Charles Barkley: All politics is just rich people screwing poor people

“TV sound bites,” the Turner basketball analyst, himself a famous producer of them, said Tuesday. “I think what happened was he made some great sound bites and news organizations love good sound bites, clearly. He draws ratings.

“So every time he says something, whether you like it or not, the TV network is like, ‘He said what?’ and they’re going to go to that.”

“The Republicans always do a good job of dividing and conquering. They do a really good job of making black folks, poor white folks and Hispanics not like each other. Everybody wants to talk about black and white, when the situation is really about rich people against poor people. …

“All they talk about is immigration, the notion that illegal immigrants are ruining our country [by] taking jobs. … We’re shipping all our jobs out of the country. That’s, to me, worse than a few Hispanics who come here to work their behinds off. If you’re a poor white person and your life sucks, it’s easy for you to blame Hispanics cause you don’t want to look in the mirror and say, ‘I’m the reason my life sucks.’ The Republicans do a good job exploiting that.”

“All politics is rich people screwing poor people. Poor people are too stupid to know they’re just chess pieces in a game. All the poor white people, all the poor black people, all the Hispanics, they’re in the same boat. They got no economic opportunities … they spend all their time blaming each other because rich people throw words at them like, illegal immigration, and racism and things like that. If poor people ever get smart, and realize like, ‘We should band together, rise up, instead of fighting each other,’ we probably can make a difference."