The racism is so profound and the recognition - the kind of deep recognition that you have to humiliate. It's not about to killing or torture. It's to humiliate. So the oppressed feel degraded. And both the oppressed understand and the oppressors understand. It's constant.

Elements of the Christian fundamentalist right are one of the strongest components of "support for Israel" - support in an odd sense, because they presumably want to see it destroyed in a cosmic battle at Armageddon, after which all the proper souls will ascend to heaven - or so I understand, again, not from close reading.

[Antonio] Gramsci's words and actions explain their assessment, though I think we should refrain from using the term "model intellectual" for him or others.

Most of the population in America is disenfranchised. It doesn't matter what they think. Just look at the passionate rhetoric about how we can't stand by when a country uses weapons to kill innocent civilians.

In the US, first of all, the electoral system has been almost totally shredded. For a long time it's been pretty much run by private concentrated spending but now it's over the top. Elections increasingly over the years have been [public relations] extravaganzas.

A democracy barely functions under the neoliberal system.

There was an international conference going on in Morocco that was a follow up for the Paris conference - to put some teeth in the Paris agreements. But on November 8, 2017 the conferences stopped. The question was, Will we survive? Not a word about it. Even more amazing, the world is looking to China to save them. The US is the wrecking machine that is destroying everything. The world is hoping that China will somehow come to the rescue.