By Stephen Feller
Dr. Cornel West called Barack Obama a “Rockefeller Republican in blackface” unworthy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s bible, which the president used during his second inauguration into office. The philosopher and professor at Princeton University said that while he is glad that Mitt Romney didn’t win the presidential election, he also has problems with some of Obama’s policies.
West called it “morally obscene and spiritually profane” to spend $6 billion on an election and not have any kind of national conversation about the major problems the country faces.
“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,” he said. “No talk about drones dropping bombs on innocent people. So we end up with such a narrow, truncated political discourse.”
Noting that he is glad there was not a “right-wing takeover,” west said that voters instead elected a “Republican in blackface,” with Obama, “so that our struggle with regard to poverty intensifies.”
He said that King would not approve of much of modern America, or what Obama has not done to change during his first four years in office. Based on King’s past speeches, West insisted that Obama has a long way to go before he is worthy of MLK’s Bible.
“Brother Martin Luther King, Jr., what you say about the New Jim Crow? What would say about the prison industrial complex? What would you say about the invisibility of so many of our prisoners, so many of our incarcerated — especially when 62 percent of them are there for soft drugs and not one executive of a Wall Street bank gone to jail,” West said.
“Martin doesn’t like that. Not one wire-tapper, not one torturer under the Bush Administration — at all . . . Then what would he say about the drones on the precious brothers and sisters in Pakistan, and Somalia, and Yemen. Those are war crimes, just like war crimes in Vietnam, Martin Luther King, Jr., what would you say?”
