© Jonathan Ernst / ReutersU.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren
radio host Jeff Kuhner caught up with Warren the other day and recorded his brief encounter, during which he asked the Massachusetts senator an easy question.
"You often say, and I agree with you, that the 99 percent are getting shafted by the 1 percent," Kuhner told Warren as she shook her head in agreement. "Let me ask you this. A lot of people, especially my listeners, say you live in Cambridge. You have a $2 million mansion, plus you're a multi-millionaire yourself. So how can you rail against the 1 percent, when you are and live like the 1 percent?"
The senator launched into a oral history of her family and the "opportunities" that landed her in the upper-upper class.
"I wasn't born in Cambridge," Warren said, "I was born into a family where my daddy worked one job after another and ended up as a janitor."
Her mother worked for minimum wage, and her brothers were in the military, and she wanted to be a school teacher and didn't even have money to pay for the college application, she said. Eventually she graduated from a "commuter college that cost $50 a semester" to become a special needs teacher. After that, she was a mom and attended a state law school, Warren said,
avoiding Kuhner's original question."But you are part of the 1 percent?" the radio host persisted. "You are a multi-millionare and have a mansion in Cambridge, do you not? It's worth north of $2 million."
Comment: According to a recent analysis from Moscow-based consultancy Awara, the Russian economy is looking rosy, as the US and NATO campaign against Russia has failed to do much damage. The punchline of the report: "We predict Russia to push through the 4 trillion level in 2017 and overtake Germany by 2018 to become the world's fifth biggest economy."