Truthdig
Cornel West Wants Bernie Sanders as President
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/cornel_west_wants_bernie_sanders
_as_president_20150827/
Posted on Aug 27, 2015
Cornel West. (Esther(https://www.flickr.com/photos/happygreentea/) / CC
BY-SA 2.0(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/) )
The influential scholar and civil rights activist Cornel West has broken
with Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges, answering black voters' skepticism
about Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign with an endorsement of the
socialist candidate.
A professor at Union Theological Seminary, West declared his support for
Sanders in a series of Twitter
messages(https://twitter.com/CornelWest?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) Monday night.
West anticipated some of the standard criticism being leveled at Sanders by
pundits and activists on the left, including Truthdig columnist Chris
Hedges, who has given his
opinion(http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/make_the_rich_panic_20150503)
that Sanders will not win the Democratic nomination and that the energy
stirred up by Sanders' campaign will ultimately be leveraged as support for
what Hedges views as an unreformable Democratic Party.
The New York Times' Alan Rapport
wrote(http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/08/25/bernie-sanders-
gets-stamp-of-approval-from-cornel-west/?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0) of
West's endorsement of Sanders:
The endorsement is a valuable one for Mr. Sanders, who has been gaining
ground on Hillary Rodham Clinton in recent polls but who has faced protests
from Black Lives Matter activists who have said he is not sufficiently
supportive of their cause. This month, a group of activists cut short one of
the Sanders rallies when they took the stage and commandeered his
microphone.
Mr. West, who has been critical of President Obama's efforts to uplift
African-American causes, explained recently that Mr. Sanders would best
serve black people because of his desire to clamp down on Wall Street and to
invest in working people and poor people.
And, watch Chris Hedges' two-part TeleSUR(http://www.telesurtv.net/english/)
interview with Cornel West:
PART 1: Chris Hedges, Cornel West on Black Prophetic
Tradition(http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/chris_hedges_cornel_west_on_b
lack_prophetic_tradition_20150804)
PART 2: Chris Hedges, Cornel West on the Demonization of the Black
Poor(http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/video_chris_hedges_cornel_west_on_
the_demonization_of_the_black_poor_201508)
-Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly(http://www.truthdig.com/alexander_kelly) .
