Friday, October 02, 2015

Elizabeth Warren is as Despicable as She is Corrupt: Phony “Injun” Senator Scalps 40-Year-Long, Respected Brookings Institution Economist Just for Disagreeing with Her

 

Fauxcahontas: Warren’s academic and political careers are based entirely on fraud. She got her job as a tenured professor at Harvard, based on lying, in claiming to be part Indian, and leveraged the Harvard professorship into a seat in the U.S. Senate. Note that fraud such as she committed is a crime, although the statute of limitations has probably run out. Now, she further abuses her misbegotten power into getting an honest man fired. “A pol of Native American heritage has taken a scalp in the form of a respected economist from a respected think tank.” [The caption obviously contradicts the story. Reporters are not responsible for captions.]
 

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix

I hope Warren's victim sues both her and Brookings.
 

A Black Mark for the Brookings Institution
6:49 P.M. ET
Investor’s Business Daily

First Amendment: When Sen. Liz Warren says "Jump!" the Brookings Institution says "How high?" How else to explain the think tank's firing of a top economist because his writing was at odds with her leftist agenda?

Confronted by a Massachusetts politician with a history of fast-buck house-flipping, undisclosed clients and a whopper of a claim to American Indian heritage to benefit from affirmative action at Harvard University, the storied center-left Brookings Institution shouldn't have given Sen. Elizabeth Warren the time of day when she attacked one of its top economists.

But all it took was one letter from the powerful pol complaining of a minor technical rules breach by Robert Litan in a paper presented to the Senate. In it, Litan warned about how proposed Labor Department regulations would force consumers to use automated phone systems instead of live financial advisors.
And boom! His four decades of affiliation with Brookings were over.

Warren had his scalp just hours after sending a letter complaining that a paper he presented to Congress had been financed by the Capital Group mutual fund, which proved that he had been "bought."

It was a disgusting accusation, given Litan's sterling reputation for economic expertise and full disclosure. Brookings secured his resignation based on a rule that he hadn't even been told about — that research paid for by others could not mention the Brookings affiliation.

The de facto firing was a huge insult to someone who helped make Brookings a prestigious think tank since 1974. "He's a first-class scholar, very productive," said Johns Hopkins University economics professor Steve Hanke, who has known Litan for 40 years.

The real issue, according to five top Democratic economists who wrote an angry letter to Brookings, was that Warren's meddling and Brookings' complicity with it "threatens ad hominem attacks on any author who may be associated with an industry or interest whose views are contrary to hers."

If Brookings had any self-respect, it would ask Warren to write "a substantive rebuttal to the paper in question," rather than just attack the man's sponsorship, the economists added.

The bottom line here is Warren's using her power to interfere. Brookings' whimper amounts to what author Jonah Goldberg calls liberal fascism — the stifling of dissent through technicalities, legalisms and Alinskyite personal attacks instead of arguments based on ideas.

"If you like excessive government regulations and don't like entrepreneurship and innovation, then Litan is not your kind of economist," Hanke noted.
This was petty, faculty-lounge backbiting politics but with the real teeth of power politics.

And it raises questions about free thought, the First Amendment and academic freedom. Brookings should be at the forefront of all that. Instead, it's taking orders from a would-be commissar.

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