Marcy Kaptur.

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

Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, from Ohio's Ninth Congressional District, is serving her fourteenth term in the U.S. House of Representatives. She's the senior-most woman in Congress.

An old-style economic populist, Kaptur combines a warm, down-to-earth manner with a sharpness that leaves her unintimidated by the so-called financial experts who testify before her on the Budget and Appropriations committees.

An early opponent of NAFTA, she was among the first members of Congress to speak out against the Wall Street bailout.

"I'm the one who gave the speeches in Congress urging people to squat in their properties" after the banks began trying to foreclose her constituents' homes, she says.

Kaptur grew up in Toledo, the daughter of working-class Polish American parents. Her father owned a small grocery store, and her mother helped organize a union at the Champion Spark Plug Company. Kaptur was the first member of her family to go to college. She studied city and regional planning and worked in that profession for fifteen years before President Carter appointed her urban adviser to the White House.

She first ran for her U.S. House seat in 1982 and was outspent 3-to-1 by her opponent, but won an upset victory by talking about her blue-collar constituents' economic struggles.

I caught up with Kaptur at The Progressive 's 100th anniversary celebration in Madison, Wisconsin.

She called my cellphone as she was running back from the farmers' market with her colleague, Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin. "I'll be right there, dear," she said in her Midwestern twang. We talked over coffee in the lobby of the downtown Hilton Hotel before she addressed the conference.

Her speech focused on economic justice--and the injustice of the bank bailout.

"Congress embraces far too many emissaries of privilege and too few progressive voices," Kaptur said. "We face the largest financial fraud in our history perpetrated by the most economically powerful."

She described her colleagues on Capitol Hill as "largely mute and ineffectual." "Ask yourself why there aren't full investigative hearings in Congress using subpoena powers?" she said. "The silence is shocking, month to month, as unemployment rates rise and foreclosures escalate."

Q: You are telling your constituents who are foreclosed to stay in their homes.

Marcy Kaptur : Absolutely. Because possession is nine-tenths of the law. Most people when they get a notice from the bank, they get so scared that they walk away from their properties. So what I said was to squat. I said, "You stay in your homes. You get legal representation. And you force the lender to produce the note," which they can't do. So if they really end up in court, what they find is that a lot of these big banks are no-shows. They don't even come to the proceeding. Because they have sold...