Warren offers plan aimed at government corruption
NEW YORK — Elizabeth Warren has released a proposal aimed at government corruption, providing a detailed policy road map for a fight she says is at the core of her presidential campaign.
The Democratic senator from Massachusetts announced the plan Monday in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park, near the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Co., which caught fire in 1911, killing 140plus workers. Many of those deaths later were attributed to neglected safety features.
Warren’s plan would ban lobbyists from many fundraising activities and serving as political campaign bundlers (a political fundraiser who collects contributions from donors on behalf of a campaign), tighten limits on politicians accepting gifts or payment for government actions and bar senior officials and members of Congress from serving on forprofit boards.
It also would prohibit federal judges from avoiding misconduct investigations by leaving their posts, prevent courts from sealing settlements in public health and safety cases and ban classaction waivers for all cases involving employment, consumer protection, antitrust and civil rights.
“The Trump Administration is the most corrupt administration of our lifetimes,” Warren wrote in an online post announcing the plan. “But these problems did not start with Donald Trump. They are much bigger than him — and solving them will require big, structural change to fundamentally transform our government.”
Warren has long argued that the nation’s modern government works only for “the wealthy and the wellconnected” like big energy, health care and insurance companies that employ lobbyists to advance their priorities over the best interests of ordinary citizens.
She wrote that popular policies championed by the Democratic Party’s progressive wing — and many of its crowded field of presidential hopefuls — like universal child care, an overhaul of the federal criminal justice system, gun reform and plans to promote affordable housing have been “stymied because giant corporations and billionaires who don’t want to pay taxes or follow any rules use their money and influence to stand in the way.”
Warren’s campaign noted that she already proposed a series of anticorruption measures in Congress last year, but it says the proposal released Monday goes further.
Calls for drastically remaking the way government works are also a key theme for Warren’s presidential campaign competitor Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. But while Warren is seeking a remake of the system, Sanders has advocated for a full political revolution.
“Real change in America never takes place from the top down,” Sanders told a weekend rally in Las Vegas, a rallying cry he repeats frequently. “It takes place from the bottom up.”