Environmental and civil rights advocate Van Jones addressed the importance of making new “green jobs” to save both the environment and the economy at a Kennedy Political Union event last Wednesday night at American U.
“Put America to work to pull America back together,” Jones said.
Jones is the founder of three organizations: the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, a California-based non-governmental organization that focuses on violence prevention in the inner city; the Color of Change, an African-American advocacy group; and Green For All, a national NGO that aims to create “green jobs.”
Jones is also the author of the New York Times bestseller, “The Green Collar Economy,” and was named a “Hero of the Environment” by Time Magazine in 2008.
In 2009, Jones was appointed to the new position of adviser for green jobs in the Obama administration. Jones was forced to resign on Sept. 6, 2009 after six months at his job. Right-wing media, including TV personality Glenn Beck and “opponents of reform,” had launched a “vicious smear campaign” against him, Jones said.
Fox News once called him “the Green Jobs Czar” for his job at the White House, a title which Jones thought painted the wrong picture of his job.
“I was more like the green jobs handyman,” he said. “I was really in there trying to make sure that the $80 billion from the recovery package was spent as well as possible. I was a mid-level White House staffer.”
In an interview with The Eagle, Jones said this smear campaign started when details emerged about his previous involvement with STORM, a left-wing group of protesters who followed the ideology of Mao Zedong, and other Marxist organizations.
Jones also said in the interview that at one point there was an untrue rumor going around the media that his name was on a petition calling 9/11 a government conspiracy.
He now teaches at Princeton University and retains his involvement in the organizations he founded years ago.
Jones said the environmental and economic crises currently plaguing the U.S. are inextricably linked; to solve one crisis could be to solve both.
“Solar panels don’t put themselves up; wind turbines don’t manufacture themselves. Workers have to get up in the morning, get their lunch bucket and hard hat and go do all that work,” he said.
In his speech, Jones said it is the responsibility of this generation to solve the problems made by the last one, which include the neglect of ecological and economic sustainability.
“The problem of the last century was whether we should [be] a capitalist society. That’s what the Cold War was about,” Jones said. “In the new century that question has been answered — we are going to have a capitalist society. The question now is what kind of capitalist society.”
Jones said the creation of new green energy jobs would empower the country and boost the economy.
“The only way to get America to re-power itself is to create a million or more new jobs in the clean energy sector, so we can fight global warming and the global recession at the same time,” he said.