Power is never so overwhelming that there's no room for resistance.
The discipline, particularly in these urban schools for the poor, it's not controlled by the administration - they're controlled by the police. This is an expression of a racist logic that has now seeped directly into schools.
To see poor people, their benefits being cut, to see pensions of Americans who have worked like my father, all their lives, and taken away, to see the rich just accumulating more and more wealth. I mean, it seems to me that there has to be a point where you have to say, 'No, this has to stop.'
Undermining life-affirming social solidarities and any viable notion of the public good, right-wing politicians trade in forms of idiocy and superstition that mesmerize the illiterate and render the thoughtful cynical and disengaged.
As politics is disconnected from its ethical and material moorings, it becomes easier to punish and imprison young people than to educate them.
America's addiction to violence is partly evident in the heroes it chooses to glorify.
Domestic terrorism has opened new war zones, operating off the assumption that all Americans are potential terrorists.
The new elites have no allegiances to nation states and don't care about the damage they do to workers, the environment, or the rest of humanity. They are unhinged sociopaths, far removed from what the Occupy Movement called the '99 percent.'
Universities are some of the few places left where a struggle for the commons, for public life, if not democracy itself, can be made visible through the medium of collective voices and social movements energized by the need for a politics and way of life counter to authoritarian capitalism.
In order for critical pedagogy, dialogue, and thought to have real effects, they must advocate the message that all citizens, old and young, are equally entitled, if not equally empowered, to shape the society in which they live.
America has become amnesiac, a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated.
Democracy is not compatible with capitalism but is congruent with a version of democratic socialism in which the wealth, resources, and benefits of a social order are shared in an equitable and just manner.
Democracy as a promise means that society can never be just enough and that the self-reflection and struggles that enable all members of the community to participate in the decisions and institutions that shape their lives must be continually debated, safeguarded, and preserved at all costs.
Policy is no longer being written by politicians accountable to the American public. Instead, policies concerning the defense budget, deregulation, health care, public transportation, job training programs, and a host of other crucial areas are now largely written by lobbyists who represent mega corporations.
