Sunday, October 26, 2008
Obama has wanted to "spread the wealth" for a long time
Barack Obama's ambition to use the law to redistribute wealth pre-dated the impact of the "Bush" tax cuts. Check out these interview excerpts from 2001:
This video has only been seen about 1650 times so far; I suspect that number is going to go up a lot in the next few days.
MORE: Drudge linked to the video this morning, so its viewership is going through the roof. We were one of the first bloggers to get it up, though, so if you check in here regularly you probably saw it here first! Anyway, Ace has much more, including an audio file of the entire interview.
29 Comments:
By 
Dawnfire82, at
Sun Oct 26, 11:38:00 PM:
Why wasn't all of this (New Party, Ayers, et al) released, oh, like a month ago?
By TigerHawk, at
Sun Oct 26, 11:42:00 PM:
If you mean by the media, I would say that it still has not been. My friend Paul Budline's "Dig It" video, linked here many times, went up in early July, and he was hardly the original source on that story. If you mean by the McCain campaign, I think it is fairly obvious that there are certain kinds of attacks that John McCain finds very distasteful. Perhaps he has stayed his campaign's hand.
By Anthony, at
Mon Oct 27, 12:41:00 AM:
Perhaps he has stayed his campaign's hand.
I don't doubt it. McCain's reticence to use the legitimate weapons he has at his disposal has given me several moments of head-meets-brick-wall this last few months.
By 
, at
Mon Oct 27, 01:46:00 AM:
The creepiest part for me is when he talks so glowingly about the concept of "positive rights." Maybe it just makes me uncomfortable because usually that phrase has a, um, negative connotation.
By Purple Avenger, at
Mon Oct 27, 01:58:00 AM:
talks so glowingly about the concept of "positive rights."
The old Soviet constitution consisted solely of positive rights. ex. Free speech wasn't something intrinsic in being a human, the state gave it to you. Those specific rights were enumerated, anything not enumerated was not a right...and in practice, most that were enumerated were routinely ignored by the authorities.
By , at
Mon Oct 27, 01:59:00 AM:
Apparently I am losing it - I just listened again and he doesn't explicitly use the phrase "positive rights." Although he is clearly talking about them.
By Anthony, at
Mon Oct 27, 02:18:00 AM:
Although he is clearly talking about them.
I took the same thing away from listening to it. For Obama, the Constitution (perhaps more properly, the Bill of Rights) is flawed because it limits itself to the negative: what government is prohibited from doing, with anything not enumerated being left to the states and the people. I think MW is on to something: Obama's talk of positive rights makes me wonder what he thinks of things not specifically enumerated.
By , at
Mon Oct 27, 02:26:00 AM:
Excellent find! I recently wrote a similar article on my blog, feel free to check it out at:
http://www.elephantfeed.com
By , at
Mon Oct 27, 02:31:00 AM:
yes i agree 100000%. obama messiah is a dyed-in-the-wool-USA-version-via-the-3rd-world-and-60s-usa-domestic-terrorist-marxist.
thanks tiger for posting this. you have made me feel good about the blogosphere once again. still doing the job the msm SHOULD BE DOIN BUT IS TOO SCARED TO.
i noticed the hits on this vid have jumped considerably since you first posted it. yeah its getting looked at alright.
cheers
By JPMcT, at
Mon Oct 27, 07:21:00 AM:
If McCain fails to use this archive effectively, then he either INTENDS to lose....or he doesn't deserve to win...perhaps both.
The sad fact is that, when polled, well over two thirds of Democrats WANT Redistribution of Wealth!
There's a quiet revolution going on...and I hope we arise from our coma before election day.
By , at
Mon Oct 27, 07:51:00 AM:
Good lord, the purpose of the income tax is to redistribute wealth. Both candidates are for tax cuts it's just a matter of whether the cuts go to the middle class or to the wealthy (again). Obama is talking about restoring tax rates to where they were in 2001. The tax rates were almost 70 percent under Reagan. Talk about socialism!
Of course, Comrade Bush and Paulson taking over the banks is the definition of laissez faire. Heh.
As they say, there are no atheists in foxholes. And it appears that there are no dyed-in-the-wool capitalists in the midst of a financial meltdown.
By , at
Mon Oct 27, 09:19:00 AM:
Whoa! Aren't you getting a little "fringy" by posting this.
Truth be told, you'd have to be a little "fringy" to the LEFT, in order to not know that Obama is a Marxist. Either that or blatantly ignorant and uninformed.
By SR, at
Mon Oct 27, 09:43:00 AM:
JPMcT:
I doubt the IRS amendment (21?)to the constitution says anything about distributing wealth. The purpose of the income tax is to provide the government with a steady source of funding. If redistribution is the goal, why does the top rate matter as long as there is progression. There are a lot of things that re-distribute wealth, most are called welfare, and are destructive to the goal of economic growth, something we need to maximize about now, wouldn't you agree?
By , at
Mon Oct 27, 10:01:00 AM:
Curtis Sliwa played an audio tape from the mid-nineties this morning, as I was driving over to the Junction at 5:30 or so, of Obama being interviewed while a state legislator in Illinois. In what sounded to me like a very critical tone, he explained that the descriptions of the Warren court as "radical" were misplaced in his view, since they "failed to break free of the bounds established by the founding fathers" and redistribute wealth.
How can this stuff be coming out only now?
By davod, at
Mon Oct 27, 11:36:00 AM:
Spread the Wealth is complimented by
Obama's rhetoric Vs his record. Every voter should check these out.
By Steve M. Galbraith, at
Mon Oct 27, 12:08:00 PM:
Good lord, the purpose of the income tax is to redistribute wealth.
Redistributing wealth?
The income tax is on, of course, income, not wealth.
And the purpose was to raise revenue to run the government. Not to distribute wealth (or even income).
If the left wants a wealth tax to redistribute wealth (and not to provide services), then be upfront about it.
By , at
Mon Oct 27, 02:33:00 PM:
Obama's campaign responds, hoping to change the subject:
Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton says. "Make no mistake, this has nothing to do with Obama’s economic plan or his plan to give the middle class a tax cut. It’s just another distraction from an increasingly desperate McCain campaign."
Burton continues: "In the interview, Obama went into extensive detail to explain why the courts should not get into that business of 'redistributing' wealth. Obama’s point – and what he called a tragedy – was that legal victories in the Civil Rights led too many people to rely on the courts to change society for the better. That view is shared by conservative judges and legal scholars across the country.
"As Obama has said before and written about, he believes that change comes from the bottom up – not from the corridors of Washington," Burton says. "He worked in struggling communities to improve the economic situation of people on the South Side of Chicago, who lost their jobs when the steel plants closed. And he’s worked as a legislator to provide tax relief and health care to middle-class families. And so Obama’s point was simply that if we want to improve economic conditions for people in this country, we should do so by bringing people together at the community level and getting everyone involved in our democratic process."
By , at
Mon Oct 27, 03:06:00 PM:
Truth be told, you'd have to be a little "fringy" to the LEFT, in order to not know that Obama is a Marxist. Either that or blatantly ignorant and uninformed.
So anon at 9:19, is it your opinion that Colin Powell, Ken Adelman, Christopher Buckley, Governor William Weld, Reagan appointee and McCain advisor, Prof. Charles Fried, Douglas Kmiec (Head of the Office of Legal Counsel under Reagan & Bush 41), Jackson M. Andrews (Republican Counsel to the U.S. Senate), Rita Hauser (Former White House intelligence advisor under George W. Bush), Larry Hunter (Former President Reagan Policy Advisor), Francis Fukuyama (Advisor to President Reagan), Bill Ruckelshaus (served in the Nixon and Reagan administrations), Fmr Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill, Congressman Leach (R-IA), Governor Carlson (R-Minn), Congressman Gilchrest (R Md), Mayor Riordan (R-Los Angeles), Fovenor Holton (R-Va), Paul Volcker, Warren Buffet, Andrew Sullivan, C.C Goldwater, Julie Eisenhower, Susan Eisenhower, Christipher Hitchens, Jeffrey Hart (National Review Senior Editor), the editorial boards of the Chicago Tribune, The St. Peterburg Times and the Financial Times are Marxists ot simply blatantly ignorant?
Do tell, oh informed and wise one.
By Biotunes, at
Mon Oct 27, 03:06:00 PM:
Bro,
I had a feeling I would find this posted here. The real tragedy is that no one seems to have listened to what Obama actually said. So listen again.
Obama was looking at the civil rights court decisions from the point of view of minorities who thought that the court would solve all their problems, and thus they didn't have to do anything for themselves to change their situation. He uses tragedy in the exact right sense, that a lack of organization in minority communities is part of what has made the wealth gap continued to grow.
As he said, the supreme court is more about saying what government *can't* do, not what it *should.* People obviously differ in their ideas of what it should do, which is why any policy change needs to be fostered from the ground up.
There is enough sound-bite "smoking gun" BS on both sides of this election. Both sides need to read/listen a little more critically for what is actually there, not what the partly line wants you to read into it. Fortunately not everyone has abandoned independent thought, though. Do you read this blog?
http://www.amconmag.com/larison/
I hope there is some future for legitimate discourse about actual conservative/liberal policy differences. Between Obama and McCain, which do you think is more likely to engage in such thoughtful discussion?
By , at
Mon Oct 27, 03:49:00 PM:
I had a feeling someone would try to misinterpret the tragedy of Sen. Obama's leftitude, but happily Ace has prepared a ready-to-eat response:
As lefties are suggesting idiotic interpretations, and even some on the right are getting it wrong, here's what he's saying:
1. The Supreme Court never considered "redistribution of wealth" or "economic justice" among the guarantees provided to citizens.
2. Even the Warren Court was not "radical" enough to do so -- to impose real change on the nation.
3. The courts have generally provided negative constraints on the government rather than positive obligations the government owes to its citizens (specifically, here, such as economic justice and redistribution of wealth).
4. Therefore, it is a "tragedy" that the civil rights movement became so courts-focused, because it limited what redress they could actually obtain -- and it took attention away from the "community organizing" efforts which could assemble "coalitions of power" (political power, that is) to actually achieve "redistributive change." Such change simply could not be had in the courts, still laboring under the "constraints" imposed by the Founding Fathers.
5. "And in some ways we still suffer from that."
Give it up, lefties -- that's what the quote means.
A mistake the right is making is claiming he wanted the courts to assume a more radical, wealth-redistribitionist posture -- which I have no doubt at all he does believe, but he doesn't quite say that in the quote.
He is saying that the courts were the wrong venue to seek such change, not being "radical" enough, and that "community organizing" and assembling "coalitions of power" were the right ways to do so.
And so he's done so himself, of course. The courts were not the right vehicle for "redistributive change," but getting himself elected president, with a socialist-friendly supermajority of Democrats in Congress to rubber stamp his agenda, is the right vehicle.
The "coalitions of power" are being assembled as we speak.
By TigerHawk, at
Mon Oct 27, 04:49:00 PM:
Sis,
There is nothing ambiguous in what Obama said in that interview. He is obviously in favor of redistribution of wealth, and says as much in the interview. Now, you might legitimately consider that a feature, rather than a bug, but there is no room for argument about his opinion.
By Steve M. Galbraith, at
Mon Oct 27, 05:30:00 PM:
He is obviously in favor of redistribution of wealth, and says as much in the interview
Indeed he does.
The interview shows him dicussing how best to enact that policy. Through the courts? Or through the political process/branches.
Not an unimportant point of discussion (courts = rights, legislature = goals).
But one far removed from the question as to whether he favors it, i.e., wealth redistributin.
He does.
By , at
Mon Oct 27, 06:01:00 PM:
American Marxism, Saul Alinsky aside, is usually academic and anti-establishment as opposed to totalitarian and dogmatic. Even Bill Ayers, the suburban private school boy that he was, seemed to stumble into Marxism mostly because of the cultural alienation of the sixties. No working class economic bigot, he, and one could easily see him becoming a prominent member of society (as he did), even if he never quite made it as high as CEO of TIAA/CREF, like a revolutionary colleague eventually did become.
My point is that Obama, the Socialist, isn't dangerous to American institutions, even if he is a Marxist. He's no Lenin, for chrissakes. No one thinks he's going to start up a political police, subvert democratic civic institutions or open an active shooting war against economic elites. Come on.
Instead, the issue is, was and always will be the economy (stupid, I know). More precisely, it's the likely impact of the policies espoused by an Obama presidency on the economy.
Raising taxes going into a global slowdown is a prescription for friggin disaster. Loving wealth-destruction, as all Democrats do by birthright, is fine. Actually practicing it is not fine. The question isn't "is Obama a Socialist?", it's "Is Obama really that dumb?".
I think he may not be dumb, but he's certainly green and he's walking into a town full of dummies like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. They have no compunction, that I can see or recall, about beginning the great Class War on January 21. It seems to me that Obama's inexperience is a bigger threat than his socialism, and the about to be ascendant entrenched Washington party leadership is the biggest problem of all.
McCain should have been running against the Congress, hard, hard, hard, all election-cycle long. Not to have done so is the greatest mistake a national candidate ever made: Congress' low approval ratings were made-to-order for McCain, and would have put him into a great position once the economy cratered of very properly blaming the entire mess on the Democrats leadership.
Why didn't McCain take the obvious path? I think it's because he really buys into all the "non-partisan", "respect your opponent" B.S. that he spouts, against all experience. If (and, it looks like when) he loses, it'll have been his amazing political naivite, his incredible desire to believe the best about his opponents (writ large) that will have been the cause.
Irresponsible moralist.
By , at
Mon Oct 27, 07:30:00 PM:
... the purpose of the income tax is to redistribute wealth.
Wrong.
As already observed, the purpose of income tax is to raise revenue to fund some agreed-upon level of government services for the benefit of all citizens.
The purpose of making income taxes progressive rather than flat or regressive was to spread the burden of paying for these government services in such a way that the poor were not deprived of the money needed for basics like food, shelter, and clothing (the way they certainly would if required to pay their "fair share" of services they, too, use). Thus, wealthier and more able to pay wage earners shoulder more of the burden of paying for these services provided by social contract.
The primary purpose is funding the operation of government - NOT forced transfer payments from the wealthy to the poor for the purpose of minimizing income inequality.
By JPMcT, at
Mon Oct 27, 09:19:00 PM:
I would be remiss if I did not add this quote from one of the men who actually wrote the constitution:
---------------------------------
“The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.”
Thomas Jefferson
----------------------------------
Here's the point - Obama is, quite clearly, a marxist ideologue. Marx himself considered socialism a bridge to communism. The fruit is hanging low on the tree...Wall Street money gluttons, Huge bail out for those deemed responsible, economy in the tank, everybody's retirement plan in the crapper. Add to this the feelings of the poorly informed electorate who would just LOVE to get a check in the mail for doing nothing.
If there were any time in US history that is ripe for a soft, non-violent political conversion from a capitalist free market system to a "workers paradise" - NOW is that time.
We are preparing to give full control of our government to the most radical, least competent, clueless collection of ne'er-do-wells in the history of this republic.
I am fully convinced that a vote for Obama, backed by bboth houses of the legislature, will be a disaster of historic proportions.
Convince me I'm wrong.
By Steve M. Galbraith, at
Mon Oct 27, 10:07:00 PM:
Obama is, quite clearly, a marxist ideologue
I've seen no evidence that he wants to dismantle representative democracy and have the state take over the means of production while banning private property. I.e., turn the US into a Marxist state.
He's a European-style statist. Socialist, if you insist.
By JPMcT, at
Mon Oct 27, 10:49:00 PM:
"I've seen no evidence that he wants to dismantle representative democracy and have the state take over the means of production while banning private property."
Such could have been said of Castro in 1958 or Lenin in 1916.
What evidence do you need?
We have already effectively nationalized our banks.
We are preparing to nationalize our health care.
We are toying with nationalizing our auto industry.
We are discussing nationalizing our retirement plans.
We are conceptually well on the way to redistributing wealth...not just naionally, but world wide.
We are investing in nationalized personal behavioral changes, disguised as "climate control".
We are empowering the labour movement with public balloting.
We are electing a man whose concept of a constitution aligns with the rights provisions of the old USSR.
All this...and they haven't even had breakfast.
The handwriting is CLEARLY on the wall. This may very well be our last true opportunity to vote, assuming the massive voter fraud hasn't already decided the election.
By davod, at
Tue Oct 28, 07:08:00 AM:
1. Statism - The practice or doctrine of giving a centralized government control over economic planning and policy. *The Heritage Dictionary.
We all know how well centralised planning has worked in the past.
2. Can someone tell me how the trickle up theory is a valid economic concept if the government has to give people money in order for the concept to work?
By , at
Fri Oct 31, 03:01:00 PM:
No one thinks he's going to start up a political police, subvert democratic civic institutions or open an active shooting war against economic elites. Come on.
Maybe he won't, but I have little doubt that that
1) His philosophical brethren will
2) If he objects to (1), it will only be in the sense of savoring the fruit while cursing the vine
