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flamingdem

(39,308 posts) Sun Nov 24, 2013, 10:10 PM Nov 2013

Henry Giroux on Zombie Politics on Bill Moyers Journal

http://billmoyers.com/segment/henry-giroux-on-zombie-politics/

Watch the whole thing, great analysis. Henry Giroux offers hope at the end - with the young and the learning of a new political vocabulary. Yep, another movement, the oldsters can give advice but it will / should come from youth if they can get over their despair and cynicism.

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In his book, Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism, author and scholar Henry Giroux connects the dots to prove his theory that our current system is informed by a “machinery of social and civil death” that chills “any vestige of a robust democracy.”

This week on Moyers & Company, Giroux explains that such a machine turns “people who are basically so caught up with surviving that they become like the walking dead – they lose their sense of agency, they lose their homes, they lose their jobs.”

What’s more, Giroux points out, the system that creates this vacuum has little to do with expanding the meaning and the substance of democracy itself. Under “casino capitalism,” the goal is to get a quick return, taking advantage of a kind of logic in which the only thing that drives us is to put as much money as we can into a slot machine and hope we walk out with our wallets overflowing.

A cultural and social critic of tireless energy and vast interests, Giroux holds the Global TV Network Chair in the English and Cultural Studies Department at McMaster University and is a distinguished visiting professor at Reyerson University, both schools in Canada.