US to stick in crisis until new economic paradigm is found – Jesse Jackson
Racial, social and economic justice must prevail in the US’ priorities today, says one of America's leading civil rights activists Reverend Jesse Jackson.
He says economic polarization between the very wealthy, the middle class and the poor continues to grow, therefore there must be some restructuring of the American economy.Unnecessary wars policing the world and bailing out those “too big to fall”, instead of spending money on social programs pushes America to moral and spiritual bankruptcy, believes Jackson, adding there must be a “direct intervention” to return to the people the ability to buy health insurance, pay the rent and decrease the number of those 41 million Americans who are currently living on food stamps.The great hype about security led the US to chase the wrong objectives, he believes. Neither the money pumped into America’s recent wars, nor the lives of the US citizens lost in them, can ever be recalled, Jackson said. “We were led by President George W. Bush into Iraq chasing the wrong target.”Jesse Jackson stressed that the racial discrimination towards Afro-Americans is deeply enrooted in the US. Afro-Americans hold leading positions in unemployment rate, mortality, short life expectancy and in home foreclosures. Also, Jackson said, “Blacks are over half of the nation’s prisoners.”The first Afro-American president Barack Obama should “target the zones of need”.“If you have [your] left foot in pain, you would not address to your right hand – you would address to the left foot.”Jesse Jackson believes that over the last two years of Obama’s presidency, America has lost a lot because of the aid schemes focused on banks which had created the crisis but are not going to pay the price for that.“We have lost access to the capital, industry and technology. Urban America has been decimated.”Jesse Jackson also noted that the US does not have any program of developing cooperation with its Spanish-speaking neighbors, like Mexico.“There must be a comprehensive hemispheric economic plan so we both [US and Mexico] can grow.”It is still hard to tell how much time it will take for America to fully recover from the crisis it has been in because the US is “still digging the hole”.The big military budget and huge expenditure in Iraq and Afghanistan is a “step in a wrong direction.” Giving tax holidays to the wealthy is no good for the American economy because they do not reinvest at home, bailing out banks does not do any good either because they are not lending.“I do not know how long it will take, but I do know that we all have a shared interest in a new paradigm for a balanced economic growth,” Jackson said.
