Elizabeth Warren: Obama 'protected Wall Street. Not families who were losing their homes'

Elizabeth Warren: Obama &#039;protected Wall Street. Not families who were losing their homes&#039;

(Image credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

last updated 8 January 2015

In a new interview with Salon, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) slams President Obama for doing too much to protect the financial elite and too little to help poor and middle class Americans:

WARREN: [If Obama hadn't been President,] we wouldn't have gotten the [Consumer Financial Protection Bureau]. At the same time, he picked his economic team and when the going got tough, his economic team picked Wall Street.

SALON: You might say, "always." Just about every time they had to compromise, they compromised in the direction of Wall Street.

WARREN: That's right. They protected Wall Street. Not families who were losing their homes. Not people who lost their jobs. Not young people who were struggling to get an education. And it happened over and over and over. So I see both of those things and they both matter. [Salon]

Warren's latest comments have fueled ongoing speculation that she might run for president in 2016, offering a potentially viable option to the left of presumed frontrunner Hillary Clinton on the Democratic ballot. In the Salon interview, however, she continues to brush aside the suggestion, advocating mass activism as more important than who is in the White House: "Yes, we want the right person for president. You bet. But it's all of us fighting back."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.