Fred Martinez's Monitor

Redistributionist Obama:"Break Free from the Essential Constraints that were Placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution"

-Is Barack Obama a socialist? A Marxist? It is hard to believe that question could even be seriously asked of a major party political candidate.[http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,444256,00.html]

-Obama: [T]he Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth.

-The Warren court, [Obama] said, failed to "break free from the essential constraints" in the U.S. Constitution and launch a major redistribution of wealth. But Obama, then an Illinois state lawmaker, said the legislative branch of government, rather than the courts, probably was the ideal avenue for accomplishing that goal.

-In the 2001 interview, Obama said:
Marxist "Redistribution of Wealth" Obama: "Break Free from the Essential Constraints that were Placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution"
If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed people, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be OK
But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it's been interpreted, and the Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can't do to you. Says what the federal government can't do to you, but doesn't say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf.[http://www.worldnetdaily.com/?pageId=79225]

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,444256,00.html

The Barack Obama We Hardly Know
Monday, October 27, 2008

By John R. Lott Jr.

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Is Barack Obama a socialist? A Marxist? It is hard to believe that question could even be seriously asked of a major party political candidate.

Nevertheless, there have been a few times that voters have gotten a glimpse of Obama in unguarded moments. Glimmers that remind me of the left-wing academic whom I ran into a number of times while we were both at the University of Chicago Law School.

— When Charlie Gibson asked Obama in April why he supported higher capital gains taxes, even if that meant less government revenue and thus less money to give to those Obama wants to help, Obama didn’t challenge Gibson’s claim. Instead he said: “I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.”

— In the middle of October, when speaking to “Joe the Plumber,” Obama justified higher taxes this way:

"It is not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everyone who is behind you, that they have a chance for success too. I think that when you spread the wealth around, it is good for everyone.”

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Stories
Obama's Tax Proposals Make a Complex System Worse John R. Lott Jr.: D.C. Handgun Ban Giuliani Bobs and Weaves on Gun Control Record A 'Tip' for Hillary: Admit Your Mistakes Media Coverage of Mall Shooting Fails to Reveal Mall's Gun-Free-Zone Status — A bombshell was released this weekend when a copy of an interview by Obama on WBEZ-FM, Chicago Public Radio, from 2001 was found (bold italics added):

"The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society ... and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that. ... I think that you can craft legal theoretical justifications for it legally, any three of us here could come up with a rational for bringing about economic change through the courts."

Class warfare rhetoric is one thing. But as Obama’s comments to Charlie Gibson indicate, Obama disapproves of the very notion that people should be successful. Why is making the wealthy poorer “fairness,” even when the poor also get less money? The goal is not to help the poor, it's to keep the wealthy from getting too much. It is apparently better that everyone be poorer than it is to have everyone have more money but a greater dispersion of income.

How is simply giving people money a way to make sure that they “have a chance for success too”? Obama might end up giving people who currently aren’t paying taxes even more money than they currently get from the Earned Income Tax Credit. But he will be doing so at a real cost: he is creating a high effective marginal tax rate that will keep them poor and keep them dependent on the government largess.

Obama’s tax credits are phased out as people earn higher incomes — that is, the government takes money away from you as your income goes up. Someone earning an extra dollar at $40,000 will find that income taxes alone will take 40 cents from that dollar.

Obama’s old comments from WBEZ seem impossible to ignore. Put aside that Obama obviously doesn’t believe that affirmative action represents redistributive justice. Saying that the Supreme Court “never ventured” into “redistribution of wealth” rules that out.

Obama’s constant theme is of transferring wealth, to “spread it around.”

There is so much else beyond his statements. Obama surrounded himself with people who were socialists and communists. Obama’s minister of 20 years, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright with his black liberation theology, a religion described as turning “Jesus into a black Marxist rebel.” Father Michael Pfleger, another Obama spiritual adviser, is also quite leftist. And his associate William Ayers apparently told an author, who was writing a book on 1960s radicals shortly before the foundation was set up in 1995, that “I’m a radical, leftist, small ‘c’ communist.”

In April Obama was caught on tape telling San Francisco donors, in a meeting that was closed to the press, that “it’s not surprising then they get bitter, [small town Pennsylvanians] cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” It was a very elitist left-wing statement. But the despising of people turning to religion is certainly something held in common by those on the far left.

During the presidential campaign Obama’s past positions have generally been ignored. Why wasn’t there one single question during the debates as to why Obama has so radically changed his positions on so many issues within just a few months?

Who is Obama going to put on the Supreme Court? With Democrats controlling a filibuster-proof Senate, will we be seeing the most extreme left-wing academics in law schools fill up the courts?



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John Lott is the author of Freedomnomics and a senior research scholar at the University of Maryland.


http://www.worldnetdaily.com/?pageId=79225

Obama rips U.S. Constitution
Faults Supreme Court for not mandating 'redistribution of wealth'

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: October 27, 2008
1:46 pm Eastern

© 2008 WorldNetDaily

Seven years before Barack Obama's "spread the wealth" comment to Joe the Plumber became a GOP campaign theme, the Democratic presidential candidate said in a radio interview the U.S. has suffered from a fundamentally flawed Constitution that does not mandate or allow for redistribution of wealth.

In a newly unearthed tape, Obama is heard telling Chicago's public station WBEZ-FM in 2001 that "redistributive change" is needed, pointing to what he regarded as a failure of the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren in its rulings on civil rights issues in the 1960s.

The Warren court, he said, failed to "break free from the essential constraints" in the U.S. Constitution and launch a major redistribution of wealth. But Obama, then an Illinois state lawmaker, said the legislative branch of government, rather than the courts, probably was the ideal avenue for accomplishing that goal.

(Story continues below)




In the 2001 interview, Obama said:

If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed people, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be OK
But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it's been interpreted, and the Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can't do to you. Says what the federal government can't do to you, but doesn't say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf.

And that hasn't shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court-focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that.

The video is available here:



In his top-rated national radio show today, Rush Limbaugh reacted to the tape.

The Constitution, he said, "most certainly does spell out things it must do on your behalf. He understands it. He just doesn't like it."

"He's talking about giving things to people," Limbaugh said. "This is perverted. Some people call this radical. I call it perverted.

"To me, ladies and gentlemen, the Constitution is a gift from God. It's not a disappointment; it's a blessing," he said.

Limbaugh cited unrepentant terrorist William Ayers, with whom Obama has had a relationship for many years, as well as Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the former pastor under whose teaching Obama attended church for two decades. Ayers has stated his Weather Underground didn't accomplish enough in the bombings on the U.S. Capitol and other locations, and Wright has called on God to d*** America.

"I'm beginning to wonder just who taught whom," Limbaugh said. "How much did Obama teach Ayers, Jeremiah Wright. Obama didn't have to hear what Jeremiah Wright was saying, Obama may have half written those sermons."

The change sought by Obama, however, simply couldn't be accomplished through court action, the Democrat said in the 2001 interview.

"The court's not very good at it," he said. "I'm not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. You know, the institution just isn’t structured that way."

"You start getting into all sorts of separation of powers issues, the court … engaging in a process that essentially is administrative," he said.

A commentator on the website American Thinker said Obama "wishes to scrap the limits placed on government powers because they get in the way of his redistributive schemes."

"What powers are we talking about? Private property rights for one. Since property is distributed 'unequally' in Obama's world, policies must be shaped and laws passed to deal with that situation."

GOP presidential candidate John McCain's campaign stated the tape proves Obama is too liberal for the White House.

"Now we know that the slogans 'change you can believe in' and 'change we need' are code words for Barack Obama's ultimate goal: 'redistributive change,'" said McCain-Palin senior policy adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin.

But the Obama campaign called the statements just another distraction.

"In this interview back in 2001, Obama was talking about the civil rights movement – and the kind of work that has to be done on the ground to make sure that everyone can live out the promise of equality. 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," spokesman Bill Burton said.

However, reaction to Obama's comments reached around the globe. In the Telegraph newspaper of London, Toby Harnden said the 2001 remarks are consistent with Obama's recent statement to the now iconic Joe the Plumber in Ohio, that "when you spread the wealth around it's a good thing for everybody."

"Although his remarks were heavily analytical and academic," Harndon said of the 2001 interview, Obama "spoke warmly of the notion of redistributing wealth, suggesting that there were other vehicles that the courts to achieve it."

Limbaugh commented, "We know Joe (the Plumber) got Obama to reveal himself."

But what would be next?

"Would he quote Marx? Would he demand change in the spirit of the Soviet Union? Would he ask us to have Constitution-burning parties?" Limbaugh said.

Limbaugh contended, however, that the "redistribution" was just a distraction.

"It's part of a process where the government confiscates private property and uses it to secure their own power. It's not about fairness," Limbaugh said. "They buy votes with the money they confiscate."

He continued, "Redistribution is the least frightening part of socialism. What comes after and before is what shocks like a Taser."

The weblog Right Pundits.com said, "In other words, he sees our money as belonging to the government. He wants to take our money and he will decide how to spend it."

posted by Fred Martinez @ 8:21 PM