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Elizabeth Warren’s Oakland Town Hall Meeting

Glen Kohler
Saturday June 01, 2019 - 10:04:00 AM
Senator Elizabeth Warren, candidate for President, speaking at Laney College in Oakland
Senator Elizabeth Warren, candidate for President, speaking at Laney College in Oakland

Elizabeth Warren is an American missile aimed at the heart of the economic and social injustices perpetrated by laissez-faire capitalism. She is a mixture of hard headed realism, eminent pragmatism, and passionate idealism: articulate, personable, engaging, and completely focused on the ills of this country and how to solve them.

Warren’s demeanor when she spoke at Laney College on Friday was natural and unassuming as she recounted her early life and her career: teaching disadvantaged children, studying law, and teaching business and banking law at the university level. Getting fired from her job teaching children by a male principal for being visibly pregnant. Running for office; winning her Senate seat.  

She described the glee of Republican Congressmen giving each other high fives for passing legislation to deprive tens of millions of Americans of health care. An unnamed senator advising her to ‘ask for less’ in her campaign speeches; advice she disregards, because what she is asking for is precisely what hundreds of millions of Americans urgently need: 

Pre-school, free or at reasonable and affordable cost, for all children. Free education for all children. Free college education for all citizens; erasing student debt for the majority of recent graduates now laboring under an obligation that was not imposed upon senior Republican leaders in their time. 

How to pay for this (and more)? By levying a two-cent tax on every dollar above 50 million earned or held in assets by the 75,000 richest families in America. 

She said more: that America must sequester atmospheric carbon if we are to survive. That our ‘Dreamers’ and long-time foreign citizens (our strength) must have paths to citizenship. And she said that every accumulation of vast riches was made by using others’ labor and others’ tax monies spent on the roads, sidewalks, government services, and every other appurtenance of the American society that made collecting those fortunes possible. 

The only difference between Warren and her supporters, and the Republicans and corporate Democrats who oppose her, is that as the latter enjoy the fruits of this country’s socialist institutions, they refuse to acknowledging or give back to their benefactors—while Warren wants to even the economic playing field with a two-cent tax to give everyone a chance to succeed. 

Is she electable? The crowd of over 10,000 East Bay residents at her Oakland Town Hall clearly thought so. Warren’s clarity of vision and firm commitment to issues that others either soft-pedal or step around puts her head and shoulders above every other Democratic candidate.