"1. Each age has its presiding metaphor. Ours is aerial bombing.

2. Drone warfare and the IMF are variations on a theme: decisions taken from a great height, with disregard for consequences on the ground.

3. Downton Abbey’s popularity is about a nostalgia for class superiority, and the desire to watch those who act from a great height.

4. Virgin Atlantic’s obnoxious designation of First Class as “Upper Class” is about the same idea: that class is benign and charming.

5. One question links the IMF, drones, Virgin’s “Upper Class,” Limbaugh’s violence and Strauss-Kahn’s, and the mania for “Downton Abbey.”

6. The question is this: those people down there, are they really people? It’s a question about for whose sake this world exists.

7. Someone in soft, casual clothes in a featureless building in Nevada presses a button, and the question disappears."

"Despair is a black leather jacket in which everyone looks good, while hope is a frilly pink dress few dare to wear. Rebecca Solnit thinks this virtue needs to be redefined.

Here she takes to our pulpit to deliver a sermon that looks at the remarkable social changes of the past half century, the stories the mainstream media neglects and the big surprises that keep on landing.

She explores why disaster makes us behave better and why it's braver to hope than to hide behind despair's confidence and cynicism's safety.

History is not an army. It's more like a crab scuttling sideways. And we need to be brave enough to hope change is possible in order to have a chance of making it happen."

"Anarchists believe in direct action…Anarchism is about acting as if you are already free…Anarchism is democracy without the government…Anarchism is direct democracy…Anarchism is a commitment to the idea that it would be possible to have a society based on principles of self-organization, voluntary association, and mutual idea."

"in the Middle Ages…merchants had to develop reputations for scrupulous integrity—not just always paying their debts, but forgiving others’ debts if they were in difficulties, & being generally pillars of their communities. Merchants could be trusted w/ money because they convinced others that they didn’t think money was the most important thing…“credit,” “honor,” & “decency” became the same thing…<br />
<br />
For much of human history, the great social evil…was the debt crisis. The masses of the poor would become indebted to the rich…lose flocks & fields, begin selling family members into peonage & slavery…uprisings…Periods dominated by credit money, where everyone recognized that money was just a promise, a social arrangement, almost invariably involve some kind of mechanism to protect debtors…<br />
<br />
…since 1971, we did exactly the opposite. Instead of setting up great overarching institutions designed to protect debtors…[we] protect creditors."

"For the first time in Greece a documentary produced by the audience. "Debtocracy" seeks the causes of the debt crisis and proposes solutions, hidden by the government and the dominant media."

"So our political class cheers on treasury-draining wars, allows financial elites to rob and pillage, witnesses huge transfers of wealth to the richest, and then when the whole thing explodes, the "real fiscal answer" is for ordinary Americans to have their Medicare benefits "slashed" and Social Security benefits reduced."

"Like Argentina in its worst moments, we never seem to question whether it is reasonable to expect foreigners to keep financing our extravagance, and we forget the bad things that happen to the Argentinas or Hungarys of the world when foreigners stop financing their excesses. So instead of laying out a realistic plan for increasing our national savings, we choose not to face up to the Social Security and Medicare crises that lie ahead, embarking instead on massive spending programs that -- whatever their long-run merits might be -- we simply cannot afford."

"In its depth & suddenness, the US economic & financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets (& only in emerging markets): South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia & Argentina (time & again). In each ... global investors, afraid that the country or its financial sector wouldn’t be able to pay off mountainous debt, suddenly stopped lending. ... that fear became self-fulfilling, as banks that couldn’t roll over their debt did, in fact, become unable to pay. ... But there’s a deeper & more disturbing similarity: elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the US—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, & fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them."

"This is an inquiry into the representations of crisis and the enactments of counter-memory in Argentina. The aim is to provide a discursive frame for some of the most impressive experiments in political art to have emerged around the turn of the millennium."

"La Normalidad (normalisation) was the theme for the third exhibition component of the Ex Argentina project which opened in Buenos Aries at the Palais de Glace on February 14th 2006. Ex Argentina was initiated by Andreas Siekmann and Alice Creischer after the dramatic economic collapse in Argentina in December 2001. They travelled to Buenos Aries in November 2002 to begin an investigation, through artistic methods, of the global and local power relations which precipitated this collapse and its aftermath. Through the exhibition program, and its associated discussions and publications, they hoped to create a geneology of the crisis in Argentina which would help foster a minoritarian and local critique capable of challenging the production of global knowledge on the collapse in Argentina, situating this within a global context."

"amid latest financial twists & turns, significant achievement...went largely unnoticed: agreement by executive board of IMF on new quota formula & increases in quotas for under-represented members, particularly emerging-market and developing countries."