Here's what brother Cornel West had to say about President Obama:
CORNEL WEST: Well, one, I think that it’s morally obscene and spiritually profane to spend $6 billion on an election, $2 billion on a presidential election, and not have any serious discussion—poverty, trade unions being pushed against the wall dealing with stagnating and declining wages when profits are still up and the 1 percent are doing very well, no talk about drones dropping bombs on innocent people. So we end up with such a narrow, truncated political discourse, as the major problems—ecological catastrophe, climate change, global warming. So it’s very sad. I mean, I’m glad there was not a right-wing takeover, but we end up with a Republican, a Rockefeller Republican in blackface, with Barack Obama, so that our struggle with regard to poverty intensifies.
My Republicans friends will read that and think West is just nuts. There's nobody to the left of Obama, many of them have been led to believe. But as I've been saying, and will continue to say, Obama's real problems is that he's either not liberal enough at heart, or he doesn't have the courage of his liberal convictions. It doesn't really matter which, the result is the same: a Third Way, bankster-trusting, safety-net cutting, austerity-imposing, forget-labor Democrat.
As Michael Moore said, we liberals hope that Republicans are right about Obama's being a crypto-socialist. We hope that now he doesn't have to worry about re-election, he'll grow some spine and fight on issues like the banking reform, mortgage relief, the environment, and protecting labor unions. We hope, but we're not stupid. History doesn't give us much grounds for hope. We realize Obama probably won't "come to Jesus" on his own. He has to be pushed.
By Amy Goodman
November 10, 2012 | Democracy Now!
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