Van Jones, the president’s controversial former green jobs czar, must have been struck by lightning yesterday en route to taping ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”
Discussing President Obama’s new “My Brother’s Keeper” program to “build pathways to success” for at-risk “children of color,” Van Jones embraced a notion of corporate personhood far beyond anything previously expressed . . . well, by anyone.
First, Jones advanced the new Obama initiative as just another bailout: “Listen, everybody else . . . got in trouble in America. Wall Street got in trouble; we were there for them. The auto industry got in trouble; we were there for the auto industry. You got a whole generation of young kids who are clearly in trouble.”
A bailout isn’t a dad, though.
And functioning fathers are “essential,” argued Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald. Noting that fatherless kids are 20 times more likely to go to prison and nine times more likely to drop out of school, she applauded the president’s statement that “nothing keeps a young man out of trouble like a father who takes an active role in his son’s life.”
MacDonald also highlighted that a whopping 73 percent of black children are now born to single mothers, and that three decades of social programs “haven’t made much difference.”
“Do you think you need anybody to tell us how terrible this is?” Van Jones, who is black, pointedly asked Mac Donald. “We work on it every day. We need corporate America to step up.”
Jones wants corporations to be fathers to our children? That’s taking personhood for corporations too far.
And asking too little of men.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.