We need to remember that education can be both a basis for critical thought and a site for repression, which destroys thinking and leads to violence.

The issue of who gets to define the future, own the nation's wealth, shape the parameters of the social state, control the globe's resources, and create a formative culture for producing engaged and socially responsible citizens is no longer a rhetorical issue, but offers up new categories for defining how matters of representations, education, economic justice, and politics are to be defined and fought over. At stake here is the need for both a language of critique and possibility.

When we talk about total war, and we talk about war zones, and we talk about the breakdown of the cities, when you exclude questions of race from that discourse, something disappears that's really central to the forms of repression that we're talking about.

Violence now becomes the only tool by which we can actually mediate social problems that should be dealt with in very different ways.

I mean, the people who got us into these crises - whether we're talking about the bankers or the hedge fund managers, or we're talking about the IMF - it's become pretty clear that the price to be paid for their illegal financial shenanigans, the burden is being placed on working class people, on the poor, on the elderly, on young people. It's become clear that neoliberal policies aren't just interested in "solving" an economic crisis, these are policies designed to enrich corporations and bankers and the rich at the expense of everybody else.

The domestic war against "terrorists" [code for young protesters] provides new opportunities for major defense contractors and corporations who are becoming more a part of our domestic lives.

Social solidarities are torn apart, furthering the retreat into orbits of the private that undermine those spaces that nurture non-commodified knowledge, values, critical exchange and civic literacy.