This is a catastrophic situation for America - we have been reduced to a plutocracy ruled by oligarchs.Īs Senator Warren points out in her book, challenging the banking industry and the lobbyists that represent them is a very difficult and unending task, particularly since much of the regulatory framework that kept them in check has been dismantled (beginning in the early 1980's during the Reagan Administration). The vast majority of our legislators have largely sold themselves out to financial, industrial and political firms and institutions in return for campaign finance contributions. The bad news is that Senator Warren is one of only a handful of legislators in the US Congress willing to advocate on behalf of ordinary American citizens and she's now in her sixties. Now, as the Senior Senator from Massachusetts and as the Chair of the Senate Banking Committee, Warren is in the right place to effect positive change for the Nation. In this passionate, funny, rabble-rousing book, Warren shows why she has chosen to fight tooth and nail for the middle class-and why she has become a hero to all those who believe that America's government can and must do better for working families.īatman, Spiderman and Superman all rolled in to one.Īn indefatigable advocate for the ordinary American citizen, Senator Elizabeth Warren is the poster child for the incorruptible government official. Finally, at age 62, she decided to run for elective office and won the most competitive-and watched-Senate race in the country. She came up with the idea for a new agency designed to protect consumers from predatory bankers and was denied the opportunity to run it. She tried to hold the federal government accountable during the financial crisis but became a target of the big banks.

She fought for better bankruptcy laws for ten years and lost. Thus began an impolite education into the bare-knuckled, often dysfunctional ways of Washington.

Then came the phone call that changed her life: could she come to Washington DC to help advise Congress on rewriting the bankruptcy laws? Early marriage and motherhood seemed to put even that dream out of reach, but fifteen years later she was a distinguished law professor with a deep understanding of why people go bankrupt. An unlikely political star tells the inspiring story of the two-decade journey that taught her how Washington really works-and really doesn't-in A Fighting ChanceĪs a child in small-town Oklahoma, Elizabeth Warren yearned to go to college and then become an elementary school teacher-an ambitious goal, given her family's modest means.

A Fighting Chance by Elizabeth Warren