Thursday, October 30, 2008

Obama on Redistribution of Wealth

Obama expressly endorsed “redistributive change” in a 2001 Chicago Public Radio interview. Lamenting that the Warren Court (the tribunal that spawned a revolution in criminals’ rights) “wasn’t that radical” after all, Obama sought to prove his point by citing the justices’ failure to take on “the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society.”

It was an early iteration of the socialist philosophy Obama recently made famous in an exchange with Joe Wurzelbacher, aka “Joe the Plumber.” Of course on the latter occasion, when Obama spoke of planning to “spread the wealth around,” it was a slip. The candidate is far more guarded now than he was in 2001, just as he was more coy in 2001 than in his mid-Nineties incarnation — when he first sought to represent an extremely left-wing district and embraced his endorsement by the radical Chicago New Party (ACORN’s electoral arm with ties to the Socialist International).

By 2001, as he eyed national office, Obama put on mainstream airs. He couched his radicalism in soothing euphemisms. “Economic justice,” however, is simply the finance angle of “social justice,” the idée fixe of Obama and his coven of Change-agents — like Michael Klonsky, the communist educator who ran a “social justice” blog on Obama’s official campaign website. Such radicals give the Warren Court high marks on non-economic rights, but flunk the justices on redistribution: the purported right of society’s ne’er-do-wells to pick the pockets of its achievers through the coercive power of government.

OBAMA’S ANTI-CONSTITUTION
As Obama sees it, the Warren Court failed to “break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution.” The judges instead clung to the hoary construction of the Constitution as “a charter of negative liberties” — one that says only what government “can’t do to you.” For Obama, economic justice demands the positive case: what government “must do on your behalf” (emphasis added).

Read it all here.

2 comments:

AllOut Investor said...

the tax calculation from both mccain and obama came out to be similar to each other. i guess this neck to neck fight between them will eventually end with our conscience choosing the president whom we really think can run the country. really, if it’s down to mccain and obama, it’s hard to tell.but if it’s their running mates, then the choice is obvious and it’s not going to be palin. a lipstick on a pig is still a pig. pain with an L in between is still a pain.

Alice C. Linsley said...

The 2 candidates are worlds apart so Americans are faced with clear choices. Hopefully, most Americans will seek to be well-informed before they go to the polls. In this election getting the facts really matters, and getting the facts means doing a good deal of research since the media is not forth-coming on Obama.