October could be a wild and dangerous month. Stock markets are acting like there is another hidden Lehman Brothers ready to explode. The euro is plummeting. The S&P is hitting new lows. Greece is desperately trying to pay impossible bills. Europe’s biggest banks are flirting with bankruptcy. The eurozone appears to be disintegrating.
Back in America, things are getting more friable too.
“October is going to be the turning point,” said Van Jones, the disgraced former Obama administration “green jobs czar.” America is about to experience “an American fall, an American autumn, just like we saw the Arab Spring,” he said on Thursday.
“You can see it right now with these young people on Wall Street. … We’re going to have an October offensive to take back the American Dream and to rescue America’s middle class.”
On Saturday, 700 “Occupy Wall Street” activists were arrested for jamming up the Brooklyn Bridge in order to gain media attention. The protesters chanted slogans like “Jobs Not Cuts” and carried signs such as “Eat the Rich.”
The protests may be spreading now, too. Smaller demonstrations in Chicago, Denver and Los Angeles were also reported over the weekend, with people protesting everything from higher gas prices to lack of medical insurance.
So far, no one organization seems to be driving it. But that may be about to change.
If Van Jones has his way, these relatively peaceful protests will be only the beginning. Van Jones is in the midst of a dramatic push to establish an alliance of labor unions, environmentalists, minority groups, globalists and angry youth protesters to “counterbalance” the growing strength of the Tea Party movement.
Yesterday, today and tomorrow, Van Jones is taking part in a huge summit to create an alliance of “progressive” forces to push the nation’s agenda further left. It’s called the “American Dream Movement,” says Jones. Some unions have already begun providing support for the protesters.
But where would Jones’s “American Dream” really take America?
Van Jones, a reportedly reformed communist, is the founder of the radical black empowerment group Color of Change. According to this group’s website, not only does the U.S. government not represent black Americans, it purposefully left hundreds of thousands of black and minority people “behind to die” in New Orleans because they were not white.
He also has strong views about the war in Iraq, which he says was just a pretext to get the oil.
According to Van Jones, America has a huge debt it needs to repay its minority groups. He said Native Americans, for example, had been pushed down and locked out of the pollution-based economy and needed to be lifted up in his new green economy. America needs to give them back their stolen land, wealth, dignity and respect they deserve, he said. The government needs to make sure women get paid more. And it needs to stop purposefully spraying chemicals on and poisoning “our immigrant brothers and sisters to get the food we want to eat.”
It is about “social justice,” says Jones. And that means monetary payments and legislated advantages for repressed racial and sexual minorities.
Jones also gained notoriety for being associated with the “9/11 Truther” organization that claims the U.S. government was involved with causing the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He has since said his name was appropriated by the group without his consent.
But perhaps most notably, Jones was also a founding member of storm (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement), a radical Marxist organization committed to creating revolution in America. One publication produced by the now disbanded storm claimed the organization looked “towards the revolutionary traditions of Third World communism and found valuable and inspiring models for revolutionary change.”
Is today Van Jones’s moment? Will he be able to help found another organization that will finally accomplish his goals? In a 2008 Uprising Radio interview, he said America needed a “complete revolution” to “transform the whole society” away from capitalism. Will he be able to channel the outrage manifest in the Wall Street riots, and the bad economy, toward his goal?
Mr. Jones certainly seems to think so. In a February article he said the nation needed to look to the union heroes in Madison, Wisconsin, for inspiration. The “spirit of Madison” needs to spread to all 50 states, he said.
He said a “rainbow force” of unions, veterans, students, faith leaders, civil rights fighters, women’s rights champions, immigrant rights promoters, lesbians, homosexuals, bisexuals, transgenders, those questioning their sexual orientation, environmentalists, academics, artists, celebrities, community activists, elected officials and more were joining forces to stand up “for what’s right.”
And what exactly is right? Jones elucidated in his Huffington Post article “Introducing the ‘American Dream’ Movement.” It includes:
- Reducing government spending by cutting “corporate welfare” for oil, agriculture and military companies—but not for heavily subsidized green energy companies.
- Protecting the “heart and soul of America” by empowering teachers, nurses and first responder unions.
- Guaranteeing “the health, safety and success of our children and communities by leaving the muscle and bone of America’s communities intact”—whatever that means. It is possibly a reference to giving illegal immigrants immunity from deportation.
- Opposing any changes to union “collective bargaining” laws, which are really “taxpayer extortion” laws.
These are not extreme ideas—they are “commonsense ideas” that can rally Americans to once again stand up and dream, he says. People can take comfort knowing that this great nation “will ultimately pull its answers—not from its ideological extremes—but from its deep, moral center,” just like the Wisconsin union workers did.
“Make no mistake about it: This is our ‘Tea Party’ moment,” says Jones.
America is indeed verging on a pivotal moment in history. The nation is divided, it is financially broke, radicals are reaching for power, disgruntled masses are ready to be manipulated—and most important of all, despite what Van Jones claims, there is no “deep, moral center” in America that will magically save it.
America’s “deep, moral center” may have existed in the past, but it is long gone.
The good news is there are answers to America’s economic, social, political, and moral problems—but they will not come from within itself. The answers are there if anyone is willing to really look for them. You just have to go to the Source of morals.
America needs a real moral revolution—that is true. But if we are not careful, the American Dream Movement could quickly become an American autumn nightmare. •
