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Leadershipmike huckabee

Mike Huckabee just called Washington and Wall Street a strip club

By
Benjamin Snyder
Benjamin Snyder
Managing Editor
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By
Benjamin Snyder
Benjamin Snyder
Managing Editor
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October 16, 2015, 1:15 PM ET
Presidential Candidates Gather At Western Conservative Summit In Denver
DENVER, CO - JUNE 27: Mike Huckabee speaks during the Western Conservative Summit at the Colorado Convention Center on June 27, 2015 in Denver, Colorado. The Western Conservative Summit attracts thousands of conservatives and a number of prominent politicians; this year the lineup includes Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, Carly Fiorina, Ben Carson, and Scott Walker. (Photo by Theo Stroomer/Getty Images)Photograph by Theo Stroomer — Getty Images
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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.

About the Author
By Benjamin SnyderManaging Editor
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Benjamin Snyder is Fortune's managing editor, leading operations for the newsroom.

Prior to rejoining Fortune, he was a managing editor at Business Insider and has worked as an editor for Bloomberg, LinkedIn and CNBC, covering leadership stories, sports business, careers and business news. He started his career as a breaking news reporter at Fortune in 2014.

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