I was considering possibly to vote for Senator Elizabeth Warren in my state’s Democratic Presidential primary, until she made a blatant lie about her record.
On July 22nd, she issued an article, which opened with her saying “The Coming Economic Crash — And How to Stop It”. It opened with a brag about herself, “I warned about an economic crash years before the 2008 crisis.”
I clicked onto the link at the word “warned”, and checked each one of the sources that were cited there. Each one of them proved her allegation to be false.
Her allegation linked there to a PolitiFact article as confirmation, but the PolitiFact article cites only statements that Warren had made against bank corruption and rising consumer debt-levels. None of them actually predicted any economic collapse. Lots of people were complaining about bank corruption and rising debt levels, before the crash, but saying this is not saying that, or when, the economy itself was going to collapse. She wasn’t predicting in any of them that the stock market would collapse. She wasn’t predicting in any of them that — much less how — the U.S. economy would collapse. She wasn’t predicting in any of them that — or how — the global economy would collapse. The author of the PolitiFact piece had assumed that for a person to have to complained about high levels of debt and about bank-corruption causing it is equivalent to predicting that, and when, the economy would collapse. But that’s not true; it’s either a lie or stupid to allege that Warren’s assertion “I warned about an economic crash years before the 2008 crisis” was not a lie. Warren flat-out lied on July 22 by saying that she had predicted the 2008 economic collapse; she did not predict any collapse of the economy. Furthermore, even the latest one of her statements that the PolitiFact article had linked to which supposedly confirmed that Warren had, in fact, predicted the 2008 collapse, which was her January 2007 testimony to the U.S. Senate banking committee, did not use the word “recession.” It did not use the word “depression.” It did not use the word “collapse.” It did not use the word “economy.” It included no economic prediction at all. This is how blatant the either incompetency or lying by PolitiFact to confirm as “true” Warren’s lie was. Elizabeth Warren certainly lied there; and, to me, this makes her an untrustworthy person, no one whom any voter should trust. Everybody knows that Trump lies about himself. Sadly, so does Warren. And she here was lying in an especially important way about herself. If her statement had been true, then I would add her to the running list I keep of people who had predicted in advance the economic collapse. I have found, thus far, 32 people, who did predict it, by no later than January 2007, and who gave, as reasons for their prediction, two or more of the important reasons that, when the crash did actually come, had, in fact been part of the actual causal scenario of why it did crash. Rising consumer debt, and bank corruption, were among those important reasons, but, like I just said, many individuals were complaining about those while not predicting any economic crash, much less how soon it would happen. Elizabeth Warren turns out to have been such a person, and this is to her credit. But it doesn’t make her a gifted economic prognosticator, such as she now brags.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
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