Van Jones
Van Jones
Anthony Kapel "Van" Jonesis an American political activist, commentator, author and attorney. He is a cofounder of several nonprofit organizations including the Dream Corps, a “social justice accelerator” which presently operates three advocacy initiatives: #cut50, #YesWeCode and Green for All. He is the author of two New York Times bestselling books, The Green Collar Economy and Rebuild The Dream. He has served as President Barack Obama’s Special Advisor for Green Jobs, as a distinguished visiting fellow at Princeton University, and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth20 September 1968
CityJackson, TN
CountryUnited States of America
Our point of view is, lets not be so elitist that we can't honor good, hard, dignified, ennobling work: people working with their hands, building things, putting up solar panels, weatherizing homes, working on organic agriculture, building wind farms. We don't have robots in society, so somebody has to do that work. Lets make sure that the people who can use that work get a chance to do it. I see that as a first step toward bigger and better things.
Most people walking around in a mall or on a college campus are carrying on them better technology than the entire U.S. government had when it put a man on the moon. Each one of us is a walking technological superpower.
Most green-collar jobs are middle-skill jobs. That means they require more education that a high-school diploma, but less than a four-year degree.
Reversing global warming will take a World War II level of mobilization. It is the work of tens of millions, not hundreds of thousands.
Rather than continuing to base our economy on a finite supply of dead things, we can base it on sources that are practically infinite and eternal: the sun, the moon, and the Earth's inner fire.
When it gets harder to love, love harder.
Each and every one of us should stop playing small and license ourselves to become one of the giants of the new century. We will need champions by the truckload.
The disaster in the gulf shows: relying on dangerous, dirty fuels can at times impose incalculable costs. I have never heard of a wind farm collapsing and causing a massive wind-slick. I have never heard of a solar farm collapsing and leaving behind a catastrophic sun-spill.
When you take the people who most need work and connect them with the work that most needs doing, you save. You save that young person’s life, you save a whole bunch of money, and you save the soul of this country when you invest and give people a chance, give people hope, give people opportunity.
Deep patriots don't just sing the song, 'America the Beautiful' and then go home. We actually stick around to defend America’s beauty -- from the oil spillers, the clear-cutters and the mountaintop removers. Deep patriots don't just visit the Statue of Liberty and send a postcard home to grandma. We defend the principles upon which that great monument was founded -- 'give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.'
I consider myself to be sort of a progressive Afrofuturist that is deeply committed to social justice.
Let's stop wasting billions of dollars on prisons, which send people home who are too often less capable and more damaged than when they went in. We would have safer neighborhoods if we spent the same money on true rehabilitation, job training, employment and entrepreneurship.
Right now, the government is spending billions of dollars supporting the problem-makers in the U.S. economy - the polluters, despoilers, incarcerators, and warmongers.
There are only two ways to have a middle class in your country: either you have highly skilled manufacturing jobs, or you have a highly skilled, well trained, knowledge-based workforce. In other words, college.