The Washington leadership has put aside non-proliferation programmes and devoted its energies and resources to driving the country to war by extraordinary deceit, then trying to manage the catastrophe it created in Iraq.

Just take ease of interchange between people. Your email is of course faster than letter - on the other hand the transition from sailing ship to telegraphs was far greater than the shift from the postal service to email. That was a fabulous change. If you sent a letter to England, instead of waiting a couple of months for a response you got it instantly. That's a huge change. Every one of these changes of course increases opportunities and also increases means of control and domination.

Public opinion can be influential, the media can be influential.

I have no Facebook page or Twitter - I don't participate in it, and I don't like it particularly. I mean, it's a form of interaction, which strikes me as extremely superficial.

With government deregulation and the triumph of financial liberalization, the dangers of systemic risks, the possibility of a financial tsunami, sharply increased.

There was also a national policy, which as a child I didn't know anything about. In 1924 the first major immigration law was passed. Before that, there was an Oriental Exclusion Act, but other than that, European immigrants like my parents were generally admitted in the early years of the twentieth century. But that ended in 1924 with an immigration law that was largely directed against Jews and Italians.

I know some really outstanding Turkish journalists, and have been pleased and honored to be able to join with them a few times in their courageous protests against state terror and repression.