Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (D-Mass.) new book about the economy is in no way setting the groundwork for a run for president, she tells Mark Strassmann in an interview for CBS SUNDAY MORNING WITH CHARLES OSGOOD to be broadcast today, April 20, 2014 (9:00 AM, ET) on the CBS Television Network.
A Fighting Chance, Warren's 10th book, is described as a plea for economic fairness wrapped inside her own life story.
"I'm not running for president," Warren tells Strassmann. "Let me be clear about this book. This is my life's work. For more than 25 years now I've been working on trying to sound the alarm on what's happening to America's middle class."
Warren's name has often been mentioned as a possible candidate for president in 2016 because of her aggressive style and her ongoing efforts to fight what she perceives as big businesses making huge profits at the expense of working families.
"I am not running for president," Warren reiterates. "You can ask lots of different ways, but I wrote this book because I can't wait any longer. It's written out of gratitude for my start and the opportunities that
America built for me, and how I think that's what we've got to do again."
Warren was born in Oklahoma. As a child she watched her mother piece together a living after her father had a heart attack. Her mother saved the family home by working a minimum-wage job. That couldn't happen today, Warren tells Strassmann.
Warren earned a law degree from Rutgers University and later became a professor at Harvard Law School. She then moved to Washington, DC in 1995 as an advisor to the National Bankruptcy
Review Commission. In 2008 she was appointed chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, which oversaw emergency loans and bailouts to big financial institutions, known as TARP. Along the way she earned a reputation as being tough. Indeed, she made headlines in 2009 when during one hearing when she clashed with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, then the administrator of the TARP program, on how the program was being handled.
Warren says she felt it was a mistake to give the cash to big financial institutions without any strings attached.
"To say in effect, 'Here, take the money, please,' rather than saying, 'We will save our financial institutions, but believe me, there have got to be strings. Here's what's got to change. You've got to change your management. You've got to change your business plan. You've got to wipe out your shareholders. You've got to agree to help out the American people, keep that money flowing in small business lending, so the economy has a shot to get going. Help out on the home mortgage crisis,'" she tells Strassmann. "But none of that - none of that was on the table. It was all about how to rebuild the largest financial institutions and to get them back to profitability as soon as possible. And I just thought that was wrong."
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