The Green Collar Economy

Van Jones

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061981944
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Développement durable en entreprise

"Steadily—by redefining green—Jones is making sure that our planet and our people will not just survive but also thrive in a clean-energy economy."
—Leonardo DiCaprio

A New York Times bestseller, The Green Collar Economy by award-winning human rights activist and environmental leader Van Jones delivers a much-needed economic and environmental solution to today's two most critical problems. With a revised introduction and new afterword by the author—a man who counsels President Barack Obama on environmental policy— The Green Collar Economy and Jones have been highly praised by a multitude of leaders and legislators, including Al Gore, Senator Tom Daschle, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Van Jones was named one of "The World's 100 Most Influential People of 2009" by Time magazine, and with The Green Collar Economy he offers a wise, necessary, and eminently achievable plan for saving the earth and rescuing working class Americans.

ONE

The Dual Crisis

FOR FORTY-EIGHT HOURS, Larry and Lorrie waited for the “imminent” arrival of the buses, spending the last twelve hours standing outside, sharing the limited water, food, and clothes they had with others. Among them were sick people, elders, and newborn babies. The buses never came. Larry later learned that the minute the buses arrived at the city limits, they were commandeered by the military.

Walgreen’s remained locked. The dairy display case was clearly visible through the widows. After forty-eight hours without electricity, the milk, yogurt, and cheeses were beginning to spoil in the ninety-degree heat. Without utilities, the owners and managers had locked up the food, water, disposable diapers, and prescriptions and fled the city. Outside, residents and tourists grew increasingly thirsty and hungry. The cops could have broken one small window and distributed the nuts, fruit juices, and bottled water in an organized manner. Instead, they spent hours playing cat and mouse, temporarily chasing away the looters.

Repeatedly, Larry and Lorrie were told that resources, assistance, buses, and the National Guard were pouring into the city. But no one had seen them. What they did see—or heard tell of—were electricians who improvised long extension cords stretching over blocks in order to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots. Nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent hours manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive. Refinery workers who broke into boatyards, “stealing” boats to rescue people stranded on roofs. And other workers who had lost their homes, but stayed and provided the only assistance available.

By day four, sanitation was dangerously abysmal. Finally Larry and Lorrie encountered the National Guard. Guard personnel said that the city’s primary shelter, the Superdome, had become a hell-hole. They also said that the city’s only other shelter, the Convention Center, was also descending into chaos and squalor and that the police were not allowing anyone else in. They could offer no alternatives and said, no, they did not have extra water to share.

When Larry and Lorrie reached it, the police command center told them the same thing. Without any other options, they and their growing group of several hundred displaced people decided to stay at the police command post. They began to set up camp outside. In short order, the police commander appeared to address the group. He told the group to walk to the expressway and cross the bridge, where the police had buses lined up to take people out of the city. When Larry pressed the commander to make certain this wasn’t further misinformation, the commander turned to the crowd and stated emphatically, “I swear to you that the buses are there.”

The group set off for the bridge with great hope and were joined along the way by families with babies in strollers, people using crutches, elderly clasping walkers, and others in wheelchairs. It began to pour down rain, but the group marched on.

As they approached the promised location, they saw armed sheriffs forming a line across the foot of the bridge. Before Larry and Lorrie were even close enough to address them, the sheriffs began firing their weapons over people’s heads. The crowd scattered and fled, but Larry managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. When told about the promises of the police commander, the sheriffs said there were no buses waiting.

Larry and Lorrie asked why they couldn’t cross the bridge anyway. There was little traffic on the six-lane highway. The sheriffs refused.

Heartbroken and desperate, the group retreated back down the highway and took shelter from the rain under an overpass. After some debate, they decided to build an encampment on the center divide of the expressway, reasoning that it would be visible to rescuers and the elevated freeway would provide some security. From this vantage point they watched as others attempted to cross the bridge, only to be turned away. Some were chased away with gunfire, others verbally berated and humiliated. Thousands were prevented from evacuating the city on foot.

From a woman with a battery-powered radio they learned that the media were talking about the encampment. Officials were being asked what they were going to do about all those families living up on the freeway. The officials responded that they were going to take care of it. “Taking care of it” had an ominous ring to it.

Sure enough, at dusk a sheriff rolled up in his patrol vehicle, drew his gun, and started screaming, “Get off the fucking freeway!” A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away the flimsy shelters. As Larry and Lorrie’s group retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with the camp’s small amount of food and water.

Forced off the freeway at gunpoint, they sought refuge in an abandoned school bus under the freeway, more terrified of the police and sheriffs with their martial law and shoot-to-kill policies than of the criminals who supposedly were roaming the streets.

Finally a search-and-rescue team transported Larry and Lorrie to the airport, where their remaining rations, which set off the metal detectors, were confiscated. There they waited again, alongside thousands of others, as a massive airlift gradually thinned the crowds and delivered them to other cities across the region.

After they disembarked from the airlift, the humiliation and dehumanization continued. The refugees were packed into buses, driven to a field, and forced to wait for hours to be medically screened to make sure no one was carrying communicable diseases. In the dark, hundreds of people were forced to share two filthy, overflowing porta-potties. Those who had managed to make it out with any possessions were subjected to dog-sniffing searches. No food was provided to the hungry, disoriented, and demoralized survivors.¹

AMONG THOSE LEFT behind after Katrina, they were the lucky ones. Larry and Lorrie are a Caucasian couple who had some resources available to them. The whole world knows what happened to the poor, black residents of New Orleans who had none.

I believe stories like this deserve retelling, revisiting, remembering. Stories from Katrina’s aftermath demonstrate that the issues of poverty, climate destabilization, petrochemical poisons, and the vulnerabilities of an oil-based economy are not just petty obsessions of the politically correct crowd. They are life-and-death issues for real people.

To be clear, it wasn’t Hurricane Katrina that wrought that catastrophe. It was a “perfect storm” of a different kind: neglect of our national infrastructure combined with runaway global warming and blatant disregard for the poor.

The flooding was not a result of heavy rains. It was a result of a weak levee—one that was in mid-repair when the storm hit. And that levee collapsed for one simple reason: fixing it was not a priority for our country’s administration. Instead, funds that should have gone for our infrastructure and to the repair of the levee were allocated to the war effort.

The dollars that could have saved New Orleans were used to wage war in Iraq instead, a war undeniably linked to our dependency on that region’s oil. Additional funds that might have spared the poor in New Orleans and the Gulf region (had the dollars been properly invested in levees and modern pumping stations) were instead passed out to the rich as tax breaks. The Katrina disaster and what followed clearly point to the fact that overfunding the military and cutting services make us less, not more, safe.

Yet that is only one of the lessons. As Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Ross Gelbspan said: “Katrina began as a relatively small hurricane that glanced off south Florida, [but] it was supercharged with extraordinary intensity by the relatively blistering sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico.”² In other words, global warming supercharged the hurricane. Yet American energy policies continue to add even more carbon to the atmosphere, further destabilizing the climate.

The human suffering in the floodwaters was not—and continues not to be—equally distributed. Poor people and black people didn’t “choose to stay behind.” They were left behind. The evacuation plans required the city’s residents to have working private cars—plus gas money and nearby relatives or funds for a hotel stay. If people didn’t have those things, tough luck.

Had the responsible agencies valued the lives of the poor, they would have helped the destitute flee in the face of the hurricane—even those who couldn’t afford a car or a motel room. But when the face of suffering is mostly black, somehow our high standards for effective action and compassion begin to sag.

The story of Katrina is a rare political circumstance, a genuine teaching moment. We owe it to the dead not to waste it. We cannot allow a messy stew of shame, pain, and racial disdain to prevent us from looking deeply into the heart of this disaster. If we can look into it and not turn away, we learn something invaluable: that we are all living in a floodplain today.

For some of us this is literally the case, like New Orleans’s Ninth Ward residents. Poverty has forced many people into homes in neighborhoods that are vulnerable to everything from flooding to mudslides to toxic air—as if it isn’t destabilizing enough to have to worry about safety on war-torn streets, get an education in schools with no resources, or hunt for scarce jobs.

Meanwhile, the stability of the relatively affluent is also under threat. The average American family has spent itself out onto a perilous perch. Credit-card debt outstrips savings plans. A sharp economic downturn or the collapse of the U.S. dollar could toss millions overboard into financial crisis.

And of course we are also on the verge of environmental bankruptcy. That big greenhouse-gas bill is fast coming due—in the form of extreme weather events that could overtake more than just the Gulf Coast. Some say it could be Manhattan, and most of our cities are no more ready than New Orleans was. Our levees, dams, schools, and hospitals are crumbling or in poor repair.

On a larger scale, Katrina also shows the flaws of the individualist “sink or swim” philosophy that dominates both major political parties. That political-economic worldview informed New Orleans’s free-market evacuation plan, which ensured that only those with private cars and money could get out.

The Katrina story illustrates clearly the two crises we face in the United States: radical socioeconomic inequality and rampant environmental destruction.

CRISIS #1: RADICAL SOCIOECONOMIC INEQUALITY

Given the skyrocketing energy prices and the specter of stagflation, it will be hard to revive the sputtering U.S. economy. But even before the present energy crisis and economic downturn, the U.S. economy and society were in deep trouble. We will examine in some detail the symptoms of a grave malady.

The country has long been deep in the throes of a socioeconomic crisis, one characterized by contracting economic opportunity for working people, growing disparities between the races, and the hording of immense wealth and privileges at the very top of our society. These features are getting worse, not better.

In fact, the United States is experiencing the greatest economic inequality between its wealthiest and poorest citizens since the Great Depression of the 1930s.³ While a tiny number of people at the top amass wealth, very little is left for everyone else to get by on; today more than 34 percent of the country’s private wealth is held by just the richest 1 percent of people. Their wealth equals more than the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent of people in this country.⁴

In comparison to their employees, chief executive officers of major corporations are earning ungodly sums of money. Their salaries are four hundred times higher than that of the average worker. That outrageous disparity has been growing exponentially: in 1990 executive pay was (just?!) about a hundred times that of the average worker.⁵ Meanwhile Americans are working longer, if not harder, than ever: we have added eighty hours to our work year over the last twenty-five years.⁶

Meanwhile, 15.6 million American households live in extreme poverty (their incomes are below half the amount considered the poverty line, which was $20,650 for a family of four in 2007), the highest rate recorded since researchers started tracking those numbers in 1975.⁷ Since 2000, the country has lost more than 3 million manufacturing jobs.⁸ More than 44 million of us live without health insurance—a number that continues to grow.⁹ In too many homes, the family health plan is short and simple: “Nobody get sick!” At the same time, the great majority of Americans are less and less able to get out of debt or to save money for the rainy days that are coming.

So many folks have needed to declare personal bankruptcy that the government finally decided to step in.¹⁰ Unfortunately, the government did not move to bail people out (as the Fed did for Bear Stearns investment bank when it got in trouble in 2008).¹¹ To the contrary, Congress saw the tidal wave of bankruptcy petitions as a sign of threat—not to families, but to the profits of the credit-card industry. So it changed the laws to make it even harder for card holders to declare bankruptcy and free themselves from usurious interest rates and outrageous fees.

As painful as it is to acknowledge, factors of race and gender exacerbate the inequities. Even today, female workers earn 77 cents for each dollar earned by their male counterparts.¹² People of color own a mere 18 cents for every dollar of white wealth.¹³ Median income levels are lowest among females of all races, and significantly lower for black, Latino, or Hispanic women.¹⁴ And income levels are related to educational attainment—whether someone graduates from high school or attends college: compared to the 32 percent of whites who hold a...