The last four years have made it clear that Cornel West doesn’t approve of the way President Barack Obama has managed his presidency. Referring to Obama as a “Rockefeller Republican in blackface,” West stated that Obama has no business using the Martin Luther King bible for his swearing in ceremony.

West says that it’s “morally obscene and spiritually profane” to spend $6 billion dollars on an election while the nation suffers from so many serious economic problems. He says that families are struggling and the wealthy of Washington don’t seem to care.

“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.”

Dr. West says that he would not have wanted the Republicans to assume power in the White House, but that people should not be forced to settle for the lesser of two evils. He also says that Dr. King would not approve of either President Obama’s policies or the state of the nation. He says that nearly every speech Dr. King gave before he died shows that he is not ideologically aligned with President Obama, but that some are quick to make the affiliation primarily because he’s black.

“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?”

Dr. Boyce Watkins, who has been outspoken about problems being faced by the African American community, says that the divide in black leadership is something that could haunt black America long after President Obama is no longer in office.

“I find it tragic that we now live in a country where a man is considered crazy for noticing that black people have a 14% unemployment rate and remain in prison for drug laws that were supposedly taken off the books years ago,” says Dr. Watkins. “If you want to leverage the legacy of Martin Luther King, then you must show that you’re working to continue that legacy. If you look at Obama’s record to date, you can see that this is clearly not the case. If he were alive today, we’d probably be attacking Dr. King in the same way we’re attacking Cornel West right now; no one enjoys the guy who spoils a good party.”

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