Just ran across this and it reminded me of the warning signs which should have alerted a concerned citizenary of the predictible failure of the current occupant of the White House.
Why the Fuss? Obama Has Long Been On Record In Favor Of Redistribution
In 2001, then state senator and University of Chicago law lecturer, Barack Obama, sat down for a public radio interview. At the time, he did not anticipate a near-term run for the presidency. He spoke candidly and deliberately about how to “break free” of Constitutional constraints against redistribution to provide “economic justice.” In the course of his interview, Obama laid out the electoral strategy of cobbling together the “power coalitions” that have been the hallmark of his 2012 re-election campaign.
Politicians are said to speak the truth only by mistake. As his political career took off unexpectedly, Obama subsequently hid his views on redistribution, except in unguarded moments, such as “you didn’t build that” or “spreading the wealth around is good.” But on that day in 2001 in a Chicago public radio station, Obama candidly expounded his political and social philosophy as shaped by his critical-legal studies professors at Harvard and his experience as a community organizer in Chicago.
The 2001 “Obama Raw” interview remains the one definitive Obama soliloquy on the Constitution,
First: “We still suffer from not having a Constitution that guarantees its citizens economic rights.” By positive economic rights, Obama means government protection against individual economic failures, such as low incomes, unemployment, poverty, lack of health care, and the like. Obama characterizes the Constitution as “a charter of negative liberties,” which “says what the states can’t do to you (and) what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf.” (Ask not what you can do for your country but what your country can do for you, to paraphrase John F. Kennedy).
Second, Obama regrets that the Constitution places “essential constraints” on the government’s ability to provide positive economic rights and that “we have not broken free” of these Constitutional impediments. Obama views the absence of positive economic liberties that the government must supply as a flaw in the Constitution that must be corrected as part of a liberal political agenda.
Third, Obama concludes that we cannot use the courts to break free of the limited-government constraints of the Founders. The courts are too tradition and precedent bound “to bring about significant redistributional change.” Even the liberal WarrenCourt “never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society.” Obama opines that the civil-rights movement’s court successes cannot be duplicated with respect to income redistribution: The “mistake of the civil rights movement was (that it) became so court focused” and “lost track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground…In some ways we still suffer from that (mistake).”
Fourth, Obama argues that economic rights that the state must supply are ultimately to be established at the ballot box. Those who favor redistribution must gain legislative control through an “actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change.” The electoral task of a redistributive President is therefore to craft coalitions of those who stand to benefit from government largess. The legislature, not the courts, must do this “reparative economic work.”
In a burst of what today might be regarded as political incorrectness, Madison wrote in 1787: “The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties (by what Obama calls “negative rights”) is the first object of government.” In modern English: It is government’s job and duty to protect the rights of those who succeed, even if the majority wishes to take these rights away. That is the test of character of a democratic government.
No comments:
Post a Comment