You don't have any vestige of democracy in this country. A report recently came out of Princeton University claiming that, of all the policies that have been made in the last thirty years, 95% of them were in the interest of the rich and had nothing to do with what people wanted - basic services, roads, all of that. They called it an oligarchy.

While the universities are increasingly corporatized and militarized, their governing structures are becoming more authoritarian, faculty are being devalued as public intellectuals, students are viewed as clients, academic fields are treated as economic domains for providing credentials, and work place skills, and academic freedom is under assault.

Certainly I think the state is more than willing to not only attempt to change the consciousness of people, but to employ violence in ways that make people quite fearful.

The ideology of neoliberalism, with its privatization, its deregulation, its emphasis on consumption, its elimination of basically apparatuses that can provide alternative points of view, has been so powerful and so normalized.

Young people live in a society in which every institution becomes an "inspection regime" - recording, watching, gathering information and storing data.

I don't think the media is a reflection of anything. The media is an active political and pedagogical force that shapes reality. If the media were a reflection of anything, then we'd have to raise the question of why it's in the hands of basically six corporations. The media is about power.

Youth are becoming the site of society's nightmares.