Conservative and liberal politicians alike now spend millions waging wars around the globe, funding the largest military state in the world, providing huge tax benefits to the ultrarich and major corporations, and all the while draining public coffers, increasing the scale of human poverty and misery, and eliminating all viable public spheres - whether they be the social state, public schools, public transportation or any other aspect of a formative culture that addresses the needs of the common good.
Henry GirouxAt the start of the second decade of the 21st century, young people all over the world are demonstrating against a variety of issues ranging from economic injustice and massive inequality to drastic cuts in education and public services. These demonstrations have and currently are being met with state-sanctioned violence and an almost pathological refusal to hear their demands.
Henry GirouxWe need to take on the new media, and in terms of power and public pedagogy, we need to organize a whole range of people outside of the academy.
Henry GirouxUnder neoliberalism, culture appears to have largely abandoned its role as a site of critique.
Henry GirouxThe war being waged against the radical imagination, particularly around young people, is just startling. Young people are laboring under a burden of debt that so ties them to a survivalist mode of existence that it's impossible for them to dream anymore. Trying to recognize what the forces are that actually squelch the imagination is a lot more interesting to me than people who go and "find themselves" because they're no longer on the grid.
Henry GirouxWe have never seen the isolation of the rich to the degree that we see it now. They're global. They travel all over the world. They're not in any way - it seems to me - committed to any one place. So it's easy for them to say, "We don't see this. We don't see poverty. We don't think it's that bad. We think wealth is really being distributed in ways that are fair."
Henry GirouxCollective insurance policies and social protections have given way to the forces of economic deregulation, the transformation of the welfare state into punitive workfare programs, the privatization of public goods and an appeal to individual accountability as a substitute for social responsibility.
Henry Giroux