We, the people, gave the marching orders to our democratically-elected officials and instructed them. We wanted out of Vietnam and we got out of Vietnam. We wanted women's right to choose and we got women's right to choose. We got the EPA, we got the Clean Air Act, Water Act, we got rights for workers in the workplace to be protected from dangers. We accomplished pretty much all of what we wanted when we had the courage of our convictions. That is the missing ingredient.

Silence is not an effective political strategy, and what we do if we silence the public interest, which is so hard to hear anyway, is that we silence ourselves and then we do not have a democracy.

Because Ajamu Baraka speaks in the language of his community, and makes no bones about it, he really invites in a whole new demographic of voters who have been locked out? - African-American and black and brown people and indigenous people? - who have felt like this system has no place for them. And he is unapologetic about standing up for the rights of the oppressed people and against colonialism and against imperialism.

We cannot simultaneously fight terrorism, we and our allies, while with the other hand we fund terrorism, arm terrorism and train terrorism.

As Frederick Douglas, the famous abolitionist, said: "power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will." You need the truth, and you also need a demand, and you need to bring that demand into the realm of electoral politics. If you don't do that, it's very hard to get such an entrenched machine to move.

To my mind, to say that says to young people "and you probably are not going to get out of debt, and you probably do not have a climate that's going to be here come 2050." And, in my view, the point is not necessarily to win now but it's to begin building our power.

I think that equality needs to be broadened to include equal access to comprehensive healthcare, equal access to jobs, and equal rights in the workplace.