If you lose, what would you like to see come out of your campaign?

I would hope that it opens up the system to third parties -- real third parties, not just Ross Perot and people with millions of dollars to spend. We want to encourage people to vote based on their principles and not their fears, and we want to ensure that all these people who don't vote are not forgotten. People have a right to vote for what they believe in, for what they feel is right. It's important to remember that people died for the right to vote. And getting people back into voting, that's something worth fighting for.

Most of your work has been in domestic policy areas, like the environment and social justice. How would you be able to formulate a foreign policy?

We all have strengths in certain areas, and I think that Ralph and I would surround ourselves with good, qualified advisors to handle some of those issues. But I do have experience and ideas about foreign policy.

The first thing we have to do is decouple foreign aid from military aid. Right now, behind Israel, Colombia is one of America's top recipients of foreign aid; so is Mexico. Most of that money is spent on the military, but neither of those countries has any foreign enemies. Why do they need that money for defense? We send most of that money saying that we expect it to be spent on the drug war, but much of the military force is used against the civilian populations in those countries. Colombia has the highest rate of kidnapping in the world and there's a lot of political violence, much of it carried out by the government. When political murders happen there, many of the victims are shot with our guns.

How would you try to influence defense?

We really need to cut back on military spending. It's time to switch to a peacetime economy. Right now, we're spending up to a third of our budget on defense, even though the Cold War is over. People in Washington don't want acknowledge that. The Cold War has been over for 10 years.

What would the first anti-LaDuke attack ad look like? What in your past do you think they would exploit?

Jeez, I don't really know. I'm not perfect; I've made some mistakes in my life. But I feel really good about the life I've led and I'm not afraid to have it examined.

Now that I think about it, I was arrested in 1992. Some people may think of that as a bad thing, but I feel good about it. I chained myself to the gate of a phone book factory, a GTE factory in Los Angeles. They were using thousand-year-old trees to make phone books. I think that's a total waste of a tree.

What is the first thing you would do as vice president?

I'd pardon Leonard Peltier, but I guess I couldn't do that as vice president. I'd ask Ralph to do it. He's a victim of COINTELPRO [the FBI counterintelligence program that infiltrated leftist American groups from 1968 to 1971], and I think it's wrong that he's still in prison. People all over the world have been asking for his release for years. [The Rev.] Desmond Tutu even wants him out. The Clinton administration released those Puerto Rican activists, and I think that was the right thing to do. After years, Geronimo Pratt was finally let out of jail, too. It's time to end the COINTELPRO era in this country and release Leonard Peltier.

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