Breaking News: Elizabeth Warren Made Money
On Sunday night, Politico reported that Senator Elizabeth Warren, formerly a lawyer, “made $1.9 million from corporate and financial legal work.” That’s it. That’s the headline.
What Politico failed to say—the context it declined to provide—proved perhaps more interesting. Warren earned the $1.9 million sum, which was disclosed amid a tit for tat with Mayor Pete Buttigieg, over the span of 24 years, between 1985 and 2009, making her earnings a lot more modest: the equivalent of about $79,200 per year. As a law professor at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, she consulted mostly on bankruptcy cases for corporate clients, including Bergner’s department store. Perhaps more controversially, Warren collected $20,000 from Dow Chemical, advising the conglomerate on breast-implant litigation against its subsidiary Dow Corning, and $77,000 from Rabobank, a creditor to Enron.
The New York Times notes that Warren’s disclosure also reveals that she “performed a considerable amount of free, or pro bono, legal work”—but no one will want to talk about that when there’s a high-earning female candidate audaciously seeking even more power to contend with!
Seriously, how dare Warren be as moneyed as the men who run for president routinely are? According to a Forbes estimate, Warren is worth around $12 million to Joe Biden’s $9 million and Bernie Sanders’s $2.5 million. Since his 2016 presidential run alone, Sanders has earned an estimated $1.6 million from three best-selling books, Forbes reports.
It’s a sum remarkably close to what Warren made in 33 years but naturally is far less talked about, because male candidates are simply expected to be wealthy—meet billionaires Mike Bloomberg and Tom Steyer—while people are unaccustomed to women with financial power. When a woman does triumph over a system that systematically pays her less than men, she is, of course, cast as highly suspect and possibly sinister. The implication that it is somehow hypocritical of Warren, who rails against income inequality, to make money of her own is not only sexist but dense: Warren isn’t advocating against Americans succeeding or earning millions of dollars. She’s just suggesting that those people—of which, yes, she is one—share the wealth.
As a 2020 candidate who denounces big-money donations and rails against corporate greed, Warren may indeed have to explain her stickier past clients to some voters. But, incidentally, so might Buttigieg, who has his own corporate past to contend with—three years as a consultant at the elite firm McKinsey & Co. Both Warren and Buttigieg have recently needled each other to be transparent about their previous earnings and clients. Warren has now done so, while Buttigieg has not, citing a nondisclosure agreement with McKinsey that he says he has requested to be released from. In the little he has said about his stint at McKinsey, Buttigieg has painted a wonky picture, referencing the power of big data. But as ProPublica and the Times co-reported last week, McKinsey advised the Trump administration on the logistics of its immigration crackdown. And its clients have included brutal and corrupt authoritarian governments and state-owned enterprises, including in China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. Buttigieg’s silence, the Times editorial board wrote last week, “is not a tenable situation.”
One can know this much about Buttigieg’s time at McKinsey: According to his tax returns, he earned $136,129 of taxable income in 2009 alone at the firm—nearly double the estimated average $79,200 Warren made each year in her 24 years of legal consulting. What, no headline blaring this dollar amount? Funnily enough, it was almost a year ago that Politico published another infamous Warren story—one that characterized her as nebulously unlikeable and likening her to Hillary Clinton—titled “Warren battles the ghosts of Hillary.” One of those ghosts clearly still remains: media bias.
Originally Appeared on Vogue
