I stand before you today because this vision of government as the engine of opportunity is what I believe in.

The Occupy movement needs an organizing principle, and - just as the Tea Party did - it needs some actual measures of success. Choose one candidate whose agenda is squarely within that of the movement and make his or her electoral success a focal point.

Those who are critical of Alliance are the same people who have done nothing for 30 years.

The reason to drive this point home with a vivid and frank comparison is many New Yorkers are still not confronting the reality of how serious our crisis is. It was an exhortation to face reality.

I would very honestly just tell you that what I tried to do was simply respond to inquiries from people as they came in. Where I've thought I could say something useful, I've tried to add a voice that was, frankly, a dissident voice earlier on, but one that I think has become a more mainstream voice-and not because I've shifted. I think that the critique I had of what was going on in our financial system from six, eight years ago-after seeing some of what we've suffered through and even since the cataclysm itself-in terms of the structural changes.

Our criminal justice system is fallible. We know it, even though we don't like to admit it. It is fallible despite the best efforts of most within it to do justice. And this fallibility is, at the end of the day, the most compelling, persuasive, and winning argument against a death penalty.

Some say that I should settle down, go slower and not push so hard, so quickly for such transformational change. To them, I say that you misunderstand the size of the problems we face, the strength of the status quo and the urgency of the people's desire for change.