it remains in doubt whether he is capable of genuinely considering the interests of anyone who does not share his last name. Donald Trump's right-wing populism has been a bonanza of crony-capitalist corruption that sustains itself politically by continually launching bigotry and resentment into the crowd. It's bread and circuses for folks frightened by a changing world. The tax bill was a handout to corporations and the rich. Inequality continues to skyrocket. The stock market is booming—at least for now—but American life expectancy has fallen for three straight years.

So, who might that leader be who so welcomes the hatred?

The candidate, of course, was riffing on the emerging Twitter Consensus? that this CNBC segment might as well be a paid advertisement for her campaign.

Here was Jim Cramer, the TV Investment Expert whose larynx Jon Stewart had so memorably removed over his speculation and gamesmanship leading up to the 2008 financial meltdown, channeling the fears of Wall Street over a potential President Warren—someone who had spent years leading up to the crisis warning that the housing market was dangerously unstable. Cramer and his co-hosts provide the perfect vessel for Warren's message, sitting on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange announcing that the people who have eaten up a larger and larger share of the resources our society has produced over the last few decades are terrified of her.

Presumably, a Bernie Sanders presidency is too much for these folks even to contemplate. The Vermont senator will surely turn his sights on Warren someday soon—perhaps at Thursday's primary debate. Some of his most vocal supporters already have, suggesting she hasn't lived up to her fundraising pledges and she's waffling on Medicare For All and she used to be a Republican. The intent with all of it is to demonstrate Warren is not a true enemy of the money power in the way Sanders is. So, why does the money power think she is?

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