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.

Is such an alliance helpful to us in this day and age? Are we creating a cold war in order to justify NATO?

[My mother] was busy being a homemaker and was not an activist by any means.

We must challenge to fight at every level, including Congress and to make that challenge political and to organize as a political party is how we get traction.

Right now we have a $600-billion or so Defense Department budget, but when you add in, for example, a trillion-dollar nuclear weapons program over the next decade or two, it adds significantly to it. So it's somewhere around $600 billion. We call for approximately cutting that in half and instead putting those dollars into true security here at home.

We have not been successful in deterring the growth or expansion of any terrorist group that we've been fighting.

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.