The earthquake in Haiti was a class-based catastrophe. It didn't much harm the wealthy elite up in the hills, they were shaken but not destroyed. On the other hand the people who were living in the miserable urban slums, huge numbers of them, they were devastated. Maybe a couple hundred thousand were killed. How come they were living there? They were living there because of-it goes back to the French colonial system-but in the past century, they were living there because of US policies, consistent policies.

Groupings of people that get together, think things through, come out to plan and so on, like unions or true political organizations, they've disintegrated. And people tend to be atomized - you get down to a society based on social units based on an atom - an atomic element - which is a person and their computer. Not a society that is going to be able to function freely and democratically. The tendency is there; it doesn't have to be, but its something to worry about.

I haven't seen any claim that Piraha lacks recursion, that is, that there are a finite number of sentences or sentence frames. If that's so, it would mean that the speakers of this language aren't making use of a capacity that they surely have, a normal situation; plenty of people throughout history would drown if they fall into water.

If you listen to the talk shows, which are rabid right-wing, and very interesting, an important fact about the United States, they reach a huge audience. And they're very uniform. So right wing, I don't think you can even find an analog in your, but they reach a mass audience, and their view is that the corporations are liberal. Their appeal to the population is, "the country is run by liberals, they own the corporations, they run the government, they own the media, and they don't care about us ordinary people."

There are major efforts being made to dismantle Social Security, the public schools, the post office - anything that benefits the population has to be dismantled. Efforts against the U.S. Postal Service are particularly surreal.

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.

The community itself didn't support the union. Now that's kind of interesting about [Barack] Obama, because Obama was supposedly a community organizer in Chicago at that time. Now I'm sure he read the Chicago Tribune, so he knew about it, but when he went to show his solidarity with the workforce, the first place he went was Caterpillar. I don't think he's forgotten, and the labor movement didn't react. Even radical labor historians didn't remember. It was only 15 years ago, after all, but that's a real triumph of propaganda in many ways.