Arianna Huffington has written a post thanking Glenn Beck for freeing Van Jones from his White House desk, where he was “tied . . . with a sock in his mouth.” Thanks to Beck, she writes, “Van is now freed to do what he does best: inspire and energize groups around the country.”

I am equally excited about this prospect. Perhaps you’ve heard this audio of Jones from 2008 — before he was bound and gagged — in which he holds forth on “minimum demands” vs. “maximum demands”:

Right now we’re saying we want to move from suicidal gray capitalism to some kind of eco-capitalism where at least we’re not, you know, fast-tracking the destruction of the whole planet.
Will that be enough? No it won’t be enough. We want to go beyond systems of exploitation and oppression altogether, but that’s a process.
And I think what’s great about the movement that’s beginning to emerge is that the crisis is so severe in terms of joblessness, violence, and now ecological threats that people are willing to be both very pragmatic and very visionary.
So the green economy will start off as a small subset, and we’re going to push it, and push it, and push it, until it becomes the engine for transforming the whole society.

I’m very glad that Van Jones is once again free to be forthright about the “maximum demands” of the environmental movement. We need more candor like this, and not just from the greens. Take Barney Frank’s admission that the Democrats’ health-care bill is designed to rachet the system in the direction of single-payer — we need more of that. I’m with Arianna. Untie the truth-tellers! Remove the socks from their mouths!