The structures of neoliberal violence have put the vocabulary of democracy on life support, and one consequence is that subjectivity and education are no longer the lifelines of critical forms of individual and social agency.

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.

Poor minorities live in a new age of Jim Crow, one in which the ravages of segregation, racism, poverty and dashed hopes are amplified by the forces of privatization, financialization, militarization and criminalization, fashioning a new architecture of punishment, massive human suffering and authoritarianism.

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.

Of course, the new domestic paramilitary forces will also undermine free speech and dissent with the threat of force while simultaneously threatening core civil liberties, rights and civic responsibilities.

In any totalitarian society, dissent is viewed as a threat, civic literacy is denounced, and those public spheres that produce engage citizens are dismantled or impoverished through the substitution of training for education.

Individual interests now trump any consideration of the good of society just as all problems are ultimately laid at the door of the solitary individual, whose fate is shaped by forces far beyond his or her capacity for personal responsibility.