Interviewed in Rolling Stone’s upcoming issue, titled perhaps a little too appropriately “Ready For The Fight,” President Barack Obama lauds the occupy movement.
RS: Occupy Wall Street seems to have influenced your rhetoric. Has it had a deeper impact on your thinking about America?
OBAMA: You know, I think that Occupy Wall Street was just one vivid expression of a broader anxiety that has been around in the United States for at least a decade or more. People have a sense the game is rigged, so just a few people can do well, and everybody else is left to scramble to get by.The free market is the greatest generator of wealth in history. I’m a firm believer in the free market, and the capacity of Americans to start a business, pursue their dreams and strike it rich. But when you look at the history of how we became an economic superpower, that rugged individualism and private-sector dynamism was always coupled with government creating a platform so that everybody could succeed, so that consumers weren’t taken advantage of, so that the byproducts of capitalism, like pollution or worker injuries, were regulated. Creating that social safety net has not made us weaker – it’s made us stronger. It liberated people to say, “I can move to another state, but if I don’t find a job right away, my kids aren’t going to go hungry. I can start a business, but if it doesn’t work out, I’m going to be able to land on my feet.” Making those kinds of commitments to each other – to create safety nets, to invest in infrastructure and schools and basic research – is just like our collective investment in national security or fire departments or police. It has facilitated the kind of risk-taking that has made our economy so dynamic. This is what it means for us to live in a thriving, modern democracy.
One of the major arguments we’ll be having in this election season is a contrasting vision that says not just that government is part of the problem, but essentially that government is the entire problem. These guys, they don’t just want to roll back the New Deal – in some cases, they want to go back even further.
Look up “banal” in the dictionary and you might see a definition resembling Obama’s remarks. “Inaccurate” and “socialist” fit too.
However. Should Americans be concerned that the occupy movement might continue influencing Obama’s rhetoric? When its speakers advocate wholesale vigilante murder? This is from Tuesday’s Occupy Justice rally at the DoJ.
SPEAKER: I feel a certain type of way about marches and rallies and I question the effectiveness of it. I do a lot of political work in Washington D.C. and as you all know this type of work is dangerous work to be doing. I would just ask – If I ever got locked-up, incarcerated – please don’t march for me. Please don’t do no rallies for me. I want ya’ll to start killing mother f–kers.
[LAUGHTER]
You see, it’s funny, but that’s the only thing our government will listen to.
God bless ‘em! But what sort of fight are Democrats aligned with occupy really getting ready for?
– Stone can put him on the cover of every issue until the election, just as TIME did in 2008.
I could no longer listen to him speak because it just makes my skin crawl. I’m afraid it’s gotten so bad too now, I can hardly even READ his words either, for the same reason! Ugh!
So it’s not just me.
No, it’s not just you. It’s so sad when many of the Americans in this country can’t abide listening to or hearing our president speak.
Praising #OWS again, huh?
I hope he does that a whole lot over the next 6 months, so the GOP can run ads juxtaposing his praises over footage of #OWS at its most disgusting and depraved.
Saul Alinsky said,
“Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution.”
The free market is the greatest generator of wealth in history. I’m a firm believer in the free market, and the capacity of Americans to start a business, pursue their dreams and strike it rich.
Frank Marshall Davis said:
“Leaving your race at the door. Leaving your people behind…. You’re not going to college to get educated. You’re going to get trained…. They’ll train you to forget what you already know. They’ll train you so good, you’ll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that s**t.”
The free market is the greatest generator of wealth in history. I’m a firm believer in the free market, and the capacity of Americans to start a business, pursue their dreams and strike it rich.
To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists.
The free market is the greatest generator of wealth in history. I’m a firm believer in the free market, and the capacity of Americans to start a business, pursue their dreams and strike it rich.
Jeremiah Wright said:
When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains, the government put them on slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton field, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, not God Bless America. God damn America — that’s in the Bible — for killing innocent people. God damn America, for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America, as long as she tries to act like she is God, and she is supreme. The United States government has failed the vast majority of her citizens of African descent..
The free market is the greatest generator of wealth in history. I’m a firm believer in the free market, and the capacity of Americans to start a business, pursue their dreams and strike it rich.
Van Jones said:
“They’ve taken their despicable ideology and used it a wrecking ball, that they have painted red, white and blue, to smash down every good thing in America.
They say they’re Patriots but they hate everybody in America who looks like us. They say they love America but they hate the people, the brown folk, the gays, the lesbians, the people with piercings, ya know ya’ll.”
The free market is the greatest generator of wealth in history. I’m a firm believer in the free market, and the capacity of Americans to start a business, pursue their dreams and strike it rich.
Now, I know that Obama was mentored by Frank Marshall Davis, a CPUSA member, and I know he sought out the Marxist professors at college, and I know that he launched his political career in Bill Ayers living room and I know that he ate dinners with Rashid Khalidi and their wives, and I know that he implanted Sam Graham Felsen as his chief blogger and had Carl Davidson and the New Party behind him, I know that he was involved with the Midwest Academy, the Socialist Scholars convention, I know that he put Anita Dunn as the Communications Director and tried to put Van Jones in as Green Jobs Czar.
I know that Obama doesn’t make any sudden moves, which he believes This was usually an effective tactic, because (white) people were satisfied as long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied; they were relieved — such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all the time.
But, what I don’t quite understand is…how a man who was mentored by a CPUSA member, went to college and sought out the Marxist professors, attended the Socialist Scholars conventions, attached to Jeremiah Wright for twenty years, launched his political career in Bill Ayers living room, attached himself to the New Party, the Midwest Academy and Saul Alinsky’s teachings, is in lockstep with George Soros, hired Anita Dunn and tried to hire Van Jones….can talk about loving the free market…when he has spent his entire lifetime surrounded by people who want to destroy it.
I cannot reconcile those two facts. He is lying to one or the other of us. He is either the sellout he says he is not…or he is not making any sudden moves, smiling and being courteous…while trying to destroy us with all those other folks he has surrounded himself with his entire life.
The betting window is now open on which is the truth and which is the lie.
It’s never about what he says; if his lips are moving, a lie is being pronounced. It’s always been about what he does. There’s the truth.
“Would you like to play a game?”
We don’t have a problem with a “social safety net,” Barack. It’s when that safety net becomes a way of life that we have a problem. And you seem hell-bent on making dependency a way of life. Furthermore, if you really believe that the free market is the greatest generator of wealth in history, why are you doing your darnedest to dismantle it? See, your actions (and associations) belie your words, so perhaps you can understand why when you say something like I’m a firm believer in the free market, we don’t believe you.
It’s really pretty simple. He loves the free market because it produces the wealth that he can take away and redistribute to those who don’t work so they’ll keep voting for democrats.
He and the rest of the left-wing cabal are just so ideologically blind and supremely arrogant that they think they can eat the goose and still continue to collect the eggs.
They can never admit that what they have passionately believed all their lives could be so utterly and completely wrong; even when the results are as visibly obvious as Oprah in a blaze-orange leotard.