Trib's idolatry of Chase inner city investment no cure for Chicago's poverty

Trib's idolatry of Chase inner city investment no cure for Chicago's poverty

The Trib's editorial 'How Chase seeks to seed prosperity on Chicago's South and West sides' see's enlightened capitalism as the cure for 300 years of slavery, white supremacy following Emancipation and institutional racism which keeps large pockets of poverty, crime and despair entrenched for hundreds of thousands on Chicago's South and West sides. Those governmental policies appear nowhere in the Trib's view which they posit is caused solely by "disinvestment - the void as risk-takers in the private sector took their dollars elsewhere." What nonsense...those risk takers were never there in the first place. As minorities moved into established neighborhoods, every bank, with government encouragement, 'red lined' the South and West sides, forcing middle class whites to flee where they were allowed to invest, dooming their new inhabitants to the hopelessness that has become intractable.

Then along comes JPMorgan Chase, investing a paltry $40 million over three years and voila, prosperity is just around the corner. Why paltry? Chase made $27 billion last year so their investment amounts to a little over 0.1% of net profits. And what have those vast wastelands of poverty received? 37 small business loans, 176 mixed income housing units preserved and a college offering associate nursing degrees. While each of those actions is helpful to a few, the overall impact is infinitesimally inadequate for rebuilding the South and West sides. The editorial amounts to a commercial for Chase and its capitalist banking brothers. By glaring omission the Trib is in utter denial of governmental policy which created America's ghettos and which has the only means of eliminating them, not with a paltry $40 million, but with hundreds of billions currently being squandered on criminal wars and tax cuts to the greedy rich. Billionaire Chase CEO Jamie Diamond is no dummy. Throw $40 million at Chicago's impoverished neighborhoods and get $40 million worth of good press that worships the banking industry even after they crashed the housing market, and nearly the entire economy, a decade ago.