Another Newly
Unearthed Obama Video:
“Rich
people are all for nonviolence. Why wouldn’t they be? They’ve got what they
want. They want to make sure people don’t take their stuff.”
10/3/2012
Does Obama really believe in non-violence?
In the wake of the
Daily Caller’s release of President Obama cheering Rev. Wright and invoking the
race card in various ways, our friend Morgen Richmond decided the time was
right to release some little-known Obama video of his own. He authorized me to
release the video here first.
The following
clips are from 2002. Obama is speaking in a church at a 2002 Martin Luther King
Jr. Day memorial service.
The full speech
is here,
and by and large it is a nice speech by a rising politician. Obama speaks about
the need for empathy in society, about taking responsibility for our actions,
and the audacity of hope. He levels barbs at the wealthy and un-empathetic, but
also criticizes those who blame the system for the arrest of O.J. Simpson and
the crack epidemic. Although the audio quality is poor because of the echo in
the church, one can tell that Obama is well spoken and articulate. Joe Biden
would have been proud.
But there are a
few times when the mask slips, just a little.
My favorite clip
is this one, where he speaks of Dr. King’s philosophy of non-violence, and
explains that it works only when there is empathy:
Transcript:
The philosophy
of nonviolence only makes sense if the powerful can be made to recognize
themselves in the powerless. It only makes sense if the powerless
can be made to recognize themselves in the powerful. You know, the principle of
empathy gives broader meaning, by the way, to Dr. King’s philosophy of nonviolence.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but rich people
are all for nonviolence. Why wouldn’t they be? They’ve got what they want. They
want to make sure people don’t take their stuff. But the principle
of empathy recognizes that there are more subtle forms of violence to which we
are answerable. The spirit of empathy condemns not only the use of
fire-hoses and attack dogs to keep people down but also accountants and tax
loopholes to keep people down.
I’m not saying
that what Enron executives did to their employees is the moral equivalent of
what Bull Connor did to black folks, but I’ll tell you what, the employees at
Enron feel violated. When a company town sees its plant closing because some
distant executives made some decision despite the wage concessions, despite the
tax breaks, and they see their entire economy collapsing, they feel violence
. . .
Other clips are
linked below. I was struck by the way that Obama portrayed those who commit
crimes and become imprisoned are “caught up” in a “prison industrial complex”
that would not be tolerated if white people
didn’t think of blacks and Latinos as unlike them.
And the class
warfare talk never ends.
What Obama really thought
about the Clinton years. Quote: “Among African American males, one third to
one fourth caught up in the criminal justice system, so that the number of
young men incarcerated exceeded the number enrolled in colleges and
universities. Throughout the nation inequality up, trust in mutuality down . .
. the evidence was there if we cared to look.”
Obama on empathy, the
powerful, and the prison industrial complex. Quote: “It’s hard to imagine
that the powerful in our society would tolerate the burgeoning prison
industrial complex if they imagined that the black men and Latino men that are
being imprisoned were something like their sons.”
Local funding of schools is
“fundamentally unjust.” Quote: “And Illinois, like many states in the
country, has an education system that is funded by property taxes. It is
fundamentally unjust. So you have folks up in Winnetka, pupils who are getting
five times as much money per student as students in the South Side of Chicago.”
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