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Van Jones has a bone to pick — with his liberal and progressive friends. In a hard-hitting speech delivered Monday, June 18, at the Take Back the American Dream conference in Washington, D.C., Jones took the greater progressive movement to task for, as he described it, sitting down on the job “in [this] moment of maximum peril.”

Jones kicked off his speech (video at the end of this story) with a promise to address the problem of “the voice that’s been missing” after paying tribute to Rodney King, a “regular brother with regular-brother problems,” who was found dead two days earlier.

King’s famous plea (“Can we all get along?”), made as Los Angeles erupted into riots after the exoneration of the police officers whose brutal beating of the unarmed King was captured on camera in a gut-wrenching video, “still resounds,” said Jones. He went on:

 We have this extraordinary moment now, as we look at November and the months beyond [to determine], who are we in this mess, in this catastrophe, in this country? Are we doing to turn to each other, or are we going to turn on each other?

Jones’ speech was designed to alert progressives to the perils of passivity, especially as so many express disappointment in President Barack Obama — for drone attacks, for deportations of undocumented immigrations, for not standing up to Wall Street firmly enough.

Rattling off various elements of America’s “catastrophe,” as he described it, Jones cited families imperiled by layoffs and the implosion of the housing market, which has led to millions left with homes worth far less than their original purchase price, and others in or near foreclosure. He spoke of the kind of racial violence that led to the death of Trayvon Martin. He mentioned the right’s attempts to move “the dirtiest energy ever created” — oil from the Canadian tar sands — across the American landscape.