GATES: You, thirty years ago, were a socialist, I think it’s fair to say. Do you believe that capitalism is compatible with the absorption of a significantly larger percentage of black people into the middle class?
CLEAVER: I think it is. I think that it is possible for the capitalist system to have a program of full employment, but we have a spiritual and moral problem in America. Our problem is not economic or political, it is that we do not care about each other because we say hey look, my people, my group, we’re first class and you guys, you’re second class and you guys over there, you third class and you guys in the back right there, no ain’t got no class. That’s our attitude but our creator never wasted his or her time creating a second class person. He made us all first class and he provided this earth as our home for all of us, not for the black man, the white man, the red man, the yellow man, the brown man, but for the whole human family.
We are the ones who have created a system of scarcity. There’s enough building materials in this country, enough skilled workers, that there should not be any homeless people. There should not be any hungry people. And so a man wrote a poem in Berkeley, old man, in which he had an immortal line. It was a poem on greed in which he said how much more than enough do you want? There is enough for all of us but we don’t have values that include us all and the black bourgeoisie suffers from that same lack of values as the white bourgeoisie and so we need a spiritual transformation in our attitude towards each other so that we can look upon each other as a family and therefore our national economy should be based upon a family budget, not going around preaching scarcity. There’s not enough money for this. There’s enough money for everything if you stop spending it the way you’re spending it and so we need to undertake some political reform. Number one, I told you about the toilets, but number two, we have got to require our politicians to write their own speeches and when they campaign to campaign under the penalties of perjury because we have developed a political culture of mendacity.
We all know the politicians lie, we don’t expect them to tell the truth so we have a low expectation because they’ve been lying all down through history. We’ve got to raise the standard and to start with we require them to write their own speeches or let’s vote for the speech writer. George Bush went in talking about let there be 1000 points of light then when he got in the White House all the lights in the country went out and we found out that a woman wrote that speech. He didn’t even write the speech. So when you come before us reading your speech we want to know what you are talking about, what you are thinking about, where you are coming from, but you can’t tell us that if you going to read a speech some word monger wrote for you. We got to change that, man, because we need truth in our political arena, and then we’ve got to restore vision because our young people are lost, they don’t see a future and to restore — yes, sir?
GATES: How do we do that in the black community? I mean we have this gangster culture.
CLEAVER: I know. We have got to do it for the country as a whole because it is no longer a situation where you can just deal with the problems of black people because we now have the same problem. We’ve gotten rid of the special problems. I know that there’s still discrimination going on and racism in the decision and what Newt Gingrich talked about a new contract with the American people. I used to carry his book around with me and I’d jump up and down on it and kick it off the stage because why do we think that Newt Gingrich going to live up to a new contract when he hasn’t lived up to the old contract? We don’t need a contract. The contract that we should be going by is called the Constitution of the United States of America and all this other stuff is just a political scam.