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To all you broke millennials who are struggling to find good-paying jobs, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), has heard your cries and she has your back.
The lawmaker issued an apology to Generation Y while speaking Friday at the 22nd Annual Wall Street Project Economic Summit, organized by Rev. Jesse Jackson. As the chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee, Waters said she sympathized with those struggling to pay the bills, even when you have multiple jobs to help make ends meet.
“What they’re not saying is ‘you haven’t done it enough. It hasn’t worked well for us. We have gone to school. We have graduated. We have done everything that you told us to do only to find we can’t get a job,'” she said. “‘If we get a job it is not worth going to work every day because of the pay that’s offered to us, and we are disappointed at what we thought would be available to us when we come of age, when we graduate and we’re ready to start our careers.'”
“Millennials, I’m sorry about that, but one of the things I talk to the banks about is I want you to create a millennial project. I want you to tell me how you’re going to stop treating millennials the way you’ve treated us traditionally when you looked at our background and our credit records and how many jobs we’ve had and decided whether or not we were stable or not.”
According to The Hill report, Waters intends to call on representatives from the nation’s largest banks testify.
“We’re going to have the CEOs of all the major banks in our committee. We’re going to be asking them some questions, many of them don’t want to come, and many of them think that perhaps we’re going to be too hard on them,” she said. “They don’t really know. All they know is that I’m the new chair and I’ve got the gavel and they’ve got to come, and so when you come, you will find out.”
In related news, Waters has weighed in on the alleged hate crime against her longtime friend Jussie Smollett, who has been charged with falsifying a false police report after claiming two masked men hurled racist and anti-gay slurs at him and looped a rope around his neck late last month in Chicago.
Investigators believe the actor staged the attack as part of a “publicity stunt… to promote his career.” But Auntie Maxine is having a hard time wrapping her head around that.
“I don’t think we can, at this point, make sense of it,” Maxine Waters told Variety‘s Marc Malkin on Thursday at Essence’s Black Women in Hollywood Awards.
“There are still some questions that we have, some answers that have to be given,” the Democrat lawmaker said. “He’s a friend. He was at my office. We marched in the Pride Parade together, he introduced me at ‘Black Girls Rock,’ and so, I believed him, when I heard about it.”
Smollet was arrested Thursday and released after a judge granted a $100,000 bail, and the Empire star paid a $10,000 bond.