Mike Huckabee may have once been a Baptist preacher, but there’s nothing godly about his recent comments slamming Washington and Wall Street.
In an interview with CNBC, the 2016 presidential hopeful and former Arkansas governor for the GOP compared Wall Street to a strip club. He believes those who work there caused the middle and working class to suffer during the financial crisis and subsequent recession—and he wasn’t afraid to lash out.
“Money, politics — that’s what I say,” he said in the interview. “Washington is like a strip club. You got people tossing dollars, and people doing the dance. But while the Washington-Wall Street strip club’s going on, you got people out there in the middle of the country and all over America who are losing their homes, losing their jobs and wondering: ‘How the heck doesn’t somebody stand up and do something about it?'”
Notably, Huckabee, who was near the top of the pack for a time in 2008, is garnering just 2.7% of the national polls this time around.
He continued his impassioned discussion of the issues between Wall Street and Main Street: “If the same kind of shell game had been practiced on the street, do you think the cops in the bunco division wouldn’t have gone down and busted ’em?” he said. “Does anybody ever accept responsibility for the fact that 60,000 manufacturing plants have closed in this country, 5 million manufacturing jobs have disappeared since the year 2000?
Huckabee continued: “Every day I meet people … who are today working two and three part-time jobs, and make less money than they used to make when they had one full-time job that paid ’em benefits and had a pension.”
And he didn’t hold back when asked whether executives should have been imprisoned for their part in the crisis. “Absolutely they should have,” he said to CNBC. “These were the smartest people in the room. These were the people that were supposed to be the geniuses. These were all Ivy Leaguers, and they knew darn well what they were doing — shuffling paper around and getting paid ridiculous sums of money.
For more on Huckabee, Fortune debunked his economic growth plan earlier this year.
