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Elizabeth Warren Addresses the Savio Memorial Lecture at UC Berkeley

By Gar Smith
Tuesday November 02, 2010 - 12:57:00 PM

The 14th annual Mario Savio Memorial Lecture () drew a huge crowd to UC Berkeley's Pauley Ballroom on Thursday, October 28. The event honors the memory and legacy of a remarkable student leader whose presence and passion became synonymous with the favor of the Free Speech Movement, which rocked the Berkeley campus in 1964. The unprecedented student sit-in and occupation of Sproul Hall — and the mass-arrest that followed — reverberated across the country challenging the established order of the Eisenhower years and triggering the social ferment that became known as "The Sixties." (For details, see the FSM Archives .) 

Each year, The Savio Lecture honors outstanding individuals with a Young Activist Award. This years awards went to Reyna Wences and Rigo Padilla, two students who risked their academic careers — and their freedom — by publicly announcing that they are undocumented. The two students are leaders of the Youth Justice League , an organization created to advocate for the rights of undocumented students in the US.  

The winners of the Young Activist honors receive an award of $6,000, which is split evenly between the activists and their organization. And there was something new about this year's prize: Mario's widow, Lynne Hollander, announced that the award money had been donated by the band Linkin Park. The reason? Llinkin Park's new album ("A Thousand Suns," released in September) includes a song that features a sampling of Mario's famous Sproul Steps Speech:  

"...There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus — and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at al!!

The event's keynote speaker was Elizabeth Warren, President Barack Obama's designated honcha for the Administration's new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Ms. Warren follows a long line of exceptional speakers that have included Seymour Hersh, Molly Ivins, Christopher Hitchens, Amy Goodman, Howard Zinn, Winona LaDuke, Robert Kennedy Jr., and Naomi Klein. Warren proved to be every inch a fighter and earned a boisterous ovation from a full house of students, grads and aging off-campus agitators. 

Railing against the indecipherable fine print intentionally designed to trick and entrap consumers, Warren declared: "The notion that people can be mugged by a contract infuriates me!" She went beyond outrage to promise strong, new regulations that would guarantee "a simple contract that can be read and understood." 

Fulminating against lending practices that are designed to blow up in peoples' faces — and lenders that subsequently blame borrowers for making unwise financial decisions, Warren observed: "If toasters were exploding, we wouldn't say the problem was that the purchasers needed to get better engineering degrees!" 

The question that appeared most frequently on the 60-plus 3-by-5 cards that were returned by the sold-out crowd was: "What can we do about usury laws?"  

Usury laws are ancient guidelines that set permissible limits to the amount of interest that can be demanded by lenders. The Old Testament was clear: "If you lend money to any of My people who are poor among you, you shall not be like a moneylender to him; you shall not charge him interest." But the Holy Writ did provide that interest could be exacted from strangers.  

In the days of Babylon (circa 1760 BCE), the code of Hammurabi established a top ceiling of 20% for interest on a silver-based loan. That standard remained the respected norm for thousands of years.  

In her response, Warren referred to "the three major chapters" in the history of usury. "The first runs from the days of Hammurabi to 1981. It was at this point that usury was 'technically' ended in the US. It became a Wild West situation where, 'If you shot it and killed it, you could have it.' The second period runs from 1981 to 2010" and, Warren concluded, "the next chapter begins tomorrow." 

Warren vowed to reign in the unregulated greed of industries that have grown used to charging high-double-digit fees for the use of borrowed money. The audience responded with thunderous applause. 

Asked if the CFPB had a website, Warren replied, "it's funny you should ask that. We are working on that at this very moment. The trick is to build a website that has transparency but provides visitors with a sense of ownership but...." At this point, Warren stopped and started to laugh. Then she continued: "I was about to say 'it's not my decision to make' but then I realized — crap, it IS my decision!" 

Warren concluded with a pledge to move beyond the data and "pay attention to the human stories." She recalled her years as an academically trained data-cruncher and how her perspective changed one day as she worked on a pile of papers for a report on bankruptcies. She had taken a fistful of survey forms along to read on a plane trip. At the end of each survey was a blank page where participants were invited to write down any personal reflections. Warren was expected to "code" these individual statements — rendering their salient points into data-points suitable for expression in percentiles for charts and graphs. 

Instead, she recalled, she began reading the stories — personal tales of failure and anguish. Warren's voice began to tremble as she fought back tears. It was clear that she had not forgotten — and would never forget — the pain expressed by the people who had written down the details of collapsing dreams and lives sideswiped by financial predators.