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.

Within the existing neoliberal historical conjuncture, there is a merging of violence and governance and the systemic disinvestment in and breakdown of institutions and public spheres that have provided the minimal conditions for democracy.

Within the United States especially, the often violent response to nonviolent forms of youth protests must be analyzed within the framework of a mammoth military-industrial state and its commitment to war and the militarization of the entire society.

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

The architecture of war and violence is now matched by a barrage of goods parading as fashion.

Politicians such as Michelle Bachmann, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich along with talking heads such as Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck and Anne Coulter are not the problem, they are symptomatic of a much more disturbing assault on critical thought, if not rational thinking itself.

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