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"Under the relentless thrust of accelerating over-population and increasing over-organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms—elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest—will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial—but Democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit." Aldous Huxley,  Brave New World Revisited , published 1958
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The Market is God, say the "free market" fundamentalists "I am determined to pursue an aggressive strategy of opening up the markets in all the regions of the world."* — Bill Clinton, firmer U.S. president, address to the WTO, May 18, 1998.  Quoted in  Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank  by Éric Toussaint and Damien Millet, 2010 One can scratch her head and thinks about what effects that has had in the U.S. Iraq, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, Egypt, South Africa, Argentina, and other countries. Clinton in fact was not pursuing something new, the "shock doctrine" was already apace, and it would be soon complemented by "shock and awe". 
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At least there is a mention of the complicity of the capitalist Western companies and the hypocrisy of the "Western leaders" who preach "human rights" and "freedoms" but do business with authoritarianism. The Thoughts of Chairman Xi
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Learning assessment has not spurred discussion of the deep structural problems that send so many students to college unprepared to succeed. Instead, it lets politicians and accreditors ignore these problems as long as bureaucratic mechanisms appear to be holding someone — usually a professor — accountable for student performance. All professors could benefit from serious conversations about what is and is not working in their classes. But instead they end up preoccupied with feeding the bureaucratic beast. “It’s a bit like the old Soviet Union. You speak two languages,” said Frank Furedi, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent in Britain, which has a booming assessment culture. “You do a performance for the sake of the auditors, but in reality, you carry on.” The misguided drive to measure 'learning outcomes'
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The UK, U.S. and the EU loathe to impose sanctions, "for fear of hurting the ordinary people or derailing a delicate democratic experiment." Hahahah! The humanist imperialists who stood by and watched during Rwanda's genocide, hurt around 200,000 Iraqis, mostly children, and then invaded a country where there was no "democratic experiment". Then they watched again during a Syrian revolution turned into a war in which the regime is the main killer and torturer. Myanmar
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"Seven years into this process – first counter-revolutionary and now exterminatory – the Ghouta has tumbled to the lowest pit of hell. This didn’t have to happen. Nor was it an accident. Local, regional and global powers created the tragedy, by their acts and their failures to act. And Arab and international public opinion has contributed, by its apathy and relative silence." The Ghouta Slaughter and Arab Responsibility
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"Scientific education for the masses will do little good, and probably a lot of harm, if it simply boils down to more physics, more chemistry, more biology, etc to the detriment of literature and history. Its probable effect on the average human being would be to narrow the range of his thoughts and make him more than ever contemptuous of such knowledge as he did not possess."  Orwell,  What is Science , 1945
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