HENRY GIROUX: The market doesn't want that at all. I mean, the market wants the people, the apostles of this market logic, I mean, they actually the first rule of the market is make sure you have power that’s unaccountable. That's what they want. And I think that, I mean, what we see for the first time in history is a war on the ability to produce meanings that hold power accountable. A war on the possibility of an education that enables people to think critically, a war on cultural apparatuses that entertain by simply engaging in this spectacle of violence and not producing programs that really are controversial, that make people think, that make people alive through the possibilities of, you know, the imagination itself. I mean, my argument is the formative culture that produces those kinds of intellectual and creative and imaginative abilities has been under assault since the 1980s in a very systemic way. So that the formative culture that takes its place is a business culture. It's a culture run by accountants, not by visionaries. It's a culture run by the financial services. It's a culture run by people who believe that data is more important than knowledge. BILL MOYERS: You paint a very grim picture of the state of democracy, and yet you don't seem contaminated by cynicism yourself. HENRY GIROUX: No, I'm not. BILL MOYERS: How do we understand that? HENRY GIROUX: Because I refuse to become a part of it. Become I refuse to become complicitous. I refuse to say—I refuse to be alive and to watch institutions being handed over to right-wing zealots. I refuse to be alive and watch the planet be destroyed. I mean, when you mentioned— you talk about the collective imagination, you know, I mean that imagination emerges when people find strength in collective organizations, when they find strength in each other. Believing that we can work together to produce commons in which we can share that raises everybody up and not just some people, that contributes to the world in a way that— and I really don't mean to be romanticizing here, but a world that is we recognize is never just enough. Justice is never done. It's an endless struggle. And that there's joy in that struggle, because there's a sense of solidarity that brings us together around the most basic, most elemental and the most important of democratic values. BILL MOYERS: Henry Giroux, thank you, very much for talking to me. HENRY GIROUX: Thank you, Bill.

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