Rep. Katie Porter on how capitalism is failing | Ezra Klein Show

Subscribe to the Ezra Klein Show: bit.ly/2oiIsle
Katie Porter is the Rep.-elect from California’s 45th District, which happens to be the district I grew up in. She’s part of the brigade of Democrats who turned Orange County blue for the first time since the Great Depression. But that’s not why I asked her on the show. I asked her on the show because she’s one of the most interesting members of the incoming House majority.
Porter grew up on an Iowa farm, watching the debt crises of the ’80s devastate her family and her region. At Harvard Law, she took the class of a particularly charismatic professor whom you might have heard of: Elizabeth Warren. That class changed Porter’s life.
Porter’s academic work explores how rarely markets work the way they’re supposed to, and how often banks and other lenders play by different rules than the law says they need to. In 2012, then-state Attorney General Kamala Harris appointed Porter to be California’s independent monitor of banks, where she saw the lengths they went to to avoid abiding by the settlements they’d signed.
In this conversation, Porter and I talk about how all this informed her path to Congress, why she thinks Americans are losing faith in capitalism, whether the Obama administration failed homeowners in the aftermath of the subprime mortgage collapse, and why lenders are always making you fax them documents (the answer is, honestly, infuriating).
I know, I know, interviews with politicians are often a bit bland. Trust me. This isn’t one of those.
Recommended books:
Evicted by Matthew Desmond
www.amazon.com...
Denial by Jessica Stern
www.amazon.com...
Lonesome Dove Larry McMurtry
www.amazon.com...
Notes from our sponsors:
LEGO: In today's show you heard advertising content from The LEGO Store. With LEGO, every gift has a story. Start your story today at LEGO.build/EKS...
Ezra Klein gives you a chance to get inside the heads of the newsmakers and power players in politics and media. These are extended conversations with policymakers, writers, technologists, and business leaders about what they believe in and why.
Subscribe and listen on all of your favorite podcast platforms:
Apple Podcasts: itunes.apple.c...
Art19: art19.com/show...
Stitcher: www.stitcher.c...
Spotify: open.spotify.c...