The oil lobby, perhaps the most powerful lobby on earth, is almost matched by hospital owners and doctors.

In the Great Depression in which I grew up and remember vividly, unemployment was over 25 percent, and over 35 percent where I lived. A grown man would work all day, 16 hours, for a dollar. I remember hundreds of people walking by, people who had come down from the North just to get warm. They would come to our house as beggars even though they might have a college education. People didn't have money. They bartered; they'd trade eggs or pigs. It was just completely different.

The bond of our common humanity is stronger than the divisiveness of our fears and prejudices.

Prostitution thrives in the United States. We focus in this country on punishing the girls. For every brothel owner or pimp or male customer, there are 50 girls who are arrested for being prostitutes. Other countries have tried the other way around, and it works beautifully...they bring the charges against the brothel owners and the pimps and the male customers, and they do not prosecute the girls, who quite often are brought into that trade involuntarily. It works quite well, by the way.

The United States is squandering international prestige and goodwill and intensifying global anti-American terrorism by unofficially condoning or abetting the Israeli confiscation and colonization of Palestinian territories.

The measure of a society is found in how they treat their weakest and most helpless citizens.

Whether the borders that divide us are picket fences or national boundaries, we are all neighbors in a global community.