When you go into a college of education you've got aspirations of making a difference in people's lives, of loving children, of working with kids, but none of that is affirmed in your college of education. Then you go working in schools, especially in places like New York City and Chicago that I'm most familiar with, and you find these huge aspirations are beaten out of you in a very systematic way - and still people persevere.

I knew Barack Obama, absolutely. And I knew him probably as well as thousands of other Chicagoans.

Well, first of all I think that we have to be careful with terms like the working class, obviously. When [Karl] Marx wrote about the working class he was writing about something much more bounded than we're talking about.

One of the great crimes of the Bloomberg/Klein administration [in New York City] is that they've removed themselves from communities, as if communities have nothing to say about what their needs and aspirations are for themselves and for their children.

I think I am a radical. I have never deviated from that. By radical, I mean someone trying to go to the root of things.

Guilty as hell. Free as a bird. America is a great country.

If the logic of capitalism is "expand or die," then either it has to die or the world has to die.