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I’m rather leaning toward Warren in the primaries. ‘Part of what has distinguished Warren\u2019s story is that it has a different frame of reference, in which politics is not an argument over the cultural aftermath of the sixties but over the influence won by wealth in the eighties, which from certain vantage points can seem the only American story worth telling.’<\/p>\n
The word \u201ccorruption\u201d rarely appears in Warren\u2019s academic work, but the seed of the idea is present there. The work that made Warren famous began at the outset of the Reagan era, when she and two colleagues at the University of Texas\u2014the demographer Theresa Sullivan, who would become the president of the University of Virginia, and the Texas law professor Jay Westbrook\u2014decided to study why more Americans seemed to be going bankrupt. The use of credit cards had exploded, and mortgages had grown more complex, and the line from politicians and the financial industry was that Americans had become imprudent, taking on more debt to buy more things than they could really afford. Warren, Sullivan, and Westbrook spent years travelling to bankruptcy courts across the country to retrieve case records. They found, Westbrook told me, \u201cfiles filled with these agonizing letters. \u2018This is so embarrassing.\u2019 \u2018I\u2019m so upset.\u2019 \u2018I hate myself.\u2019 \u201d The vast majority of the \u201cbankrupts\u201d turned out to be middle-class people who were victims of health-care calamities or job loss.<\/p>\n
I asked Westbrook whether, as young law professors, they had understood the credit industry to be corrupt. He said it took them a while to come to this conclusion. In 1995, when Congress was considering a revision to the bankruptcy code, Warren, then at the University of Pennsylvania, was appointed to assemble an expert analysis on bankruptcy. But the process was usurped by the credit-card industry, which drafted a bill that eventually became the core of a law, signed by President Bush, in 2005. Among other provisions, it held that debtors are required to continue to pay the courts even if they have no assets to liquidate. \u201cThe tide of blame-the-unlucky combined with relentless lobbying and campaign contributions finally overwhelmed Congress,\u201d Warren wrote of this experience. She had become a Democrat by then, and a credit-debt expert, both in Washington and on \u201cDr. Phil,\u201d where she talked about the \u201ctricks and traps\u201d by which the credit industry manipulates its customers. When the housing bubble burst, in 2008, it had some of the same dynamics that she, Westbrook, and Sullivan had pinpointed almost thirty years before.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n