The educational system in the US was a highly predictable victim of the neoliberal reaction, guided by the maxim of "private affluence and public squalor." Funding for public education has sharply declined. As higher education is driven to a business model in accord with neoliberal doctrine, administrative bureaucracy has sharply increased at the expense of faculty and students. Cost-cutting leads to hyper-exploitation of the more vulnerable, creating a new precariat of graduate students and adjuncts surviving on a bare pittance, replacing tenured faculty.

The more there is a need to talk about the ideals of democracy, the less democratic the system usually is.

By accident of geography, the world's major oil resources are in Shi'ite-dominated areas. Iran's oil is concentrated right near the gulf, which happens to be an Arab area, not Persian. Khuzestan is Arab, has been loyal to Iran, fought with Iran not Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. This is a potential source of dissension. I would be amazed if there isn't an attempt going on to stir up secessionist elements in Khuzestan.

Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.

There's an interesting book called The Fugu Plan, written by Marvin Tokayer and Mary Swartz, which describes the circumstances when European Jews came to Japan, a semi-feudal society.

It turned out that [Bill] Clinton had authorized Texaco to illegally ship oil to the military junta [in Haiti] during a time when we were supposedly opposing the military junta and supporting democracy instead.

Marx's early manuscripts, with their roots in the Enlightenment and Romanticism, derived fundamental concepts such as alienation from a conception of human nature - what we would call genetically determined.