No joke. In this 2001 PBS radio interview, the Messiah chastises the very liberal Warren Supreme Court for not going far enough with civil rights in the 60's, saying imposing laws requiring the redistribution of wealth as a means to guarantee economic equality should be made a constitutional right.
OBAMA: You know, if you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the courts, I think where it succeeded was to get 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 was able to pay for it I’d be OK. But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society.
And to that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren Court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties.
It says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted. And one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, because the civil rights movement became so court-focused, I think 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 to bring about redistributive change. And in some ways we still suffer from that.
Welcome to the United Socialists of America, gang. By the time Obama's presidency is done, we will make France look right wing. The American people want socialism? Well, they'll sure get a big dose of it now...Marx must be smiling ear-to-ear from his grave.
-MZ
