Supporters of Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, one of the few senators to run unabashedly as a liberal, are seizing on what they see as a double standard by CNBC in invoking copyright requirements on the senator for posting a clip of her appearance on Squawk Box to her YouTube channel.
The network was able to compel her to remove the clip and link back to the CNBC.com website instead. It’s been pointed out that other senators have been able to the very thing that Warren did and never encountered copyright issues. The other senators run the complete political spectrum from liberals, moderates, conservatives, and even socialist Senator Bernie Sanders. So why target Warren? Obviously, politics has nothing to do with it. At least not Beltway politics. It’s the fact that Warren’s clip had gone viral and CNBC would prefer to see those hits coming back to their website. As the adage goes, it’s not personal, it’s business.
As for the clip itself, Warren makes a compelling case to bring back the Glass-Steagall Act which decade’s long statute prevented mixing bank deposits into speculative investments. It had stood since 1932. In 1999, the bill was formally revoked by President Bill Clinton which quickly gave rise to the Structured Investment Vehicle (SIV) which was a derivative product at the center of the 2008 financial crisis. Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL) warned the repeal would allow speculative abuses to threaten the financial system of the nation.
It should be noted that Warren’s recitation of the history of Glass-Steagall and the contributing factors of events leading up to the 2008 financial crisis curiously gave Clinton a pass.