Van Jones shared uplifting perspectives and strategies from the San Francisco Bay to over 400 Mayor Johnson’s Greenwise Sacramento task force participants in the standing room only solar-powered EPA auditorium and overflow room yesterday.
My child or your polar bear
Jones tackled a vital misconception about the study of the environment. He imitated the concerns of a parent awakening to the importance of what it means to be an environmentalist, “I didn’t know you cared about my child, or how to help her to get off her asthma reliever that she has to keep in her pocket.”
In fact, the discipline of Environmental Sciences is about making sure as much life as possible survives at optimal quality and as balanced as life can be, with specific respects to clean air, clean water, good food, sanctuary, and as respected and fairly compensated a livelihood as possible. That includes humans and children.
Jones finished, "Environmentalists have two arms, we can hug both a tree, and a child."
Imagine a green economy that doesn’t throw away children
Jones asked the audience young and old, to think about how Mayor Johnson is referring to his Greenwise initiative as the Emerald Valley and that it should be centered around one of the city's most financially challenged inner communities known as Oak Park. “Oak Park ought to be at the center of the greenest city in the nation.”
He kept it real with the crowd, “If you are an aluminum can, you have a great future in Sacramento- you can be recycled and given lots of work to do. But what if you are a child in Oak Park? Can we imagine a green economy that doesn’t throw away children? We could tell our teenagers to put down the hand gun and to pick up the caulking gun.”
He further envisioned, "We could provide new insulation and a new solar company so that instead of an elderly woman sitting down to write a check to pay the electricity bill, someone sends her a check to pay her for the electricity her solar panels created and supplied back to the grid.”
AB 23 is a sludge hammer to kill clean jobs
When asked by a member of the Greenwise Sacramento Taskforce about California Initiative AB 23, Jones answered, “Proposition 23 is a sludge hammer to kill your job creating engine and to destroy it. If you allow that to happen- you don’t know what that will mean.”
Jones furthered that Californians will have taken themselves out of the next most important global economic step for which China now leads. “Business people are not happy in trying to plan when such erratic moves are made. Passing AB 23 would be viewed as a ludicrous move by business investors.”
Most memorable of Jones was, “If you want to see the future- look up. Look at the sky, the wind, the Great lakes, our coastlines.....and include Oak Park.” We can put America back to work in a clean economy. “I’ve never heard of a wind platform collapsing and causing a wind slick, a solar panel causing a sun spill.”
A class war, not a race war
Jones rallied the heavily packed auditorium of all ages and colors to be mindful of how Martin Luther King Jr. would be sure to include all economically disadvantaged.
Jones clarified, “At the local level you see all the pain but you have the least power. How do you shrink the pain and grow the power? Partnerships [between the people and businesses] are key to a solution.”
“King’s last job,” Jones continued, “was to figure out how to get some new chairs at the table. We get to build a whole new table.” The reference being made here say scholars of King was that his last leadership for injustice was that of an economic one, no matter the color of the individual, a class war, not a race war.
King’s last job
On March 12, 1968, less than a month before Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee, King visited the wealthy Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe, Michigan.
Per King’s words, “… it’s much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to guarantee a livable income and a good solid job. It’s much easier to guarantee the right to vote than it is to guarantee the right to live in sanitary, decent housing conditions. It is much easier to integrate a public park than it is to make genuine, quality, integrated education a reality. And so today we are struggling for something which says we demand genuine equality.”
Thomas Jackson (2007) writes in his book Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice, “When the civil rights and antipoverty policies of the [Lyndon] Johnson administration failed to deliver on the movement’s goals of economic freedom for all [meaning all races], King demanded that the federal government guarantee jobs, income, and local power for poor people.”
References:
Democracy Now! January, 18, 2010. Remembering Martin Luther King.
Thomas Jackson (2007) Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice. University of Pennyslvannia Press.
Comments
The California Jobs Initiative (CJI) is an oil corporation farce and fraud. There is no connection, whatsoever, between greenhouse gas emission reduction and the loss of jobs. This notion is an insult to the intelligence of the people of California. In fact, there is job growth in the clean, renewable energy industry. Chevron employs 65,000 worldwide and CJI is not going to change this. The only jobs created by the oil industry are clean-up jobs after oil spills and deep water, blow-outs and pump-handler jobs. CJI will make fantastic profits for the oil industry, increase air pollution, especially in communities around their refineries, and there will not be lower gas prices.
Jones knows what is really going. The Whitehouse should hire him back.
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