October 15, 2024 • 53 mins
Join us for an enlightening conversation with the distinguished Dr. Cornel West as he shares his profound reflections on Barack Obama's presidency. What happens when a leader's intellectual promise encounters the harsh realities of political power? Dr. West opens up about his initial support for Obama and the hopes he pinned on his presidency, only to later voice concerns about his policies on Wall Street, drone warfare, and poverty. Together, we explore the emotional resonance of Obama's 2008 victory amidst America's ongoing battle with racism and inequality, questioning the trajectory of his leadership in the years that followed.
We dissect the complex dance between political pragmatism and moral courage, drawing from historical figures like FDR to scrutinize the legacy of the Obama administration. Dr. West passionately argues for a leadership model anchored in justice, truth, and love, critiquing the deference often shown toward political figures. Our discussion delves into systemic issues and the importance of accountability, especially in positions of power. Influential voices, such as Marian Wright Edelman and Reverend Jeremiah Wright, are highlighted for their unwavering stance on principle over political calculation.
The episode further navigates through the lasting impact of Obama's presidency on contemporary issues, including systemic racism and the rise of authoritarian populism. Dr. West provides a critical lens on Obama's handling of racial injustice, the controversial use of drone strikes, and the broader implications for democracy. The conversation underscores the necessity for solidarity within the black community and the urgent need for leadership marked by integrity and courage. Tune in for a thought-provoking analysis of the symbolic and practical legacy of Obama's presidency and its implications for the future of American democracy.
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Speaker 2 (00:07):
Dr Cornel West interview.
Take one marker what was itlike when you first met Obama?
Speaker 1 (00:19):
I recall that he gave me a call at Princeton
immediately after his powerfulspeech that he gave in Boston at
the Democratic NationalConvention and he had said
America is a magical place.
And I had said this brother'sgoing to have a Christopher
Columbus experience.
He's going to discover America.
(00:39):
America is free and democraticto the degree to which people
fight to keep it free anddemocratic through blood, sweat
and tears.
Nothing magical about this atall.
This is not Disneyland orDisney World.
So he called me up and he saidI heard what you said about my
speech.
Why did you say it?
I said I said it because Ibelieved it.
It's clear that you're brilliant.
It's clear that you've gotunbelievable rhetorical talent.
(01:00):
But at the same time I wantedto speak the truth.
He said well, you know I'mthinking about running for
president and I was wonderingwhether you would work with me.
I said I've got one questionwhat is your relation to the
legacy of Martin Luther King Jr?
How will your campaign enactthe struggle against poverty,
militarism, racism andmaterialism?
Those are the four evils thatMartin Luther King Jr saw right
(01:24):
before he was murdered.
And he was very honest with meand he said he said, professor
West, you know that I'm not asradical as you are, but I do see
myself directly connected tothe legacy of Martin Luther King
Jr.
I said that sounds wonderful tome.
Let's work together.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
How was he working with Obama?
Speaker 1 (01:43):
The next thing, you know, I was down in Washington
DC in a meeting we werepreparing him for a debate at
Howard University.
It was with Charles Ogletree,david Axelrod, jesse Jackson Jr,
arthur Davis.
We were all in a room, weworked for two days and so I
became a critical supporter.
(02:03):
That was the first time I methim there in Washington and I
met him again in South Carolinawhen I was doing a number of
events.
But I ended up doing about 65events all around the country,
beginning with Iowa and endingup in Ohio, those crucial states
and it was always a criticalsupport because there's no doubt
(02:24):
that he was better than theother candidates.
I thought all he needed to doand I told him.
When I first met him I said ifwe can leapfrog over the Clinton
machine, you're going to be thenext president.
At that time he had about sixor seven percent support and
even black folk had not reallybegan to kick in.
This is prior to Iowa.
So I was deeply impressed byhis intellect, his sharpness,
(02:48):
his poise and so on.
But it was always a questionwould he be able to hold up the
bloodstained banner of thelegacy of Martin Luther King Jr
within the context of thetreacherous terrain of American
electoral politics.
That was a fundamentalchallenge that I think he and I
knew that he had.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
And what was Obama's relationship to Dr King?
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Well, he knew that.
You know, I've got a callingand a vocation, not just a
career and a profession, and soI was going to hold up the
legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer, ellaBaker, marlitha King Jr
vis-a-vis his candidacy oranybody else's candidacy in that
regard.
And when I introduced him hereat Harlem, at the Apollo, I said
(03:31):
exactly the same thing.
I said we're here to try tokeep alive the legacy of Martin
Luther King Jr and the others,and the best candidate who does
that is our dear brother Barack.
Well, again, it's a relativejudgment.
He was better than the othercandidates, there's no doubt
about that.
That's why my critical supportwas always there.
But once he brought in the WallStreet advisors, wall Street
(03:56):
affiliates Tim Geithner, larrySummers, robin Rubin and company
it was very clear that he waswilling to bail out Wall Street
to 1% and not bail out thehomeowners, who somebody Mon
King and Ella Baker and otherswould resonate with.
So my critique already startedthere and then it began to
(04:17):
deepen when I saw Brennan fromthe Bush administration tied to
the same counterterroriststrategy of dropping those
drones on terrorists.
And dropping drones onterrorists I can understand in
terms of a just war theory, butwhen it includes innocent people
.
That to me, is a crime againsthumanity.
(04:37):
I don't care what color you are, I don't care what country
you're from, and when I saw thatpolicy increased and that was
tied to mass surveillance, itwas tied to national security
policies that were continuouswas something I was very
critical of under the Bushadministration.
Wall Street on the one hand.
You got drones on the otherhand, and then the fundamental
(05:02):
issue of poverty that I washoping that he would make
poverty much more of a centralissue, even as he was trying to
reconstruct the economy.
But by reconstructing theeconomy he had a chance to
render Wall Street elitesaccountable.
Their greed was running amok.
There were crimes committedinsider trading, market
(05:24):
manipulation, predatory lending,fraudulent activities.
At least I thought we'd have aJustice Department that would
apply rule of law to them theway they apply rule of law to
Jamal on the corner, juanita onthe corner, poor whites, any
poor folk who would actuallyviolate the law.
So when I saw the tilt towardWall Street, the tilt toward the
(05:47):
drone policies, and then alsono serious issue hitting a
poverty or the massincarceration regime, my
critique began to deepen and itgot.
You know, it was consistentlydeep throughout his eight years.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
What about the election night of 2008?
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Well, I remember my feelings when I saw right there
on CNN a screen that he won thetears of so much struggle
against the vicious legacy ofwhite supremacy in the history
of this nation the slavery, jimCrow, jane Crow lynching spit on
rebuke scorn.
(06:27):
Now you've got a black man inthat White House built primarily
by black slaves.
That's a moment that I thinkall of us of all colors who have
a care about human beings andthe future of American democracy
would feel very, very deeply.
I'll never forget that as longas I live, very, very much so.
But then the question becamenow that we have the success,
(06:51):
let's see whether there'll begreatness.
See, success and greatness isnot the same thing.
For me, success is being in aposition of authority, power and
influence.
Greatness is what you do withit.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
And what was Obama's relationship to Wall Street?
Speaker 1 (07:06):
When I read in Ron Susskind's text Confidence Men,
wall Street, washington and theEducation of a President, that
meeting that took place March2009 with those 13 firms seven
of them head Wall Street leaders, firms seven of them head Wall
(07:28):
Street leaders and he walks inand he says I stand between you
and the pitchforks, but I wantto let you know, I'm on your
side, I will protect you.
That's what you say to poorpeople.
That's what you say to workingpeople.
That's what you say to blackpeople, brown people, red people
, yellow people, women, gays,lesbians, trans the ones who are
being pushed to the margins.
Wall Street doesn't need that,and I don't want to present
(07:48):
myself as a Wall Street hater.
I just hate greed and I hateinjustice and I hate entitlement
and privilege that's notaccountable to the demos, to
everyday people, you see.
So when I saw that Wall Streettilt and the bailout everyday
people, you see so, when I sawthat Wall Street tilt and the
bailout, I said, oh my God,we've got a continuation of
(08:12):
neoliberal politics that tilttoward the corporate elites and
not toward working people.
And that was the beginning ofmy deep suspicion that, lo and
behold, he was leaning in adirection away from the legacy
of Martin Luther King Jr.
He was leaning in a directionaway from the legacy of Martin
Luther King Jr and somebody hadto try to keep alive that legacy
of Martin and the others thatvery much were responsible for
(08:35):
the election of a black man in asociety so deeply shaped by
white supremacy.
And Obama and the blackcommunity supremacy and Obama
and the black community.
He would say over and overagain that I'm not president of
black America, I'm president ofAmerica.
And I would say back I want youto stand for truth and justice.
(08:56):
Black people, poor people,working people we're not asking
for anything special, we'reasking for fairness, we're
asking for justice.
If you stand for justice, thenI know you're going to make the
mass incarceration regime apriority.
You're going to make poverty apriority.
You're going to makeaccountability of Wall Street a
(09:16):
priority.
But the sad thing was, ofcourse, you had such massive
Black elite capitulation and youhad ordinary Black brothers and
sisters who were so caught upin symbol that they downplayed
the substance.
And I can understand that,symbolically, barack Obama will
forever go down in the annals oftime as having this great
(09:38):
symbolic status.
The struggle for freedom andjustice is not just about
symbols.
The struggle for freedom andjustice is not just about
symbols.
You've got to be able to seizethe moment and let the world
know you are a fighter for thosewho have been spit on,
subjugated, dominated, exploited.
They can't live vicariouslythrough your symbolic success.
(10:03):
You see, we live in a culture,a culture of superficial
spectacle.
All you got to do is havesuccessful woman, successful
black or brown and all the otherfolk catching hell, supposed to
live through them.
You see, that's not mytradition.
No, no, not at all.
We applaud their success.
Now, how are you going to useyour success, you see, are you
going to continue to bend,whatever you can, your authority
(10:25):
and influence to try to empowerpoor and working people?
Now I think, brother Barack,president Obama will come back
to me and say well, brother West, I am a pragmatist, I've got
limited options, I've gotlimited alternatives and I have
to be able to maneuver.
I've got to be able to work ina bipartisan way.
I'm a politician, I'm not justpart of the prophetic tradition.
(10:49):
I thoroughly understand that weall have different lanes.
But then the question becomeshow intense is your struggle?
So, when it came to health care,he had been a supporter of a
single payer but didn't allowthe voices of single payer to
come in.
He had been a supporter ofsingle payer but didn't allow
the voices of single payer tocome in.
He had the meeting with thepharmaceutical companies.
They cut a deal and I said youdon't punt on second down, you
(11:15):
punt on the fourth down, youpush it as far as you can go.
Then you say here's acompromise, here are the
concessions, so that I knew thathe would not be able to get the
single payer, but I thought atleast we'd get the public option
.
You got to fight for it.
You see, you don't have theseprivate meetings just to come
out with success.
(11:35):
And it wasn't just him.
He had Rahm Emanuel, he had aguy in there and a whole host of
others whispering in his earbecause he was relatively new at
that level of power and he wasfalling back on his advisors.
And most of his advisors wereold Clintonites for the most
part.
And I had said exactly the samething about Bill Clinton as I
said about Barack Obama Tooclose to Wall Street, foreign
(11:59):
policies that I had deepdisagreements with and didn't
hit the issue of poverty.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
And when it's challenging Obama.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Well, I got a call from my dear sister, valerie
Jarrett.
She said I want to know whetherthis is friendly fire or
whether this is a critique ofsomeone who is more and more a
foe.
And I said well, I'm trying tojust accent the moral and
spiritual dimensions of what Ihave to say.
I'm trying to look at the worldthrough the lens of poor and
(12:32):
working people and, as aChristian, I'm looking at the
world through the lens of thecross, and that cross signifies
unarmed truth, and the conditionof truth is always to allow
suffering to speak, beginningwith the most vulnerable, and
that comes out of Hebrewscripture you spread that
steadfast love to the mostvulnerable the god, the
motherless, the fatherless, thewidow, the stranger and so forth
(12:52):
, and then unconditional loveacross the board.
So I'm loving the babies inSomalia, afghanistan and
Pakistan who are being killed,as much as I'm loving the black
folk who've been killed bypolice here or anybody else,
anywhere, you see.
And so she made it clear theyhad a.
(13:12):
Uh, there was a piece of theNew York Times where she came
out and said uh, she said,brother Wes is not only crazy,
he's un-American.
I said oh, I'm an enemy of thestate now, I'm anti-American.
I just let them know.
No, I'm anti-injustice inAmerica, no matter what color
the president is.
Now, as you can imagine, itcreated tremendous controversy
(13:34):
because my language was verysharp and very, very intense and
people were wondering wait aminute.
I thought Fox News were thecritics of the president.
Well, they're right-wingcritics.
Most times they're wrong andyou had to protect the president
vis-a-vis the racist attacksbecause, of course, his family
(13:55):
is very precious, could bekilled any minute.
So you get the solidarity withthe president on that issue.
But there are left-wingcritiques of the president that
need to be heard and people weresaying, no, no criticisms at
all.
My dear brother, al Sharpton,who I've known for 30 years, and
he would tell me all the timeany criticism of the president
in public is not allowed becauseit reinforces the right wing,
(14:20):
and I said, no, we can't havethat.
I come from a people that sayslift every voice.
That's the anthem of blackpeople.
You got to lift your voice.
I'm not going to be an echo andjust part of some kind of
protective crowd.
I'm going to protect.
When he's being viciouslyattacked for bad reasons, I'm
(14:42):
going to critique him, I try forgood reasons, but it's going to
be in the name of the verypeople and tradition that put
him in office.
You see, the last thing youneed now is a black president
who gets milquetoast when itcomes to poverty, spineless when
it comes to Wall Street andstill dropping drones on folk
(15:04):
and therefore not being able tocreate the kind of what I'd call
a more radically democraticpresidency.
It'd be a fusion of the best ofFDR, I think, bernie Sanders,
my dear brother in his critiqueof Wall Street.
That's what I wanted out ofBarack Obama.
It was not in him.
Bernie Sanders is not aneoliberal in that sense, he's a
(15:25):
social democrat, he's moreprogressive.
And people say you're askingtoo much.
Maybe you know, but at least Ihave to let him know.
You know what some of us arethinking I wasn't all by myself,
but what so many of us werethinking in terms of fighting
for poor working people.
In regard to politicalcalculation, how do you preserve
(15:48):
your position?
How do you rethink yourrelation to your constituency?
But then there's what I calljust moral witness and political
courage.
And you see, there's adifference between a
statesperson who can bringtogether prudence with moral
(16:10):
witness and political courage.
See, when FDR said the WallStreet were greedy, they were
economic royalists and he said Iwelcome their hatred.
He said that in the White House, that's what a statesman does,
who's in solidarity with workingpeople.
What I saw with Barack Obama washe didn't have a lot of
(16:32):
political courage.
He didn't have a lot of moralwitness.
He was always obsessed withbeing in the middle and there's
nothing in the middle but justthat yellow line.
The truth is beneath the road.
The road is hiding andconcealing all the suffering.
You see, you think of thechildren.
One out of two black and brownchildren under six live in
(16:54):
poverty in the richest nation inthe history of the world.
Where is the policy?
Marian Wright Edelman she'spart of the great legacy of
Martin Luther King Jr, edelman.
She's part of the great legacyof Martin Luther King Jr the
children's fund.
She's raising the same kind ofissues.
Can't get a word out of it.
I will not mention the wordpoverty, of course.
(17:15):
My dear brother Tavis Smileyand I went on two poverty tours
21 cities the first time, 14cities the second time, trying
to raise the issue of poverty.
No response in most of hissupporters and cheerleaders.
We don't want to hear it.
Wait a minute.
How are you going to have apresident here and all these
children catching hell?
And you can't even raise theissue?
And yet Wall Street isbreakdancing to the bank.
(17:35):
They got Federal Reserve givingthis quantitative easing.
They're getting nearly zerointerest rates, free money
flowing.
Students have to pay interestrates to go to college.
Something's wrong here in termsof the 1% vis-a-vis the 99%.
So again, raise the issue, putthe critique forward.
(17:57):
I think it's no accident thatyou end up with a Black Lives
Matter movement under a blackpresident, with a black attorney
general, with a black HomelandSecurity cabinet member.
If black lives mattered enoughin the White House, you would
think they'd be able to come toterms with the accountability of
(18:18):
these police killing too manyof these precious young brothers
and sisters.
You see, and when it took place, you know, my dear brother
Brock says Trayvon would have ifI had a son, it would have
looked like Trayvon.
I said that's a beautifulformulation.
But when Zimmerman went free,what did he say?
(18:39):
This is a nation of laws.
We must observe the law.
That's not what fathers saywhen their sons get shot down.
So don't act like you're afather one moment.
In the next moment you'retalking about.
This is a nation of laws.
Slavery was law of the nation,jim Crow was the laws.
Women can't vote until 1990.
(18:59):
That's part of the laws too.
So don't invoke the laws inrelation to your deep feeling
and empathy of somebody who justgot killed.
Don't play that game with us.
And I had to hit him hard onthat too.
See, in the end, this is notabout individuals, it's not
about a president, it's notabout professor or anything else
(19:20):
.
A tradition has been put inplace by our great people who
have been hated for 400 yearsand taught the world so much
about how to love, love justice,love truth, love beauty and
love the good.
And, for some of us, religiouslove, god, love the holy.
That tradition is richer anddeeper, coming out of the sweat
(19:41):
and tears of everyday people,than any president.
And that was part of mystruggle with so many of the
black leaders and black punditsand so forth who wanted to be so
uncritical, so deferential, inthe kowtow and not recognizing
there's principles involved here.
And what about Michelle Obama?
(20:19):
She's been hard your wholefamily in terms of no violence,
no vicious attacks and threatsbeing executed and so forth.
So we never talked policy oranything, but she was always
very, very, very, very kind.
So it's a fascinatingdifference there actually.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
And Obama's candidacy .
Speaker 1 (20:39):
It was surprising because one of course, my dear
brother, brother Jeremiah Wright, reverend Jeremiah Wright was
supposed to be there.
He had been Barack Obama'spastor.
He had been, he played afundamental role in the marriage
of course he brought, heperformed a wedding and so on,
and he had sent notes alreadythat he was asked not to be
(21:01):
there and everybody said wait,what's going on here?
And then Barack Obama said hewould be at to have a smile, his
state of black union.
And the last minute said no, hemakes the announcement in
Springfield tied to the legacyof Abraham Lincoln, which is a
rich one.
So we understood, okay, I meanpolitical calculation.
(21:21):
Every politician has to do that,very much so.
And you don't want to alienateyour white fellow citizens
coming out of the box.
So you don't want to be tooassociated with black people
early on.
But you also want to be clearwith the black folk.
Because you had promised to bethere, because we didn't know,
(21:42):
we found out right there ontelevision.
We went wait, what's going on?
Let's respect us enough to tellus why you can't do it so early
on.
There was a certain suspicion.
No, there's no doubt about that.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
What about.
Dr Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
Reverend Jeremiah Wright is one of the giants in
the Black prophetic tradition ofthe 20th century.
He's deeply influenced byMalcolm X.
In some ways he more or lessbecame Jr.
He studied at the University ofChicago, so he's both a scholar
as well as a powerful preacher.
(22:17):
Now, jeremiah Wright has alwaysbeen one to engage in a very,
very intense critique, not justof white supremacy but of the
American empire, war, invasions,occupations and so forth.
And one may not always agreewith him or not, but there's no
(22:37):
doubt that he has put his lifeon the line and that makes a
difference.
That makes a big difference.
And that makes a difference.
That makes a big difference.
I've blessed the teaching inthe basement of his church with
Malefia Sante, one of the greatblack scholars, afrocentric
theorists.
So I go way back.
King Jr's last sermon was goingto be why America may go to hell
(23:08):
.
It was not America should go tohell.
It was not America ought to goto hell.
It may go to hell because ifyou don't come to terms with
racism, poverty, militarism,materialism, those evils are
going to suck all the good stuffout of your democracy.
That's in part what JeremiahWright was talking about.
But Fox News and the others.
(23:29):
You know they cast it in such away that he was a hater of
America rather than a hater ofinjustice in America.
And so, unfortunately, ofcourse, as an American
politician, you can't get tooclose to that kind of prophetic
fire or you get burned.
So I can understand Barack insome sense wanting to get a
(23:49):
distance as a politician, but ona personal level and on a very
deep, truthful level, you had totry to teach people that there
are voices in our society thatare radical, that are not up for
elections.
They're trying to tell thetruth and you can give your own
(24:10):
critique of those voices or youragreement with those voices.
And of course that didn't takeplace.
He just got completelydemonized and that's a very sad
thing.
Somebody raised their voice andjust completely demonized.
In some ways people tried todismiss him, but I think I went
on Fox News and said that I takea bullet for Brother Jeremiah
(24:30):
and I don't agree with him allthe time, but I know that he's
got a deep love of ordinarypeople, deep love of black
people, deep love of oppressedpeople.
See, integrity is not aboutideological purity or moral
purity.
Integrity is about saying whatyou believe, meaning what you
say, saying what you mean andputting your life on the line.
(24:51):
That's bottom line, that'sMartin, that's Malcolm, that's
Ella, that's Fannie, and it goesacross the board.
Dorothy Day was like that,rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was
like that, edward Zaid was likethat.
This is a human thing.
It cuts across race and genderand sexual orientation in that
regard, and politicians arealways a bit fearful of such
(25:14):
people.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Obama's famous speech A More Perfect Human.
A lot of people have problemswith that.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
I was a bit disturbed by it because he seemed to
equate black rage.
After 244 years of barbaricslavery and almost 100 years of
American terrorism called JaneCrow and lynching and Jim Crow.
That black rage had the samestatus as white resentment that
(25:42):
these black folk were moving uptoo quickly.
Now I believe in staying incontact with the humanity of my
precious white brothers andsisters, but they need to
understand that in a whitesupremacist civilization, when
you've been the beneficiary ofunbelievable privilege and
entitlement, you have a right tojustice, you have a right to
fairness, but your resentmentwill never have the same weight,
(26:05):
morally and spiritually, as ablack rage who've had to come to
terms with foremothers andforefathers raped and violated
and exploited and lynched.
And when he presented thatequivalent, it made me upset.
I said you're not telling thetruth.
You don't give speeches to makewhite fellow citizens feel
(26:26):
better about themselves.
You give speeches to try totell the truth and then win
elections.
He decided he couldn't tell thetruth.
He had to ease white fears,insecurities and anxieties and
make that equivalent.
And many, many black folk, ofcourse, were very deeply upset
with the speech.
(26:58):
No-transcript and Obama's use oflanguage.
See part of the problem ofhaving a silvery tongue is that
it can be used as a substitutefor a moral backbone.
And a moral backbone you don'thave to have a silvery tongue,
you just need witness courage,fortitude so that, for example,
(27:24):
even with the, we come back topolice brutality and Black Lives
Matter.
Silvery's tongue gives aformulation and pulls back no
action at all.
What are you going to do aboutaccountability of the police?
Well, we'll see withinvestigation.
We've seen investigations overand over again.
(27:45):
They still walk free.
So I think in some ways thatkind of silvery tongue is a
dangerous thing in terms of notallowing people to keep focus on
what the real actions and deedsand policies really are.
I mean, he gave a wonderfultalk about income inequality,
(28:08):
didn't he say?
Well, why is it after you firstturned to top 1% got 95% of the
income growth?
So your policies go on one wayand your wonderful speech on
income inequality go on theother way.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
And the media coverage.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
And the mainstream media.
I mean he had the corporatemedia in his back pocket.
I mean we got to be honestabout this.
Msnbc was basically a statemedia.
It was hardly a critical wordsaid about him in eight years.
Black, white pundits, if you'regoing to be a media obsessed
with free speech and firstamendment, then engage in
(28:43):
affirmation but also critiqueHardly none at all.
Our dear brother Barack Obamawins the Peace Prize and his
last year he drops over 26,000bombs.
He's got five wars going onsimultaneously but he is viewed
as a peaceman because that's theimage projected and you say
(29:05):
well, wait a minute, where's thetruth?
Here they say oh, brother Wes,how come you upset?
You ought to be supporting theblack president.
I like the black brother.
He's brilliant.
I love him as a human being.
He's head of an empire.
He is the brilliant, poisedblack face of the empire, just
like now we got know-nothing,mean-spirited, xenophobic white
(29:30):
face of the American empire.
We got to keep track of thestructures and institutions, not
just the styles and thetemperaments.
Now, of course, barack Obama ismuch, much, much, much better.
Donald Trump's no comparison.
But they're still running anempire.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
Obama is America's first black president.
What is that?
Speaker 1 (29:49):
Well, one is.
I think it sent messages blackAmerica, brown America, yellow
America, red America, whiteAmerica that white supremacy was
, at a crucial level, a lie, andthat's the symbolic indictment
of white supremacy and Iresonate with that deeply.
That's why I cry.
I resonate with that deeply.
(30:12):
The very notion that blackpeople are human beings at the
deepest level is still news fortoo many people, and a lot of my
fellow citizens have yet to getthat memo.
The black man, brilliant blackwife, charismatic black wife,
beautiful, sharp black children,symbolic indictment of white
(30:33):
supremacy, crucial.
That will never be taken awayfrom Brother Barack Obama.
The challenge will be when thehistory books are written.
It's going to be more than justsymbol.
It's going to be what kind ofsubstance?
Did you keep alive the legacyof the best of black people?
We're talking about SarahVaughan.
We're talking about DonnyHathaway.
(30:54):
These are love warriors at thedeepest level, and if you're a
love warrior, you hate injustice.
And if you're not a lovewarrior, you can hide and
conceal the injustice withsilvery speeches and get all the
symbolic acclaim, but when itcomes to the rubber hitting the
(31:15):
road, that's a different thing.
That's a different thing.
Marvin Gaye can write somebeautiful songs, but if he can't
sing it, then what's going on?
It's going to be a differentperformance.
You're going to feel itdifferently and I think, as the
years go by, more and more blackpeople are going to say what a
missed opportunity with theblack president, especially
(31:37):
given this horrible, nightmarishcondition now.
How come he didn't hit poverty?
How come he didn't hit massincarceration?
How come he didn't talk aboutrace?
How come he didn't hit poverty?
How come he didn't hit massincarceration?
How come he didn't talk aboutrace?
How come he kept dropping thosedrones on those folk?
How come he assassinated anAmerican citizen without due
process?
We've been concerned aboutpersonal liberties as a people
because they could assassinateus.
(31:58):
You can't assassinate anAmerican citizen because you
disagree with them, with no dueprocess.
These are crimes and I got introuble because I call them a
war criminal.
You don't kill innocent people.
In Pakistan and Somalia, over200-some children killed.
Those are war crimes.
Bush 45 drones.
Barack Obama over 500.
(32:19):
I call Bush war criminal.
What does that make BarackObama War criminal too?
You got to tell the truth.
You're not in it for popularity.
This is about an integrity of apeople, of a struggle, of a
movement, of a grand effort tomake the world a better place.
Speaker 2 (32:39):
Increased racism during the Obama's presidency.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
In a white supremacist civilization, when
you get a symbolic indictment ofwhite supremacy, you're going
to get a backlash.
That's another reason why, whenyou're in there, you better
fight, you better fight this isnot no popularity contest in
terms of PR strategy and so thatwhen the backlash takes place,
we better have serious,substantive progress, have
(33:03):
something to hold on to, because, believe me you I mean all the
white supremacist militia groupsare operating.
Before barack obama, many of ushad to keep track of him
because they coming at us withhim almost double not just him,
but a whole lot of others too,but especially him as the major
(33:23):
symbol.
Now that he's gone, it's partof the mainstream.
When I'm there inCharlottesville and I'm looking
in the eyes of these neo-Nazi,thuggish brothers and sisters,
that hatred bubbling up.
It had been there for a longtime, but now it could come out
and they're willing to live anddie.
(33:44):
So that's, in part, whitesupremacist backlash against the
symbolic indictment of whitesupremacy, which was the black
president.
I also think that if Obama'sneoliberal policies had actually
spoke to the needs of workingpeople, he would have been able
to convince them not to go rightwing.
(34:04):
He would have given them asense that they're not forgotten
.
So when you get authoritarianpopulists, the crypto
neo-fascists like Trump, andtries to convince them he's on
their side, because they've beenforgotten and they were
forgotten.
With the wealth inequality inplace under Obama's
administration, the wagestagnation, massive
redistribution of wealth frompoor and working people to the
(34:26):
top 1% that had been going onfor a while, it escalated, you
see, so that it helped set thecontext for the kind of both
white backlash, as well as therule of big money, the rule of
big military, the scapegoatingof our precious Mexicans and
other immigrants, the viciousmisogyny that emerged, all of
(34:47):
the various forms of hatred thatwe've seen since Donald Trump
came down that escalator, youknow, as somebody who you know
for so long had to live underdeath threats myself, it's clear
to me that the levels of hatredand contempt and the
willingness to kill and murdercut very deep in certain circles
(35:12):
of my fellow citizens.
That's precisely the reason why, when you get a chance to make
your blow for justice, youbetter do it strong, because if
you don't, you'll still bemisunderstood as being more
militant than he is.
He was called a socialist.
Everybody knows he's not asocialist.
Ask Wall Street whether he's asocialist or not, he's called a
Muslim.
We know the brother's.
(35:32):
Not a Muslim.
He was called somebody not bornin America.
Hawaii is in America Last timewe checked.
All these lies are going to goon, that's par for the course.
So no, I'm not surprised at all.
I mean, my God, this is America.
You've got magnificent humanbeings in America of all colors,
and you've got some xenophobesin America who hold on to their
(35:55):
whiteness for dear life.
That's just the kind of countrywe are.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
Henry Lewis the Skip Gates controversy.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
Well, I recall when it happened happened.
Skip just got back from China.
You know Skip and I go back 40years.
He's my very, very dear Skip.
You know he's a liberal too now, so we don't agree on
everything, but I have a deeplove and respect for him and
when I called him up I said thisis a moment in which you can
Link your plight To the plightof everyday black people who get
(36:26):
mistreated like this all thetime.
When the first time he was onCNN, that's exactly what he did.
Then the intervention took placeto somehow isolate him as this
black professional who's tied tothese particular kind of sites,
from Martha's Vineyard toHarvard and so forth, to create
some kind of beer, from Martha'sVineyard to Harvard and so
forth, to create some kind ofbeer summit to bring them
(36:48):
together.
So it's more individual asopposed to institutional and
structural.
It's very important that blackmiddle class people, that black
bourgeois people, link theirplight with the plight of the
black poor and black workingclass.
Link their plight with theplight of the black poor and
black working class, Because oneof the strategies of the powers
(37:12):
that be is to isolate them,extricate them, make them
exceptional Negroes, exceptionalpeople, and still treat the
rest of black people in adisrespectful way, and I thought
what was upsetting about theresponse from the White House.
It made it too individualistic,as if this thing is not
something that's widespread.
By the time you got to TrayvonMartin, Ferguson, Baltimore,
(37:33):
Oakland, Chicago, it became veryclear of course it's systematic
, Of course it is chronic.
Course is something that's muchmore widespread than these
individuals, especially thesevery brilliant, well-to-do
individuals like my very dearbrother Skip Gates.
Amazing grace that speech AgainI thought it remained on a
(37:58):
superficial level.
This is not the time forsinging.
This is not the time forsinging.
This is a time for policiesthat speak to institutional
racism, that are responsible forthe deaths of so many black
folk.
So it was almost a kind ofdiversion or distraction in that
(38:20):
way, and I must say also, Ithought he sang the wrong song.
And I must say also, I thoughthe sang the wrong song Because
when you've got precious bodiesin the coffin owing to a vicious
white supremacist, this is notabout amazing grace at all.
It's not about worms that weare Uh-uh.
(38:42):
We got some other songs in theblack tradition.
You could sing Wade in thewater, god going to trouble the
water, we're going to meet Godin this trouble, in this
struggle.
We're going to make sure thatjustice can be found for these
folk in the coffin.
You need a fighting song.
We got some fighting songs inthe black tradition.
(39:02):
Now, amazing Grace is abeautiful song.
There's a time to sing thatsong.
He got wrong song and what doesthat do?
That pacifies people, you see.
So I was.
I wasn't that excited aboutthat particular moment either.
I was glad he went down.
I thought he should have goneto ferguson barack obama.
He's got a decency about him.
He really does.
(39:23):
I don't want to downplay that Idon't see enough courage and
backbone.
He's got a decency about him.
He really does.
I don't want to downplay that Idon't see enough courage in
backbombing.
He's got a decency about him.
So there's things that he'sdone that are beautiful.
I thought the speech that hegave for the brothers and
sisters in Connecticut, newtownit was powerful.
When he cried, those weregenuine tears.
Absolutely.
(39:43):
That's a decency about him, yousee.
But decency in tears is not thesame as action based on
political courage and moralwitness, and that's what I've
seen.
That's relatively lacking inhis eight years.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
And so Obama's contributions.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Well, I think, first and foremost he provided a sense
of hope, optimism, upbeatquality in the early part of the
21st century, just as theAmerican empire was beginning to
undergo various forms ofdecline and decay, of decline
(40:28):
and decay, and it looked as ifhe could provide a regeneration
and revitalization of Americandemocracy at that moment, and
that's a major contribution.
It had repercussions all aroundthe world Africa was looking
toward him, latin America waslooking, the Middle East was
looking for him and so forth,and that's something, again,
that can never be taken away.
The problem is, when youprovide that level of hope, if
(40:49):
you don't come through, thedisappointment is felt in a very
deep way.
Now we talked before about thissymbolic indictment of white
supremacy.
Being a black president, thatwill never be taken away from
you.
But when you do that, you haveto then also be measured by the
best of that black tradition,and when you got, you know
(41:12):
Frederick Douglass and HarrietTubman and Martin King and
Malcolm X and others in thattradition.
It doesn't get too much betterthan that.
That's like somebody showing upand going to blow their horn.
Oh, I'm sounding Well, you'resounding good, but let's play
some cold-trained Miles Davis.
Let's play some Mary LouWilliams on the piano and you
listen to this.
Oh, I got to do some morepractice.
(41:33):
You sure do.
Yes, you do.
That's true for blackpresidents too, because the
standards are set from inside ofthe traditions of the everyday
people.
You set the highest standardsof love, courage, fortitude,
service to others, sacrifice.
That's where the standards are,you see.
And it's not Wall Street, it'snot stock markets, it's not
(42:01):
Harvard, it's not Princeton.
Those are the eliteinstitutions that will pat you
on the back, but the realmeasurement is going to be the
ways in which you empowered orwilling to serve and sacrifice
for those slash.
Don't call everyday people.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
What about Donald Trump?
Speaker 1 (42:16):
Well, I think the Obama presidency was a
neoliberal rule, and byneoliberal what I mean is the
rule of big money, with marketlogic shot through every sphere
of our society, militarism, withwars in various countries,
disproportionately Muslimcountries.
(42:36):
You have a neoliberal rule inplace, unable to speak to the
wealth inequality, unable tospeak to the militarism, in fact
reinforcing it.
And here comes along somebodywho calls for the collapse of
that status quo.
And Trump calls for the end ofthis kind of regime.
(42:57):
And what does he have?
Well, what we had was we hadBernie on the left.
I do believe Bernie Sanderscould have beat him.
I knew that the oldneoliberalism of Clinton just
didn't have enough gump and gutand grit to deal with the
newness of this spectacle,substance-less, xenophobic
movement that Donald Trump wasgalvanizing.
(43:20):
And so there's a sense in whichthe Obama administration in no
way is a cause of the Trumpadministration.
No, not at all.
But he helped set theatmosphere by not following
through and speaking to theneeds, especially of working
people, and by working people Imean all colors across the board
(43:42):
, reigning in the Wall Street,greed not allowing people to
think they've been forgotten,and so forth.
Speaker 2 (43:50):
And what about the future of democracy?
Speaker 1 (43:53):
The rule of big money and the rule of military
industrial complex.
You got to remember now, forevery dollar spent in the US
budget, 53 cents goes straightto the military industrial
complex.
So they already feel verytruncated and narrowed.
If it is the case that Americacan no longer generate
(44:13):
high-quality leadership orstatespersons of integrity, then
democracy is just lying down aslippery slope to chaos.
And that means not just anarchy, that means tyrants.
Tyrannical rule.
Plato becomes right.
Every democracy produces a demosthat's driven by unruly passion
(44:35):
and ubiquitous ignorance thatbecomes gullible to a strong man
, and so you end up with atyrant who takes over and
democracy goes under.
Slowly but surely it goes under.
We're already seeing signs ofthat under Trump.
So I refuse to believe that,given all the magnificent human
(44:56):
beings in this country, full ofunbelievable imagination,
intelligence, courage, that thebest we can do is the kind of
mediocre and under mediocreleadership that we have right
now.
If that is the best we can do,then you know something very
precious it's coming to an end.
The democracies are veryfragile, very fragile
(45:21):
possibility of your reconnectionwith obama well, you never know
.
You never know, you know.
I mean, he's always been mybrother, he's always in my
prayers in terms of his safetyand so forth.
Uh, and my hunch is is that, um, there'll be context in which
we'll get a chance to talk, youknow, I get a brother hug and
tell him why I had my strongcritique, why I still think I'm
right, and so on, but maybe nottoo, you know, you never know.
(45:45):
You never know.
All of us need to be renderedaccountable in some way.
I'm not always right either.
He could correct me on somethings, you see, but you never
know.
I'm always open, I'm alwaysopen.
Speaker 2 (46:02):
So Cornel West?
Dr Cornel West is obviouslyrunning for president right now.
Cornel West in that recalled ameeting working with challenging
and critiquing Barack Obama.
In this, west discussed Obama'scandidacy, the symbolic
(46:23):
importance of becoming the firstblack president and, as he tied
it to the importance of keepingthe legacy of Dr Martin Luther
King alive.
Cornel West is a prominentphilosopher, activist, author.
He was serving as the D RichBonhoeffer Professor of
(46:47):
Philosophy and ChristianPractice at Union Theological
Seminary.
Wes first began his teachingcareer at Union Theological back
in 1976, when he was just 23years old.
He has since taught at Yale,princeton, where he received an
(47:08):
MA and a PhD in philosophy andwhere he still holds the title
of Professor Emeritus, also atHarvard, his alma mater, and the
University of Paris.
He has authored 20 books, bestknown for his classic, the 1993
book Race Matters and the 2004book Democracy Matters.
(47:28):
He has produced three spokenword albums, where he
collaborated with Prince andother notable people, and
appeared in over 25documentaries and films.
In over 25 documentaries andfilms.
Additionally, he is a frequentcommentator on political and
social issues across severalmedia outlets.
(47:52):
A provocative, democraticintellectual, west initially
supported Obama in 2008'spresidential campaign but
historically soon after becameone of President Obama's
fiercest critics from the left.
Throughout process andthroughout President Obama's two
terms, dr West cited vehementopposition on everything from
(48:14):
his handling through thefinancial crisis to his handling
of the black identity andracial issues.
Now this is what I'm starting todo in our classic interview
section, and this came fromsnippets from a interview
archive of life stories.
(48:35):
This was a didn't make themovie all of out of a 2018
interview, and the movie, whichI said all of us didn't make it
in it was a thing that they hadon HBO and it was a three-part
(49:02):
HBO documentary series thatended up coming out in 2021 and
that documentary was called InPursuit of a More Perfect Union
the personal and politicaljourney of President Barack
Obama explored that weavestogether conversation with
colleagues, friends and criticsalongside his own speeches and
(49:24):
interviews, so that you couldprobably still go to HBO and
watch the entire thing.
I hope you enjoyed it.
We've got a lot more of thingslike this coming.
I used to do a part of the showcalled Blast from the
Intellectual Past and that ledme to think that maybe sometimes
we need to have a longer blastfrom the intellectual pass in
(49:48):
long form.
Thank you for tuning in and wewill see you on the next episode
.
Dr Cornel West interview.
Take one marker what was itlike when you first met Obama?
Speaker 1 (00:19):
I recall that he gave me a call at Princeton
immediately after his powerfulspeech that he gave in Boston at
the Democratic NationalConvention and he had said
America is a magical place.
And I had said this brother'sgoing to have a Christopher
Columbus experience.
He's going to discover America.
(00:39):
America is free and democraticto the degree to which people
fight to keep it free anddemocratic through blood, sweat
and tears.
Nothing magical about this atall.
This is not Disneyland orDisney World.
So he called me up and he saidI heard what you said about my
speech.
Why did you say it?
I said I said it because Ibelieved it.
It's clear that you're brilliant.
It's clear that you've gotunbelievable rhetorical talent.
(01:00):
But at the same time I wantedto speak the truth.
He said well, you know I'mthinking about running for
president and I was wonderingwhether you would work with me.
I said I've got one questionwhat is your relation to the
legacy of Martin Luther King Jr?
How will your campaign enactthe struggle against poverty,
militarism, racism andmaterialism?
Those are the four evils thatMartin Luther King Jr saw right
(01:24):
before he was murdered.
And he was very honest with meand he said he said, professor
West, you know that I'm not asradical as you are, but I do see
myself directly connected tothe legacy of Martin Luther King
Jr.
I said that sounds wonderful tome.
Let's work together.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
How was he working with Obama?
Speaker 1 (01:43):
The next thing, you know, I was down in Washington
DC in a meeting we werepreparing him for a debate at
Howard University.
It was with Charles Ogletree,david Axelrod, jesse Jackson Jr,
arthur Davis.
We were all in a room, weworked for two days and so I
became a critical supporter.
(02:03):
That was the first time I methim there in Washington and I
met him again in South Carolinawhen I was doing a number of
events.
But I ended up doing about 65events all around the country,
beginning with Iowa and endingup in Ohio, those crucial states
and it was always a criticalsupport because there's no doubt
(02:24):
that he was better than theother candidates.
I thought all he needed to doand I told him.
When I first met him I said ifwe can leapfrog over the Clinton
machine, you're going to be thenext president.
At that time he had about sixor seven percent support and
even black folk had not reallybegan to kick in.
This is prior to Iowa.
So I was deeply impressed byhis intellect, his sharpness,
(02:48):
his poise and so on.
But it was always a questionwould he be able to hold up the
bloodstained banner of thelegacy of Martin Luther King Jr
within the context of thetreacherous terrain of American
electoral politics.
That was a fundamentalchallenge that I think he and I
knew that he had.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
And what was Obama's relationship to Dr King?
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Well, he knew that.
You know, I've got a callingand a vocation, not just a
career and a profession, and soI was going to hold up the
legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer, ellaBaker, marlitha King Jr
vis-a-vis his candidacy oranybody else's candidacy in that
regard.
And when I introduced him hereat Harlem, at the Apollo, I said
(03:31):
exactly the same thing.
I said we're here to try tokeep alive the legacy of Martin
Luther King Jr and the others,and the best candidate who does
that is our dear brother Barack.
Well, again, it's a relativejudgment.
He was better than the othercandidates, there's no doubt
about that.
That's why my critical supportwas always there.
But once he brought in the WallStreet advisors, wall Street
(03:56):
affiliates Tim Geithner, larrySummers, robin Rubin and company
it was very clear that he waswilling to bail out Wall Street
to 1% and not bail out thehomeowners, who somebody Mon
King and Ella Baker and otherswould resonate with.
So my critique already startedthere and then it began to
(04:17):
deepen when I saw Brennan fromthe Bush administration tied to
the same counterterroriststrategy of dropping those
drones on terrorists.
And dropping drones onterrorists I can understand in
terms of a just war theory, butwhen it includes innocent people
.
That to me, is a crime againsthumanity.
(04:37):
I don't care what color you are, I don't care what country
you're from, and when I saw thatpolicy increased and that was
tied to mass surveillance, itwas tied to national security
policies that were continuouswas something I was very
critical of under the Bushadministration.
Wall Street on the one hand.
You got drones on the otherhand, and then the fundamental
(05:02):
issue of poverty that I washoping that he would make
poverty much more of a centralissue, even as he was trying to
reconstruct the economy.
But by reconstructing theeconomy he had a chance to
render Wall Street elitesaccountable.
Their greed was running amok.
There were crimes committedinsider trading, market
(05:24):
manipulation, predatory lending,fraudulent activities.
At least I thought we'd have aJustice Department that would
apply rule of law to them theway they apply rule of law to
Jamal on the corner, juanita onthe corner, poor whites, any
poor folk who would actuallyviolate the law.
So when I saw the tilt towardWall Street, the tilt toward the
(05:47):
drone policies, and then alsono serious issue hitting a
poverty or the massincarceration regime, my
critique began to deepen and itgot.
You know, it was consistentlydeep throughout his eight years.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
What about the election night of 2008?
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Well, I remember my feelings when I saw right there
on CNN a screen that he won thetears of so much struggle
against the vicious legacy ofwhite supremacy in the history
of this nation the slavery, jimCrow, jane Crow lynching spit on
rebuke scorn.
(06:27):
Now you've got a black man inthat White House built primarily
by black slaves.
That's a moment that I thinkall of us of all colors who have
a care about human beings andthe future of American democracy
would feel very, very deeply.
I'll never forget that as longas I live, very, very much so.
But then the question becamenow that we have the success,
(06:51):
let's see whether there'll begreatness.
See, success and greatness isnot the same thing.
For me, success is being in aposition of authority, power and
influence.
Greatness is what you do withit.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
And what was Obama's relationship to Wall Street?
Speaker 1 (07:06):
When I read in Ron Susskind's text Confidence Men,
wall Street, washington and theEducation of a President, that
meeting that took place March2009 with those 13 firms seven
of them head Wall Street leaders, firms seven of them head Wall
(07:28):
Street leaders and he walks inand he says I stand between you
and the pitchforks, but I wantto let you know, I'm on your
side, I will protect you.
That's what you say to poorpeople.
That's what you say to workingpeople.
That's what you say to blackpeople, brown people, red people
, yellow people, women, gays,lesbians, trans the ones who are
being pushed to the margins.
Wall Street doesn't need that,and I don't want to present
(07:48):
myself as a Wall Street hater.
I just hate greed and I hateinjustice and I hate entitlement
and privilege that's notaccountable to the demos, to
everyday people, you see.
So when I saw that Wall Streettilt and the bailout everyday
people, you see so, when I sawthat Wall Street tilt and the
bailout, I said, oh my God,we've got a continuation of
(08:12):
neoliberal politics that tilttoward the corporate elites and
not toward working people.
And that was the beginning ofmy deep suspicion that, lo and
behold, he was leaning in adirection away from the legacy
of Martin Luther King Jr.
He was leaning in a directionaway from the legacy of Martin
Luther King Jr and somebody hadto try to keep alive that legacy
of Martin and the others thatvery much were responsible for
(08:35):
the election of a black man in asociety so deeply shaped by
white supremacy.
And Obama and the blackcommunity supremacy and Obama
and the black community.
He would say over and overagain that I'm not president of
black America, I'm president ofAmerica.
And I would say back I want youto stand for truth and justice.
(08:56):
Black people, poor people,working people we're not asking
for anything special, we'reasking for fairness, we're
asking for justice.
If you stand for justice, thenI know you're going to make the
mass incarceration regime apriority.
You're going to make poverty apriority.
You're going to makeaccountability of Wall Street a
(09:16):
priority.
But the sad thing was, ofcourse, you had such massive
Black elite capitulation and youhad ordinary Black brothers and
sisters who were so caught upin symbol that they downplayed
the substance.
And I can understand that,symbolically, barack Obama will
forever go down in the annals oftime as having this great
(09:38):
symbolic status.
The struggle for freedom andjustice is not just about
symbols.
The struggle for freedom andjustice is not just about
symbols.
You've got to be able to seizethe moment and let the world
know you are a fighter for thosewho have been spit on,
subjugated, dominated, exploited.
They can't live vicariouslythrough your symbolic success.
(10:03):
You see, we live in a culture,a culture of superficial
spectacle.
All you got to do is havesuccessful woman, successful
black or brown and all the otherfolk catching hell, supposed to
live through them.
You see, that's not mytradition.
No, no, not at all.
We applaud their success.
Now, how are you going to useyour success, you see, are you
going to continue to bend,whatever you can, your authority
(10:25):
and influence to try to empowerpoor and working people?
Now I think, brother Barack,president Obama will come back
to me and say well, brother West, I am a pragmatist, I've got
limited options, I've gotlimited alternatives and I have
to be able to maneuver.
I've got to be able to work ina bipartisan way.
I'm a politician, I'm not justpart of the prophetic tradition.
(10:49):
I thoroughly understand that weall have different lanes.
But then the question becomeshow intense is your struggle?
So, when it came to health care,he had been a supporter of a
single payer but didn't allowthe voices of single payer to
come in.
He had been a supporter ofsingle payer but didn't allow
the voices of single payer tocome in.
He had the meeting with thepharmaceutical companies.
They cut a deal and I said youdon't punt on second down, you
(11:15):
punt on the fourth down, youpush it as far as you can go.
Then you say here's acompromise, here are the
concessions, so that I knew thathe would not be able to get the
single payer, but I thought atleast we'd get the public option
.
You got to fight for it.
You see, you don't have theseprivate meetings just to come
out with success.
(11:35):
And it wasn't just him.
He had Rahm Emanuel, he had aguy in there and a whole host of
others whispering in his earbecause he was relatively new at
that level of power and he wasfalling back on his advisors.
And most of his advisors wereold Clintonites for the most
part.
And I had said exactly the samething about Bill Clinton as I
said about Barack Obama Tooclose to Wall Street, foreign
(11:59):
policies that I had deepdisagreements with and didn't
hit the issue of poverty.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
And when it's challenging Obama.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Well, I got a call from my dear sister, valerie
Jarrett.
She said I want to know whetherthis is friendly fire or
whether this is a critique ofsomeone who is more and more a
foe.
And I said well, I'm trying tojust accent the moral and
spiritual dimensions of what Ihave to say.
I'm trying to look at the worldthrough the lens of poor and
(12:32):
working people and, as aChristian, I'm looking at the
world through the lens of thecross, and that cross signifies
unarmed truth, and the conditionof truth is always to allow
suffering to speak, beginningwith the most vulnerable, and
that comes out of Hebrewscripture you spread that
steadfast love to the mostvulnerable the god, the
motherless, the fatherless, thewidow, the stranger and so forth
(12:52):
, and then unconditional loveacross the board.
So I'm loving the babies inSomalia, afghanistan and
Pakistan who are being killed,as much as I'm loving the black
folk who've been killed bypolice here or anybody else,
anywhere, you see.
And so she made it clear theyhad a.
(13:12):
Uh, there was a piece of theNew York Times where she came
out and said uh, she said,brother Wes is not only crazy,
he's un-American.
I said oh, I'm an enemy of thestate now, I'm anti-American.
I just let them know.
No, I'm anti-injustice inAmerica, no matter what color
the president is.
Now, as you can imagine, itcreated tremendous controversy
(13:34):
because my language was verysharp and very, very intense and
people were wondering wait aminute.
I thought Fox News were thecritics of the president.
Well, they're right-wingcritics.
Most times they're wrong andyou had to protect the president
vis-a-vis the racist attacksbecause, of course, his family
(13:55):
is very precious, could bekilled any minute.
So you get the solidarity withthe president on that issue.
But there are left-wingcritiques of the president that
need to be heard and people weresaying, no, no criticisms at
all.
My dear brother, al Sharpton,who I've known for 30 years, and
he would tell me all the timeany criticism of the president
in public is not allowed becauseit reinforces the right wing,
(14:20):
and I said, no, we can't havethat.
I come from a people that sayslift every voice.
That's the anthem of blackpeople.
You got to lift your voice.
I'm not going to be an echo andjust part of some kind of
protective crowd.
I'm going to protect.
When he's being viciouslyattacked for bad reasons, I'm
(14:42):
going to critique him, I try forgood reasons, but it's going to
be in the name of the verypeople and tradition that put
him in office.
You see, the last thing youneed now is a black president
who gets milquetoast when itcomes to poverty, spineless when
it comes to Wall Street andstill dropping drones on folk
(15:04):
and therefore not being able tocreate the kind of what I'd call
a more radically democraticpresidency.
It'd be a fusion of the best ofFDR, I think, bernie Sanders,
my dear brother in his critiqueof Wall Street.
That's what I wanted out ofBarack Obama.
It was not in him.
Bernie Sanders is not aneoliberal in that sense, he's a
(15:25):
social democrat, he's moreprogressive.
And people say you're askingtoo much.
Maybe you know, but at least Ihave to let him know.
You know what some of us arethinking I wasn't all by myself,
but what so many of us werethinking in terms of fighting
for poor working people.
In regard to politicalcalculation, how do you preserve
(15:48):
your position?
How do you rethink yourrelation to your constituency?
But then there's what I calljust moral witness and political
courage.
And you see, there's adifference between a
statesperson who can bringtogether prudence with moral
(16:10):
witness and political courage.
See, when FDR said the WallStreet were greedy, they were
economic royalists and he said Iwelcome their hatred.
He said that in the White House, that's what a statesman does,
who's in solidarity with workingpeople.
What I saw with Barack Obama washe didn't have a lot of
(16:32):
political courage.
He didn't have a lot of moralwitness.
He was always obsessed withbeing in the middle and there's
nothing in the middle but justthat yellow line.
The truth is beneath the road.
The road is hiding andconcealing all the suffering.
You see, you think of thechildren.
One out of two black and brownchildren under six live in
(16:54):
poverty in the richest nation inthe history of the world.
Where is the policy?
Marian Wright Edelman she'spart of the great legacy of
Martin Luther King Jr, edelman.
She's part of the great legacyof Martin Luther King Jr the
children's fund.
She's raising the same kind ofissues.
Can't get a word out of it.
I will not mention the wordpoverty, of course.
(17:15):
My dear brother Tavis Smileyand I went on two poverty tours
21 cities the first time, 14cities the second time, trying
to raise the issue of poverty.
No response in most of hissupporters and cheerleaders.
We don't want to hear it.
Wait a minute.
How are you going to have apresident here and all these
children catching hell?
And you can't even raise theissue?
And yet Wall Street isbreakdancing to the bank.
(17:35):
They got Federal Reserve givingthis quantitative easing.
They're getting nearly zerointerest rates, free money
flowing.
Students have to pay interestrates to go to college.
Something's wrong here in termsof the 1% vis-a-vis the 99%.
So again, raise the issue, putthe critique forward.
(17:57):
I think it's no accident thatyou end up with a Black Lives
Matter movement under a blackpresident, with a black attorney
general, with a black HomelandSecurity cabinet member.
If black lives mattered enoughin the White House, you would
think they'd be able to come toterms with the accountability of
(18:18):
these police killing too manyof these precious young brothers
and sisters.
You see, and when it took place, you know, my dear brother
Brock says Trayvon would have ifI had a son, it would have
looked like Trayvon.
I said that's a beautifulformulation.
But when Zimmerman went free,what did he say?
(18:39):
This is a nation of laws.
We must observe the law.
That's not what fathers saywhen their sons get shot down.
So don't act like you're afather one moment.
In the next moment you'retalking about.
This is a nation of laws.
Slavery was law of the nation,jim Crow was the laws.
Women can't vote until 1990.
(18:59):
That's part of the laws too.
So don't invoke the laws inrelation to your deep feeling
and empathy of somebody who justgot killed.
Don't play that game with us.
And I had to hit him hard onthat too.
See, in the end, this is notabout individuals, it's not
about a president, it's notabout professor or anything else
(19:20):
.
A tradition has been put inplace by our great people who
have been hated for 400 yearsand taught the world so much
about how to love, love justice,love truth, love beauty and
love the good.
And, for some of us, religiouslove, god, love the holy.
That tradition is richer anddeeper, coming out of the sweat
(19:41):
and tears of everyday people,than any president.
And that was part of mystruggle with so many of the
black leaders and black punditsand so forth who wanted to be so
uncritical, so deferential, inthe kowtow and not recognizing
there's principles involved here.
And what about Michelle Obama?
(20:19):
She's been hard your wholefamily in terms of no violence,
no vicious attacks and threatsbeing executed and so forth.
So we never talked policy oranything, but she was always
very, very, very, very kind.
So it's a fascinatingdifference there actually.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
And Obama's candidacy .
Speaker 1 (20:39):
It was surprising because one of course, my dear
brother, brother Jeremiah Wright, reverend Jeremiah Wright was
supposed to be there.
He had been Barack Obama'spastor.
He had been, he played afundamental role in the marriage
of course he brought, heperformed a wedding and so on,
and he had sent notes alreadythat he was asked not to be
(21:01):
there and everybody said wait,what's going on here?
And then Barack Obama said hewould be at to have a smile, his
state of black union.
And the last minute said no, hemakes the announcement in
Springfield tied to the legacyof Abraham Lincoln, which is a
rich one.
So we understood, okay, I meanpolitical calculation.
(21:21):
Every politician has to do that,very much so.
And you don't want to alienateyour white fellow citizens
coming out of the box.
So you don't want to be tooassociated with black people
early on.
But you also want to be clearwith the black folk.
Because you had promised to bethere, because we didn't know,
(21:42):
we found out right there ontelevision.
We went wait, what's going on?
Let's respect us enough to tellus why you can't do it so early
on.
There was a certain suspicion.
No, there's no doubt about that.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
What about.
Dr Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
Reverend Jeremiah Wright is one of the giants in
the Black prophetic tradition ofthe 20th century.
He's deeply influenced byMalcolm X.
In some ways he more or lessbecame Jr.
He studied at the University ofChicago, so he's both a scholar
as well as a powerful preacher.
(22:17):
Now, jeremiah Wright has alwaysbeen one to engage in a very,
very intense critique, not justof white supremacy but of the
American empire, war, invasions,occupations and so forth.
And one may not always agreewith him or not, but there's no
(22:37):
doubt that he has put his lifeon the line and that makes a
difference.
That makes a big difference.
And that makes a difference.
That makes a big difference.
I've blessed the teaching inthe basement of his church with
Malefia Sante, one of the greatblack scholars, afrocentric
theorists.
So I go way back.
King Jr's last sermon was goingto be why America may go to hell
(23:08):
.
It was not America should go tohell.
It was not America ought to goto hell.
It may go to hell because ifyou don't come to terms with
racism, poverty, militarism,materialism, those evils are
going to suck all the good stuffout of your democracy.
That's in part what JeremiahWright was talking about.
But Fox News and the others.
(23:29):
You know they cast it in such away that he was a hater of
America rather than a hater ofinjustice in America.
And so, unfortunately, ofcourse, as an American
politician, you can't get tooclose to that kind of prophetic
fire or you get burned.
So I can understand Barack insome sense wanting to get a
(23:49):
distance as a politician, but ona personal level and on a very
deep, truthful level, you had totry to teach people that there
are voices in our society thatare radical, that are not up for
elections.
They're trying to tell thetruth and you can give your own
(24:10):
critique of those voices or youragreement with those voices.
And of course that didn't takeplace.
He just got completelydemonized and that's a very sad
thing.
Somebody raised their voice andjust completely demonized.
In some ways people tried todismiss him, but I think I went
on Fox News and said that I takea bullet for Brother Jeremiah
(24:30):
and I don't agree with him allthe time, but I know that he's
got a deep love of ordinarypeople, deep love of black
people, deep love of oppressedpeople.
See, integrity is not aboutideological purity or moral
purity.
Integrity is about saying whatyou believe, meaning what you
say, saying what you mean andputting your life on the line.
(24:51):
That's bottom line, that'sMartin, that's Malcolm, that's
Ella, that's Fannie, and it goesacross the board.
Dorothy Day was like that,rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was
like that, edward Zaid was likethat.
This is a human thing.
It cuts across race and genderand sexual orientation in that
regard, and politicians arealways a bit fearful of such
(25:14):
people.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Obama's famous speech A More Perfect Human.
A lot of people have problemswith that.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
I was a bit disturbed by it because he seemed to
equate black rage.
After 244 years of barbaricslavery and almost 100 years of
American terrorism called JaneCrow and lynching and Jim Crow.
That black rage had the samestatus as white resentment that
(25:42):
these black folk were moving uptoo quickly.
Now I believe in staying incontact with the humanity of my
precious white brothers andsisters, but they need to
understand that in a whitesupremacist civilization, when
you've been the beneficiary ofunbelievable privilege and
entitlement, you have a right tojustice, you have a right to
fairness, but your resentmentwill never have the same weight,
(26:05):
morally and spiritually, as ablack rage who've had to come to
terms with foremothers andforefathers raped and violated
and exploited and lynched.
And when he presented thatequivalent, it made me upset.
I said you're not telling thetruth.
You don't give speeches to makewhite fellow citizens feel
(26:26):
better about themselves.
You give speeches to try totell the truth and then win
elections.
He decided he couldn't tell thetruth.
He had to ease white fears,insecurities and anxieties and
make that equivalent.
And many, many black folk, ofcourse, were very deeply upset
with the speech.
(26:58):
No-transcript and Obama's use oflanguage.
See part of the problem ofhaving a silvery tongue is that
it can be used as a substitutefor a moral backbone.
And a moral backbone you don'thave to have a silvery tongue,
you just need witness courage,fortitude so that, for example,
(27:24):
even with the, we come back topolice brutality and Black Lives
Matter.
Silvery's tongue gives aformulation and pulls back no
action at all.
What are you going to do aboutaccountability of the police?
Well, we'll see withinvestigation.
We've seen investigations overand over again.
(27:45):
They still walk free.
So I think in some ways thatkind of silvery tongue is a
dangerous thing in terms of notallowing people to keep focus on
what the real actions and deedsand policies really are.
I mean, he gave a wonderfultalk about income inequality,
(28:08):
didn't he say?
Well, why is it after you firstturned to top 1% got 95% of the
income growth?
So your policies go on one wayand your wonderful speech on
income inequality go on theother way.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
And the media coverage.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
And the mainstream media.
I mean he had the corporatemedia in his back pocket.
I mean we got to be honestabout this.
Msnbc was basically a statemedia.
It was hardly a critical wordsaid about him in eight years.
Black, white pundits, if you'regoing to be a media obsessed
with free speech and firstamendment, then engage in
(28:43):
affirmation but also critiqueHardly none at all.
Our dear brother Barack Obamawins the Peace Prize and his
last year he drops over 26,000bombs.
He's got five wars going onsimultaneously but he is viewed
as a peaceman because that's theimage projected and you say
(29:05):
well, wait a minute, where's thetruth?
Here they say oh, brother Wes,how come you upset?
You ought to be supporting theblack president.
I like the black brother.
He's brilliant.
I love him as a human being.
He's head of an empire.
He is the brilliant, poisedblack face of the empire, just
like now we got know-nothing,mean-spirited, xenophobic white
(29:30):
face of the American empire.
We got to keep track of thestructures and institutions, not
just the styles and thetemperaments.
Now, of course, barack Obama ismuch, much, much, much better.
Donald Trump's no comparison.
But they're still running anempire.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
Obama is America's first black president.
What is that?
Speaker 1 (29:49):
Well, one is.
I think it sent messages blackAmerica, brown America, yellow
America, red America, whiteAmerica that white supremacy was
, at a crucial level, a lie, andthat's the symbolic indictment
of white supremacy and Iresonate with that deeply.
That's why I cry.
I resonate with that deeply.
(30:12):
The very notion that blackpeople are human beings at the
deepest level is still news fortoo many people, and a lot of my
fellow citizens have yet to getthat memo.
The black man, brilliant blackwife, charismatic black wife,
beautiful, sharp black children,symbolic indictment of white
(30:33):
supremacy, crucial.
That will never be taken awayfrom Brother Barack Obama.
The challenge will be when thehistory books are written.
It's going to be more than justsymbol.
It's going to be what kind ofsubstance?
Did you keep alive the legacyof the best of black people?
We're talking about SarahVaughan.
We're talking about DonnyHathaway.
(30:54):
These are love warriors at thedeepest level, and if you're a
love warrior, you hate injustice.
And if you're not a lovewarrior, you can hide and
conceal the injustice withsilvery speeches and get all the
symbolic acclaim, but when itcomes to the rubber hitting the
(31:15):
road, that's a different thing.
That's a different thing.
Marvin Gaye can write somebeautiful songs, but if he can't
sing it, then what's going on?
It's going to be a differentperformance.
You're going to feel itdifferently and I think, as the
years go by, more and more blackpeople are going to say what a
missed opportunity with theblack president, especially
(31:37):
given this horrible, nightmarishcondition now.
How come he didn't hit poverty?
How come he didn't hit massincarceration?
How come he didn't talk aboutrace?
How come he didn't hit poverty?
How come he didn't hit massincarceration?
How come he didn't talk aboutrace?
How come he kept dropping thosedrones on those folk?
How come he assassinated anAmerican citizen without due
process?
We've been concerned aboutpersonal liberties as a people
because they could assassinateus.
(31:58):
You can't assassinate anAmerican citizen because you
disagree with them, with no dueprocess.
These are crimes and I got introuble because I call them a
war criminal.
You don't kill innocent people.
In Pakistan and Somalia, over200-some children killed.
Those are war crimes.
Bush 45 drones.
Barack Obama over 500.
(32:19):
I call Bush war criminal.
What does that make BarackObama War criminal too?
You got to tell the truth.
You're not in it for popularity.
This is about an integrity of apeople, of a struggle, of a
movement, of a grand effort tomake the world a better place.
Speaker 2 (32:39):
Increased racism during the Obama's presidency.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
In a white supremacist civilization, when
you get a symbolic indictment ofwhite supremacy, you're going
to get a backlash.
That's another reason why, whenyou're in there, you better
fight, you better fight this isnot no popularity contest in
terms of PR strategy and so thatwhen the backlash takes place,
we better have serious,substantive progress, have
(33:03):
something to hold on to, because, believe me you I mean all the
white supremacist militia groupsare operating.
Before barack obama, many of ushad to keep track of him
because they coming at us withhim almost double not just him,
but a whole lot of others too,but especially him as the major
(33:23):
symbol.
Now that he's gone, it's partof the mainstream.
When I'm there inCharlottesville and I'm looking
in the eyes of these neo-Nazi,thuggish brothers and sisters,
that hatred bubbling up.
It had been there for a longtime, but now it could come out
and they're willing to live anddie.
(33:44):
So that's, in part, whitesupremacist backlash against the
symbolic indictment of whitesupremacy, which was the black
president.
I also think that if Obama'sneoliberal policies had actually
spoke to the needs of workingpeople, he would have been able
to convince them not to go rightwing.
(34:04):
He would have given them asense that they're not forgotten
.
So when you get authoritarianpopulists, the crypto
neo-fascists like Trump, andtries to convince them he's on
their side, because they've beenforgotten and they were
forgotten.
With the wealth inequality inplace under Obama's
administration, the wagestagnation, massive
redistribution of wealth frompoor and working people to the
(34:26):
top 1% that had been going onfor a while, it escalated, you
see, so that it helped set thecontext for the kind of both
white backlash, as well as therule of big money, the rule of
big military, the scapegoatingof our precious Mexicans and
other immigrants, the viciousmisogyny that emerged, all of
(34:47):
the various forms of hatred thatwe've seen since Donald Trump
came down that escalator, youknow, as somebody who you know
for so long had to live underdeath threats myself, it's clear
to me that the levels of hatredand contempt and the
willingness to kill and murdercut very deep in certain circles
(35:12):
of my fellow citizens.
That's precisely the reason why, when you get a chance to make
your blow for justice, youbetter do it strong, because if
you don't, you'll still bemisunderstood as being more
militant than he is.
He was called a socialist.
Everybody knows he's not asocialist.
Ask Wall Street whether he's asocialist or not, he's called a
Muslim.
We know the brother's.
(35:32):
Not a Muslim.
He was called somebody not bornin America.
Hawaii is in America Last timewe checked.
All these lies are going to goon, that's par for the course.
So no, I'm not surprised at all.
I mean, my God, this is America.
You've got magnificent humanbeings in America of all colors,
and you've got some xenophobesin America who hold on to their
(35:55):
whiteness for dear life.
That's just the kind of countrywe are.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
Henry Lewis the Skip Gates controversy.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
Well, I recall when it happened happened.
Skip just got back from China.
You know Skip and I go back 40years.
He's my very, very dear Skip.
You know he's a liberal too now, so we don't agree on
everything, but I have a deeplove and respect for him and
when I called him up I said thisis a moment in which you can
Link your plight To the plightof everyday black people who get
(36:26):
mistreated like this all thetime.
When the first time he was onCNN, that's exactly what he did.
Then the intervention took placeto somehow isolate him as this
black professional who's tied tothese particular kind of sites,
from Martha's Vineyard toHarvard and so forth, to create
some kind of beer, from Martha'sVineyard to Harvard and so
forth, to create some kind ofbeer summit to bring them
(36:48):
together.
So it's more individual asopposed to institutional and
structural.
It's very important that blackmiddle class people, that black
bourgeois people, link theirplight with the plight of the
black poor and black workingclass.
Link their plight with theplight of the black poor and
black working class, Because oneof the strategies of the powers
(37:12):
that be is to isolate them,extricate them, make them
exceptional Negroes, exceptionalpeople, and still treat the
rest of black people in adisrespectful way, and I thought
what was upsetting about theresponse from the White House.
It made it too individualistic,as if this thing is not
something that's widespread.
By the time you got to TrayvonMartin, Ferguson, Baltimore,
(37:33):
Oakland, Chicago, it became veryclear of course it's systematic
, Of course it is chronic.
Course is something that's muchmore widespread than these
individuals, especially thesevery brilliant, well-to-do
individuals like my very dearbrother Skip Gates.
Amazing grace that speech AgainI thought it remained on a
(37:58):
superficial level.
This is not the time forsinging.
This is not the time forsinging.
This is a time for policiesthat speak to institutional
racism, that are responsible forthe deaths of so many black
folk.
So it was almost a kind ofdiversion or distraction in that
(38:20):
way, and I must say also, Ithought he sang the wrong song.
And I must say also, I thoughthe sang the wrong song Because
when you've got precious bodiesin the coffin owing to a vicious
white supremacist, this is notabout amazing grace at all.
It's not about worms that weare Uh-uh.
(38:42):
We got some other songs in theblack tradition.
You could sing Wade in thewater, god going to trouble the
water, we're going to meet Godin this trouble, in this
struggle.
We're going to make sure thatjustice can be found for these
folk in the coffin.
You need a fighting song.
We got some fighting songs inthe black tradition.
(39:02):
Now, amazing Grace is abeautiful song.
There's a time to sing thatsong.
He got wrong song and what doesthat do?
That pacifies people, you see.
So I was.
I wasn't that excited aboutthat particular moment either.
I was glad he went down.
I thought he should have goneto ferguson barack obama.
He's got a decency about him.
He really does.
(39:23):
I don't want to downplay that Idon't see enough courage and
backbone.
He's got a decency about him.
He really does.
I don't want to downplay that Idon't see enough courage in
backbombing.
He's got a decency about him.
So there's things that he'sdone that are beautiful.
I thought the speech that hegave for the brothers and
sisters in Connecticut, newtownit was powerful.
When he cried, those weregenuine tears.
Absolutely.
(39:43):
That's a decency about him, yousee.
But decency in tears is not thesame as action based on
political courage and moralwitness, and that's what I've
seen.
That's relatively lacking inhis eight years.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
And so Obama's contributions.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Well, I think, first and foremost he provided a sense
of hope, optimism, upbeatquality in the early part of the
21st century, just as theAmerican empire was beginning to
undergo various forms ofdecline and decay, of decline
(40:28):
and decay, and it looked as ifhe could provide a regeneration
and revitalization of Americandemocracy at that moment, and
that's a major contribution.
It had repercussions all aroundthe world Africa was looking
toward him, latin America waslooking, the Middle East was
looking for him and so forth,and that's something, again,
that can never be taken away.
The problem is, when youprovide that level of hope, if
(40:49):
you don't come through, thedisappointment is felt in a very
deep way.
Now we talked before about thissymbolic indictment of white
supremacy.
Being a black president, thatwill never be taken away from
you.
But when you do that, you haveto then also be measured by the
best of that black tradition,and when you got, you know
(41:12):
Frederick Douglass and HarrietTubman and Martin King and
Malcolm X and others in thattradition.
It doesn't get too much betterthan that.
That's like somebody showing upand going to blow their horn.
Oh, I'm sounding Well, you'resounding good, but let's play
some cold-trained Miles Davis.
Let's play some Mary LouWilliams on the piano and you
listen to this.
Oh, I got to do some morepractice.
(41:33):
You sure do.
Yes, you do.
That's true for blackpresidents too, because the
standards are set from inside ofthe traditions of the everyday
people.
You set the highest standardsof love, courage, fortitude,
service to others, sacrifice.
That's where the standards are,you see.
And it's not Wall Street, it'snot stock markets, it's not
(42:01):
Harvard, it's not Princeton.
Those are the eliteinstitutions that will pat you
on the back, but the realmeasurement is going to be the
ways in which you empowered orwilling to serve and sacrifice
for those slash.
Don't call everyday people.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
What about Donald Trump?
Speaker 1 (42:16):
Well, I think the Obama presidency was a
neoliberal rule, and byneoliberal what I mean is the
rule of big money, with marketlogic shot through every sphere
of our society, militarism, withwars in various countries,
disproportionately Muslimcountries.
(42:36):
You have a neoliberal rule inplace, unable to speak to the
wealth inequality, unable tospeak to the militarism, in fact
reinforcing it.
And here comes along somebodywho calls for the collapse of
that status quo.
And Trump calls for the end ofthis kind of regime.
(42:57):
And what does he have?
Well, what we had was we hadBernie on the left.
I do believe Bernie Sanderscould have beat him.
I knew that the oldneoliberalism of Clinton just
didn't have enough gump and gutand grit to deal with the
newness of this spectacle,substance-less, xenophobic
movement that Donald Trump wasgalvanizing.
(43:20):
And so there's a sense in whichthe Obama administration in no
way is a cause of the Trumpadministration.
No, not at all.
But he helped set theatmosphere by not following
through and speaking to theneeds, especially of working
people, and by working people Imean all colors across the board
(43:42):
, reigning in the Wall Street,greed not allowing people to
think they've been forgotten,and so forth.
Speaker 2 (43:50):
And what about the future of democracy?
Speaker 1 (43:53):
The rule of big money and the rule of military
industrial complex.
You got to remember now, forevery dollar spent in the US
budget, 53 cents goes straightto the military industrial
complex.
So they already feel verytruncated and narrowed.
If it is the case that Americacan no longer generate
(44:13):
high-quality leadership orstatespersons of integrity, then
democracy is just lying down aslippery slope to chaos.
And that means not just anarchy, that means tyrants.
Tyrannical rule.
Plato becomes right.
Every democracy produces a demosthat's driven by unruly passion
(44:35):
and ubiquitous ignorance thatbecomes gullible to a strong man
, and so you end up with atyrant who takes over and
democracy goes under.
Slowly but surely it goes under.
We're already seeing signs ofthat under Trump.
So I refuse to believe that,given all the magnificent human
(44:56):
beings in this country, full ofunbelievable imagination,
intelligence, courage, that thebest we can do is the kind of
mediocre and under mediocreleadership that we have right
now.
If that is the best we can do,then you know something very
precious it's coming to an end.
The democracies are veryfragile, very fragile
(45:21):
possibility of your reconnectionwith obama well, you never know
.
You never know, you know.
I mean, he's always been mybrother, he's always in my
prayers in terms of his safetyand so forth.
Uh, and my hunch is is that, um, there'll be context in which
we'll get a chance to talk, youknow, I get a brother hug and
tell him why I had my strongcritique, why I still think I'm
right, and so on, but maybe nottoo, you know, you never know.
(45:45):
You never know.
All of us need to be renderedaccountable in some way.
I'm not always right either.
He could correct me on somethings, you see, but you never
know.
I'm always open, I'm alwaysopen.
Speaker 2 (46:02):
So Cornel West?
Dr Cornel West is obviouslyrunning for president right now.
Cornel West in that recalled ameeting working with challenging
and critiquing Barack Obama.
In this, west discussed Obama'scandidacy, the symbolic
(46:23):
importance of becoming the firstblack president and, as he tied
it to the importance of keepingthe legacy of Dr Martin Luther
King alive.
Cornel West is a prominentphilosopher, activist, author.
He was serving as the D RichBonhoeffer Professor of
(46:47):
Philosophy and ChristianPractice at Union Theological
Seminary.
Wes first began his teachingcareer at Union Theological back
in 1976, when he was just 23years old.
He has since taught at Yale,princeton, where he received an
(47:08):
MA and a PhD in philosophy andwhere he still holds the title
of Professor Emeritus, also atHarvard, his alma mater, and the
University of Paris.
He has authored 20 books, bestknown for his classic, the 1993
book Race Matters and the 2004book Democracy Matters.
(47:28):
He has produced three spokenword albums, where he
collaborated with Prince andother notable people, and
appeared in over 25documentaries and films.
In over 25 documentaries andfilms.
Additionally, he is a frequentcommentator on political and
social issues across severalmedia outlets.
(47:52):
A provocative, democraticintellectual, west initially
supported Obama in 2008'spresidential campaign but
historically soon after becameone of President Obama's
fiercest critics from the left.
Throughout process andthroughout President Obama's two
terms, dr West cited vehementopposition on everything from
(48:14):
his handling through thefinancial crisis to his handling
of the black identity andracial issues.
Now this is what I'm starting todo in our classic interview
section, and this came fromsnippets from a interview
archive of life stories.
(48:35):
This was a didn't make themovie all of out of a 2018
interview, and the movie, whichI said all of us didn't make it
in it was a thing that they hadon HBO and it was a three-part
(49:02):
HBO documentary series thatended up coming out in 2021 and
that documentary was called InPursuit of a More Perfect Union
the personal and politicaljourney of President Barack
Obama explored that weavestogether conversation with
colleagues, friends and criticsalongside his own speeches and
(49:24):
interviews, so that you couldprobably still go to HBO and
watch the entire thing.
I hope you enjoyed it.
We've got a lot more of thingslike this coming.
I used to do a part of the showcalled Blast from the
Intellectual Past and that ledme to think that maybe sometimes
we need to have a longer blastfrom the intellectual pass in
(49:48):
long form.
Thank you for tuning in and wewill see you on the next episode
.
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