The media is not about responding to the wishes of people. All you have to do in the United States is turn on the national news at six-thirty, and watch big pharma intervene between the news stories, trying to tell people what drugs they should buy. That's not a reflection of anything. That's an attempt to promote a particular kind of consumer logic that basically abuses people.

Today, there is a new focus on public values, the need for broad-based movements for solidarity, and alternative conceptions of politics, democracy and justice.

There is a need for educators, young people, artists and other cultural workers to develop an educative politics in which people can address the historical, structural and ideological conditions at the core of the violence being waged by the corporate and repressive state and to make clear that government under the dictatorship of market sovereignty and power is no longer responsive to the most basic needs of young people - or most people for that matter.

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.

War is one of the nation's most honored virtues, and its militaristic values now bear down on almost every aspect of American life.

The issue should not be, we're going to tax you more to give you the services you want. The issue is, this is the wealthiest country in the world, and we're going to use that wealth to service human needs and not to service a military industrial corporate surveillance state.

This is a moment in our history - that we can thank neoliberalism for - that has really destroyed what Hannah Arendt called "the virtue of thoughtfulness."