The uniformity and obedience of the media, which any dictator would admire...

The actual consequences of Plan Colombia are to devastate peasant communities, which have been driven to drug production. These peasants have no particular desire to grow coca, but their other means of livelihood have been wiped out.

There is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws.

The United States in many ways resembles a Third World country - far more elevated, but it has many of those structural characteristics: the extreme inequality of wealth, the deterioration of infrastructure because it only serves poor people, predatory operations, huge corruption, and so on.

People are interested in authentic long-term, socialist goals, which is not what is usually called socialism. They should be thinking through carefully how the projected society should work, but not in extensive detail because a lot of things just have to be learned by experiment and we don't know enough to plan societies in detail by any means. But, general guidelines could be worked out and many of the specific problems can be discussed. That should just be part of people's popular consciousness. That's how a transition to socialism could take place.

Since the civil war in Laos was resumed in earnest in 1963, American participation has been veiled in secrecy.

In the early 50s in the US, there was what was called McCarthyism and the only reason it succeeded was that there was no resistance to it. When they tried the same thing in the 60s it instantly collapsed because people simply laughed at it so they couldn't do it. Even a dictatorship can't do everything it wants. It's got to have some degree of popular support.