The cheerleaders for neoliberalism work hard to normalize dominant institutions and relations of power through a vocabulary and public pedagogy that create market-driven subjects, modes of consciousness, and ways of understanding the world that promote accommodation, quietism and passivity.

Students, in particular, now find themselves in a world in which heightened expectations have been replaced by dashed hopes.

What social safety net does is provide a glimmer of hope for what a democratic socialist society might look like. It makes the claim that without social provisions, without a welfare state, without a social contract, society can't survive. We need a foundation for people - economically, politically, and socially - where what the Right considers "entitlements" are really rights.

It seems to me that as economics drives politics and money markets set policies, what we have is an enormously powerful emergence of both a police state on the one hand and an incredible culture of cruelty on the other. All of the sudden, shared hopes are replaced by shared fears.

Young black men are not only being arrested and channeled into the criminal justice system in record numbers, they are also being targeted by the police, harassed by security forces, and in some instances killed because they are black and assumed to be dangerous.

Under the regime of neoliberalism, individual responsibility becomes the only politics that matters, and serves to blame those who are susceptible to larger systemic forces. Even though such problems are not of their own making, neoliberalism's discourse insists that the fate of the vulnerable is a product of personal issues ranging from weak character to bad choices or simply moral deficiencies. This makes it easier for its advocates to argue that poverty is a deserved condition.

It says anybody can make it, because we're all on a level playing field. But we're not on a level playing field. That 's precisely the point, and that's what the rich don't want to look at. They don't want to recognize that they're not producing wealth at all. They're hoarding wealth. That's different.