Van Jones as Stealth Capitalist

Van Jones doesn't want your kids to have a lemonade stand. Or their P.T.A. to have a bake sale. Good heavens, some little private citizen out there might be selling food that's fresher and better than the garbage distributed by the corporations that invested so much in the Obama campaign...that can't be allowed! But it's all right when it's Jones's own kid...

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/call-the-cops-van-jones-son-opens-illegal-lemonade-stand/

For the record, Grandma Bonnie Peters spent years developing a selection of three affordable, gluten-free, MSG-free, dairy-free, egg-free, low-salt, all-natural-and-mostly-organic "Veggie Burger" flavors. The demand for these products was limited, but vociferous. You know how department stores don't have to advertise Carhartt coveralls--they advertise themselves with "We have Carhartt"? Food stores in eastern Tennessee were advertising themselves with "We have Allergy-Ease Veggie Burgers." Food stores throughout the entire eastern United States were trying to contact Grandma Bonnie, saying that customers had been asking for something just like Veggie Burgers.

For the record, Grandma Bonnie was offered substantial payments for her recipes, but she wanted to spend her retirement years as an active part of East Tennessee's depressed economy, creating jobs and getting local people off welfare. She had created full-time jobs for two adults with partial disabilities and four single mothers. She wanted to extend those benefits to more Tennesseans.

For the record, the Democratic Party used--back when I found good things to say about them, which has become difficult lately--to talk about the need to support ventures like Grandma Bonnie's Veggie Burgers. Jim Hightower wrote whole chapters about this very topic. Where did all this love of the American working man or woman, who is really meeting a need and giving his or her neighbors a good deal, go after we got the Chicago gang that are currently occupying the White House? "Phfft!" is where it went. The Democrats I loved, my husband and favorite aunt, are tossing and turning in their graves. Especially "Aunt Dotty." She left all that land and money to support Veggie Burgers...

So...I'm not saying Veggie Burgers would displace home-grown, grass-fed Angus steak on most of our neighbors' tables. For most people they're an alternative. For some people, who don't have the other alternatives, Veggie Burgers meet a need. So why can't you buy them at the supermarket?

Because, just when Grandma Bonnie had invested her life savings and those of four relatives, sold everything but the house where she was living and taken out a mortgage on that, in order to get around the existing barriers to entering the U.S. food market, the Obama Administration dumped enough new regulations on top of her to demand another half-million-dollar investment...and the money's not there any more. It's gone. There's no way Grandma Bonnie will ever get it back. She was a hardworking entrepreneur with a dream. She is a senior citizen whose Social Security pension will just barely stretch around her mortgage, who has to take part-time low-wage jobs to pay for groceries and electricity.

Thanks so much, President Obama, and all your Chicago-style pals, e.g. Van Jones.