The promises of modernity regarding progress, freedom and hope have not been eliminated; they have been reconfigured, stripped of their emancipatory potential and relegated to the logic of a savage market instrumentality.

Young black men in America have an identity ascribed to them that is a direct legacy of slavery.

Students, in particular, now find themselves in a world in which heightened expectations have been replaced by dashed hopes.

Increasingly, poor minority and white youth are being funneled directly from schools into prison.

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.

Under neoliberalism, you have a political-financial class that doesn't care about whether people are suffering. They float above politics. They have power and they don't care. They'll do anything to simply increase their wealth.

The degree to which fear now becomes an organizing principle of society is enormous compared to what it was like in the past.