Melinda Tuhus
Willie Darden and Jesse Jackson at Darden’s home in Newhallville Saturday.
A national civil rights leader showed up on Willie Darden’s porch to make a point about Newhallville – and about what the country needs.
The leader, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, brought some people with him to Darden’s house: Attendees at a rally for “economic reconstruction.”
Darden’s predicament – facing foreclosure, seeking a loan modification – put a human face on the clarion call Jackson carried with him to the New Haven rally Saturday.
The rally was held at Rev. Boise Kimber’s First Calvary Baptist Church on Dixwell Avenue in Newhallville. Jackson fired up the crowd with talk about the foreclosure crisis, bank bailouts, and a Wall Street Economic Summit that his Rainow PUSH Coalition is holding in New York this week. The event reflected growing grassroots opposition in the country over bank bailouts and continued economic pain for working-class and middle-class families in the recession.
Jackson spoke to the crowd of up to 100 people of how the federal government gave bankers a $750 billion government bailout “without linkage to reinvestment, without linkage to restructuring. What we did was refortify them; we bailed them out as they were.” He contrasted that with the restructuring that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt crafted during the Great Depression, including the Glass-Steagall Act, which prohibited a bank holding company from owning other financial companies. That act was repealed in 1999. Many analysts believe that helped pave the way for the financial free-for-all that almost brought down the economy in the fall of 2008.
Jackson spoke of how the civil rights movement democratized society and helped spur other movements to democratize it even more. “Now the challenge,” he said, “is to democratize capital.We say the banks are ‘too big to fail.’ They were too big to operate inside the law. No one is too big to operate outside the law. If they operate outside the law, that means they can use their power to change the law.” He said the job of Congress is to be the overseer, “to protect us from ‘bankster’ domination. But we see that political leaders started getting deals from banks; they start using their power to protect banks.”
Jackson also emphasized that if one home on a street is foreclosed upon and is not kept up, that affects the value of all the surrounding homes.
Toward the end of his talk, he told his listeners that during the Wall Street action “we hope there’ll be some focus on the need to begin to again involve the people in mass street action, that’s disciplined, to bring about mass change.” That obvious applause line fell in total silence.
After the program at the church ended, Jackson and Kimber – deciding it was too cold to ask people to walk – drove with some supporters two blocks to Willie Darden’s house on Thompson Street. Darden explained that he inherited the house from his dad, who passed away in October 2007. He was unemployed at the time, and couldn’t keep up with the payments. So his lender, Bank of America, sent a letter saying they could foreclose at any time. The bank put him on a forbearance plan, on which he’s been paying for the past six months. “After six months they still haven’t found a modification plan they say I qualify for,” he said.
At that point Jackson handed reporters a copy of a New York Times article showing that Bank of America held just over a million home loans eligible for modification but had made only 98 permanent modifications – or less than one out of a thousand.
Darden said he plans to attend the Jan. 13 – 15 Wall Street Economic Summit. “I would like clarification, because there’s a lot of gray areas in what they say,” he said. “I get a different dialogue from each representative I speak to. I would like some help, not only for myself but for other people that are in the same predicament I am.”