Fox News is Demonizing Van Jones

Truth is a scary thing when your profits hide behind a lie.

Fox News, the constant defender of dirty coal and big oil, is now out to destroy Van Jones. Why? Because Van is one of the most powerful voices urging America to move away from old, polluting ways to a new energy economy. Van has been a consistent voice for a deeper concern for the poor who live and work in nasty places where harmful chemicals are sprayed on crops that they pick and in urban areas where old power plants belch mercury, sulphates and other harmful contaminants into the air, soil and water.

As Van clearly stated at the 2009 Power Shift conference, change must be fundamental and must go deep enough to protect all people and to secure the future of nature. Here is what Van said to 12,000 college students gathered in Washington D.C. this past winter that got Glenn Beck so stirred up.

“This movement is deeper than a solar panel. Deeper than a solar panel. Don’t stop there. Don’t stop there. No, we’re going to change the whole system. We’re going to change the whole thing. We’re not going to put a new battery in a broken system. We want a new system.

“We want a new system. All we do is take out the dirty power system, the dirty power generation in a system and just replace it with some clean stuff, put a solar panel on top of this system. We don’t deal with how we are consuming water, we don’t deal with how we’re treating our other sister and other brothers’ species, we don’t deal with toxins, we don’t deal with the way we treat each other, if that’s not a part of this movement, let me tell you what you’ll have. This is all you’ll have. You’ll have solar powered bulldozers, solar powered buzz saws, and biofuel bombers and we’ll be fighting wars over lithium for the batteries instead of oil for the engines and we’ll still have a dead planet. This movement is deeper than a solar panel, deeper than a solar panel. Don’t stop there. Don’t stop there. No, we’re going to change the whole system.”

Glenn Beck distorts Van’s words to suggest that Van is calling for communism. These words offered as evidence completely out of context, Beck outrageously distorts Van’s call for a new way of thinking about our relationship to nature and to each other by saying,

“When will America wake up? The left has started a revolution. No different than Hugo Chavez. When Hugo Chavez was elected, he was elected by Democratic process. But he did not tell the people when he was running that he was a communist.”

Beck is dead wrong about Van Jones. Van’s provocative message is different, very different from the way Beck presents it. He is not proposing communism but access to green jobs for all and a fundamental change in mindset about how we care for nature, our planet and for all people including the poor and those yet unborn. Watch Van’s inspirational speech at the Powershift conference and judge for yourself whether or not Van’s call for some fresh thinking about environmental stewardship is about forming a communistic state or about establishing moral leadership on an urgent issue that threatens us all.

I also urge a careful reading of Van’s best selling book, “The Green Collar Economy-How one solution can fix our two biggest problems.”