While many of us are fully familiar with the neoliberal policies that have redistributed wealth upward, ripped away any real safety net for the poor, and promoted capital flight, outsourcing, and free trade policies that destroy the environment and reduce much of the world's labor force to semi-slavery, we are less familiar with the policies and practices that cultivate popular ignorance, that reduce the body politic to civic illiterates, and that privatizes what ought to be an open and vibrant public sphere. ~ Robin D, G. Kelly
The deadening of public values and civic consciousness is also the result of the work of self-serving financial interests, right-wing ideologues, conservative think tanks, powerful commercial media, and a market-driven public pedagogy that acts relentlessly to replace the open power of citizenship with a closed set of pre-defined consumer choices: Coke or Pepsi, Burger King or McDonalds, Republican or Democrat. This neoliberal-driven culture of consumption, commerce, financialization, and self-interest also functions to depoliticize people by encouraging market-driven ideals of unrestrained individualism and self-reliance. Under these conditions, politics become inner-directed, lost in a language of therapy, self-help, and self-transformation that has exploded in American culture. Thus, the self becomes cut off from any sense of common purpose and solidarity. ~ Henry A. Giroux
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