Before the 1970s, banks were banks. They did what banks were supposed to do in a state capitalist economy: they took unused funds from your bank account, for example, and transferred them to some potentially useful purpose like helping a family buy a home or send a kid to college.

Concentration of executive power, unless it's very temporary and for specific circumstances, let's say fighting world war two, it's an assault on democracy.

It's kind of interesting and sick that the intellectual culture called the 1960s, "time of troubles," a dangerous period in which a lot of harm was done to the society. And the reason is because we were civilized and that's dangerous. That increased the commitment to democracy, to rights and so on, and this left people much less obedient.

Somehow the fact of enormous privilege and freedom carries with it a sense of impotence, which is a strange, but striking, phenomenon. The fact is, we can do just about anything. There is no difficulty, wherever you are, in finding groups that are working hard on things that concern you.

My linguistics is pretty theoretical.

If you care about other people, you might try to organize to undermine power and authority. That's not going to happen if you care only about yourself.

You also have to get beyond that to dismantle the system of production for profit rather than production for use. That means dismantling at least large parts of market systems.