Warren Formally Announces Presidential Bid

Speaking on a clear, chilly day against the background of the old red brick mill buildings at the site of one of the nation’s most famous labor strikes, she said workers now, like workers then, had had enough. She said that replacing Trump, whose administration she called “the most corrupt in living memory,” was only the first step in fighting back against a system tilted in favor of the wealthy.

“It won’t be enough to just undo the terrible acts of this administration,” Warren said. “We can’t afford to just tinker around the edges — a tax credit here, a regulation there. Our fight is for big, structural change.”

The selection of Lawrence was symbolic: It was the site, in 1912, of a historic labor strike started by a group of women at Everett Mill, where Warren made her announcement.

Warren drew on the strike as a story of women, many of them immigrants, taking on a stacked system and triumphing by gaining raises, overtime, and other benefits. She described the U.S. economy as similarly tilted against the middle class, with wealth and political power concentrated at the top.

“Today, millions and millions and millions of American families are also struggling to survive in a system that’s been rigged, rigged by the wealthy and the well-connected,” Warren said.

Warren described her own journey, growing up as the daughter of a janitor and going on to become a law professor and a senator. As a scholar of bankruptcy law, she explained, she had studied how the opportunities she was afforded had narrowed in recent decades, as the rich became richer and the middle class was squeezed.

Warren touted proposals aimed at diminishing the financial industry’s power in Washington and cited her proposed wealth tax, which she dubbed an “Ultra-Millionaire Tax.”

Warren also received two important endorsements Saturday, from the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, and from Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy III of Massachusetts, her former law student, who introduced her here.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.