Top Stories

BET.com – Critical Condition: What’s At Stake in Health Care Reform

This BET News special examines the critical issues associated with health care reform and why it matters to African Americans. Melody Barnes discusses the President’s health care plan. Length: 41 minutes LINK

TV One – Washington Watch W/ Roland Martin

The premiere of the first Sunday talk show with an African American focus, Vice President Biden is Roland’s first guest.  Washington Watch airs Sundays at 11 a.m. ET and 5 p.m. ET.  Take a look at clips from last week’s show.  LINK

Health Care

BET.com - Back to Work on Health Care Reform for Black Lawmakers

President Barack Obama took advantage of a friendly crowd and continued his push for health care reform Saturday night during his speech at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s (CBCF) annual dinner.  CBCF Chairman Rep. Kendrick Meek (D-Fla.) and CBC Chairwomen Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) greet the president and first lady.   The president and first lady were warmly greeted when they arrived at the Washington Convention Center. The president told the predominantly African American gathering of 4,000 the time has come to overhaul the health care system.  LINK

TheGrio.com - Obama addresses Black Caucus on health care

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama on Saturday resumed his push to overhaul the health care system, telling a Congressional Black Caucus conference... LINK

BET.com - Public Option Struggling in Senate

A proposal to include a government-funded insurance option as part of sweeping health care legislation making its way through Congress faced a serious setback Tuesday as it failed to win approval in the Senate Finance Committee. LINK

BlackAmericaWeb.com - Senate Panel Rejects Public Insurance Option

Democrats twice failed Tuesday to inject a government-run insurance option into sweeping health care legislation in the Senate.  LINK

H1N1

Black Enterprise.com - Government to Track H1N1 Vaccine Effects -- Safety of Shot Could Determine How Many Get It

WASHINGTON - More than 3,000 people a day have a heart attack. If you're one of them the day after your swine flu shot, will you worry the vaccine was to blame and not the more likely culprit, all those burgers and fries?   LINK

Sister2Sister Magazine - Is it a cold, flu and H1N1?

Seasonal illness usually starts with a sniffle, but here’s how to tell whether you’ve got a cold, the flu or the dreaded swine flu.  LINK

Education

BET.com - Gingrich, Sharpton Tour Philly With Education Secretary

PHILADELPHIA — They say politics makes strange bedfellows. It turns out education does, too.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the Rev. Al Sharpton and Republican former House Speaker Newt Gingrich began a nationwide "listening and learning" tour in Philadelphia on Tuesday.  LINK

BlackAmericaWeb.com - Sharpton, Gingrich Take Part in Schools Tour

The tour began in Philadelphia with visits to two public charter schools and other programs that have made major academic strides.  LINK

Statement by 1Sky’s Gillian Caldwell on the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

September 30, 2009

Takoma Park, MD – 1Sky Campaign Director Gillian Caldwell issued the following statement in reaction to the introduction of the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act by Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA).

“With the introduction of the Clean Energy Jobs & American Power Act by Senators Kerry and Boxer the race is on in the U.S. Senate to get us on the road to a clean energy economy and tackle global warming.  We applaud the two senators’ leadership, and recognize that this bill reflects some important improvements over the legislation that recently passed the House of Representatives, particularly with respect to ensuring we have the ability to clean up old and dirty coal plants, and put an end to the expansion of dirty coal technologies. The Kerry-Boxer bill also responds to widespread calls to strengthen the 2020 target for reducing global warming pollution in the face of escalating evidence that the planet is warming even more quickly than scientists predicted.

However, we can and we must do more.  This is just the beginning of what will be a heated debate: Will our elected leaders stand with the people and the planet, or will they prioritize profit for the dinosaur industries of the past? Polls have found citizens overwhelmingly support climate action and an urgently-needed shift towards a clean energy economy.  And so 1Sky’s nationwide campaign is in full gear, calling for bold action now in the face of well-funded opposition by dirty coal and big oil who prioritize their own profits over our economic recovery, our health, our national security, our planet, and our people.  We have not a moment to lose and it is going to take millions of Davids, and even more leadership from President Obama, to overcome the Goliath that is the industries of yesterday that repeatedly stand in the way of our progress.“

1Sky is a collaborative national campaign for strong federal action to tackle global climate change and invest in building the clean energy economy of the future.  As one of the largest national campaigns in the country, 1Sky combines the force of 450 allied organizations, and 168,000 committed climate advocates, 2,500 volunteer Climate Precinct Captains covering more than 380 congressional districts in 50 states, and a team of 51 including 40 organizers in 29 states working to mobilize constituent support.

For more information on 1Sky contact Alex Posorske at (415) 420-3370 (cell) or 1sky.org

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Join host Wyclef Jean, the Hip Hop Caucus, Green For All and members of the Hip Hop Caucus Advisory Board for a night of Celebration to End Poverty and Pollution!!!

What: Panel on Protecting, Promoting, and Preparing Our Kids for the Green Economy

When: 1:00pm- 2:50pm

            Thursday, September 24, 2009

Where:  209-B   

              Washington Convention Center

             801 Mt. Vernon Place NW  

What:  Hip Hop's Impact on the Political Landscape in America

When:  10:30am- 12:00pm

             Friday, September 25, 2009

Where: Room 140-B

             Washington Convention Center

            801 Mt. Vernon Place NW

Written by Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr. and Bill McKibben

This article will appear in the September 28, 2009 edition of the Nation Magazine

Here's a question whose answer might surprise you: what American songwriter penned the most-listened-to piece of environmental protest music of all time? Somebody with an acoustic guitar? John Denver?

The answer, almost certainly, is Marvin Gaye. "Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology)" appeared on What's Going On, the album he released in May 1971, which went straight to the top of the charts, even though Motown boss Berry Gordy thought it was too political to sell. "I realized that I had to put my own fantasies behind me if I wanted to write songs that would reach the souls of people. I wanted them to take a look at what was happening in the world," Gaye said later. The Vietnam War, protested in the album's title song, was part of that story, and so was drug abuse--and so was "oil wasted on the oceans and upon our seas," and "radiation in the ground and in the sky," and "fish full of mercury."

Where did all the blue sky go?

Poison is the wind that blows

From the north, east, south and sea

For a brief moment after the first Earth Day, it made perfect sense for the civil rights and environmental movements to be singing the same tune. Tragically, those movements soon diverged--diverged so far that some people still find it odd that activists like ourselves are working side by side again on issues like global warming and poverty. But it makes perfect sense--there is no threat to social justice greater than the breakdown of our earth's physical systems, and no way to ease that threat without rearranging power, both in America and around the world.

Think for a minute about Hurricane Katrina: those high winds blew in a lot of truths. For one, we've amped up nature in a dangerous way: scientists now expect ever stronger storms to rake our shores. For another, poverty puts some people at far more risk than others. No one will ever forget those pictures of the Lower Ninth Ward when the levee broke, but in almost every city on earth the poorest people live in the equivalent of the Lower Ninth. It's not that everyone won't eventually be affected by climate change--plenty of middle-class white people lost their homes when the storm rampaged across Louisiana and Mississippi. But almost everywhere, rich people occupy higher ground, and the places that flood belong to those who can't afford better. As the oceans rise throughout this century, those are the places that will turn wet and swampy first--substandard housing in the twenty-first century still means lead paint and asthma, but now it means you better cut a hole in the attic so you can get on the roof and wait for the helicopter.

And of course there are whole nations built on low ground--places like Bangladesh, which may see a fifth of its land under water. In this decade we've watched diseases like dengue fever spread through the poorest parts of the poor world, driven by the mosquitoes that like the warm, wet world we're building. We've watched blocs of nations--low-lying islands, for instance--turn to the UN to demand action to ensure their very survival. Almost without exception, these endangered places are filled with people of color, and with poor people.

That's why the fight against climate change is a very basic fight for people in New Orleans, or in Oakland, or in DC--or in Dhaka, and Calcutta, and Lagos. These are the places that will drive the demographic future, here and abroad; the centuries to come belong to black and brown and yellow humans. But 200 years of burning coal and gas and oil, mostly by Americans and Europeans, threaten to make that future impossible. That's why, right now, we've got to take a united stand to slow it down--why 350.org will be holding demonstrations around the planet on October 24 to demand that our leaders pay attention to science and limit carbon concentrations to 350 parts per million. That's the most important number on the planet, though no one knew it eighteen months ago. NASA's Jim Hansen and his team reported recently that concentrations higher than 350 are not compatible with "the planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted." Since we're at 387 and rising right now, that's very bad news. It explains why the Arctic is melting, why Australia is drying up and why we watch the hurricane season with more trepidation with each passing year.

It also explains why more than a thousand actions are already planned for October 24, in every corner of the planet. The earth's immune system is finally kicking in, people are signing up to march in China and India, and churches across America are pledging to ring their bells 350 times that day. It may turn out to be the largest global environmental action of all time, and beyond any doubt the most beautiful and diverse. Some of those protests will be atop lofty mountains, or undersea off the Great Barrier Reef, or on the lovely organic farms of Vermont. And some will be in grittier places, where the battle is even more crucial.

That battle--which began when the Hip Hop Caucus and Green for All announced the Green the Block campaign on August 4 from the West Wing of the White House--is for many things. One of those is a stronger deal at the Copenhagen climate conference in December than the weak agreement currently under consideration. Yvo de Boer, the international diplomat who is chairing those talks, recently pointed out as diplomatically as possible that the numbers on the table are nowhere near what the science demands. "This is not enough to address climate change," he said. Later he told activists that it would help the process enormously if they would mobilize: "If you could get your members out on the street before Copenhagen, that would be incredibly valuable." So we will--and if Copenhagen is to succeed, we must move American policy too. The Waxman-Markey legislation on Capitol Hill goes further than any climate legislation in the past, but it's still riddled with loopholes and giveaways, because members of Congress still fear the coal industry more than they fear the effects of climate change (or climate-minded voters).

But this environmentalism can't just be about the dangers we'll face if we don't take action--Green the Block means embracing the changes we must make as a way to build inclusive, thriving local economies. We need to put people to work swinging hammers--not building luxury condos for people with easy credit but installing insulation in old homes and solar hot-water heaters on roofs. We need urban farming and strong local businesses standing up to the big boxes that suck the life and money from communities.

We believe we will be able to affect the decisions in Copenhagen and in Congress, because some of the leaders of this new movement are different from the environmental lobbyists of the past. The old school are still important, but their constituencies are also graying, their work too often confined to making cozy arrangements with the powers that be. The new environmentalism draws everyone from church people to business people. The world's greatest mountain climbers are busy recruiting their brethren for October 24, urging them to get up high with banners. Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver are rallying small farmers and food activists; people will rally at many a farmers' market that day. And b-boys and graffiti artists are busy recruiting their friends to create images of 350.

But most of all, the constituency is young people, who understand that they will bear the results of inaction for their whole lives--and who understand in a visceral way the hopeful possibilities that come from a newly connected world. Marvin Gaye and the soul era gave voice to the oppressed during the struggle for civil rights. Now young people are singing new freedom songs and identifying with one another under an umbrella known as hip-hop. The swagger and style that young people and their urban-influenced culture bring to the green movement bear little resemblance to the old tree-hugging brand of environmentalism. But as the conscious caretakers of a "block" on the brink of climate catastrophe, they are powerful partners in the green movement.

That's why the soul of modern environmentalism is right where Marvin Gaye left it in 1971, the spot we never should have walked away from:

Oh, things ain't what they used to be

What about this overcrowded land?

How much more abuse from man can she stand?

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

About Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr.

The Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr. is president and CEO of the Hip Hop Caucus. more...

About Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben is the author of a dozen books, most recently The Bill McKibben Reader, an essay collection. A scholar in residence at Middlebury College, he is co-founder of 350.org, the largest global grassroots organizing campaign on climate change. more...

Cross posted from Huffington Post

By Rev. Lennox Yearwood and Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins

This September 11th, communities are honoring those who lost their lives eight years ago by participating in service activities.

Churches, schools, and community groups are holding nearly one-hundred Green the Block service events in more than 24 states.

All across the nation, people are choosing to act on encouragement instead of discouragement, on hope instead of despair.

Both of us are often asked to speak for those who have no voice, and to remind others of those who are often forgotten. We are asked to respond to the frustrations of our communities and fulfill the aspirations of those who are seeking better lives. Yet we are constantly humbled by those who we strive to serve.

To see people from all walks of life take up service as a way to remember the tragedy of 9/11 is beauty from ashes. It is also part of the solution that will put our nation on the road to recovery, permanently.

We just read about a handful of the events that are going on today, and imagine if everyday this was happening in every city all over the country...

In Brooklyn, one-hundred high school students are helping to green their community through urban gardening.

In Florida, local cooks are preparing an organic meal for their firefighters, to show gratitude and educate their community about healthy eating.

In Chicago, volunteers are cleaning and greening two community homeless shelters.

In Washington, D.C., elementary school students are delivering cards made from recycled materials to the troops at Walter Reed U.S. Army Medical Center.

In Atlanta, hundreds of light-bulbs will be exchanged for energy efficient ones.

In Chattanooga, Tennessee a ninety-year-old community center will get a green retrofit.

In Bakersfield, California local leaders will provide at-risk young men with jobs training.

After today's nearly one-hundred Green the Block events are completed, we will continue to promote building stronger communities through service and the Green the Block campaign.

Join us today and everyday hereafter in working for peace and prosperity for everyone, because it is in the daily struggle for a brighter future that we truly remember and honor those who died on 9/11.

Green the Block is a campaign of Green For All and the Hip Hop Caucus, designed to educate and mobilize low-income communities and communities of color to ensure a voice and stake in the clean-energy economy. This September 11th, Green The Block teamed up with President Obama's United We Serve initiative to organize green community service events. Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins is the CEO of Green For All. Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr. is the President and CEO of the Hip Hop Caucus.

THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary

_________________________________________________________________

For Immediate Release                           September 8, 2009

REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT

IN A NATIONAL ADDRESS TO AMERICA'S SCHOOLCHILDREN

Wakefield High School

Arlington, Virginia

12:06 P.M. EDT

THE PRESIDENT:  Hello, everybody!  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you, everybody.  All right, everybody go ahead and have a seat.  How is everybody doing today?  (Applause.)  How about Tim Spicer?  (Applause.)  I am here with students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia.  And we've got students tuning in from all across America, from kindergarten through 12th grade.  And I am just so glad that all could join us today.  And I want to thank Wakefield for being such an outstanding host.  Give yourselves a big round of applause.  (Applause.)

I know that for many of you, today is the first day of school.  And for those of you in kindergarten, or starting middle or high school, it's your first day in a new school, so it's understandable if you're a little nervous.  I imagine there are some seniors out there who are feeling pretty good right now -- (applause) -- with just one more year to go.  And no matter what grade you're in, some of you are probably wishing it were still summer and you could've stayed in bed just a little bit longer this morning.

I know that feeling.  When I was young, my family lived overseas.  I lived in Indonesia for a few years.  And my mother, she didn't have the money to send me where all the American kids went to school, but she thought it was important for me to keep up with an American education.  So she decided to teach me extra lessons herself, Monday through Friday.  But because she had to go to work, the only time she could do it was at 4:30 in the morning.

Now, as you might imagine, I wasn't too happy about getting up that early.  And a lot of times, I'd fall asleep right there at the kitchen table.  But whenever I'd complain, my mother would just give me one of those looks and she'd say, "This is no picnic for me either, buster."  (Laughter.)

So I know that some of you are still adjusting to being back at school.  But I'm here today because I have something important to discuss with you.  I'm here because I want to talk with you about your education and what's expected of all of you in this new school year.

Now, I've given a lot of speeches about education.  And I've talked about responsibility a lot.

I've talked about teachers' responsibility for inspiring students and pushing you to learn.

I've talked about your parents' responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and you get your homework done, and don't spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with the Xbox.

I've talked a lot about your government's responsibility for setting high standards, and supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren't working, where students aren't getting the opportunities that they deserve.

But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, the best schools in the world -- and none of it will make a difference, none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities, unless you show up to those schools, unless you pay attention to those teachers, unless you listen to your parents and grandparents and other adults and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.  That's what I want to focus on today:  the responsibility each of you has for your education.

I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself.  Every single one of you has something that you're good at.  Every single one of you has something to offer.  And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is.  That's the opportunity an education can provide.

Maybe you could be a great writer -- maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper -- but you might not know it until you write that English paper -- that English class paper that's assigned to you.  Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor -- maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or the new medicine or vaccine -- but you might not know it until you do your project for your science class.  Maybe you could be a mayor or a senator or a Supreme Court justice -- but you might not know that until you join student government or the debate team.

And no matter what you want to do with your life, I guarantee that you'll need an education to do it.  You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer?  You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military?  You're going to need a good education for every single one of those careers.  You cannot drop out of school and just drop into a good job.  You've got to train for it and work for it and learn for it.

And this isn't just important for your own life and your own future.  What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country.  The future of America depends on you.  What you're learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future.

You'll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment.  You'll need the insights and critical-thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free.  You'll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.

We need every single one of you to develop your talents and your skills and your intellect so you can help us old folks solve our most difficult problems.  If you don't do that -- if you quit on school -- you're not just quitting on yourself, you're quitting on your country.

Now, I know it's not always easy to do well in school.  I know a lot of you have challenges in your lives right now that can make it hard to focus on your schoolwork.

I get it.  I know what it's like.  My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mom who had to work and who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn't always able to give us the things that other kids had.  There were times when I missed having a father in my life.  There were times when I was lonely and I felt like I didn't fit in.

So I wasn't always as focused as I should have been on school, and I did some things I'm not proud of, and I got in more trouble than I should have.  And my life could have easily taken a turn for the worse.

But I was -- I was lucky.  I got a lot of second chances, and I had the opportunity to go to college and law school and follow my dreams.  My wife, our First Lady Michelle Obama, she has a similar story.  Neither of her parents had gone to college, and they didn't have a lot of money.  But they worked hard, and she worked hard, so that she could go to the best schools in this country.

Some of you might not have those advantages.  Maybe you don't have adults in your life who give you the support that you need.  Maybe someone in your family has lost their job and there's not enough money to go around.  Maybe you live in a neighborhood where you don't feel safe, or have friends who are pressuring you to do things you know aren't right.

But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life -- what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you've got going on at home -- none of that is an excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude in school.  That's no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school.  There is no excuse for not trying.

Where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up.  No one's written your destiny for you, because here in America, you write your own destiny.  You make your own future.

That's what young people like you are doing every day, all across America.

Young people like Jazmin Perez, from Roma, Texas.  Jazmin didn't speak English when she first started school.  Neither of her parents had gone to college.  But she worked hard, earned good grades, and got a scholarship to Brown University -- is now in graduate school, studying public health, on her way to becoming Dr. Jazmin Perez.

I'm thinking about Andoni Schultz, from Los Altos, California, who's fought brain cancer since he was three.  He's had to endure all sorts of treatments and surgeries, one of which affected his memory, so it took him much longer -- hundreds of extra hours -- to do his schoolwork.  But he never fell behind.  He's headed to college this fall.

And then there's Shantell Steve, from my hometown of Chicago, Illinois.  Even when bouncing from foster home to foster home in the toughest neighborhoods in the city, she managed to get a job at a local health care center, start a program to keep young people out of gangs, and she's on track to graduate high school with honors and go on to college.

And Jazmin, Andoni, and Shantell aren't any different from any of you.  They face challenges in their lives just like you do.  In some cases they've got it a lot worse off than many of you.  But they refused to give up.  They chose to take responsibility for their lives, for their education, and set goals for themselves.  And I expect all of you to do the same.

That's why today I'm calling on each of you to set your own goals for your education -- and do everything you can to meet them.  Your goal can be something as simple as doing all your homework, paying attention in class, or spending some time each day reading a book.  Maybe you'll decide to get involved in an extracurricular activity, or volunteer in your community.  Maybe you'll decide to stand up for kids who are being teased or bullied because of who they are or how they look, because you believe, like I do, that all young people deserve a safe environment to study and learn.  Maybe you'll decide to take better care of yourself so you can be more ready to learn.  And along those lines, by the way, I hope all of you are washing your hands a lot, and that you stay home from school when you don't feel well, so we can keep people from getting the flu this fall and winter.

But whatever you resolve to do, I want you to commit to it.  I want you to really work at it.

I know that sometimes you get that sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work -- that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star.  Chances are you're not going to be any of those things.

The truth is, being successful is hard.  You won't love every subject that you study.  You won't click with every teacher that you have.  Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right at this minute.  And you won't necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.

That's okay.  Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who've had the most failures.  J.K. Rowling's -- who wrote Harry Potter -- her first Harry Potter book was rejected 12 times before it was finally published.  Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team.  He lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career.  But he once said, "I have failed over and over and over again in my life.  And that's why I succeed."

These people succeeded because they understood that you can't let your failures define you -- you have to let your failures teach you.  You have to let them show you what to do differently the next time.  So if you get into trouble, that doesn't mean you're a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to act right.  If you get a bad grade, that doesn't mean you're stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying.

No one's born being good at all things.  You become good at things through hard work.  You're not a varsity athlete the first time you play a new sport.  You don't hit every note the first time you sing a song.  You've got to practice.  The same principle applies to your schoolwork.  You might have to do a math problem a few times before you get it right.  You might have to read something a few times before you understand it.  You definitely have to do a few drafts of a paper before it's good enough to hand in.

Don't be afraid to ask questions.  Don't be afraid to ask for help when you need it.  I do that every day.  Asking for help isn't a sign of weakness, it's a sign of strength because it shows you have the courage to admit when you don't know something, and that then allows you to learn something new.  So find an adult that you trust -- a parent, a grandparent or teacher, a coach or a counselor -- and ask them to help you stay on track to meet your goals.

And even when you're struggling, even when you're discouraged, and you feel like other people have given up on you, don't ever give up on yourself, because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.

The story of America isn't about people who quit when things got tough.  It's about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.

It's the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and they founded this nation.  Young people.  Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon.  Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google and Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.

So today, I want to ask all of you, what's your contribution going to be?  What problems are you going to solve?  What discoveries will you make?  What will a President who comes here in 20 or 50 or 100 years say about what all of you did for this country?

Now, your families, your teachers, and I are doing everything we can to make sure you have the education you need to answer these questions.  I'm working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books and the equipment and the computers you need to learn.   But you've got to do your part, too.  So I expect all of you to get serious this year.  I expect you to put your best effort into everything you do.  I expect great things from each of you.  So don't let us down.  Don't let your family down or your country down.  Most of all, don't let yourself down.  Make us all proud.

Thank you very much, everybody.  God bless you.  God bless America.  Thank you.  (Applause.)

END               12:22 P.M. EDT

Late last night, Van Jones resigned from his position with the White House Council on Environmental Quality.  Many of us are left with pain and anger after seeing a leader of integrity, vision, and commitment targeted by hateful personal attacks.  Van stepped down in service to our movement. He felt that fighting the attacks would draw attention to him and detract from our mission.

Now, our challenge is to turn our disappointment and anger into action and renewed resolve for our common goals.

Like the great social justice movements of the 20th century, our movement for an inclusive green economy is based in the most fundamental American values: equality, justice, and opportunity for all.

That's why our opponents reduced the debate to fear, hatred, and division. They cannot win a debate about values. They cannot win a debate about solutions.

Our allies and friends may be redirected by these attacks, and focus on the rants of those who fear our vision. For Green For All, our struggle must be defined by the issues our opponents refuse to debate: ending global warming; lifting people out of poverty; restoring the economy; and bringing health to our communities. These are the challenges that matter the most.

This moment reaffirms our commitment and makes us more steadfast in pushing for our goals, including a climate bill that delivers on the promise of a clean-energy economy.  We will not be led astray. We will not let our anger cloud our vision.

Instead, it is the time to come together around the values our movement stands for: clean air; healthy communities; good jobs; and opportunity for all. 

Please sign our Petition in support of the Green Jobs Movement.

Then pass it on to 10 friends. Let's use this opportunity to grow in numbers and strength.

In the face of tactics intended to frighten and divide, we must stand strong around our core values and renew our commitment to our shared vision.

Thank you for taking a stand with us.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins
Chief Executive Officer
Green For All