Now if we look at the way in which the labor movement itself has evolved over the last couple of decades we see increasing numbers of black people who are in the leadership of the labor movement and this is true today.

It simply cannot be disputed that for decades the Palestinian leadership was more interested in there not being a Jewish state than in there being a Palestinian state.

You know the sad thing of post-9/11 which was of course horrific was that the city in which I felt completely at home for two decades suddenly people like us - brown people - were looked at as the 'Others.'

And I think what people in New Jersey have gotten to know about me over the last decade that I've been in public life is what you see is what you get. And I'm no different when I'm sitting with you than I am when I'm at home or anyplace else.

There are certain moments in the history of a nation when the choices made define the decades to come.

Decades ago women suffered through horrifying back-alley abortions. Or they used dangerous methods when they had no other recourse. So when the Republican Party launched an all-out assault on women's health pushing bills to limit access to vital services we had to ask: Why is the GOP trying to send women back... to the back alley?

Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.

On Australia Day 2010 as we enter this second decade of the 21st century Australians can be optimistic about our future but we cannot afford to mistake optimism for complacency.

Like many other touchstones of twenty-first-century pop culture 'The Sopranos' was hatched in the late Nineties predicting a future that never arrived. It was designed for a decade that would be just like the Nineties except more so in an America that enjoyed seeing itself as smarter and braver and freer than ever before.

President Obama has offered a plan with 4 trillion dollars in debt reduction over a decade with two and a half dollars of spending reductions for every one dollar of revenue increases and tight controls on future spending. It's the kind of balanced approach proposed by the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission.