We call for a new kind of offensive in the Middle East because our current approach has a track record and it's not a good one.

I feel like that is saying to young people, "You have no chance of ever getting out of debt in your life, right?" Personally, I think that the role of the press is to ensure that the American public understands who their choices are.

According to, for example, one academic by the name of Philip Harvey, whose expertise is basically how do we create a New Deal, today. According to his estimate, these jobs could be created for far less than the [Barack] Obama stimulus package, which cost, you know, $700 or $800 billion, something like that, and produced around 3 million jobs - not a lot. According to his estimates, it would cost less to produce two-thirds of 20 million.

If we want to cure the things that threaten life, limb and even survival, we need to heal our sick political system. That is, not just to address our physical ailments, but the things that determine whether we're going to survive into the next century. That is war, climate change, poverty, etc. We've got to fix our politics.

I don't think this is rocket science. I think we have some common interests, like dismantling our nuclear weapons, dealing with terrorism and, in my view, you know, [Barack] Obama is now cooperating with [Vladimir] Putin to drop bombs.

The idea here is for communities to decide how they meet these criteria for becoming sustainable economically, ecologically and socially.Through a community decision-making process. And exactly how that would be configured, you know, remains to be established. The process of community budgeting, participatory budgeting, is one model that's been suggested.

Twenty million jobs is what we call for in the Green New Deal, which is essentially a New Deal focused on greening the economy on an emergency basis. So it's 20 million jobs, which are mixed, private sector, nonprofits, government jobs where others will not do the job and will not create the employment.