The UN can go as far as the U.S. will allow, and no further. And it's bound by conditions that the powerful states, which means mostly the U.S., impose.

I happened to go to a school when I was a kid and that's all we did, pursue our own interests. It was kind of structured so you ended up knowing everything you were supposed to know, arithmetic, Latin, whatever it was. But almost always it was under your own initiative.

Those who wish to change the world should have the best possible understanding of the world, including what is revealed by the sciences, some of which they might be able to use for their purposes. That's why workers education, including science and mathematics, has commonly been a concern of left intellectuals.

By most accounts, Aristide is the most popular figure in Haiti.

One of the real problems of society is that its far too atomized, what sociologists call secondary associations.

The Sanders campaign showed that a candidate with mildly progressive programs could win the nomination, maybe the election, even without the backing of the major funders or any media support. There's good reason to suppose that Sanders would have won the nomination had it not been for shenanigans of the Obama-Clinton party managers. He is now the most popular political figure in the country by a large margin.

In fact, what were called the socialist countries in Eastern Europe were the most anti-socialist systems in the world. Workers had more rights in the United States and England than they had in Russia, and it was somehow still called socialism.