But, Elizabeth Warren is the problem she's allegedly supposed to fix:
"With all that on her plate, you might expect Warren to shy away from tough and slightly controversial questions, but that's just not her style. When asked if she thought we'd be in the financial mess we're in if more women had a seat at the decision-making tables on Wall Street, she didn't hesitate. 'I think if more women had had seats at the table, we just would not have had a crisis like this,' the Harvard law professor told me during an interview inside one of the War Rooms at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building across from the White House.
Warren cites two big differences between women and men. Women are 'especially good' at fighting on behalf of others and are often outsiders, she says. "The outsider status was missing," says Warren. "There were a bunch of insiders talking to insiders and that's how they ended up blowing up the economic world.
'So my view on this is I want to see a lot of women get involved, a lot of women,' Warren continues. Amen to that."
It's not that we should abolish Wall Street and chase the bankers and traders into the drink, where they can hang out with Shakespeare's lawyers. It's not that Wall Street is a place and a culture where life and livelihood are traded and degraded, to the emolument of the capitalist class. It's not that Wall Street and market practices are by their very operation predatory...
...It's that if there were more female essences there, bad things would never have happened.
C'mon now...
And before I get the same damned cut and paste replies - pointing out the flaws of liberalism, capitalism, capitalist liberal feminism or feminist essentialism does not mean that I hate the wimmins, think all is well and hunky dory, that women should be content with whatever jobs men don't want - or that leftists, anarchists and Marxists have a wicked good awesome record with regard to the liberation of women, gender roles, bias and/or sexism.
Crow's Eye: Maintaining a commitment to Pointless Acrimony™ and Hate Filled Invective™! Also available in corvid mischief and traditional sly dog's mistrust.
11 comments:
Women are 'especially good' at fighting on behalf of others and are often outsiders, she says.
Condi Rice was especially good at fighting on behalf of all those poor Iraqi women that hadn't yet had the opportunity to be killed by American imperialism.
For what? Although there is the advantage that Warren hasn't shaved her head, like a Goldman Sachs executive, and is not obviously insane.
More on the "women on Wall Street" issue here and here.
Once upon a time, I heard a gay man discourse on "the beard," a woman taken as a date for the purpose of setting up an image of heterosexuality.
Elizabeth Warren is the beard for the gay man of status quo consumerist-materialist-capitalism.
She serves the same role that Barack Obama serves as Our First Black POTUS.
Nifty symbolic victories are swell stuff when you're rich and pampered yourself, and don't need to sweat a paycheck to paycheck existence. You can satisfy yourself with the Image of Holism. Don't forget to use the right buzz-phrases to show Progressive Credibility.**
__________________
**See Digby for examples.
Fish,
Good point. I don't want to give the impression that men and women have strictly identical mental, moral or emotional templates, all the same. I just have a real problem with the argument that "if only women [insert thing men fucked up] did it, such and such would not have happened." It's offensive first and foremost to women, because it necessarily if subtly recasts them in the role of perpetual-mother-to-adolescent males, counting on them to fulfill the task of cleaning up after men. It, like all essentialism, is fundamentally sexist, regardless of the gender of the person making it.
Charles,
I was going to angle that way, but the other thing irked me enough to monopolize my focus. Good call. Warren has the ability to relabel the dog food while still complaining about the cat food she's working hard to keep off the table.
Lambert,
Title somewhat personal, I know. But, I know Warren's been boosted over Corrente way, and this is precisely the sort of person over which we necessarily must disagree. Warren's a distraction from the core class tensions. She's there to insure the rich, not the working class or that chimaera, the "middle class." Warren's a capitalist, with capitalist concerns. That's why her "bold" expression of a tired gender essentialism is so important to note. It's part and parcel of broader set of assumptions about human interaction, human exchange and the future we're all about to inherit.
Respect,
Jack
I just *knew* you'd leave out the capitalist feminist Marxists. Bastard.
I'm always amazed that people still take gender essentialist political rhetoric like this seriously in a post-Thatcher, post-Condoleeza Rice world with Hillary Clinton in charge of US foreign policy.
Where's all that peace, love and understanding we were promised?
This kind of pouty bullshit is a major feature of the pwoggiesphere. Examples:
'If Al Gore were president we'd never have had occupied Afghanistan/Hurricane Katrina/Paris Hilton/etc.'
'If Hillary were president she'd have closed Gitmo by now.'
'If Howard "the Duck" Dean were DNC head we'd never have lost the House.'
Ad nauseam.
If women ran the shadow guvermint, we'd have free medikals and nap time.
"Warren cites two big differences between women and men. Women are 'especially good' at fighting on behalf of others and are often outsiders, she says.
"The outsider status was missing," says Warren. "There were a bunch of insiders talking to insiders and that's how they ended up blowing up the economic world.
'So my view on this is I want to see a lot of women get involved, a lot of women,' Warren continues. Amen to that.""
oh yeah, you mean like Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina??
or, maybe Jan Brewer?
this nonsense is what you get when feminism sterilizes itself by separating itself from any racial and class consciousness
here's another one: Claire McCaskill:
http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2010/11/18/ron-paul-introduces-american-traveler-dignity-act-encourages-tsa-opt-out-day/
Argh, Richard.
The sad thing is part of me sort of wants the narrative to have some merit.
But, it really just doesn't hold water.
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