"Commander Vimes didn’t like the phrase ‘The innocent have nothing to fear’, believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like ‘The innocent have nothing to fear’."

"[Obama is] just too tied to Wall Street. And at this point he is a war criminal. You can’t meet every Tuesday with a killer list and continually have drones drop bombs. You can do that once or twice and say: ‘I shouldn’t have done that, I’ve got to stop.’ But when you do it month in, month out, year in, year out – that’s a pattern of behaviour. I think there is a chance of a snowball in hell that he will ever be tried, but I think he should be tried and I said the same about George Bush. These are war crimes. We suffer in this age from an indifference toward criminality and a callousness to catastrophe when it comes to poor and working people."

“No to Profit”

bostonreview:

Americans may have much to learn from the upwelling of public sentiment against privatized education in Chile. The United States is just starting down the long road toward outsourcing education to private interests such as massive open online courses (MOOCs). But in Chile we see what four decades of privatized education can achieve, particularly when it is backed by a dictatorship capable of enforcing a free market that might, in a less authoritarian setting, have been constrained. Chile has long been cited as the great neoliberal example. The question is what it is an example of. If President Lagos’s explanation is correct, Chile has little to teach us, since many of its internal conflicts are more or less in keeping with its progress as a developing nation. But if Mayol is right—if the protests over education are indeed the cries of a society that wants out from marketization—we should be watching Chile very closely.

Read Lili Loofbourow on Chile’s experiment in privatizing higher education. (Boston Review, May/June 2013)