FSM & Elizabeth Warren

When I was a youngster in 1964 I was in a play at my church where the name Mario Savio was highlighted and the mysterious FSM (Free Speech Movement) was mentioned. Over the years I've come to understand more deeply the wonderful uprising at Berkeley and the role that Mario Savio played. I look back to those years as ones where youth were galvanized by social issues and tried to change the world for a better future. But it all got derailed by nihilists (the SDS's Weathermen), reactionary racial protest groups (H. Rap Brown's SNCC, the Black Panthers), and the acid-dropping back-to-the-land apathetic youth (the "counter-culture", the "hippies", the Timothy Leary followers). The ideals of the early 1960s dissolved into a haze of drugs and violence and turned into the narcissistic 1970s with its Erhard's EST, Baba Ram Dass, TM, and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and Hare Krishna as examples of the devolution of activism into idiotic self-indulgent cultic religiosity.

The drift of the 1970s through the early 2000s allowed the right wing politicians to seize the high ground. They have now driven the economy onto the rocks. Here is a talk by one woman, Elizabeth Warren, who is working hard to fix the problem and turn back the tide of the last 40 years.

Here is a speech given by Elizabeth Warren at this year's Mario Savio Memorial Lecture. She starts talking at 25:50 in this video. The best part starts at 58:00 when she starts answering questions. It ends with her giving a very heartfelt answer with a tear in her voice. It is very moving:



I have one slight qualm in watching this video. At 47:24 she talks about how this federal agency could have made a big difference by spotting the bad loans early. But in reality, many states had already spotted the bad loans and were trying to force the mortgage brokers and banks to stop giving out mortgages to people who clearly couldn't afford the houses they were buying. But the Bush administration "regulators" came along and forced those states to back off and allow the scam to continue. (Watch the November 16, 2010 interview of Bethany McLean & Joe Nocera by John Stewart. They made this claim in their book All the Devils are Here.) So she is being simplistic and deceptive in making the claim that this new agency she is going to set up to be the "saviour" of the consumer and the economy.

I wish "all power" to her and "God speed" in her mission. But I am skeptical. Greed and evil are far more widespread and more persistent than anybody can believe. It won't be easy to root it out. One truth I know is that social change does not come when the rich have the middle and working class by the throat. It comes when there is a sense of a new day dawning, a time when people are getting better off and have the resources to confront the greed at the top. Maybe in 5 years there will be a new young generation that will take on the world and try to deliver a new tomorrow. I applaud Elizabeth Warren, but she is but a small step on the way to getting things back on track and giving people hope.

Here's the Elizabeth Warren Rap Video mentioned by in the introduction to the talk:



I'm a big Elizabeth Warren fan. She is honest. She has the right viewpoint. She's on the side of the "little people". I sure hope she does great things. I sure wish she replaced Barack Obama in 2012. If you listen to her dealing with the last question at the end of that video, you have a person who really, really cares about people. Something that Barack Obama has not shown. Something that is very much needed by a leader in America to pull the country out of the mess it is in.