Van Jones probably wasn’t referring to the ‘economy’ President Barack H. Obama pretends to have inherited from his predecessor when at tonight’s NAACP awards ceremony he saluted Barry, who as he put it “volunteered to be the captain of the Titanic after it hit the iceberg and we [are] still floating.”
Van Jones, who was fired almost immediately after Obama appointed him “White House Council on Environmental Quality” for his prevalent communist sympathies, previous statements made in strong support of 9/11 conspiracies, and vulgar behavior was more than likely referring to the sinking ship of American Capitalism in the wasn’t-socialist-enough vein.
What’s so ironic is that not only is the NAACP so ready and willing to throw support to an individual whose comments when asked why Republicans seemed to be able to muster more bipartisan support while in control than Democrats included “they[Republicans]‘re assholes.”
In case you just need to see this for yourself, here’s the video:
What’s not Ironic is that Van Jones is still willing to support Obama even after Obama threw him under the bus. In his answer to this same question he continues to say:
“As a technical, political kind of term. And Barack Obama is not an asshole. Now, I will say this: I can be an asshole, and some of us who are not Barack Hussein Obama, are going to have to start getting a little bit uppity.”
The communist sympathies in Van Jones still believe that Obama is the best chance for socialism in the U.S.
It doesn’t matter though what was in Van Jones’ mind as he made the comment, because you and I and everyone else who heard it will still understand it as yet another stab at Bush, and the bad economy he supposedly left Barack Obama to inherit.
Now, I’m not saying that the recession didn’t start during Bush’s term, but I am calling BS on President Obama’s insistent refusal to accept responsibility for TARP and the first bailout. The senate had to author and vote on that legislation before it was ever voted into law and given to Bush to sign, and I certainly don’t remember Obama doing anything then to stop it, unless you consider a yes vote and taking time out of a campaign to help push it through staunch opposition.
I further recall Obama’s support of Ben Bernanke, the unheralded root of so many of the problems both with the mortgage crisis and the extremely poor bailout decisions. Sure Ben inherited artificially deflated interest rated from Greenspan, who had justified lowering them to offset the 2000 tech bubble burst (that’s right, our recession today humorously is the offset of the recession that appeared under Clinton), but that didn’t force him to hike the rates up to ‘normal levels’ overnight, throwing the mortgage sector into crisis. Nor is there a ‘normal level,’ any rate determined by one individual instead of by natural forces is inherently artificial.
We all remember what happened with the mortgages. Households who could afford a $500 monthly mortgage payment couldn’t afford a $1000 or greater monthly payment, and a debt and foreclosure bomb was upon us. But somehow, it was Bush’s fault that individuals had refinanced with lower interest rates.
Van Jones was right, Obama is steering the titanic. In real life, the Titanic didn’t sink right away, it had a few last hurrahs to give before it tipped and slid to the bottom of the ocean. The economy will recover and America will prosper left to itself, but the repeated bailouts and huge debt that Obama has steered us into is an iceberg ready to sink our ship.
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James Thoburn (twitter: @you_count) is the founder of Backyard Politics. Comment here or @reply you_count on twitter to join the conversation.
I think Greenspan is getting senile, today he said that you can stop asset bubbles by increasing capital requirements. That just increases the cost of credit. The next time you have a real estate bubble, you’ll have the same problem, assuming that banks are still in the business of loaning against real estate. If you want to stop this problem, then eliminate the federal subsidies for real estate development and investment, then require people in that industry to put their own money at risk instead of someone elses. If Greenspan really wants to change the banking system, though, then simply ban 95% and 90% LTV loans. Require a bigger equity cushion. BTW, the “too big to fail” argument is a fallacious one. During the Great Depression, Canada had no bank failures. The reason was that their banks were very large. The banks closed branches, etc., but none of them failed. By contrast, the US was dominated by thousands of very small banks, and we had more than 10,000 of them fail. So there is nothing inherently unsafe about a banking system dominated by large banks. The real problem with large banks is that during good times, they don’t provide enough competition for each other.