Cornel West: Ultimate Fight for Entitlements Will be in the Streets

[tonyz]

Ah, Critical Legal Studies, Critical Race Theory, Feminist Jurisprudence…mix in some Marxist theories…shake well and it's no surprise that you get...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cqN4NIEtOY

[Sigaba]

Originally Posted by Dusty

Nobody who gets everything they need in life handed to them on a silver platter should snivel.

Poverty is defined not by income statistics alone, but by an individual's true situation and prospects.

Source is here.

[Sigaba]

Originally Posted by JimP

Some of ya'll may not be as long in the tooth or as attuned the the denizens in the legal community as I've been for a bunch of years. [Cornel] West was preaching this crap years ago when he was a professor at Harvard. In fact - he had a LOT to do with a doctrinairre approach to law that was termed Critical Legal Studies (CLS). Harvard was the vanguard for this - ultimately not very successful - theory. The theme was akin to what the poverty-pimps (Jesse and Fat-Albert) have been doing for years: that if you are black/underprivilieged (so long as you were black); or economically depressed (so long as you were black - white crackers from Appalachia need not apply), you are OWED a successful and prosperous life from "the Man".

Similar to the "social justice" crowd. When you hear "social justice", run. It is a thinly veiled synonym for redistributionist economic policies. CLS never really caught on but had quite an impact within the upper-tier law schools and many of the future leaders of the country and industry. Guess what high-profile black man graduated Harvard Law and is imposing similar views on America.....??? That's right: Obama. Kind of all fits in doesn't it...??

QP JimP

While I agree with your assessment of the intellectual sustainability of CLS, I respectfully but strongly disagree with your thumbnail of its intellectual origins. IMO, CLS reflected an Americanized application of the broader tenets of post-structuralism and post-modernism that had worked their ways across the Atlantic from European intellectual circles.

Moreover, I think you and others are misreading West's activism, his political views, and his political philosophy. While the latter is informed by his study of Western philosophy, it is ultimately driven by his faith as a Christian. In regards to his political views, West made clear in a 1989 interview with Anders Stephanson, that he feels there is a big gap between what left of center intellectuals say and what they do.

MOO, given West's position as a critic of the political left, it is a grave political and intellectual miscalculation to denigrate his positions on issues such as poverty. I think the political right would be better served were it to engage Professor West in good faith and from a position of intellectual understanding.

My $0.02. YMMV.

[BOfH]

Originally Posted by Sigaba

Source is here.

Wow, 30 years young and it could have been written yesterday.

[JimP]

Sigaba - well stated and very good points. You are right in the essence of your argument; however, I have neither the time nor the patience to distill the origins of what West CLAIMS is his background to his philosophic approach as applied to his racist/activist belief's and actions. There's simply no coincidence that he and Larry Tribe come from the same academic background and spout many of the same beliefs. He can portray it as a "Christian-based belief structure" but if you've listened to him over the years, it's nothing more than warmed-over victim studies. No doubt he's a smart man but he's smart enough to know that the raw in-your-face-racism of jesse Jackson turns off far more than it serves. West's approach is far subtler, he argues like a typical liberal psuedo-intellectual. I.e., if you don't agree with him you are simply "misinformed" and not of sufficient intellect to absorb the subtleties of racist policies as enacted by America and the ever-present boogeyman affectionately decried as "Whitey" by less sophisticated "colored people".

I'm too old to try to put a PC face on what is clearly a race-baiting charlatan trying to pull a slicky-boy on the public at large. My days of trying to debate these folks are pretty much over. I prefer to call them as I see them. I won't go out of my way to screw with them but i will let them know that what they are selling won't go well with those of independent thought.

[tonyz]

Some additional insight into Cornel West by David Horowitz - this is a 12 page article - only brief excerpts are produced below for your convenience.

The complete article is available at the link below.

Hurricane West: Cornel West and American Radicalism

This academic impostor symbolizes the decline in America's intellectual and moral standards.

David Horowitz

National Review online

May 10, 2010 4:00 A.M.

Full Article:

http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...david-horowitz

Edited Excerpts:

To measure the dimensions of our current predicament, there are few better indicators than the improbable career of a cultural icon and political radical named Cornel West, friend (and former colleague) of Pres. Barack Obama, a man of vacuous ramblings and vaudevillian dimensions who is known to intimates as “Corn,” and to one Venezuelan acolyte as “Hurricane West.”

Because of his cultural prominence and radical enthusiasms, West was named to the Obama presidential campaign’s Council of Black Advisers and introduced Obama on his first campaign stop in Harlem in 2007, where he called the future president “my brother and my companion and comrade.” In return, Obama called West “not only a genius, a public intellectual, an oracle . . . [but] also a loving person.” West has also been a friend and campaigner for Bill Clinton, as well as a political adviser to Sen. Bill Bradley and Al Sharpton in their failed bids for the Democratic party’s presidential nomination in 2004.

THE RÉSUMÉ

Cornel West is the recipient of tenured appointments (and six-figure incomes) at four elite universities, including Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, and has taught at the University of Paris. He has been awarded 20 honorary degrees and is the author of 19 published books, two of which have made the New York Times bestseller list with over 100,000 hardcover copies sold. West is one of a handful of living authors included in the curriculum of Columbia University’s great-books program; there are more references to his work in academic professional journals than to 14 of the other 17 designated “University Professors” on the Harvard faculty; his work is referenced twice as frequently as that of Harvard’s ex-president, Larry Summers, himself a distinguished academic and former secretary of the Treasury, now chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

A rancorous quarrel between West and Summers in 2001 led to Summers’s censure by his own faculty, while West was promptly recruited for a prestigious post at Princeton. This was considered a momentous cultural event by the New York Times, which reported the story on its front page as national news.

A tireless self-promoter, West refers to his own work as “prophetic” (“I am a prophetic Christian freedom fighter”); the words “prophetic” or “prophesy” appear on the covers of four his books. A collection of casual pieces and reviews is titled Prophetic Fragments, as though West were a contemporary of Ezekiel and the parchments containing his wisdom had been eaten away by time.

While West’s self-adulation has raised the eyebrows of some, it has proven infectious for others, inspiring a chorus of prominent imitators. Maya Angelou, a Pulitzer Prize–winning author and sought-after speaker on the academic lecture circuit, tells us, “Cornel West thinks like a sage, acts like a warrior, and writes like a poetical prophet.” Marian Wright Edelman, wife of a Kennedy adviser, friend of Hillary Clinton, and head of the Children’s Defense Fund, agrees: “Cornel West is one of the most authentic, prophetic, and healing voices in America today.” Time and Newsweek laud him as a “brilliant scholar” and “an eloquent prophet,” while Sam Tanenhaus, editor of The New York Times Book Review, stepped forward as West’s defender in his confrontation with Harvard’s president. West is probably the only professor currently on a faculty who has had a school named after him, the oxymoronic Cornel West Academy of Excellence in Raleigh, N.C.


West is a frequent speaker at the church of Jeremiah Wright, former spiritual mentor to the president, and refers to the well-known race-hater as “my dear brother” and “a prophetic Christian preacher.” He is specifically determined to defend Wright’s notorious anathema — “God damn America.” According to West, it is the function of prophetic Christians such as Wright to call on God to damn America, because America is no different from every nation that treats its citizens as “less than human.”

As an academic celebrity, West is annually invited to deliver more than a hundred speeches on university campuses, at fees ranging from $10,000 to $35,000 per performance. “For me, these lectures were not simply money-making gigs,” he explains, “but occasions to make the world my classroom” and (with the unanchored grandiosity that is his trademark) to make “all people my congregation.”

Those who attend West’s lectures are treated to oracular wisdom like the following, selected at random from West’s 2008 book Hope on a Tightrope: Words and Wisdom.

But while his audiences nod agreeably at this mumbo-jumbo, treating it as a discourse that somehow makes sense, what they really come to hear are the progressive insults to their country and their countrymen, which West serves up at every venue and every turn:

“If you view America from the Jamestown Colony, America is a corporation before it’s a country. If it’s a corporation before it is a country, then white supremacy is married to capitalism. Therefore, white supremacy is something that is so deeply grounded in white greed, hatred, and fear that it constitutes the very foundation for . . . [a] democracy called the U.S.A.”

LOVE AFFAIR WITH RACISTS

One of the instructive anomalies revealed in West’s self-portrait is how much of his love is directed towards figures whose racial and religious malice are their defining features. The black theologian James Cone is introduced in West’s bluesman patois: “I remember going with my colleagues to a conference at Yale. It was a big-time gathering of the most celebrated theologians in the world. When I walked into that hall with my brothers — James Cone, Jim Washington and Jim Forbes — man I felt like we were the Dramatics walking on stage at the Apollo.”

James Cone is the founder of “black theology,” a racist creed built on such canonical sentiments as this: “Theologically, Malcolm X was not far wrong when he called the white man ‘the devil’”; and “What we need is the destruction of whiteness, which is the source of human misery in the world.”

But this self-described moral teacher and disciple of Socrates and Christ has nothing to say about the collusion of progressives in the worst episode of mass murder and human oppression in recorded history. Instead, West is the proud co-chair of the “Democratic Socialists of America,” an organization that defines its position on the left as “anti-anti-Communist” — that is, opposed to those who opposed Communism and supported America’s Cold War against the Soviet gulag.

West is also an enthusiastic member of the academic movement to resurrect the ideas that inspired Communism, burnishing the escutcheons of such Stalinist intellectuals as Gyorgy Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, and Eric Hobsbawm, all heroes of the current university establishment. West himself is the author of books devoted to this resurrection project, including Black Theology and Marxist Thought and The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought, his first book.

[Sigaba]

Originally Posted by tonyz

Entire post

Does your own reading of any of West's works agree with this analysis of Professor West's thought?

[tonyz]

Originally Posted by Sigaba

Does your own reading of any of West's works agree with this analysis of Professor West's thought?

CW is, no doubt, a prolific writer and speaker and from what I've read and watched - Horowitz may have been kind.

At the risk of grave political and intellectual miscalculation, I believe CW to be an educated and sophisticated charlatan.

YMMV

[GratefulCitizen]

Originally Posted by NORMAL550GIRL

Are you really prepared to take away all public assistance, and watch these children starve? Go without medical care and clothing, proper shelter?

I never said that.
I said take away federal funding.

The state and local governments, as well as non-governmental entities, are much better suited to the task.
Let the state and local governments, non-governmental charities, and individuals stand or fall on their own.

If the federal government fouls things up, where do you go?
With 50 seperate states and countless other local governments and entities, the best solutions will demonstrate themselves.

When a government spends a fiat currency, it has absolute power to confiscate arbitrary amounts of goods and services.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

All that corruption means there is less to go around, and the poor suffer for it.

"The last official act of any government is to loot the treasury." -George Washington

[AngelsSix]

Originally Posted by JimP

Sigaba - well stated and very good points. You are right in the essence of your argument; however, I have neither the time nor the patience to distill the origins of what West CLAIMS is his background to his philosophic approach as applied to his racist/activist belief's and actions. There's simply no coincidence that he and Larry Tribe come from the same academic background and spout many of the same beliefs. He can portray it as a "Christian-based belief structure" but if you've listened to him over the years, it's nothing more than warmed-over victim studies. No doubt he's a smart man but he's smart enough to know that the raw in-your-face-racism of jesse Jackson turns off far more than it serves. West's approach is far subtler, he argues like a typical liberal psuedo-intellectual. I.e., if you don't agree with him you are simply "misinformed" and not of sufficient intellect to absorb the subtleties of racist policies as enacted by America and the ever-present boogeyman affectionately decried as "Whitey" by less sophisticated "colored people".

I'm too old to try to put a PC face on what is clearly a race-baiting charlatan trying to pull a slicky-boy on the public at large. My days of trying to debate these folks are pretty much over. I prefer to call them as I see them. I won't go out of my way to screw with them but i will let them know that what they are selling won't go well with those of independent thought.

I agree. I watched one video of West and was instantly thinking the same thing. Same idea with Michelle Bachman and her husband. They think that being "conservative and Christian" is the only Right Thing. (I am referring to the way they believe that you can "pray the gay away", same principles as West, IMO, just a different dynamic).

Conservative Christians can have their say, but I just feel like I see things from a different perspective than they do. It's not about religion to me, it's about the REALITY of a situation based on facts.

[dollarbill]

I get the feeling West is also opposed to drug screening of all goverment assistance. I can hear it now. Here are your monthly stamps, go get some food or crack. If you run out, your community will resupply. Just be happy.

[Sten]

Originally Posted by dollarbill

I get the feeling West is also opposed to drug screening of all goverment assistance. I can hear it now. Here are your monthly stamps, go get some food or crack. If you run out, your community will resupply. Just be happy.

Yeah and with results like this he is a fool not to back it

ALLAHASSEE --
Since the state began testing welfare applicants for drugs in July, about 2 percent have tested positive, preliminary data shows.

Ninety-six percent proved to be drug free -- leaving the state on the hook to reimburse the cost of their tests.

The initiative may save the state a few dollars anyway, bearing out one of Gov. Rick Scott's arguments for implementing it. But the low test fail-rate undercuts another of his arguments: that people on welfare are more likely to use drugs.

At Scott's urging, the Legislature implemented the new requirement earlier this year that applicants for temporary cash assistance pass a drug test before collecting any benefits.

The law, which took effect July 1, requires applicants to pay for their own drug tests. Those who test drug-free are reimbursed by the state, and those who fail cannot receive benefits for a year.

Having begun the drug testing in mid-July, the state Department of Children and Families is still tabulating the results. But at least 1,000 welfare applicants took the drug tests through mid-August, according to the department, which expects at least 1,500 applicants to take the tests monthly.

So far, they say, about 2 percent of applicants are failing the test; another 2 percent are not completing the application process, for reasons unspecified.

Cost of the tests averages about $30. Assuming that 1,000 to 1,500 applicants take the test every month, the state will owe about $28,800-$43,200 monthly in reimbursements to those who test drug-free.

That compares with roughly $32,200-$48,200 the state may save on one month's worth of rejected applicants.

http://www2.tbo.com/news/politics/20...res-ar-252458/

[tonyz]

Reportedly, another 1,600 other folks have refused to take the FL drug test since the summer 2011.

It is what it is - both sides will spin the facts.

The price for the FL tests reportedly range from $25-$45 per person - a far cry from the thousands of dollars suggested in an earlier thread on this BB discussing the drug testing of welfare recipients.

I believe in FL that the cost of the test is fronted by the recipient and then reimbursed by the state if the test is passed.

All-in-all this topic remains controversial in FL.

[PedOncoDoc]

Originally Posted by tonyz

Reportedly, another 1,600 other folks have refused to take the FL drug test since the summer 2011.

It is what it is - both sides will spin the facts.

The price for the FL tests reportedly range from $25-$45 per person - a far cry from the thousands of dollars suggested in an earlier thread on this BB discussing the drug testing of welfare recipients.

I believe in FL that the cost of the test is fronted by the recipient and then reimbursed by the state if the test is passed.

All-in-all this topic remains controversial in FL.

Drug testing is most effective when random/unannounced, as many drugs are out of the system within 24-48 hours of use unless someone is a heavy/habitual user. How best to apply random/impromptu testing is unclear, but most people can clean their acts up for short periods of time if they know they need to piss clean.

My $0.02...

[The Reaper]

Originally Posted by PedOncoDoc

Drug testing is most effective when random/unannounced, as many drugs are out of the system within 24-48 hours of use unless someone is a heavy/habitual user. How best to apply random/impromptu testing is unclear, but most people can clean their acts up for short periods of time if they know they need to piss clean.

My $0.02...

But not THC.

TR