Obama on MLK day 2002 ‘Does non-violence make sense?’

All that can be said is the man is consistent. It has been class warfare since day one.

I don’t  know if you’ve noticed, but rich people are all for non-violence. Why wouldn’t they be? They’ve got what they want. They want to make sure nobody’s going to take their stuff!

In a speech given just a over a decade ago, President Obama said Martin Luther King’s philosophy of nonviolence “only makes sense” if the rich have sufficient empathy for the poor and the “powerless” are able to see a chance to become like those he says are running society.

Speaking on Martin Luther King Day in 2002 at a church in Chicago, then-State Senator Obama charged there was an “empathy deficit” in America resulting in a failure of the rich to correct society’s inequities. Here is a transcript of the video below:

The philosophy of non-violence only makes sense if the powerful can be made to recognize themselves in the powerless. It only makes sense if the powerless can be made to recognize themselves in the powerful.

You know, the principle of empathy gives broader meaning, by the way, to Dr. King’s philosophy of non-violence. I don’t  know if you’ve noticed, but rich people are all for non-violence. Why wouldn’t they be? They’ve got what they want. They want to make sure nobody’s going to take their stuff!

The well off, Obama suggests, are in fact practicing their own form of violence against the poor through a kind of economic oppression.

But the principle of empathy recognizes that there are more subtle forms of violence to which we are answerable. The spirit of empathy condemns not only the use of fire hoses and attack dogs to keep people down but also accountants and tax loopholes to keep people down.

I’m not saying that what Enron executives did to their employees is the moral equivalent of what Bull Connor did to black folks but, I tell you what, the employees of Enron feel violated. When a company town  sees some distant executives made some decisions despite the wage concessions, despite the tax breaks, and they see their entire economy collapses, they feel violence.

From January 21, 2002. University of Chicago

First picked up at WhiteHouse Dossier  with H/T’s as well to  National Review .

Thanks go to:

Patterico’s Pontifications  who was the original source with additional clips. Here are his additional links:

And the class warfare talk never ends.

What Obama really thought about the Clinton years. Quote: “Among African American males, one third to one fourth caught up in the criminal justice system, so that the number of young men incarcerated exceeded the number enrolled in colleges and universities. Throughout the nation inequality up, trust in mutuality down . . . the evidence was there if we cared to look.”

Obama on empathy, the powerful, and the prison industrial complex. Quote: “It’s hard to imagine that the powerful in our society would tolerate the burgeoning prison industrial complex if they imagined that the black men and Latino men that are being imprisoned were something like their sons.”

Local funding of schools is “fundamentally unjust.” Quote: “And Illinois, like many states in the country, has an education system that is funded  by property taxes. It is fundamentally unjust. So you have folks up in Winnetka, pupils who are getting five times as much money per student as students in the South Side of Chicago.”

The full clip on YouTube.

His usual class warfare drivel, no surprise, but just in case anyone still wonders about the man.