Van Jones Quotes

This country isn't working for working people. It's working only for people at the top. That's not the American dream. That's the American nightmare.

There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.

The laws are stacked for the wealthy.

The economy is not governed with the bottom half in mind.

The middle class has just fallen further and further behind the rich.

This society cannot go forward, the way we have been going forward, where the gap between the rich and the poor keeps growing.

The dirty truth is that the rich are the great cause of poverty.

To one American family out of four, the idea of capitalism as a benign system of comfort, dignity, and personal advance is only a myth, or worse, a bitter mockery.

We cannot continue to have the upper class wealty getting richer and richer, the middle class shrinking and 43 million living in poverty.

There is growing inequality. The families of the all-powerful Ministers are getting richer. The poor and hard-working Belizeans are getting poorer.

I'm here to speak for those who say the American Dream isn't working for them, because I know it isn't. I'm here to say it's not your fault: the ruling class... has failed you.

I do think that there is both a very powerful sense of entitlement and a kind of bubble of wealth which makes it hard for the people at the very top to understand the travails of the middle class.

Barack Obama destroyed the middle class. Whatever you want to say about his rhetoric, the rich got richer, but the poor got poorer, and the middle class got wiped out. That's really what Trump appealed to and inspired in the forgotten man.

For 40 years, the American middle class has been disappearing. Millions of people are working longer hours for lower wages despite a huge increase in technology and productivity. And what we have seen during that period is a massive transfer of trillions of dollars from the middle class to the top one-tenth of 1 percent of America

The patience and forbearance of the poor are among the strongest bulwarks of the rich.

In my view, there is no justice when the 15 wealthiest people in this country in the last two years, saw their wealth increase by $170 billion. That is more wealth acquired in a two year period than is owned by the bottom 130 million Americans.

The interesting thing about class warfare is that it's only class warfare if it's up, not down. If you talk about welfare cheats or something, that's not class warfare because it's down; you have to talk about rich people before it's class warfare.

Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.

During the last two years the wealthiest 14 Americans saw their wealth increase by $157 billion. This is truly unbelievable. This $157 billion INCREASE in wealth among 14 individuals is more wealth that is owned, collectively, by 130 million Americans. This country does not survive morally, economically or politically when so few have so much, and so many have so little.

I think our biggest problem in society is we're headed more and more toward a two-tiered society. That is, creating welfare for the wealthy and destroying opportunities for the disadvantaged.

They talk about class warfare -- the fact of the matter is there has been class warfare for the last thirty years. It's a handful of billionaires taking on the entire middle-class and working-class of this country. And the result is you now have in America the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on Earth and the worst inequality in America since 1928. How could anybody defend the top 400 richest people in this country owning more wealth than the bottom half of America, 150 million people?

The burning issue of our time is the growing inequality in income and wealth in our country, and it's got to be addressed. We've got to stop it. It's eroding our politics. It's separating our society into the haves and the have-nots. It's condemning a whole younger set of our population to not be able to enter the middle class. And, it hits hardest in the prairie areas of the United States, our small towns and communities, where the jobs just aren't available and the incomes are low.

The gap between rich and poor is, in fact, widening enormously. This idea of building up the powers of people who are already powerful and keeping everyone else back is a recipe for endless misery and conflict.

It's class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn't be.

You can say that I've grown bitter but of this you can be sure. The rich have get their channels in the bedrooms of the poor. And there's a mighty Judgement coming but I may be wrong.