Van Jones – Transforming the American Dream into the American Nightmare (Pt 3 of 5)

Life Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness... or ease, comfort and the consumption of entitlements fed to you by a 'kind' master. What I've been trying to show you over the last couple posts, is that that is the simple choice which is being offered to us today; those are the options which are clearly being pawned off in Van Jones 'Contract for the American Dream' - if you look beyond what it says to what it means - and it is for us to choose between them; it is for us to choose which one we truly want for ourselves and for our children.

To own your own life, or to live a life approved for you by various experts in govt and quasi-govt organizations, such as Jones' group. That is the nature of the contract he is 'offering' up for all of us to sign, and once signed onto... can you imagine trying to cancel it? Look at the difficulties we're experiencing from Medicare and Social Security alone. Don't delude yourself, this is a permanent agreement.

Look at all of the foundations and organizations who've attached their bright and shiny logos as seals of approval at the bottom of the contract. Don't they seem to be proudly endorsing this? Why then is it that the actual message they are peddling, is so carefully left unsaid? Why doesn't the contract simply come out and say,

"We, the undersigned, do not feel that people such as yourselves can be trusted with making the everyday decisions that have to be made in daily life. We, the undersigned, believe that experts from all walks of lie, should be put in ultimate control of all walks of your lives. We, the undersigned, hereby agree that experts should be trusted to select the experts who will make these decisions for you, and of course they must have unfettered access to any wealth which you might create - which after all can only be made as a result of their decisions - from here on out."

But they don't say that, do they? What Van Jones, George Soros, the Tides Foundation and all the others obviously do not want, is for anyone to actually give consideration to their proposals and understand just what it is they are agitating for. They never come out into the open and state that they are for the government taking control of our lives, for government taking control over what we have left to 'choose' from, to read, to listen to, to watch, to receive medical attention for, to learn, to eat, to drink, to amuse ourselves with, and on and on and on.

They will not come out and say what they mean.

Rather than doing so, they prefer to slick their positions by We The People in seemingly liberty loving phrases arranged about the surface of their message, while leaving that darker and central requirement for taking and maintaining control over us, unsaid in the implications of a few select words, wrapped snugly in the emotional appeals of each paragraph. It is done clumsily enough, but it is what they have done.

What becomes quickly apparent in reading this contract, is that that main tactic, that of wrapping their actual message deep within a roll of a more appetizing and identifiably American one, like a bitter pill wrapped in bacon for a dog to swallow, is as close as they will willingly risk saying what they actually mean.

In this next paragraph, I think we're on the third one now, we find the same 'rhetorical bacon around the poison pill' plan, of saying what any sensible person would find themselves nodding along with, while wrapping it around an implication that is nearly hidden from sight. The sizzling portion of the bacon wrapping, is what this paragraph begins with, a statement which I can wholeheartedly agree with, "Today, the American Dream is under threat." But what that American dream in fact is, is of critical importance to understanding what is threatening it and where the threat is coming from.

“Today, the American Dream is under threat. Our veterans are coming home to few jobs and little hope on the home front. Our young people are graduating off a cliff, burdened by heavy debt, into the worst job market in half a century. The big banks that American taxpayers bailed out won’t cut homeowners a break. Our firefighters, nurses, cops, and teachers – America’s everyday heroes – are being thrown out onto the street. "

If the 'American dream' is put forward as being 'getting a decent job', that presumes facing a different set of threats than what might be faced if the 'American Dream' is recognized as being 'To live your own life.' If getting a decent job for those who play by the rules, is the dream you are promised, then it's a simple thing to do to say that everyone who plays by 'the rules' should be given a 'decent job' - what those rules are and what the job would be, and more importantly who will give it to you, are open issues - which they'll be happy to provide answers for, later, once there is no other option left. On the other hand, if the 'American Dream' is thought to be 'To live your own life, then having someone appointed with the power to determine what 'the rules' will be, what a 'decent job' is, and whether or not your own dream is to get one - or not - will itself be seen as a threat to you and to all of your dreams. The dream to 'To live your own life' is in mortal peril from the dream of experts and do-gooders with the power of the government and the force of law behind them, will leave you no option but of ''being told by the state how to live your own life. These are not reconcilable differences. Even setting aside differences over simple policy approaches, such as the, role and blame, of the federal government in the issues surrounding education and the debt, the fact is that it has been the driving goal of the left to expand the size and scope of government - defining how much you can earn, what you should be allowed to keep as your own, where you can live, what you must be taught in school - which can't help but impose their ideal of govt upon each persons desire to live their own life. By the very nature of the left, they are advancing a cause which the original American dream explicitly sought to escape… this raises some questions, doesn't it? If you do recognize that contradictions indicate, at the very least, that there is a problem in this thinking (and what is it that passes for thinking which doesn't recognize that? Hmmm?), how can you possibly reconcile the idea of Liberty, with the leftist propensity for telling people what, when and how to act and live their own lives?! And then we get to this, the poison hidden within the pill, “The big banks that American taxpayers bailed out won’t cut homeowners a break." , and it's a danger to overlook this as simply a pandering play for populist angst… the real issue here is what is packaged together, and what is ignored, within that. The simple packaging is that the big banks were bailed out by the taxpayers. For some of the big banks, that is indeed true, but one thing left unsaid here, is that that was the very prescription of the Keynesian system of economics - bailing out banks, large corporations, and other large institutions, while 'injecting' (ever more worthless) cash into the 'system' - which the left (and not a few of the rino right) have been trying to replace conservative free market economics with, for a century now. This is explicitly the economic policy of the left, but they are here trying to sweep that under the rug, while brazenly trying to empathize with and glom onto the very anger of the American taxpayers, which was largely brought about by the very policies they so strenuously agitated for! But wait! There's more! This portion of that sentence, "...won’t cut homeowners a break." , really takes the cake. What it hopes to divert the attention of the American Taxpayer away from, not just themselves (and they, We The People, do bear a sizable portion of guilt), but the fact, the blatant fact, that politicians in general, and leftists in particular, from Barney Frank to Bill Clinton (and a young community organizer named Barack Obama), did not just encourage, but MANDATED that those banks make those home risky loans which they knew darn well, weren’t good loans to make. as the New York Times, circa 1999 stated, "Demographic information on these borrowers is sketchy. But at least one study indicates that 18 percent of the loans in the subprime market went to black borrowers, compared to 5 per cent of loans in the conventional loan market. In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980's." What do you suppose it is that they must have thought ‘bad loan’ meant to bankers? Probably what thought they gave to it was shuffled aside with a sneer of ‘not enough profit’, but what that may be somewhat true, is merely an effect; the cause is that making loans which don’t show reliable financial traits, enough income to debt ratio, etc, are ‘bad loans’, credit risks, because making too many of those loans not only hurts the market, but it can put you out of business. It also shows an absolute willful ignorance to consider what an Economy actually is! An Economy is not just a collection of financial statistics, it is the result of information, the reasoned actions taken by tens, hundreds, thousands and millions of people based upon that information, and how that information is transmitted to others, in order to make financial and productive judgments. When you introduce poor, bad, corrupt, data into an Economy, in the costume of Good information, that information is acted upon… endless numbers of decisions are made based upon the assumed merit of that data. Any data that turns out not to have been true, has introduced unknowingly poor information into the system - there is always a certain amount of error in a market, and the better informed the people of that market are, the more smoothly the market operates; the less or more poorly informed the people are, the less efficient and prosperous the market is. That is why information, and the ability for each person closest to the matter, be able to consider and make the best decision they possibly can. But when false, misleading and corrupted information is introduced to an economy, and not just on the scale of a local mob hood, but across an entire nation of hundreds of millions of people, and all the millions and billions of decisions that are made based upon the assumption that that information is true, are rendered, as our economy found out with the junk mortgages – a substanceless house of cards. The first breeze which comes along to expose the falsehoods at the center of so many innumerable assumptions, it will, and must, expose that skeletal fragility, and the entire structure comes crashing down around your ears. Welcome to our economy. To say that bankers “Won’t cut homeowners a break” is not only crude political pandering, it is a strident confession of not only utter ignorance of economics (meaning of course, valid, cause and effect based economics, which excludes Marxist of Keynesian economics), but a truly idiotic inability and probably a deliberate refusal to learn from their mistakes – and more likely than not, a refusal to admit to having made any mistakes at all. Hence their placing the blame upon the evil bankers. Just take a moment and imagine the most obvious of implications brought about by a 10%, 15%, 18% increase in families being sold homes they were unlikely to be able to afford over the long run. Simply purchasing a single home can kick an incalculable number of other decisions into action, often by people so far removed that the connection is never, and can never, be made, but when you talking about in increase in the percentages of all homes sold, here are just a few of the local decisions that will be made based upon them: local landscaper might hire on another hand and purchase another mower, schools will need to up their materials and staff for teaching their children, similar considerations have their affects on local grocery stores, eateries, hardware & video stores, and so on. These decisions are made on the basis of the assumption that hiring on these people and placing increased orders for goods, expanding their businesses, are in fact wise decisions to make because of the anticipated needs and demands of new residents, and not a few of these decisions will themselves require taking on new loans, which will be made based upon the assumption that the first bank which made its loan to the new homeowner, was a loan that was a good one to make, and that the person getting the loan, will be bringing income into the area - the local economy - to make their decisions profitable ones. When information turns out to be faulty - or flat out dishonest and far short of reality, all of those people; gardeners, carpenters homeowners who took what they thought to be reasonable risks, discover from out of the blue that the expected new income into their neighborhoods, will not come, will not happen. Think of all the hardship which even one deliberately ignorant home loans initiates... then multiply that by millions. Because when these myriad decisions are made by you and me because of what we think our income prospects are, when all of our decisions - yours and mine - turn out to be made based upon other loans which most people thought were good loans to make, but in fact were foolish loans doomed to default, and all our decisions and those of the community at large which were affected by them, affected by their bad information, and so with all of those purchases initiated by that first fraudulent decision, are themselves transformed into becoming faulty loans, returns, cancellations, etc. From those few homes purchased in individual neighborhoods... imagine the results of that happening to millions of homes... or better yet, turn on the evening news. A free market not only thrives upon, but requires, truthful information and sound judgment. Deliberately polluting that market of information, is poisoning the entire society which depends upon it. Gov. Rick Perry recently called the Fed's actions potentially treasonous? Yeah. Ya think? The 'thinking' behind Van Jones, and Fanni Mae, and Barney Frank and Hank Paulson and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and all the rest is beyond irresponsible, it is pure immature childishness – it is the magical thinking that effects can actually precede their causes, and that otherwise grown adults are not only paying attention to it, but supporting and promoting it, are actually given MBA's or are elected to public office for believing it enough... it moves beyond faerie tales and into the realm of horror stories really damn fast. And then you come to this bit trying to pull the heartstrings of one and all: "Our firefighters, nurses, cops, and teachers – America’s everyday heroes – are being thrown out onto the street. " To use our firefighters, nurses, cops and teachers as a rhetorical ploy for increasing the size and scope of government even further, in order to sprinkle still more of this leftist faerie dust upon our economy, which is itself chiefly responsible for the economic situation these everyday heroes are presently suffering from... using these everyday heroes for purposes of everyday hucksterism... is despicable. But it is nothing compared to brazen buffoonery on display in the next paragraph, which we'll venture into tomorrow.