Elizabeth Warren, the Voice of Outrage Wall Street Couldn't Squelch

When Harry Reid summoned Elizabeth Warren to Washington in November 2008 to run the Congressional Oversight Panel monitoring the federal bank bailout program, it was as if the Oklahoma plains had risen up and found a voice. The country was reeling from economic collapse, bank bonuses were about to be paid, and Warren, a polite, politically astute Harvard University bankruptcy scholar, applied her academic skills to building an intellectual case against Wall Street. It came out like a war cry. “People are angry because they are paying for programs that haven’t been fully explained, and that have no apparent benefit for their families or the economy as a whole, but still seem to leave enough cash in the system for lavish bonuses and golf outings,” Warren complained to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner at a May 2009 hearing. “None of this seems fair.”