Dare to Struggle

Today, conditions are as dire as those we faced in the 1960s, but we are not coming together with sufficient urgency to confront them. Climate change threatens the very existence of a habitable planet, but here in the United States, the business of burning fossil fuels continues as usual.

Coercive Environments

Education. Consumerism. Incarceration. Henry Giroux’s new book identifies these as three key forces in binding contemporary youth to the social structures of neoliberalism.

Why Torture Continues

The American media has largely acquiesced to the Bush Administration’s strategy in reporting on the war: if American human rights violations get reported at all, they are quickly forgotten. Yet, the strong efforts by the Bush Administration to retain torture as a standard procedure in dealing with anyone it considers a terrorist or “enemy combatant” indicates a commitment to continue using torture for as long as the government can get away with it.

The House of Inspection

LONG AGO A PRISON WAS DESIGNED, the Panopticon. Prisoners would be isolated in separate cells that were organized like a stack of rings around a central tower. By special devices, the inspector in the tower would be able to see each prisoner but the prisoners would not be able to see the inspector. The prisoners could never be certain whether they were being watched or nor. This combination of isolation and the sense of being observed was to lead to moral reflection and rehabilitation. Versions of the Panopticon were constructed from time to time; the most uncompromising was the experimental women’s prison at A–.

Zero Tolerance

There is a growing sense in American life that politics has become corrupt. Those traditional public spheres in which people could exchange ideas, debate, and shape the conditions that structured their everyday lives increasingly appear to have little relevance or political importance. Within the increasing corporatization of everyday life, market values replace social values and people appear more and more willing to re treat into the safe, privatized enclaves of the family, religion, and consumption. The result is not only silence and indifference, but the terrible price paid in what Zygmunt Bauman calls the “hard currency of human suffering.”