Social movements and "reclaiming public values"

I found this article Reclaiming Public Values in the Age of Casino Capitalism by Henry Giroux really interesting. It speaks to the cultural challenges in the US facing progressive climate justice/green jobs, health care, economic justice/ financial reform activism that have sprouted in recent years in their efforts to create larger social movements. This part was especially poignant:

At this time of national crisis, we need to recognize that the current economic recession cannot be understood apart from the crisis of democracy itself. It is all the more crucial, therefore, to recognize in a post Gilded Age moment that those public spaces that traditionally have offered forums for debating norms, critically engaging ideas, making private issues public and evaluating judgments are disappearing under the juggernaut of free-market values, corporate power and intense lobbying pressure on the part of the country's most powerful financial institutions. Schools, universities, the media, and other aspects of the cultural education apparatus are being increasingly privatized or corporatized and removed from the discourse of the public good. Consequently, it becomes all the more crucial for educators, parents, social movements, and others to raise fundamental questions about what it means to revitalize a politics and ethics that takes seriously "such values as citizen participation, the public good, political obligation, social governance, and community."[2] The call for a revitalized politics grounded in an effective democracy substantively challenges the dystopian practices of the new culture of fear and neoliberalism - with their all-consuming emphasis on insecurity, market relations, commercialization, privatization and the creation of a worldwide economy of part-time workers - against their utopian promises. Such an intervention confronts Americans with the problem as well as challenge of developing those public spheres - such as the media, higher education, and other cultural institutions - that provide the conditions for creating citizens who are capable of exercising their freedoms, competent to question the basic assumptions that govern political life and skilled enough to participate in developing social movements that will enable them to shape the basic social, political and economic orders that govern their lives.