A couple of weeks ago four of the biggest banksters, Citigroup, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America,
had a public tantrum about Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) being mean to them, threatening to take their campaign donations and go home if Warren and other good Democrats like Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) don't start making nice. Warren
isn't buying it.
"Do you think that if I used a sweeter tone with the banks, that if I said very nicely, 'We should have broken you into pieces,' that everything would be fine?" she asked audience members at the Know Your Value Conference in Philadelphia.
"Do you think that if I smiled more at banking committee hearings, that Wall Street would put me on their Christmas card lists?" she continued. "Give me a break." […]
"They didn't stop the train wreck happening right in front of them," Warren argued of the mortgage market's disintegration in 2008.
"What happened in the mortgage market wasn't like a hurricane or a tornado," she added. "What happened in the mortgage market was a deliberate decision by the financial institutions to improve their profits by selling mortgages that were like grenades with the pins pulled out."
Wall Street is never going to acknowledge their responsibility for bringing the country—and a good part of the world—to the brink of another great depression, and they're going to continue to resent the hell out of anyone who reminds the rest of us that they did that. But resentment and outright threats are very different things. Of course Warren isn't going to be intimidated by those threats. From where she sits, with her enormous popularity and her messaging post in leadership, she can make other Democrats follow suit.