Elizabeth ‘Pocahontas’ Warren and CFPB Shenanigans Are Part of the Same Story
Millions of Americans are now aware of Warren's fake Cherokee heritage. But are they aware of her involvement in the CFPB?
By calling Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas,” President Trump has done what no one else could do. He’s made millions of Americans aware of her fakery. And by trying to appoint his own successor, Richard Cordray, the outgoing director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has revealed the raw, political nature of the agency. Millions are now worried that the CFPB, created in 2010, is a menace.
What you might not know is that Warren, Cordray, and the CFPB are part of the same story. Warren played a key role in creating the CFPB and she still plays a role in the left’s infiltration of our financial system.
In 2013, I wrote a book that described these matters at length. Since you might not have noticed, here’s some background to get you up to speed.
Faux-cahontas?
In the spring of 2012, Warren was a professor at Harvard Law School and the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate against GOP incumbent Scott Brown.
Then, in April, the Boston Herald revealed that Harvard Law had for years claimed she added ethnic diversity to their faculty. That’s because she claimed she had Native American ancestry. When asked about it, Warren cited “family lore.” She’d heard that she had a great-great-great grandmother who was Cherokee. But there was and still is no evidence that the blond, blue-eyed native of Oklahoma had Cherokee lineage.
When I first heard the story, I got it at once. I grew up in the Texas Panhandle. From there, you can drive to Warren’s hometown of Oklahoma City in just a few hours. Besides the hot summers, wide-open spaces, and latitude, they have something else in common: Almost everyone with deep roots in the area has heard family lore about Cherokee ancestry. The Cherokees had been moved to the region from Georgia in the early 1800s. Claiming Cherokee lineage added an exotic flare to otherwise dull personal bios. Warren is that rare public figure who used such lore to career advantage.
Few Americans know the key role Warren played in the CFPB and that she still plays in the left’s infiltration of our financial system.
Had she been running in Oklahoma, her career might have been over. As it was, there were amusing follow-up pieces about “Faux-cahantas” and “Sacajahwarren.” Soon the media stamped the subject “old news.” It had dissipated when she took the stage in September 2012 at the Democratic National Convention.
The CFPB was Warren’s Brainchild
Warren’s role in the CFPB, however, starts earlier. In 2007, she wrote an article for the leftwing journal Democracy. In it, she laid out a proposal for what she called a Financial Product Safety Commission.
Of course, the financial industry was already covered with mountains of regulation. There were state audits, the FDIC, federal regulations (like Truth-in-Lending), Fair Credit Reporting, rules against discrimination, the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Office of Thrift Supervision. In the essay, she granted that some regulation already existed. But she insisted that these were weak reeds against the tsunami of industry lobbyists. Hence the need for a new, powerful, “independent” agency to police the financial world.
Warren didn’t just call for the government to protect us from fraud, which it already does. She called for the government to protect us from a financial crisis. This was odd, since her proposal had almost nothing to do with the causes of the 2007-08 meltdown. And yet, she wanted a unique agency to fill the space already occupied by dozens of local, state, and federal regulators. Businesses as diverse as college loan providers, credit card companies, collection agencies, mortgage lenders, installment lenders, payday lenders, and pawnshops would fall within its grasp.
Just three years later, the Dodd-Frank Act, which was supposed to prevent another financial crisis, created the CFPB. Warren had worked with others behind the scenes to make it happen.
Clearly the 2008 financial crisis didn’t require a new agency to police pawnshops in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The crisis, rather, was an opportunity to create one. What we got was an agency with unprecedented power and little oversight. More on that in my next piece.
Jay Richards is the Executive Editor of The Stream and author of the New York Times bestseller Infiltrated. Follow him on Twitter.
