Steve Jobs was a capitalist by any measure, having retaken control in 1997 of the company he co-founded in 1976, and remaking it into the technology giant it is today. According to CNBC’s Darren Rovell, if you had bought 100 shares of Apple stock (NASDAQ: APPL) on July 9, 1997 it would have cost you $342. Today, it’s worth roughly $37,900.
And though one day after may seem too soon to use his death to promote any sort of political agenda — particularly one that could be anti-capitalist, like the “Occupy Wall Street” protests currently going on around the country — Rainbow PUSH coalition founder and president Jesse Jackson did not think so.
In an appearance on MSNBC’s “Jansing & Co.” on Thursday, Jackson took time to offer his condolences to the Jobs family and added there are other things to remember him for beyond his personal computing legacy.
“Chris [Jansing], may I take a liberty and say our hearts go out for the Jobs family,” Jackson said. “I knew Steve over a period of time — not as a technical computer genius, but also he had an acute sense of social justice and a peace warrior. So, he was a well-rounded guy, not just a computer genius we talk about today.”
However after being prodded by host Chris Jansing, Jackson said Jobs would have supported the “Occupy Wall Street” movement and listed several things that, in his mind, the movement is attempting to accomplish.
“Well, no doubt about it,” Jackson said. “He had the sense — this idea of making computers available for the common people. He was kind of the people’s people. As for the Wall Street protests, you are looking at the reaction of the abuses of Wall Street power extremes.”
“Student loan debt,” he continued, “is bigger than credit card debt, so many youth cannot afford to go to school or they cannot stay in school. The graduates, they are without a guaranteed job and a low credit score … If we were to forgive student loan debt, it would be a big stimulus to take the economy forward. That is an issue.”
“Secondly, [when you] bail out the banks, not link the lending of reinvestment, the result is that they keep investing. They are not lending and the home market continues to fall. There is a substantive legitimacy behind the abuse of bank power.”
Watch: