Cornel West, who is the Class of 1943 university professor at Princeton, calls President Obama "a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats."
The Boston Globe reports: "West also recounts personal slights by Obama — that his phone calls didn't get returned, and that he couldn't get a ticket with his mother and brother to the inauguration."
As Professor West puts it: "brother Barack Obama had no sense of gratitude, no sense of loyalty, no sense of even courtesy."
I don't see why Professor West has to bring the president's blackness into it. Or the Jewishness of those like Lawrence Summers and Rahm Emanuel. (Professor West says of President Obama, "He feels most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they want.") And it may be a mistake to take what Professor West says seriously. But I do think in a strange way the professor is on to something. While Mr. Obama has been rhetorically hostile to certain industries, raised certain taxes and tried to raise others, and imposed lots of new regulations, he has basically enshrined the too-big-to-fail banks while also propping up GE and the firms that will benefit from ObamaCare.
Professor West: "The tea party folk are right when they say the government is corrupt. It is corrupt. Big business and banks have taken over government and corrupted it in deep ways....we've got to think seriously of third-party candidates, third formations, third parties."
The full interview in which Professor West unloads is here.
