The US and Canada are now increasingly isolated in the hemisphere, and sooner or later, I think we're going to find that the US and Canada are simply excluded from hemispheric affairs. That's a sharp reversal of what was the case not long ago.

Take a look at the bombing of Serbia in 1999. The US was quite open about the reasons for the bombing. A main reason was to preserve stability and credibility. Serbia was interfering with stability, meaning that it was the one part of the Balkans that was not integrated into the Western-dominated (mostly US-dominated) system.

Student debt is structured to be a burden for life. The indebted cannot declare bankruptcy, unlike Donald Trump. Current student debt is estimated to be over $1.45 trillion. There are ample resources for that simply from waste, including the bloated military and the enormous concentrated private wealth that has accumulated in the financial and general corporate sector under neoliberal policies. There is no economic reason why free education cannot flourish from schools through colleges and university. The barriers are not economic but rather political decisions.

On humanitarian intervention in general, I guess my view is not unlike the view that was attributed to Gandhi, accurately or not, when he was supposedly asked what he thought about western civilization. He is supposed to have said that he thought it would be a good idea. Similarly, humanitarian intervention would be a good idea, in principle.

The very properties of the human mind that provide an enormous scope for human genius in some domains will serve as barriers to progress in other domains, just as the properties that enable each child to acquire a complex and highly articulated human language block the acquisition of other imaginable linguistic systems.

[Donald] Trump has been very inconsistent on many things; on Twitter he's been all over the place, but some of it is very consistent. That is: Do nothing about climate change except make it worse. And he's not just speaking for himself, but for the whole Republican Party, the whole leadership. It's already had impact, it will have worse impact.

Anti-union propaganda has been considerably more successful here [ in the U.S.] than in Europe, even among working people who would benefit [from] unions.