Watch: Zombie Politics and Casino Capitalism

Previously published on BillMoyers.com

This week on Moyers & Company, author and scholar Henry Giroux explains how our political system has turned people into zombies -- "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."

In his book, Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism, 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."

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.

Also on the broadcast, a look at Birth of the Living Dead, a mesmerizing new documentary that examines the singular time in which the classic 1968 film Night of the Living Dead was shot -- when civil unrest and violence gave the nation nightmares and zombies were a metaphor for a troubled and distressed American public.

And an essay remembering the Nobel-prize winning novelist Doris Lessing who passed away this week in London at the age of 94.

Moyers & Company airs weekly on public television. Explore more at BillMoyers.com.