Hotair: "Smells Like Socialist Spirit"

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 invest formal rights in previously dispossessed people, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order as long as I could pay for it I’d be o.k. But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society.

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 its been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says 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, and that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, 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 coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that. …

I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. You know, the institution just isn’t structured that way. Barack Obama

"...One more clarifying thought is in order. Barack Obama complains that the Constitution is a “charter of negative liberties”. That’s because the Constitution was intended as a limiting document, to curtail the power of the federal government vis-a-vis the states and the individual. The founders intended at the time to limit the reach of the federal government, and built the Constitution accordingly.

Barack Obama wants to reverse that entirely. And that’s radical change you’d better believe in, or else."




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If I told you that in 2006 several former Weather Underground terrorists linked up with the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS) and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to form an activist support group, would you do any more than yawn?

If I were to say that two of those former terrorists were Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, would your ears prick up-ever so slightly?

If I then revealed that several leaders of this organisation went on to create a satellite group, specifically designed to help Barack Obama win the US presidency, would you start to get a little bit interested?

Read all of the link immediately above:

Early this year MDS board members Tom Hayden, Bill Fletcher and Barbara Ehrenreich joined with radical actor/activist Danny Glover to set up a new organisation-Progressives for Obama.

The quartet announced;

We intend to join and engage with our brothers and sisters in the vast rainbow of social movements to come together in support of Obama’s unprecedented campaign and candidacy. Even though it is candidate-centered, there is no doubt that the campaign is a social movement, one greater than the candidate himself ever imagined....