Charles,

I believe you are cutting Van Jones a wee bit too much slack on the eco-capitalism thing. Look at the content of his speeches & books, not just the titles, and then decide if his ideas are more Marx or capitalism. My conclusion is that he leans to socialism (not communism), with a strong racialist tone.

Here’s his wiki page:

In 1995, Jones started Bay Area PoliceWatch, the region’s only bar-certified hotline and lawyer-referral service for alleged victims claiming police abuse. The hotline started receiving fifteen calls a day.[9] PoliceWatch began as a project of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. “We designed a computer database, the first of its kind in the country, that allows us to track problem officers, problem precincts, problem practices, so at the click of a mouse we can now identify trouble spots and troublemakers,” says Jones “This has given us a tremendous advantage in trying to understand the scope and scale of the problem. Now, obviously, just because somebody calls and says, “Officer so-and-so did something to me,” doesn’t mean it actually happened, but if you get two, four, six phone calls about the same officer, then you begin to see a pattern. It gives you a chance to try and take affirmative steps.”.[14] By 1996, Jones founded a new umbrella NGO, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which “consisted of a closet-like office and a computer that Jones had brought from his apartment.”[11]

From 1996-1997, Jones and PoliceWatch led a campaign which was successful in getting officer Marc Andaya fired from the San Francisco Police Department. Andaya was the lead officer accused of the in-custody death of Aaron Williams, an unarmed black man. In 1999 and 2000, Jones was a leader in the failed campaign to defeat Proposition 21, which sparked a student movement that made national headlines.[15][16] In 2001, Jones and the Ella Baker Center launched the Books Not Bars campaign. From 2001-2003, Jones and Books Not Bars led a campaign to block the construction of a proposed “Super-Jail for Youth” in Oakland’s Alameda County. Books Not Bars later went on to launch a statewide campaign to transform California’s juvenile justice system.[17]

In 2004, Jones was one of “100 notable Americans” who signed a “911 Truth Statement” from 911truth.org. The statement demanded an investigation of “unanswered questions that suggest that people within the current administration may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.”[18] Jones appears as signer number 46 to the document.[19]