A Fighting Chance

Maybe there were some other, less visible wins. After I left COP, my next job required that I spend a lot of time in the Treasury Building. Every now and then I’d walk down those hollow, high-ceilinged halls and bump into a member of the staff who would stop to say hello. During some of these conversations, I heard different versions of the following comment: “You don’t know me, but I was working in the XX section during the financial crisis. When we talked about what we should do, someone always seemed to ask, ‘What will Elizabeth Warren say when she finds out about this?’ That usually made people stop and think again.”


I never thought that comment was about me. I believed it was about all of the panelists who served on COP, as well as our great staff. But I also thought the comment was about democracy. To me it was another way of saying, “What if everyone knew what we were up to?” I didn’t need any better proof that speaking up—and speaking up loudly and clearly—was worthwhile.

Before Harry Reid called me on the night of the student barbecue, I had never thought much about government oversight. With COP, we had a chance to involve the American people in events as they were happening. Our job was to give regular folks a window into the decisions that would shape their economy and their lives—and ultimately to help them have the information they needed to decide whether their leaders were taking the country in the right direction.

My time as a COP changed me. I still didn’t have a badge or a set of handcuffs, and I was still nervous about going on television (although I never threw up again), but I learned a couple of important lessons. I learned that insiders don’t appreciate questions from outsiders, including pesky professors who don’t know the unwritten rules of Washington. I also learned an essential truth: When you have no real power, go public—really public. The public is where the real power is.

Those long days and weeks on the oversight beat weren’t always fun. But Otis didn’t complain: he ate a lot of cornbread and began to put on weight. I poured my troubles out to Bruce, often over fried clams and beer. Sometimes I wanted to shout curses at the gods of finance over what I couldn’t accomplish. But the fury was tempered by the sadness I felt when I thought about all the injustice and all the heartbreak that so many families had suffered. Despite how awful the crash had been, I was not sorry that I had been part of the fight to improve the government’s response to it. I was deeply grateful for the chance to serve our country, to do whatever I could, at such a critical time.

Our oversight of the bailout wasn’t perfect, not by any stretch. But I saw what was possible. We took an obscure little panel that could have disappeared without a trace and worked hard to become the eyes and ears and voice for a lot of people who had been cut out of the system. And every now and again we landed a blow for the people who were getting pounded by the economic crash.

That felt good. It felt really good.





4 | What $1 Million a Day Can Buy

IN THE MIDST of the COP work, I took on another project, one that came at me sideways. The project had nothing to do with congressional oversight but everything to do with the financial meltdown. It grew out of an idea that had been knocking around in my head for a while, and when the opportunity arose to make the idea a reality, I couldn’t hold back. I guess it was like holding a missing puzzle piece and seeing right where it fit in the jigsaw—almost impossible to resist trying to put it where it belonged.

Ideas grow in lots of ways, and my idea was born of years of wonky research and teaching technical details of the law. But it wasn’t enough to have a good idea. I also needed to explain it, and one way to do that was to recall one of the times when I nearly set my kitchen on fire.

When we lived in New Jersey in the 1970s, I liked to make toast for breakfast. One morning when Amelia was little, probably three or four, she was sitting in a booster chair at the kitchen table, eating cereal. I popped a few pieces of bread in our toaster oven, got busy doing six other things, and quickly forgot about the toast. When I saw smoke pouring out of the toaster oven, I grabbed the handle and pulled out the tray, exposing four slices of bread that were on fire. Always a quick thinker, I screamed and threw the tray at the kitchen sink. Three pieces of toast hit the target, but the fourth went high—setting the cute little yellow curtains on fire.

I screamed again, then grabbed Amelia’s cereal bowl and threw it at the burning curtains. The milk doused most of the fire, and I calmed down enough to realize that throwing things was probably not my best strategy. Then I noticed that the toaster itself was shooting sparks and seemed to be on fire. (How long had the darn thing been on?) I got a glass, filled it with water, and poured the water on what remained of my flaming curtains. Then I grabbed a towel and beat on the toaster until everything seemed quiet and I could unplug it.