Instead of schools being a pipeline to opportunity, schools are feeding our prisons.

FDR was enormously influenced by this, and afraid. I mean, his intervention was to save capitalism. It wasn't to basically appease the workers. And I think that today you don't have those movements.

Economics now drives politics. This gives us a system in which the relationship between power and politics is no longer fused. Power is global. We have an elite that now floats in global flows. It could care less about the nation-state, and it could care less about traditional forms of politics. Hence, it makes no political concessions whatsoever. It attacks unions, it attacks public schools, it attacks public goods. It doesn't believe in the social contract.

Rich people live in places so removed from everybody else, they operate in circles so incestuous and so closed, they're off on islands. To try to understand their indifference is to understand also their separation from the rest of society.

America has become amnesiac - a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated.

All of this in [Donald] Trump now has become so overt that it's difficult when we talk about repression not to talk about white supremacy, not to talk about its legacy, from slavery to lynching to mass incarceration, and what it has developed into.

Everyone, especially minorities of race and ethnicity, now live under a surveillance panoptican.