Some people dismiss my insistence that Obama is a communist (Marxist) as the ranting of a racist, hate-filled, redneck who is just opposed to change.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Well if you believe that is that path that brought me to this point then please don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t bother to read this and certainly do not respond. To quote that brilliant statesman Al Gore, “The time for debate is over.”<\/p>\n
If you can read (or better yet listen) to the man\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s actual words and still maintain that he is not a Marxist, bent on the complete reinterpretation of the constitution and dismantling of our capitalist society, then all I can say my friends is, get your excuses ready because the train\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a come\u00e2\u20ac\u2122n.<\/p>\n
The transcript<\/a> below is from a radio interview on Chicago Public Radio<\/a> from 2001.\u00c2\u00a0 I heard it for the first time yesterday. If you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t understand what it means, just watch The Daily Show or Saturday Night Live. They will explain it to you in a way that will make you laugh at what a fearful buffoon I am.<\/p>\n Barack Obama, in 2001: <\/em><\/p>\n You know, if you look at the victories and failures of the civil-rights movement, and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples. So that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d be okay, but the Supreme Court never entered into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n And uh, to that extent, as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t that radical. It didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution \u00e2\u20ac\u201d at least as it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s been interpreted, and Warren Court interpreted it in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties: [It] says what the states can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t do to you, says what the federal government can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t do to you, but it doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf.<\/p>\n And that hasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t shifted, and one of the, I think, the tragedies of the civil-rights movement was because the civil-rights movement became so court-focused, uh, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change. And in some ways we still suffer from that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n A caller then helpfully asks: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The gentleman made the point that the Warren Court wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t terribly radical. My question is (with economic changes)\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 my question is, is it too late for that kind of reparative work, economically, and is that the appropriate place for reparative economic work to change place?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n Obama replies: <\/strong><\/p>\n You know, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. The institution just isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t structured that way. [snip] You start getting into all sorts of separation of powers issues, you know, in terms of the court monitoring or engaging in a process that essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time. You know, the court is just not very good at it, and politically, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just very hard to legitimize opinions from the court in that regard.<\/p>\n So I think that, although you can craft theoretical justifications for it, legally, you know, I think any three of us sitting here could come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Some people dismiss my insistence that Obama is a communist (Marxist) as the ranting of a racist, hate-filled, redneck who is just opposed to change.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Well if you believe that is that path that brought me to this point then please don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t bother to read this and certainly do not respond. To quote that brilliant […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,9,8],"tags":[22,15,23],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phyrfight.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phyrfight.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phyrfight.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phyrfight.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phyrfight.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=638"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.phyrfight.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":642,"href":"https:\/\/www.phyrfight.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638\/revisions\/642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phyrfight.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phyrfight.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phyrfight.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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