That's the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don't work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.

[Moral responsibilities] has nothing particular to do with academia, except insofar as those within it tend to be unusually privileged in the respects just mentioned.

As long as people are marginalized and distracted [they] have no way to organize or articulate their sentiments, or even know that others have these sentiments. People assume that they are the only people with a crazy idea in their heads. They never hear it from anywhere else. Nobody's supposed to think that. ... Since there's no way to get together with other people who share or reinforce that view and help you articulate it, you feel like an oddity, an oddball. So you just stay on the side and you don't pay any attention to what's going on. You look at something else, like the Superbowl.

In 1961, the United States began chemical warfare in Vietnam, South Vietnam, chemical warfare to destroy crops and livestock. That went on for seven years. The level of poison - they used the most extreme carcinogen known: dioxin. And this went on for years.

The kind of work that should be the main part of life is the kind of work you would want to do if you weren't being paid for it. It’s work that comes out of your own internal needs, interests and concerns.

The racism in Europe takes the form of anti-immigrant extremism - which is bad enough here - I think it's hard to measure, but my guess is that it's probably worse there.

Policy is largely set by economic elites and organized groups representing business interests with little concern for public attitudes or public safety, as long as the public remains passive and obedient.