In my view, this is not extremism on the left. This is what the American people support in poll after poll. Support the right to a job. Support living wages. Support real climate action. Support small community-based banks that make loans available to every day people and small businesses, not these too-big-to-fail banks that rip us off, that crash the economy at taxpayer expense. Support a public-option healthcare system, not Obamacare, which has been a boondoggle for insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

We are plunging headlong into a cold war, and we have 2,000 nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert.

African Americans, in particular, saw their cumulative wealth crash. They used to have 10 cents on the dollar of the average white family. That 10 cents on the dollar that the African American family used to have crashed down to 5 cents on the dollar, given the focus of predatory lending on the African American community and the degree to which they were really devastated by the foreclosure crisis. So yeah, I think there is a lot of disappointment out there.

I was more tuned into the assassinations, the riots that were going on, like in Watts, and, in fact, my summer before my senior year in high school I went on the Experiment in International Living to Sweden, yes, with a group of students , you know, leisurely discussion over the summer about, you know, where we were going to go with our lives, and how did you how did, you know, being a born-again Christian mesh with being, you know, a socialist from New York.

I'm not opposed to the use of force.

What happened in Cuba, just to cut to the chase, their death rate from diabetes went down 50%, their death rate from heart attacks and stroke went down approximately 30% and all-cause mortality went down 18% while they adhered to the system. Then they opened up their pipeline again from Venezuela, and their health improvements went away.

I think we need to be a superpower of human rights, of support for true grassroots democracy, not corporatist economic development, which suits our economic elite but has not been helpful to the cause of democracies around the world.