Elizabeth Warren.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW - Interview

Elizabeth Warren, the government's watchdog on the massive bank bailout, is a hero to critics of the financial industry. A professor at Harvard Law School and an expert on bankruptcy, she chairs the Congressional Oversight Panel, which oversees the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Many people on Wall Street despise her. One bank lobbyist denounced her panel because in its early findings it brought up outlandish ideas like nationalizing or liquidating the banks.

As a scholar, a member of the commission that criticized the 2005 bankruptcy bill, and an author of popular books, Warren has been speaking out for ordinary Americans' financial interests in her academic work, as well as on Dr. Phil and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart . In her 2003 book, The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke , co-authored with her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi, Warren presciently warned about the systemic dangers of predatory lenders. Rebutting what she called "the myth of the immoral debtor," she placed blame squarely on the bankers.

Warren is an expert on the complex investment practices that led to the recent financial collapse. But she also speaks clearly and forcefully on this simple truth: The banks are not our friends. She points to high interest rates, hidden fees, and other nasty surprises lurking in the fine print of consumers' mortgage agreements and credit card contracts.

Warren is also an unusual figure in Washington because, as one colleague put it, "she doesn't want anything." As an outsider who prefers to remain in academia, she has no ambition to win appointments or elections or join the permanent power structure. So, she is uniquely positioned to stand up to Wall Street and to critique the Obama Administration, Congress, and the Treasury.

Recently, the President and Democrats in Congress have taken up Warren's big idea: a Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

On the morning we speak, a front-page article in The New York Times detailed a new bank scheme: pay-in-advance debit cards. Banks offer these cards specifically to low-income people and those who don't have bank accounts as an easy way to access money without carrying around wads of cash. The only catch is that the banks charge huge fees and penalties, eating up much of the cash consumers put on the cards.

Does this sort of thing make Warren angry, I ask, or is she used to it by now?

"I will never get used to it," she says. "Every single day that goes by I read another news report about why we need a consumer agency with real teeth. There is not a single day that goes by that I don't read at least one story somewhere--in The New York Times , in The Boston Globe , in The Wall Street Journal , online about how large financial institutions have figured out ways to lie to people, to squeeze them for money, to make profits by tricking and trapping people rather than by offering a better product. So...