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Our Contention is Occupy MarriottAmerican politics is dead the extreme right controls mainstream discourse and an entirely depoliticized public is allowing the 1% to steer the US toward fascismGiroux 11 (Henry A. Giroux, Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, 1 June 2011, Zombie Politics, Democracy, and the Threat of Authoritarianism - Part I, http://www.truth-out.org/zombie-politics-democracy-and-threat-authoritarianism-part-i/1306932037)In the world of popular culture, zombies seem to be everywhere, as evidenced by the relentless slew of books, movies, video games, and comics. From the haunting Night of the Living Dead to the comic movie Zombieland, the figure of the zombie has captured and touched something unique in the contemporary imagination. But the dark and terrifying image of the zombie with missing body parts, oozing body fluids, and an appetite for fresh, living, human brains does more than feed the mass-marketing machines that prey on the spectacle of the violent, grotesque, and ethically comatose. There is more at work in this wave of fascination with the grotesquely walking hyper-dead than a Hollywood appropriation of the dark recesses and unrestrained urges of the human mind. The zombie phenomenon is now on display nightly on television alongside endless examples of destruction unfolding in real-time. Such a cultural fascination with proliferating images of the living hyper-dead and unrelenting human catastrophes that extend from a global economic meltdown to the earthquake in Haiti to the ecological disaster caused by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico signals a shift away from the hope that accompanies the living to a politics of cynicism and despair. The macabre double movement between the dead that walk[2] and those who are alive but are dying and suffering cannot be understood outside of the casino capitalism that now shapes every aspect of society in its own image. A casino capitalist zombie politics views competition as a form of social combat, celebrates war as an extension of politics, and legitimates a ruthless Social Darwinism in which particular individuals and groups are considered simply redundant, disposablenothing more than human waste left to stew in their own misfortuneeasy prey for the zombies who have a ravenous appetite for chaos and revel in apocalyptic visions filled with destruction, decay, abandoned houses, burned-out cars, gutted landscapes, and trashed gas stations. The twenty-first-century zombies no longer emerge from the grave; they now inhabit the rich environs of Wall Street and roam the halls of the gilded monuments of greed such as Goldman Sachs. As an editorial in The New York Times points out, the new zombies of free-market fundamentalism turned the financial system into a casino. Like gambling, the transactions mostly just shifted paper money around the globe. Unlike gambling, they packed an enormous capacity for collective and economic destructionhobbling banks that made bad bets, freezing credit and economic activity. Societynot the bankersbore the cost.[3] In this way, the zombie the immoral, sub-Nietzschean, id-driven other who is hyper-dead but still alive as an avatar of death and crueltyprovides an apt metaphor for a new kind of authoritarianism that has a grip on contemporary politics in the United States.[4] This is an authoritarianism in which mindless self-gratification becomes the sanctioned norm and public issues collapse into the realm of privatized anger and rage. The rule of the market offers the hyper-dead an opportunity to exercise unprecedented power in American society, reconstructing civic and political culture almost entirely in the service of a politics that fuels the friend/enemy divide, even as democracy becomes the scandal of casino capitalismits ultimate humiliation. But the new zombies are not only wandering around in the banks, investment houses, and death chambers of high finance, they have an ever-increasing presence in the highest reaches of government and in the forefront of mainstream media. The growing numbers of zombies in the mainstream media have huge financial backing from the corporate elite and represent the new face of the culture of cruelty and hatred in the second Gilded Age. Any mention of the social state, putting limits on casino capitalism, and regulating corporate zombies puts Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and other talking heads into a state of high rage. They disparage any discourse that embraces social justice, social responsibility, and human rights. Appealing to real American values such as family, God, and Guns, they are in the forefront of a zombie politics that opposes any legislation or policy designed to lessen human suffering and promote economic and social progress. As Arun Gupta points out, they are insistent in their opposition to civil rights, school desegregation, womens rights, labor organizing, the minimum wage, Social Security, LGBT rights, welfare, immigrant rights, public education, reproductive rights, Medicare, [and] Medicaid.[5] The walking hyper-dead even oppose providing the extension of unemployment benefits to millions of Americans who are out of work, food, and hope. They spectacularize hatred and trade in lies and misinformation. They make populist appeals to the people while legitimating the power of the rich. They appeal to common sense as a way of devaluing a culture of questioning and critical exchange. Unrelenting in their role as archetypes of the hyper-dead, they are misanthropes trading in fear, hatred, and hyper-nationalism. The human suffering produced by the walking hyper-dead can also be seen in the nativist apoplexy resulting in the racist anti-immigration laws passed in Arizona, the attempts to ban ethnic studies in public schools, the rise of the punishing state, the social dumping of millions of people of color into prisons, and the attempts of Tea Party fanatics and politicians who want to take back America from President Barack Obamadescribed in the new lexicon of right-wing political illiteracy as both an alleged socialist and the new Hitler. Newt Gingrich joins Glenn Beck and other members of the elite squad of the hyper-dead in arguing that Obama is just another version of Joseph Stalin. For Gingrich and the rest of the zombie ideologues, any discourse that advocates for social protections, easing human suffering, or imagining a better future is dismissed by being compared to the horrors of the Nazi holocaust. Dystopian discourse and End Times morbidity rule the collective consciousness of this group. The death panels envisaged by Sarah Palin are not going to emerge from Obamas health care reform plan but from the toolkits the zombie politicians and talking heads open up every time they are given the opportunity to speak. The death threats, vandalism, and crowds shouting homophobic slurs at openly gay U.S. House Representative Barney Frank already speak to a fixation with images of death, violence, and war that now grips the country. Sarah Palins infamous call to a gathering of her followers to reload in opposition to President Obamas policiessoon followed in a nationally televised press conference with a request for the American people to embrace Arizonas new xenophobic lawsmakes her one of the most prominent of the political zombies. Not only has she made less-than-vague endorsements of violence in many of her public speeches, she has cheerfully embraced the new face of white supremacy in her recent unapologetic endorsement of racial profiling, stating in a widely reported speech that Its time for Americans across this great country to stand up and say, Were all Arizonians now.[6] The current descent into racism, ignorance, corruption, and mob idiocy makes clear the degree to which politics has become a sport for zombies rather than engaged and thoughtful citizens.[7] The hyper-dead celebrate talk radio haters such as Rush Limbaugh, whose fanaticism appears to pass without criticism in the mainstream media. Limbaugh echoes the fanatics who whipped up racial hatred in Weimar Germany, the ideological zombies who dissolved the line between reason and distortion-laden propaganda. How else to explain his claim that environmentalist terrorists might have caused the ecological disaster in the gulf?[8] The ethically frozen zombies that dominate screen culture believe that only an appeal to self-interest motivates peoplea convenient counterpart to a culture of cruelty that rebukes, if not disdains, any appeal to the virtues of a moral and just society. They smile at their audiences while collapsing the distinction between opinions and reasoned arguments. They report on Tea Party rallies while feeding the misplaced ideological frenzy that motivates such gatherings but then refuse to comment on rallies all over the country that do not trade in violence or spectacle. They report uncritically on Islam bashers, such as the radical right-wing radio host Michael Savage, as if his ultra-extremist racist views are a legitimate part of the American mainstream. In the age of zombie politics, there is too little public outrage or informed public anger over the pushing of millions of people out of their homes and jobs, the defunding of schools, and the rising tide of homeless families and destitute communities. Instead of organized, massive protests against casino capitalism, the American public is treated to an endless and arrogant display of wealth, greed, and power. Armies of zombies tune in to gossip-laden entertainment, game, and reality TV shows, transfixed by the empty lure of celebrity culture. The roaming hordes of celebrity zombie intellectuals work hard to fuel a sense of misguided fear and indignation toward democratic politics, the social state, and immigrantsall of which is spewed out in bitter words and comes terribly close to inciting violence. Zombies love death-dealing institutions, which accounts for why they rarely criticize the bloated military budget and the rise of the punishing state and its expanding prison system. They smile with patriotic glee, anxious to further the demands of empire as automated drones kill innocent civiliansconveniently dismissed as collateral damageand the torture state rolls inexorably along in Afghanistan, Iraq, and in other hidden and unknown sites. The slaughter that inevitably follows catastrophe is not new, but the current politics of death has reached new heights and threatens to transform a weak democracy into a full-fledged authoritarian state. A Turn to the Dark Side of Politics The American media, large segments of the public, and many educators widely believe that authoritarianism is alien to the political landscape of American society. Authoritarianism is generally associated with tyranny and governments that exercise power in violation of the rule of law. A commonly held perception of the American public is that authoritarianism is always elsewhere. It can be found in other allegedly less developed/civilized countries, such as contemporary China or Iran, or it belongs to a fixed moment in modern history, often associated with the rise of twentieth-century totalitarianism in its different forms in Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union under Stalin. Even as the United States became more disposed to modes of tyrannical power under the second Bush administrationdemonstrated, for example, by the existence of secret CIA prisons, warrantless spying on Americans, and state-sanctioned kidnapingmainstream liberals, intellectuals, journalists, and media pundits argued that any suggestion that the United States was becoming an authoritarian society was simply preposterous. For instance, the journalist James Traub repeated the dominant view that whatever problems the United States faced under the Bush administration had nothing to do with a growing authoritarianism or its more extreme form, totalitarianism.[9] On the contrary, according to this position, America was simply beholden to a temporary seizure of power by some extremists, who represented a form of political exceptionalism and an annoying growth on the body politic. In other words, as repugnant as many of Bushs domestic and foreign policies might have been, they neither threatened nor compromised in any substantial way Americas claim to being a democratic society. Against the notion that the Bush administration had pushed the United States close to the brink of authoritarianism, some pundits have argued that this dark moment in Americas history, while uncharacteristic of a substantive democracy, had to be understood as temporary perversion of American law and democratic ideals that would end when George W. Bush concluded his second term in the White House. In this view, the regime of George W. Bush and its demonstrated contempt for democracy was explained away as the outgrowth of a random act of politics a corrupt election and the bad-faith act of a conservative court in 2000 or a poorly run election campaign in 2004 by an uncinematic and boring Democratic candidate. According to this narrative, the Bush-Cheney regime exhibited such extreme modes of governance in its embrace of an imperial presidency, its violation of domestic and international laws, and its disdain for human rights and democratic values that it was hard to view such antidemocratic policies as part of a pervasive shift toward a hidden order of authoritarian politics, which historically has existed at the margins of American society. It would be difficult to label such a government other than as shockingly and uniquely extremist, given a political legacy that included the rise of the security and torture state; the creation of legal illegalities in which civil liberties were trampled; the launching of an unjust war in Iraq legitimated through official lies; the passing of legislative policies that drained the federal surplus by giving away more than a trillion dollars in tax cuts to the rich; the enactment of a shameful policy of preemptive war; the endorsement of an inflated military budget at the expense of much-needed social programs; the selling off of as many government functions as possible to corporate interests; the resurrection of an imperial presidency; an incessant attack against unions; support for a muzzled and increasingly corporate-controlled media; the government production of fake news reports to gain consent for regressive policies; the use of an Orwellian vocabulary for disguising monstrous acts such as torture (enhanced interrogation techniques); the furtherance of a racist campaign of legal harassment and incarceration of Arabs, Muslims, and immigrants; the advancement of a prison binge through a repressive policy of criminalization; the establishment of an unregulated and ultimately devastating form of casino capitalism; the arrogant celebration and support for the interests and values of big business at the expense of citizens and the common good; and the dismantling of social services and social safety nets as part of a larger campaign of ushering in the corporate state and the reign of finance capital? Authoritarianism With a Friendly Face In the minds of the American public, the dominant media, and the accommodating pundits and intellectuals, there is no sense of how authoritarianism in its soft and hard forms can manifest itself as anything other than horrible images of concentration camps, goose-stepping storm troopers, rigid modes of censorship, and chilling spectacles of extremist government repression and violence. That is, there is little understanding of how new modes of authoritarian ideology, policy, values, and social relations might manifest themselves in degrees and gradations so as to create the conditions for a distinctly undemocratic and increasingly cruel and oppressive social order. As the late Susan Sontag suggested in another context, there is a willful ignorance of how emerging registers of power and governance dissolve politics into pathology.[10] It is generally believed that in a constitutional democracy, power is in the hands of the people, and that the long legacy of democratic ideals in America, however imperfect, is enough to prevent democracy from being subverted or lost. And yet the lessons of history provide clear examples of how the emergence of reactionary politics, the increasing power of the military, and the power of big business subverted democracy in Argentina, Chile, Germany, and Italy. In spite of these histories, there is no room in the public imagination to entertain what has become the unthinkablethat such an order in its contemporary form might be more nuanced, less theatrical, more cunning, less concerned with repressive modes of control than with manipulative modes of consentwhat one might call a mode of authoritarianism with a distinctly American character. [11] Historical conjunctures produce different forms of authoritarianism, though they all share a hatred for democracy, dissent, and civil liberties. It is too easy to believe in a simplistic binary logic that strictly categorizes a country as either authoritarian or democratic, which leaves no room for entertaining the possibility of a mixture of both systems. American politics today suggests a more updated if not a different form of authoritarianism. In this context, it is worth remembering what Huey Long said in response to the question of whether America could ever become fascist: Yes, but we will call it anti-fascist.[12] Longs reply suggests that fascism is not an ideological apparatus frozen in a particular historical period but a complex and often shifting theoretical and political register for understanding how democracy can be subverted, if not destroyed, from within. This notion of soft or friendly fascism was articulated in 1985 in Bertram Grosss book Friendly Fascism, in which he argued that if fascism came to the United States it would not embody the same characteristics associated with fascist forms in the historical past. There would be no Nuremberg rallies, doctrines of racial superiority, government-sanctioned book burnings, death camps, genocidal purges, or the abrogation of the U.S. Constitution. In short, fascism would not take the form of an ideological grid from the past simply downloaded onto another country under different historical conditions. Gross believed that fascism was an ongoing danger and had the ability to become relevant under new conditions, taking on familiar forms of thought that resonate with nativist traditions, experiences, and political relations.[13] Similarly, in his Anatomy of Fascism, Robert O. Paxton argued that the texture of American fascism would not mimic traditional European forms but would be rooted in the language, symbols, and culture of everyday life. He writes: No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance. These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the internal enemy.[14] It is worth noting that Umberto Eco, in his discussion of eternal fascism, also argued that any updated version of fascism would not openly assume the mantle of historical fascism; rather, new forms of authoritarianism would appropriate some of its elements, making it virtually unrecognizable from its traditional forms. Like Gross and Paxton, Eco contended that fascism, if it comes to America, will have a different guise, although it will be no less destructive of democracy. He wrote: Ur-Fascism [Eternal Fascism] is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be much easier for us if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to parade again in the Italian squares. Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instancesevery day, in every part of the world.[15] The renowned political theorist Sheldon Wolin, in Democracy Incorporated, updates these views and argues persuasively that the United States has produced its own unique form of authoritarianism, which he calls inverted totalitarianism.[16] Wolin claims that under traditional forms of totalitarianism, there are usually founding texts such as Mein Kampf, rule by a personal demagogue such as Adolf Hitler, political change enacted by a revolutionary movement such as the Bolsheviks, the constitution rewritten or discarded, the political states firm control over corporate interests, and an idealized and all-encompassing ideology used to create a unified and totalizing understanding of society. At the same time, the government uses all the power of its cultural and repressive state apparatuses to fashion followers in its own ideological image and collective identity. In the United States, Wolin argues that an emerging authoritarianism appears to take on a very different form.[17] Instead of a charismatic leader, the government is now governed through the anonymous and largely remote hand of corporate power and finance capital. Political sovereignty is largely replaced by economic sovereignty as corporate power takes over the reins of governance. The dire consequence, as David Harvey points out, is that raw money power wielded by the few undermines all semblances of democratic governance. The pharmaceutical companies, health insurance and hospital lobbies, for example, spent more than $133 million in the first three months of 2009 to make sure they got their way on health care reform in the United States.[18] The more money influences politics the more corrupt the political culture becomes. Under such circumstances, holding office is largely dependent on having huge amounts of capital at ones disposal, while laws and policies at all levels of government are mostly fashioned by lobbyists representing big business corporations and commanding financial institutions. Moreover, as the politics of health care reform indicate, such lobbying, as corrupt and unethical as it may be, is not carried out in the open and displayed by insurance and drug companies as a badge of honora kind of open testimonial to the disrespect for democratic governance and a celebration of their power. The subversion of democratic governance in the United States by corporate interests is captured succinctly by Chris Hedges in his observation that Corporations have 35,000 lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals that dole out corporate money to shape and write legislation. They use their political action committees to solicit employees and shareholders for donations to fund pliable candidates. The financial sector, for example, spent more than $5 billion on political campaigns, influenc[e] peddling and lobbying during the past decade, which resulted in sweeping deregulation, the gouging of consumers, our global financial meltdown and the subsequent looting of the U.S. Treasury. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America spent $26 million last year and drug companies such as Pfizer, Amgen and Eli Lilly kicked in tens of millions more to buy off the two parties. These corporations have made sure our so-called health reform bill will force us to buy their predatory and defective products. The oil and gas industry, the coal industry, defense contractors and telecommunications companies have thwarted the drive for sustainable energy and orchestrated the steady erosion of civil liberties. Politicians do corporate bidding and stage hollow acts of political theater to keep the fiction of the democratic state alive.[19] Rather than being forced to adhere to a particular state ideology, the general public in the United States is largely depoliticized through the influence of corporations over schools, higher education, and other cultural apparatuses. The deadening of public values, civic consciousness, and critical citizenship is also the result of the work of anti-public intellectuals representing right-wing ideological and financial interests,[20] dominant media that are largely center-right, and a market-driven public pedagogy that reduces the obligations of citizenship to the endless consumption and discarding of commodities. In addition, a pedagogy of social and political amnesia works through celebrity culture and its counterpart in corporate-driven news, television, radio, and entertainment to produce a culture of stupidity, censorship, and diversionary spectacles. Depoliticizing Freedom and Agency Agency is now defined by a neoliberal concept of freedom, a notion that is largely organized according to the narrow notions of individual self-interest and limited to the freedom from constraints. Central to this concept is the freedom to pursue ones self-interests independently of larger social concerns. For individuals in a consumer society, this often means the freedom to shop, own guns, and define rights without regard to the consequences for others or the larger social order. When applied to economic institutions, this notion of freedom often translates into a call for removing government regulation over the market and economic institutions. This notion of a deregulated and privatized freedom is decoupled from the common good and any understanding of individual and social responsibility. It is an unlimited notion of freedom that both refuses to recognize the importance of social costs and social consequences and has no language for an ethic that calls us beyond ourselves, that engages our responsibility to others. Within this discourse of hyper-individualized freedom, individuals are not only liberated from the constraints imposed by the dense network of social bonds, but are also stripped of the protection which had been matter-of-factly offered in the past by that dense network of social bonds. [21] Freedom exclusively tied to personal and political rights without also enabling access to economic resources becomes morally empty and politically dysfunctional. The much-heralded notion of choice associated with personal and political freedom is hardly assured when individuals lack the economic resources, knowledge, and social supports to make such choices and freedoms operative and meaningful. As Zygmunt Bauman points out, The right to vote (and so, obliquely and at least in theory, the right to influence the composition of the ruler and the shape of the rules that bind the ruled) could be meaningfully exercised only by those who possess sufficient economic and cultural resources to be safe from the voluntary or involuntary servitude that cuts off any possible autonomy of choice (and/or its delegation) at the root....[Choice] stripped of economic resources and political power hardly assure[s] personal freedoms to the dispossessed, who have no claim on the resources without which personal freedom can neither be won nor in practice enjoyed.[22] Paul Bigioni has argued that this flawed notion of freedom played a central role in the emerging fascist dictatorships of the early twentieth century. He writes: It was the liberals of that era who clamored for unfettered personal and economic freedom, no matter what the cost to society. Such untrammeled freedom is not suitable to civilized humans. It is the freedom of the jungle. In other words, the strong have more of it than the weak. It is a notion of freedom that is inherently violent, because it is enjoyed at the expense of others. Such a notion of freedom legitimizes each and every increase in the wealth and power of those who are already powerful, regardless of the misery that will be suffered by others as a result. The use of the state to limit such freedom was denounced by the laissez-faire liberals of the early 20th century. The use of the state to protect such freedom was fascism. Just as monopoly is the ruin of the free market, fascism is the ultimate degradation of liberal capitalism.[23] This stripped-down notion of market-based freedom that now dominates American society cancels out any viable notion of individual and social agency. This market-driven notion of freedom emphasizes choice as an economic function defined largely as the right to buy things while at the same time cancelling out any active understanding of freedom and choice as the right to make rational choices concerning the very structure of power and governance in a society. In embracing a passive attitude toward freedom in which power is viewed as a necessary evil, a conservative notion of freedom reduces politics to the empty ritual of voting and is incapable of understanding freedom as a form of collective, productive power that enables a notion of political agency and freedom that affirms the equal opportunity of all to exercise political power in order to participate in shaping the most important decisions affecting their lives.[24] This merging of the market-based understanding of freedom as the freedom to consume and the conservative-based view of freedom as a restriction from all constraints refuses to recognize that the conditions for substantive freedom do not lie in personal and political rights alone; on the contrary, real choices and freedom include the individual and collective ability to actively intervene in and shape both the nature of politics and the myriad forces bearing down on everyday lifea notion of freedom that can only be viable when social rights and economic resources are available to individuals. Of course, this notion of freedom and choice is often dismissed either as a vestige of socialism or simply drowned out in a culture that collapses all social considerations and notions of solidarity into the often cruel and swindle-based discourse of instant gratification and individual gain. Under such conditions, democracy is managed through the empty ritual of elections; citizens are largely rendered passive observers as a result of giving undue influence to corporate power in shaping all of the essential elements of political governance and decision making; and manufactured appeals to fear and personal safety legitimate both the suspension of civil liberties and the expanding powers of an imperial presidency and the policing functions of a militaristic state. I believe that the formative culture necessary to create modes of education, thought, dialogue, critique, and critical agencythe necessary conditions of any aspiring democracyis largely destroyed through the pacification of intellectuals and the elimination of public spheres capable of creating such a culture. Elements of a depoliticizing and commodifying culture become clear in the shameless propaganda produced by the so-called embedded journalists, while a corporate-dominated popular culture largely operates through multiple technologies, screen cultures, and video games that trade endlessly in images of violence, spectacles of consumption, and stultifying modes of (il)literacy. Funded by right-wing ideological, corporate, and militaristic interests, an army of anti-public intellectuals groomed in right-wing think tanks and foundations, such as the American Enterprise Institute and Manhattan Institute, dominate the traditional media, police the universities for any vestige of critical thought and dissent, and endlessly spread their message of privatization, deregulation, and commercialization, exercising a powerful influence in the dismantling of all public spheres not dominated by private and commodifying interests. These experts in legitimation, to use Antonio Gramscis prescient phrase, peddle civic ignorance just as they renounce any vestige of public accountability for big business, giant media conglomerates, and financial mega corporations. How else to explain that nearly twenty percent of the American people believe incorrectly that Obama is a Muslim! Under the new authoritarianism, the corporate state and the punishing state merge as economics drives politics, and repression is increasingly used to contain all those individuals and groups caught in an expanding web of destabilizing inequality and powerlessness that touches everything from the need for basic health care, food, and shelter to the promise of a decent education. As the social state is hollowed out under pressure from free-market advocates, right-wing politicians, and conservative ideologues, the United States has increasingly turned its back on any semblance of social justice, civic responsibility, and democracy itself. This might explain the influential journalist Thomas Friedmans shameless endorsement of military adventurism in the New York Times article in which he argues that The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fistMcDonalds cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valleys technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.[25] Freedom in this discourse is inextricably wedded to state and military violence and is a far cry from any semblance of a claim to democracy. We are the midst of a worldwide paradigm shift away from neoliberalism the Occupy movement is the only hope to stop the extreme right from controlling the aftermath

Schreiner 11 (Ben Schreiner, contributor to New Politics journal, freelance writer, October 23, 2011, Occupy Wall Street in Context: Systemic Crisis and Rebellion, http://newpol.org/node/540)

The main flaw of the Occupy Wall Street movement, according to the establishment media, has been that the protesters themselves have only been able to articulate a "vague" sense of grievance. This, it is argued, is evidenced in the protesters' disorganized and rather scattered complaints. What is it, the media bemoans, that all those demonstrators occupying city parks across the nation in an apparent protest of everything from the death penalty to corporate greed really want? Of course, the reason for the varied grievances of the Occupy participants lies in the fact that the protests have spawned in response to a systemic crisis afflicting the day's hegemonic economic orderi.e., neoliberal capitalism, or neoliberalism. And as this crisis of neoliberalism has intensified, its internal contradictions have become ever more pronounced. The crisis-stricken system thus churns out: mass unemployment and swelling wealth inequality, state sanctioned violence and repression, and a privatized and gridlocked political system. Is it any wonder, then, that assorted grievances abound in the Occupy protests? The crisis of neoliberalism, and the revolt it has now set off, is not without precedents, though. The current worldwide unrestfrom Cairo to London, from Santiago to New Yorkresembles that of forty-years ago. In fact, it has been since the late 1960s, particularly 1968, that such wide scale unrest has occurred. And, lest we forget, it was in the wake of this latter revolt that the capitalist model was made anew, as neoliberalism began its rise to dominance (about which more will be said below). Clearly then, we are in the midst of a worldwide period of transition and tumulta world revolution. The neoliberal era is at its end, and the formation of a new economic paradigm to take its place has begun. This, needless to say, is not to imply that we are on the precipice of a more equitable and just society. The experience of the 1960s, as that of 1848, demonstrates that crises and popular uprisings can be suppressed or seized by the right. The parameters of the neoliberal successor, in other words, are not preordained, but will be determined through the course of struggle. Therefore, the question faced when assessing Occupy Wall Street is whether the movement will be able to sustain itself, grow, and eventually summon the power to function as a vehicle for resolving the current systemic crisis in a way that can lead to a more equitable economic and political order. Or, conversely, whether the promise and hope epitomized in the Occupy movement will be beaten back by a reactionary counteroffensive.[Schreiner continues]In effect, we see, neoliberalism flipped the redistribution of the Keynesian welfare state on its head, funneling wealth from the pocketbooks of the working classes to the portfolios of the economic elite. (The present cries of the Occupy Wall Street movement against the 1-percent holding sway over the other 99-percent, we see, are not mere hyperbole.) And it's been with this vast expansion of economic inequality that scores of accompanying social ills have arisen. As the British researchers Richard Wilkinson and Kate Picket state in their 2009 book, The Spirit Level, "Inequality seems to make countries socially dysfunctional across a wide range of outcomes." Wilkinson and Picket tirelessly document how inequality negatively impacts everything from physical and mental health to levels of violence, and even societal trust. Hence, the apparently "diffuse" grievances of Occupy protesters are in reality intertwined. The Collapse and the Political Crisis By 2008, neoliberalism had run itself aground. The bursting of the U.S. housing bubble and the crash of the speculative financial sector signified to the world the catastrophic folly of the neoliberal model. The experiment to bring the self-regulating market of economic textbook lore into realitywhat the economic historian Karl Polanyi deemed in his 1943 book, The Great Transformation, a "stark utopia"had failed. Even the most strident of neoliberals acknowledged as much. As former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan painfully acknowledged, "I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations, specifically banks, is such that they were best capable of protecting shareholders and equity in the firms." In fact, it was neoliberal free market ideologues like Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and his Wall Street brethren who immediately turned to the state for salvation. And with the salvation granted via TARP, neoliberalism became little more than a farce. Yet, because both the Democratic and Republican parties had moved toward building a neoliberal consensus over the past three decades (all were now neoliberals), the economic crisis quickly morphed into a political and governing crisis as well. For neither could offer a viable path out of the crisis, for neither was in possession of one. The Thatcher quip that "there is no alternative" to neoliberalism had become self-fulfilling. Thus, facing an increasingly angry electorate and an economic system in disarray, both political parties have since chosen to engage in seemingly petty and dangerous political brinkmanship and crisis governing, as was seen most spectacularly in the debt ceiling debate of this past August. But with no ideological alternative to neoliberalism, both are actually forced to engage in such political theatre, for if they don't, their bankruptcy would be exposed for all to see. We can expect, then, the orchestrated political spectacle to continue until the economic crisis is resolved. Expect ample reason to occupy and revolt. The Crisis of Ecology The crisis of neoliberal capitalism, it must be noted, has coincided with a worldwide ecological crisis. The move toward the stark utopia of an unencumbered market holds dire consequences for both society and nature. As Polanyi wrote, "allowing the market mechanism to be the sole arbitrator of human beings and their natural environment would result in the demolition of society." Nonetheless, try and demolish we have. As a July report from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs states, "Continuation along the previously trodden economic growth pathways will further exacerbate the pressures exerted on the world's resources and natural environment, which would approach limits where livelihoods were no longer sustainable." To quell any doubts of such claims, the report goes on to note that, "The current species extinction rate is about 1,000 times higher than the rates that prevailed over the planet's history." The ecological crisisalthough no doubt exacerbated by the previous three decades of shrinking environmental protectionis more fundamentally a crisis of capitalism. The underlying engine of capitalism, one must remember, is capital accumulation. This accumulation, moreover, must never cease. As Marx wrote in Volume I of Capital, "The circulation of money as capital is an end in itself, for the valorization of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The movement of capital is therefore limitless." However, there exists a problem with this insatiable quest: we live in a finite world. Although the movement of capital within a capitalist system is limitless, the system itself is not. One can open only so many new markets and offshore production only so many times. Moreover, there exist only so many barrels of oil and so many tons of coal to extract from the earth. In brief, capitalism, whether it is Keynesian or neoliberal in nature, is an unsustainable system. It is not a matter of if it shall reach a terminal crisis, but when and if humanity shall survive. So then, as we barrel toward ever-greater economic and ecological ruin, what are our alternatives? Alternative Constructs At the present, there appears to be three principal alternatives taking shape. The first alternative originates from the Tea Party-beholden Republican Party. It seeks a resolution to the present crisis by intensifying the class war, wringing even greater concessions from the working class. Troublingly, this course has been able to gain significant traction. Its advance can be seen in the attacks on organized labor levied in Wisconsin, Ohio, and elsewhere. It is also seen in the calls for drastic "entitlement reform" (code for cuts in Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid) and the draconian anti-immigrant laws popping up in states across the nation (from Alabama to Arizona). In short, it is nearly identical to the neoliberal capitalist model of the last thirty years, only with a heightened level of working class and democratic suppressiona sort of authoritarian neoliberalism. The ramification for democracy, ecology, immigrants, and working people if such a dark alternative were to coalesce into the parameters of our successor economic system would obviously be grave. The second alternative comes from the Democratic Party establishment. With the party controlled by its corporate financiers, yet still choosing to don the cloak of the "peoples' party," this alternative seeks to resolve the crisis by splitting the difference between failed Keynesian and neoliberal prescriptions. While the New Deal Democrats turned to bold Keynesian policies to save capitalism, the modern Democratic Party has turned to Keynesian-lite policies in order to save the neoliberal ideology. This is seen in the effort President Obama and Congressional Democrats have placed in implementing tax cuts and modest infrastructure spending as a means with which to stimulate growth (Keynesian prescriptions), while also calling for "shared sacrifice" and "entitlement reforms" (neoliberal prescriptions). Despite its obvious limitations, we may call this the more "responsible" of the establishment-sponsored alternatives, given that it merely throws us into the abyss, rather than rocketing us there. The third and final alternative comes from the ideals embodied in the Occupy Wall Street movement. In short, we can say these ideals run counter to all those found in the alternatives above. In other words, the movement composes the second half of what Polanyi defined as society's double movement. As Polanyi argued, the movement toward a free market utopia, and all this would entail, creates a counter movement to conserve both people and nature. For the Occupy movement, the conservation of society is to be achieved via the expansion of democracyeconomic and political. Yet, the protesters, to the alarm of the establishment, have not sought democratic expression via recognized electoral means. There will be no candidate endorsement from the Occupy movement, the protesters insist. Rather, the movement appears set on expanding democracy outside of established channels, as it seeks a transformed society that is somehow democratic in a new way. Well, what exactly does this, and can this, mean?

The hegemony of the 1% causes planetary extinctionKetcham 11 (Christopher Ketcham, contributor to Orion Magazine, has written for Vanity Fair, Harper's, The Nation, Mother Jones, November/December 2011, The Reign of the One Percenters, http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/6470/ AND a postscript, Reign of the Ninety-nine Percenters?, http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/newsfrom187/entry/6518/)

For the One Percenters are a global threat, found in every city where the technocratic managers of global capital seek to make money without being productive. They are in Moscow, London, Tokyo, Dubai, Shanghai. They threaten not merely the well-being of peoples but the very future of Earth. The system of short-term profit by which the One Percenters enrich themselvesa system that they have every interest in maintaining and expandingimplies everywhere and always the long-term plundering of the global commons that gives us sustenance, the poisoning of seas and air and soil, the derangement of ecosystems. A tide of effluent is the legacy of such a system. An immense planetwide inequality is its bequest, the ever-expanding gap between the few rich and the many poor. Therefore, cry outthough the hour is late. What is needed is a new paradigm of disrespect for the banker, the financier, the One Percenter, a new civic space in which he is openly reviled, in which spoiled eggs and rotten vegetables are tossed at his every turning. What is needed is a revival of the language of vigorous old progressivism, wherein the parasite class was denounced as such. What is needed is a new Resistance. We face, as Hessel describes, a system of social control that offers nothing but mass consumption as a prospect for our youth, that trumpets contempt for the least powerful in society, that offers only outrageous competition of all against all. To create is to resist, writes Hessel. To resist is to create. Such creativity, alas, is unlikely in New York. The city is regressing, and this sparks no protest from its people. Too many New Yorkers, it appears, want to join the One Percenters, want the all-or-nothing billion dollars. New York City, once looked upon as a crowning achievement of our civilization, one of its most progressive cities, is now the vanguard for the most corrosive tendencies in society. My daughter would probably do better to forget about this town. [To read the authors postscript, written since the occupation of Wall Street began, see Orions blog.]

[Ketcham continues]When I wrote the first draft of The Reign of the One Percenters in the autumn of 2010, I had little hope that the kids in New York would pull off anything like the growing revolt in Liberty Square and beyond. I am delighted to be proved totally wrong. Some thoughts, then, for present and future Occupiers everywhere. Id suggest they take a page from the Populist movement of the 1890s. Like Occupy Wall Street, Populism was a broad, economics-driven revolt that targeted a predatory elite of corporate capitaliststhe Robber Barons of the Gilded Agewho had captured government and established monopoly power over the political economy. The Populists were social visionaries, anticipating and driving the Progressive Era of reform of the early 1900s. They sought to dismantle the centralized power of corporations in the economy and return economic liberty to individuals and small business. Long before anyone else, they envisioned the graduated income tax, the secret ballot, the regulation of banks, the right of workers to set the terms of their labor. They transformed the political discourse of their time. In the midst of this our Second Gilded Age, the Occupiers need to remember that the Populists also formed a political partythe Peoples Partyand they ran candidates who won office, and they formed real-world cooperatives between business and labor to challenge the hegemony of corporate capitalism. Theirs was not a platform of quixotic revolution, but one of radical reform that took decades of hard labor to bear fruit. In the meantime: the politics of radical protest; the politics of turmoil and disruption; the politics of ridicule and shaming; the politics of the rhetorical rotten egg smashed in the eyes of the criminal banking classthese are the orders of the day. The protest in Liberty Square, the protest of the Ninety-nine Percenters, is currently driven by no mere platform of demands, nor should it be. It is driven by moral outrage, as a challenge to the authority of an immoral economic system.

As debaters and intellectuals, our only option is to occupy higher education represents the last bastion of democratic dissent, but one threatened by ongoing corporatization. Only Occupying can politicize the debate-space and infuse the ballot with concrete political meaningGiroux 11 (Henry A. Giroux, Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, 21 November 2011, Occupy Colleges Now: Students as the New Public Intellectuals, http://www.truth-out.org/occupy-colleges-now-students-new-public-intellectuals/1321891418)

Finding our way to a more humane future demands a new politics, a new set of values, and a renewed sense of the fragile nature of democracy. In part, this means educating a new generation of intellectuals who not only defend higher education as a democratic public sphere, but also frame their own agency as intellectuals willing to connect their research, teaching, knowledge, and service with broader democratic concerns over equality, justice, and an alternative vision of what the university might be and what society could become. Under the present circumstances, it is time to remind ourselves that academe may be one of the few public spheres available that can provide the educational conditions for students, faculty, administrators, and community members to embrace pedagogy as a space of dialogue and unmitigated questioning, imagine different futures, become border-crossers, and embrace a language of critique and possibility that makes visible the urgency of a politics necessary to address important social issues and contribute to the quality of public life and the common good. As people move or are pushed by authorities out of their makeshift tent cities in Zuccotti Park and other public spaces in cities across the United States, the harsh registers and interests of the punishing state become more visible. The corporate state cannot fight any longer with ideas because their visions, ideologies and survival of the fittest ethic are bankrupt, fast losing any semblance of legitimacy. Students all over the country are changing the language of politics while reclaiming pedagogy as central to any viable notion of agency, resistance and collective struggle. In short, they have become the new public intellectuals, using their bodies, social media, new digital technologies, and any other viable educational tool to raise new questions, point to new possibilities, and register their criticisms of the various antidemocratic elements of casino capitalism and the emerging punishing state. Increasingly, the Occupy Wall Street protesters are occupying colleges and universities, setting up tents, and using the power of ideas to engage other students, faculty, and anyone else who will listen to them. The call is going out from the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University, Florida State University, Duke University, Rhode Island College, and over 120 other universities that the time has come to connect knowledge not just to power, but to the very meaning of what it means to be an engaged intellectual responsive to the possibilities of individual and collective resistance and change. This poses a new challenge not only for the brave students mobilizing these protests on college campuses, but also to faculty who often relegate themselves to the secure and comfortable claim that scholarship should be disinterested, objective and removed from politics. There is a great deal these students and young people can learn from this turn away from the so-called professionalism of disinterested knowledge and the disinterested intellectual by reading the works of Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Jacques Derrida, Howard Zinn, Arundhati Roy, Elaine Scarry, Pierre Bourdieu and others who offer a treasure trove of theoretical and political insights about what it means to assume the role of a public intellectual as both a matter of social responsibility and political urgency. In response to the political indifference and moral coma that embraced many universities and scholars since the 1980s, the late Said argued for intellectuals to move beyond the narrow interests of professionalism and specialization as well as the cheap seductions of celebrity culture being offered to a new breed of publicity and anti-public intellectuals. Said wanted to defend the necessity indeed, keep open the possibility of the intellectual who does not consolidate power, but questions it, connects his or her work to the alleviation of human suffering, enters the public sphere in order to deflate the claims of triumphalism and recalls from exile those dangerous memories that are often repressed or ignored. Of course, such a position is at odds with those intellectuals who have retreated into arcane discourses that offer the cloistered protection of the professional recluse. Making few connections with audiences outside of the academy or to the myriad issues that bear down on everyday lives, many academics became increasingly irrelevant, while humanistic inquiry suffers the aftershocks of flagging public support. The Occupy Wall Street protesters have refused this notion of the deracinated, if not increasingly irrelevant, notion of academics and students as disinterested intellectuals. They are not alone. Refusing the rewards of apolitical professionalism or obscure specialization so rampant on university campuses, Roy has pointed out that intellectuals need to ask themselves some very "uncomfortable questions about our values and traditions, our vision for the future, our responsibilities as citizens, the legitimacy of our 'democratic institutions,' the role of the state, the police, the army, the judiciary, and the intellectual community."[1] Similarly, Scarry points to the difficulty of seeing an injury and injustice, the sense of futility of one's own small efforts, and the special difficulty of lifting complex ideas into the public sphere.[2] Derrida has raised important questions about the relationship between critique and the very nature of the university and the humanities, as when he writes: The university without condition does not, in fact, exist, as we know only too well. Nevertheless, in principle and in conformity with its declared vocation, its professed essence, it should remain an ultimate place of critical resistance and more than critical to all the power of dogmatic and unjust appropriation.[3] Chomsky and the late Zinn have spoken about and demonstrated for over 40 years what it means to think rigorously and act courageously in the face of human suffering and manufactured hardships. All of these theorists are concerned with what it means for intellectuals both within and outside of higher education to embrace the university as a productive site of dialogue and contestation, to imagine it as a site that offers students the promise of a democracy to come, to help them understand that there is no genuine democracy without genuine opposing critical power and the social movements that can make it happen. But there is more at stake here than arguing for a more engaged public role for academics and students, for demanding the urgent need to reconnect humanistic inquiry to important social issues, or for insisting on the necessity for academics to reclaim a notion of ethical advocacy and connective relationships. There is also the challenge of connecting the university with visions that have some hold on the present, defending education as more than an investment opportunity or job credential, students as more than customers, and faculty as more than technicians or a subaltern army of casualized labor. At a time when higher education is increasingly being dominated by a reductive corporate logic and technocratic rationality unable to differentiate training from a critical education, we need a chorus of new voices to emphasize that the humanities, in particular, and the university, in general, should play a central role in keeping critical thought alive while fighting back all attempts to foreclose and pre-empt the further unraveling of human possibilities, prodding human society to go on questioning itself and prevent that questioning from ever stalling or being declared finished. Corporations and the warfare state should not dictate the needs of public and higher education, or, for that matter, any other democratic public sphere. As the Occupy student protesters have pointed out over the last few months, one of the great dangers facing the 21st century is not the risk of illusory hopes, but those undemocratic forces that promote and protect state terrorism, massive inequality, render some populations utterly disposable, imagine the future only in terms of immediate financial gains, and promote forms of self-serving historical reinvention in which power is measured by the degree to which it evades any sense of actual truth and moral responsibility. Students, like their youthful counterparts in the 1960s, are once again arguing that higher education, even in its imperfect state, still holds the promise, if not the reality, of being able to offer them the complex knowledge and interdisciplinary related skills that enable existing and future generations to break the continuity of common sense, come to terms with their own power as critical agents, be critical of the authority that speaks to them, translate private considerations into public issues, and assume the responsibility of not only being governed but learning how to govern. Inhabiting the role of public intellectuals, students can take on the difficult but urgent task of reclaiming the ideal and the practice of what it means to reclaim higher education in general and the humanities, more specifically, as a site of possibility that embraces the idea of democracy not merely as a mode of governance but, most importantlyas journalist Bill Moyers points out as a means of dignifying people so they can become fully free to claim their moral and political agency. Students are starting to recognize that it is crucial to struggle for the university as a democratic public sphere and the need to use that sphere to educate a generation of new students, faculty and others about the history of race, racism, politics, identity, power, the state and the struggle for justice. They are increasingly willing to argue in theoretically insightful and profound ways about what it means to defend the university as a site that opens up and sustains public connections through which people's fragmented, uncertain, incomplete narratives of agency are valued, preserved, and made available for exchange while being related analytically to wider contexts of politics and power. They are moving to reclaim, once again, the humanities as a sphere that is crucial for grounding ethics, justice and morality across existing disciplinary terrains, while raising both a sense of urgency and a set of relevant questions about what kind of education would be suited to the 21st-century university and its global arrangements as part of a larger project of addressing the most urgent issues that face the social and political world. The punishing state can use violence with impunity to eject young people from parks and other public sites, but it is far more difficult to eject them from sites that are designed for their intellectual growth and well-being, make a claim to educate them, and register society's investment and commitment to their future. The police violence that has taken place at the University of California campuses at Berkeley and Davis does more than border on pure thuggery; it also reveals a display of force that is as unnecessary as it is brutal, and it is impossible to justify. These young people are being beaten on their campuses for simply displaying the courage to protest a system that has robbed them of both a quality education and a viable future. But there is more. It is also crucial not to allow casino capitalism to transform higher education into another extension of the corporate and warfare state. If higher education loses its civic purpose and becomes simply an adjunct of corporate and military power, there will be practically no spaces left for dissent, dialogue, civic courage, and a spirit of thoughtfulness and critical engagement. This is all the more reason to occupy colleges and use them as a launching pad to both educate and to expand the very meaning of the public sphere. Knowledge is about more than the truth; it is also a weapon of change. The language of a radical politics needs more than hope and outrage; it needs institutional spaces to produce ideas, values, and social relations capable of fighting off those ideological and material forces of casino capitalism that are intent in sabotaging any viable notion of human interaction, community, solidarity, friendship, and justice. Space is not the ultimate prize here.[4] Politics and ideology are the essence of what this movement should be about. But space becomes invaluable when it its democratic functions and uses are restored. In an age when the media have become a means of mass distraction and entertainment, the university offers a site of informed engagement, a place where theory and action inform each other, and a space that refuses to divorce intellectual activities from matters of politics, social responsibility and social justice. As students and faculty increasingly use the space of the university as a megaphone for a new kind of critical education and politics, it will hopefully reclaim the democratic function of higher education and demonstrate what it means for students, faculty, and others to assume the role of public intellectuals dedicated to creating a formative culture that can provide citizens and others with the knowledge and skills necessary for a radical democracy. Rather than reducing learning to a measurable quantity in the service of a narrow instrumental rationality, learning can take on a new role, becoming central to developing and expanding the capacity for critical modes of agency, new forms of solidarity, and an education in the service of the public good, an expanded imagination, democratic values, and social change. The student intellectual as a public figure merges rigor with civic courage, meaning with the struggle for eliminating injustice wherever it occurs and hope with a realistic notion of social change. Hopefully, the Occupy Wall Street movements will expand their appropriation of public space to the university. And if so, let's hope that higher education will be viewed as a crucial public good and democratic public sphere. Under such circumstances, the university might be transformed into a new and broad-based community of learning and resistance. This is a huge possibility, but one worth struggling for. Unlike the youth movements of the past, such a movement will not crystallize around specific movements, but will create, hopefully, a community of the broadest possible resistance and political clout. In this way, the Occupy movement will connect to the larger world through a conversation and politics that links the particular with broader notions of freedom and justice. And against the pedagogical machine and political forces of casino capitalism, this expanding movement will fight hopefully with renewed energy. It will be determined in its mission to expand the capacities to think otherwise, and courageous in its attempts to take risks. It will be brave in its willingness to change the nature of the questions asked, fight to hold power accountable, and struggle to provide the formative culture for students and others to fight for those economic, political, social, and cultural conditions that are essential both to their future and to democracy itself.

The question is not Occupy vs. Policy proposals: single-issue politics is broken Only by activating debates political capacity through holistic critique can we break down casino capitalismGiroux 11 (Henry A. Giroux, Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, 26 October 2011, Occupy Wall Street's Battle Against American-Style Authoritarianism, http://www.truth-out.org/occupy-wall-streets-battle-against-american-style-authoritarianism/1319570241)

The Occupy Wall Street movement is raising new questions about an emerging form of authoritarianism in the United States, one that threatens the collective survival of vast numbers of people, not through overt physical injury or worse, but through an aggressive assault on social provisions that millions of Americans depend on. For those pondering the meaning of the pedagogical and political challenges being addressed by the protesters, it might be wise to revisit a classic essay by German sociologist and philosopher Theodor Adorno titled "Education After Auschwitz," in which he tries to grapple with the relationship between education and morality in light of the horrors perpetrated in the name of authoritarianism and its industrialization of death.[1] Adorno's essay, first published in 1967, asserted that the demands and questions raised by Auschwitz had barely penetrated the consciousness of peoples' minds such that the conditions that made it possible continued, as he put it, "largely unchanged." Mindful that the societal pressures that produced the Holocaust had far from receded in post-war Germany, and that under such circumstances this act of barbarism could easily be repeated in the future, Adorno argued that "the mechanisms that render people capable of such deeds" must be made visible.[2] For Adorno, the need for a general public to come to grips with the challenges arising from the reality of Auschwitz was both a political question and a crucial educational consideration. Realizing that education before and after Auschwitz in Germany was separated by an unbridgeable chasm, Adorno wanted to invoke the promise of education through the moral and political imperative of never allowing the genocide witnessed at Auschwitz to be repeated. [3] HYPERLINK "http://www.truth-out.org/public-intellectual-project/1319676515" \t "_blank"

For such a goal to become meaningful and realizable, Adorno contended that education had to be addressed as both an emancipatory promise and a democratic project. Adorno urged educators to teach students how to be critical so they could learn to resist those ideologies, needs, social relations and discourses that lead back to a politics where authority is simply obeyed and the totally administered society reproduces itself through a mixture of state force and orchestrated consensus. Adorno keenly understood that education is at the center of any viable notion of democratic politics, and that such education takes place in a variety of spheres both within and outside of schools. Freedom means being able to think critically and act courageously, even when confronted with the limits of one's knowledge. Without such thinking, critical debate and dialogue degenerates into slogans, while politics, disassociated from the search for justice, becomes a power grab, or simply hackneyed. What is partly evident in the Occupy Wall Street movement is not just a cry of collective indignation over economic and social injustice that pose threats to human kind, but a critical expression of how young people and others can use new technologies, social formations and forms of civil disobedience to reactivate both the collective imagination and develop a new language for addressing the interrelated modes of domination that have been poisoning democratic politics since the 1970s. At the same time, the movement is using the dominant media to focus on injustices through a theoretical and political lens that counters the legitimation of casino capitalism in the major cultural apparatuses. The rationality, values and power relations that inform hypercapitalism are now recognized as a new and dangerous mode of authoritarianism. I am certainly not equating the genocidal acts that took place in Nazi Germany with the increasingly antidemocratic tendencies evident in US foreign and domestic policies, but I do believe that Adorno's essay offers some important theoretical insights about how to imagine a broader understanding of politics as a form of public pedagogy. Its acute analysis of authoritarianism no doubt continues to resonate today, especially in light of the emergence of antidemocratic forces in American society that propagate massive human suffering, a disproportionate distribution of wealth and income, individual and collective despair, a sense of powerlessness and hopelessness, and multiple forms of economic, political and racial exclusion. Adorno's essay raises fundamental questions about how acts of inhumanity are inextricably connected to the pedagogical practices that produce formative cultures that legitimate a culture of cruelty, a punishing state, the militarization of everyday life and an assault on the welfare state, while transforming government into an adjunct of corporate power. Adorno insisted that crimes against humanity by authoritarian regimes should not be reduced to the behavior of a few individuals, but instead should be understood as speaking in profound ways to the role of the state in propagating such abuses and the mechanisms employed in the realm of culture that attempt to silence the public in the face of horrible acts. Adorno pointed to the dire need to issue a public challenge that would name such acts as moral crimes against humankind and translate that moral indignation into effective pedagogical and political practices throughout society so that such events would never happen again. Adorno's plea for education as a moral and political force is just as relevant today, given the authoritarian practices used by the Bush and Obama administrations in conjunction with powerful corporations and financial institutions. The political and economic forces fueling such antidemocratic practices - whether they are unlawful wars, systemic torture, practiced indifference to chronic poverty, persistent racism, a war on youth and immigrants, massive economic inequality or the killing of innocent civilians by drone attacks - are always mediated by widespread educational forces and a host of anti-public intellectuals, institutions and cultural minions. Just as Adorno asserted following the revelations about Auschwitz after World War II, effective resistance to such authoritarian acts cannot take place without a degree of knowledge and self-reflection about how to name these acts and their accomplices and transform moral outrage into concrete attempts to prevent such human violations from unfolding in the first place. Adorno's essay in many ways offers insight into the concerns and collective opposition being raised by young people and others through the Occupy Wall Street protests taking place all over the United States and in many other parts of the globe. What we see happening in this surge of collective resistance is an attempt to make visible the ideologies, values, social relations and relations of power that fuel a toxic form of casino capitalism, one that assumes it owes no accountability to the American public and legitimates itself through an appeal to the self-evident and the discourse of common sense. Injustices of various stripes are much more powerful when they are normalized or hide behind the shadow of official power. The collective uproar we see among young people and others is, in part, an attempt to make dominant power visible and accountable, while doing so through new forms of solidarity that have been often marginalized, fractured, pathologized or punished. In fact, within a very short time, the Occupy Wall Street protesters have changed the national conversation from the Republican right-wing discourse about deficit reduction and taxing the poor to important issues that range from poverty and joblessness to corporate corruption. They have all but usurped dominant media and cultural apparatuses that have been enormously successful in normalizing the ideology, values and social practices of market fundamentalism for a number of decades. But most importantly, as writer Jonathan Schell has argued, they have unleashed "a new spirit of action," an expression of outrage fueled less by policy demands than by a cry of collective moral and political indignation whose message, says Schell, is "'Enough!' to a corrupt political, economic and media establishment that is hijacking the world's wealth for itself, immiserating ordinary people, sabotaging the rule of law, waging interminable savage and futile wars, plundering the world's finite resources, lying about all this to the public and threatening Earth's life forms into the bargain."[4] The spirit of action that informs the current protest movement is not about providing recipes or tossing around facile slogans - it is about using new pedagogical tools, practices and social relations to educate the rest of the American public about the dangers of casino capitalism as a new form of authoritarianism. The Occupy Wall Street protests offer a new language of critique and hope, while inventing a mode of politics in which the claims to justice, morality, and social responsibility prevail. In this first and important stage of the movement, young people and others are making visible how organized violence works through a criminal culture and set of dominating power relations; they are expressing a sense of not just individual but collective outrage that is as moral as it is concretely utopian. "Imagine the unimaginable" is more than an empty slogan; it is a call for reactivating the potential of a radical imagination, one that rejects the tawdry dreamworlds of a privatized, deregulated and commodified society. The protesters are making a claim for a sense of collective agency in which their voices must be heard as part of a concerted effort to shape the future that they will inherit. This effort is part of what the philosopher Bernard E. Harcourt has called a social movement in search of a new form of politics, one that not only rejects the inadequacy of existing laws and institutions, but also offers resistance "to the very way in which we are governed: it resists the structure of partisan politics, the demand for policy reforms, the call for party identification, and the very ideologies that dominated the post-war period."[5] What young people and other protesters are making visible is that the frontal assault being waged by casino capitalism against social protections, economic justice, immigrants, unions, worker rights, public servants, democratic public spheres, the notion of the common good and human dignity itself represents not only an attack on existing and future generations of young people, but also an alarming act of barbarism and attack on democratic modes of governance and sovereignty. Democracy is always an unfinished project. Yet, in its current state in America, it appears to be terminal decay. If a democratic struggle is to be successfully mobilized against the bankers, hedge fund managers, religious extremists, and other members of the ruling and corporate elite, then a critical and democratic formative culture must be given life through the production of new ways of thinking and speaking, new social organizations, and a new set of institutions that collectively stake a claim to democracy, if not hope itself. What is promising about the Occupy Wall Street protests is that young people and older Americans are delineating the contours, values, sensibilities and hidden politics of the mode of authoritarianism that now shapes the commanding institutions of power and everyday relations of the 99 percent, who are increasingly viewed as excess, disposable and unworthy of living a life of dignity, shared responsibility and hope. This task of delineation is not easy: the conditions of domination are layered, complex and deeply flexible. Yet, while the forms of oppression are diverse, there is a promising tendency within the Occupy Wall Street movement to refocus these diverse struggles as part of a larger movement for social transformation. And there is more. Such protests also embody the desire for new forms of collective struggle and modes of solidarity built around social and shared, rather than individualized and competitive, values. History is not without ample examples of how new modes of resistance can develop, ranging from traditional acts of civil disobedience such as sit-down strikes and teach-in campaigns to voter registration drives and the development of alternative modes of communication. But the Occupy Wall Street protesters, while capable of using traditional and historically informed acts of resistance, are in large part rejecting old ideological and political models. They are not calling for reform, but for a massive rethinking and restructuring of the very meaning of politics - one that will be not only against a casino capitalism, which through the chimera of free markets rewards the financial and political elites at great social and environmental costs, but also for a restructuring of the notion of governance, rule of law, power relations and the meaning of democratic participation. The current protests make clear that this is not - indeed, cannot be - only a short-term project for reform, but a political and moral movement that needs to intensify, accompanied by the reclaiming of public spaces, the use of digital technologies, the development of public spheres, new modes of education and the safeguarding of places where democratic expression, new identities, and collective hope can be nurtured and mobilized. At the same time, there are some crucial short-term demands that are worth pursuing, such as ending student debt, funding programs to eradicate the scourge of poverty that affects 22 percent of American children, developing much needed infrastructure, offering mortgage relief for the 50 million people living with the "nightmare of foreclosures,"[6] increasing taxes on the wealthy and corporations and putting into place a public works program for the 25 million unable to find jobs. These calls for change represent only a handful of the policy reforms that will surely continue to be articulated as part of a larger strategy of long-term structural change and political transformation. It is important to recognize that what young people and many others are now doing is making a claim for a democratically informed politics that embraces the public good, economic justice and social responsibility. Central to this struggle is the need to affirm the social in governing, while defining freedom not simply through the pursuit of individual needs and the affirmation of self-interests but also as part of a social contract that couples individual and political rights with social rights. Political and individual freedoms are meaningless unless people are free from hunger, poverty, needless suffering and other material deprivations that undercut any viable possibility of dignity, agency and justice. The capacity for individual and political freedom has to take a detour through the social, which provides the economic foundation, public infrastructures and social supports for making private joys possible and individual dreams realizable. The public good is the basis for any real understanding of freedom, at least one that believes in shared responsibilities, liberty, equality and justice. As sociologist Zygmunt Bauman points out, political rights lose their viability without social rights. He writes: Little or no prospect of rescue from individual indolence or impotence can be expected to arrive from a political state that is not, and refuses to be, asocial state. Without social rights for all, a large and in all probability growing number of people will find their political rights of little use and unworthy of their attention. If political rights are necessary to set social rights in place, social rights are indispensable to make political rights "real" and keep them in operation. The two rights need each other for their survival; that survival can only be their joint achievement.[7] The Occupy Wall Street protests are rejecting a notion of society which embraces a definition of agency in which people are viewed only as commodities, bound together in a Darwinian nightmare by the logic of greed, unchecked individualism and a disdain for democratic values (as linguistic theorist and writer George Lakoff recently pointed out in Truthout). The old idea of democracy, in which the few govern the many through the power of capital and ritualized elections, is being replaced with a new understanding of democracy and politics in which power and resources are shared and economic justice and democratic values work in the interest of the common well-being and social responsibility. The Occupy Wall Street protesters reject the propaganda they have been relentlessly fed by a market-driven culture: the notion that markets should take priority over governments, that market values are the best means for ordering society and satisfying human needs, that material interests are more important than social needs and that self-interest is the driving force of freedom and the organizing principle of society. Professor Fred Jameson once said, and I am paraphrasing here, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. That no longer seems true. The cracks in the capitalist edifice of greed and unchecked power have finally split open, and while there is no guarantee that new modes of social transformation will take place, there is a vibrant collective energy on the horizon that at least makes such a possibility imaginable once again. In the spirit of Adorno's call after Auschwitz for a politics that embraces education as both an emancipatory promise and a democratic project, the Occupy Wall Street protesters are making clear that the values and practices of disposability and social death promoted by casino capitalism have replaced important elements of a democratic polity with a culture of violence in which democracy has become a pathology, and in which informed appeals to morality and justice are a cruel joke. They are arguing, forcefully and rightly with their bodies, and through the new social media, that neoliberal economics and its cruel forms of politics and public pedagogy, amply circulated in various platforms of the dominant media and in higher education, have become a register of how difficult it is for American society to make any claim on the promise of a democracy to come. As the realm of democratic politics shrinks and is turned over to market forces, social bonds crumble and any representation of communal cohesion is treated with disdain. As the realm of the social disappears, public values and any consideration of the common good are erased from politics, while the social state and responsible modes of governing are replaced by a corporate-controlled punishing state and a winner-take-all notion of social relations. Within this form of casino capitalism, social problems are placed entirely on the shoulders of individuals, just as the forces of privatization, deregulation and commodification weaken public institutions and undermine the web of human bonds and modes of solidarity that provide the foundations for a democratic politics and a political and economic democracy. Younger and older Americans are now saying, "We have had enough," and their spirit of resistance is as educational as it is political. At this same moment, young people all over the world are developing a new language of ethics, community, and democracy in order to imagine a type of society and global world other than the one that is currently on display. It is imperative for intellectuals, educators, social workers, organized labor, artists and other cultural workers to join with them in order to put the question of radical democracy, solidarity, and economic and racial justice on the political agenda. This suggests we need to forego the fractured, single-issue politics of the past by refusing to argue for isolated agendas. It suggests developing a social movement that rejects small enclaves in favor of a broader social movement that can address how the current configuration of neoliberal capitalism and other antidemocratic modes of authoritarianism work as part of a larger totality. Such a globalized movement must offer to all people the tools of a politics that embraces both a radical imagination and a radical democracy. This means making evident not only how casino capitalism intensifies the pathologies of racism, student debt, war, inequality, sexism, xenophobia, poverty, unemployment and violence, but also how we might take up the challenge of developing a politics and pedagogy that can serve and actualize a democratic notion of the social - that is, how we might understand and collectively organize for a politics whose hope lies with defending the shared values, spaces and public spheres that enable an emergent radical democracy.

Thus, in the spirit of Occupy Wall Street, Suo and I occupy debate in solidarity with democratic protesters in Tahrir Square.

The assumption inherent to democracy assistance is that America, as the great democratic educator, is capable and willing to assist Egypts political revolution. The opposite is true only linking our Occupation of debate and democracy assistance to the radical emancipatory potentials of Tahrir Square through solidarity creates democracy at home and abroad.

Kennedy 11 (Michael D. Kennedy, Professor of Sociology and International Studies at Brown University, Oct 11 2011, Arab Spring , Occupy Wall Street, and Historical Frames: 2011, 1989, 1968, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/2853/arab-spring-occupy-wall-street-and-historical-fram)

Activists and analysts increasingly join the [Arab revolutions] Arab Spring with Occupy Wall Street. And some now recognize this historical juncture to have more in common with the transformative social movements of 1968 than with 1989, the year in which east European dictatorships were overturned by democratically driven civil societies. Shifting comparative frames for 2011 from 1989 to 1968 is helpful on a number of scores for thinking historically, theoretically, and strategically. It can help us reframe our expectations for global transformations too: for now, it is not only a matter of drafting constitutions, but of rearticulating solidarity across the world. From1989 to 2011 At the beginning of 2011, some analysts likened the Tunisian and Egyptian movements to what happened in 1989. After all, in 1989, with a speed few anticipated, people in East Central Europe (Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and East Germany) peacefully dismantled a system widely recognized as corrupt and unjust. Change came more slowly in Bulgaria, and Romanias transformation was violent. A couple of years later, an attempted putsch ignited the movement to end the Soviet Union, while the wars of Yugoslav succession moved southeast European transformations with a legacy of immediate violence that continues to haunt. East Central Europes 1989, however, offered a model to many, especially European elites, who wished to insert the [Arab Revolutions Arab Spring into a world historical narrative. That story continues to guide many in the European Union foreign policy establishment. I heard the refrain over these last several months in a number of meetings with EU officials: in order to be a better partner for the European Union, Middle Eastern and Far East European emerging democracies (especially Ukraine and Moldova along with the Caucasus) need a better organized civil society and a political elite that recognizes the power of the people and the value of democracy. With that, the European Union and its allies will reward good initiative with additional resources. And, truth be told, that basic formula worked well for the first wave of European Union enlargement completed in 2004. In 1999, European Commission President Romano Prodi was tasked with bringing five postcommunist countries into the EU within ten years; in fact, he managed to enlarge the EU by ten within five years, because the EU and the acceding countries elites worked so effectively together to design and implement institutional change. But building on the story of what began in 1989 to guide what will happen following 2011 is profoundly misleading. There are important parallels between 1989 and 2011 to keep in mind. In both revolutionary moments, Western elites were unprepared, having developed dtentes and accommodations