There are people in this world who love to draw attention to themselves by point out pressing issues without offering credible solutions to solve these issues.  Princeton University Professor Cornel West is one of these individuals.  West, along with his PBS partner in crime, Tavis Smiley have been protesting the rising occurrence of poverty in American society.  They have denounced allegedly rapacious bankers and Wall Street investors, and even have timidly criticized Barack Obama for this sad situation..  However, West and Smiley are the latest in the long line of self-serving leftist blowhards who are more interested in self-promotion than actually contributing to constructive public debate.

West, or Brother West, as his drooling disciples call him has lived a charmed live in the creme de la creme at America's preeminent academic institutions.  He was a professor for many years at Harvard until the university's former President Larry Summers dismissed him for devoting to much time to his celebrity role as a "public intellectual" and not enough time to teaching and conducting work appropriate academic research.  The prolific West founded a soft landing waiting for him at Princeton University and took his golden parachute down the Atlantic seaboard. 

Since Princeton is a private university, it's not possible to find out how much West earns for his "services" to this institution.  However, it's safe to say he has a comfortable six figure income just from his salary and benefits.  Unfortunately, New Jersey does not provide unrestricted public access to local property tax records, like my state of Indiana does, but a commercial website lists the median house price for Princeton as being $442,675.  In addition, 2009 statistics from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey reveal that this community's median annual family income is $147,819.  Perhaps West lives in a gated community within Princeton with various kinds of restrictive covenants to keep non-liberal riff-raff away.  A January 2002 National Review critique of West revealed his lecture fee was $15,000 per appearance at the time.  I expect that inflationary upgrades and ego enhancements have increased that drastically over the last decade.

The recent rise in poverty is a cause for concern but West, Smiley, and others of the Occupy Wall Street cult are advocating the wrong answers.  You would think West would be familiar with the works of Edward Banfield, Charles Murray, and Marvin Olasky which have thoroughly documented the abysmal failure of Great Society antipoverty programs and the devastating damage they've caused Black families.  West and his acolytes should also consult government statistics put out by agencies as diverse as the Census Bureau, Federal Reserve Board, Government Accountability Office,  and Bureau of Labor Statistics to demonstrate the failure of government antipoverty programs and the acute financial situation our country faces due to personal and governmental financial profligacy.  Of course, factual reality is a concept beyond Cornel West's grasp, since he remains stuck in a Jim Crow time warp and conducts himself like a aging 60's radical who tries to be cool by embracing rap music and presenting a Shaft Goth couture image and persona for the 21st century world of instantaneous communication and media exposure.

It would be interesting to see West's recent itemized federal income tax returns.  There's a Pulitzer Prize waiting for any investigator who can find out what charitable contributions, if any, West has made.  Has he helped Habitat for Humanity or provided direct financial assistance to a New Jersey charter school like Facebook founder Marc Zuckerberg did?  West and Smiley should tell their followers and the Occupy Wall Street dregs to embrace individual personal moral responsibility, staying in school, planning for their future, and striving to better themselves personally and financially instead of blaming "the man", casting anti-Semitic slurs on financial leaders and institutions, denouncing the "capitalist system," and embracing socialism despite its multiple failures.  As an academic, West should embrace the moral responsibility to inspire and uplift students instead of promoting an ideology of victimization.  West and his sycophants may think he's a modern day example of the Old Testament prophet Amos crying out against societal injustices but biblical quality prophecy is beyond West's capabilities.

Unfortunately for West, he can't deal with the failure of Barack Obama's Keynesian redistributive delusions which have weakened our economy, created further moral decline, and injured our standing in the world despite laudable drone strikes against Islamist terrorists.  West forgets that Amos was not a publicity seeking demagogue, but a concerned and patriotic Jew concerned about his country's moral standing and that Amos did not advocate public policies which failed to improve Israel's spiritual condition.  A better biblical analogy to describe Cornel West and his self-serving public advocacy of failed policies is provided in Proverbs 26:11 which informs us "As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats his folly."  Scripture provides ample additional examples of fools and their behavior who are historical antecedents of Cornel West.