I wrote another op-ed for Big Government. This time it was about Jesse Jackson and his speech before Claremont McKenna. Here's a selection from it.
Naturally, Jackson ignored his own role in housing crisis. That he made his argument against banks at one of the schools that produces the most investment bankers in the country did not go unnoticed – however. Those hoping to listen to watch his entire speech can watch it here.
Jackson decried the “biggest shift of wealth in American history in the last 9 months.” He assailed Obama’s so-called spending freeze. “We’ll freeze the rich in their wealth and the poor in their poverty. . . . Freeze? They have already frozen modifications of home foreclosures.” And he applauded Roosevelt’s “direct investment in the poor” and for “breaking up their ability to be indifferent to the poor.” “Banks serve at the privilege of the state and their mission is to lend and invest,” he said, not presumably to get paid back.
Of course much of the speech sounded like the usual socialist rhetoric, which he claimed Martin Luther King Jr. was trying to “take us there” – wherever there is.
Some of my favorites of these sorts were:
- “Today, too few got too much”;
- “The wealthy are wealthy not because they are working hard, not because they are smart, but because there is simply a shift of wealth from working class people to the rich.”
- The first step [to ending poverty] at home is to enforce the law. Some of the poverty is driven by unenforced civil rights law. If the banks were not allowed to circumvent fair lending laws and the community reinvestment act, to target communities on the basis of race. If they had had to honor Title 6 of the Equal Employment Act, contract compliance, affirmative action, we’d have a fairer distribution of resources.”
