Live Blog: Van Jones on Rebuild The Dream

6:00 Hi everyone! This is Sarah Coughlon, I’m at the Forum to liveblog Van Jones’ address, “Rebuild The Dream: The Next American Economy.” Van Jones is an environmental advocate, civil rights activist, and attorney. He has served as President Obama’s Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise, and Innovation, is a Senior Fellow at the Center For American Progress and American Progress Action Fund, and sits on the boards of Demos, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, and the Campaign for America’s Future. Most recently, he worked with MoveOn.org earlier this year to launch the Rebuild The Dream Campaign, intending to start a progressive American Dream movement to counter the Tea Party. He’s an extremely distinguished guest, and it’s great to have him here at the Forum.
6:07 A representative from the Harvard Black Men’s Forum is here to introduce Jones. Trey Grayson, director of the IOP, just explained that Jones is here largely because undergrads (specifically at the HBMF) wanted to see him here; it’s really great to see undergrad influence in interesting campus events like this.
6:10 Jones is moving away from his “normal canned speech” to talk about the influence of the Occupy movement. He says that these are victims of the recession whom no one has been talking about, and he credit the protests for moving the dialogue in that direction.
6:11 People who are victims of the recession: veterans returning with the inability to find jobs, college grads (“Young people are graduating off a cliff”) are struggling to find jobs and pay off student loans, public employees are having their benefits cut.
6:12 The protests “are a judgment” against an establishment that has been promising that things will get better when they never do. The protestors “are feeling abandoned not just by Wall Street, but by the political class. And that’s us.”
6:13 Jones says that Tea Party was the beginning of this judgment on the political class, and that people sense that we’re moving from a democracy to a plutocracy. “The Occupation of Wall Street is a response to the Occupation by Wall Street of Washington, with their twenty thousand lobbyists.”
6:16 Jones is describing a disconnect where the middle class feels that they’re working harder and making less than those at the top; he says that the protests and the Tea Party are the people’s way of asking “When do we get to be too big to fail?”
6:17 Jones says that the Tea Party was “a remarkable exercise in people-powered politics.” He points out that the “Contract From America” (the Tea Party’s policy statement) was edited by 50,000 people as a wiki. “It’s an open-source brand”: you can’t go to Tea Party headquarters and talk to the president of the Tea Party.
6:19 Jones says that “there’s something remarkable about what [The Tea Party] did, a remarkable hypocrisy.” He claims that there’s a disconnect between the “rugged individualism” of the Tea Party’s argument and the collective tactics that enabled them to influence the political process. Now he turns leftward and pokes some fun at fractured progressives (“I’m working for the Left-Handed Lesbians of Color Caucus”) who preache a message of acceptance and unity but is unable to act as a single political entity.
6:23 Jones says that there are two threats to liberty, and that our generation’s fight needs to be to address them both. One is excessive concentrations of political authority (totalitarianism), and the other is excessive concentrations of economic power. “They say ‘Obama is a socialist’, but what if it’s the other way around? What if Citizens United, and this idea that corporations are people, is the real threat to liberty?”
6:26 Jones is talking about his effort to unite progressive groups as a foil to conservative organizing efforts. He claims that the moral clarity of the argument in this progressive coalition enables them to craft a coherent message, and that the lack of the “Fox Brothers” (a Freudian portmanteau of “Fox” and the “Koch Brothers”) to spread that message doesn’t mean that it isn’t there.
6:29 He calls this “horizontal politics”, and points out that it’s new territory.
6:29 He says that those who oppose the Occupy protests have a moral responsibility to explain how these people will live in the future. “The middle class in Asia, God bless ’em, is getting bigger, but the middle class in the West is getting smaller.” He critiques those people who say that the Occupy protests aren’t being polished enough in their expression of legitimate frustration. I think this is one of the more fascinating issues about Occupy: do people who are unable to find work or pay for their student loans really need a full policy proposal to explain how we need to fix systemic inequality? Isn’t it enough that they’re raising these issues?
6:34 He closes with a call for us to talk about policies, not demonize people: the problem, he says, isn’t the bankers as people but what the banks have been doing. Finally, he concludes by praising the moral high ground taken by the young women who were pepper-sprayed by the NYPD at Occupy Wall Street.