Rebecca Solnit at TomDispatch:
Argentina is big in land, resources, and population with a very different culture and history than Iceland. Where Iceland goes from [bankruptcy] is hard to foresee. But as Icelandic writer Haukar Már Helgason put it in the London Review of Books last November:
“There is an enormous sense of relief. After a claustrophobic decade, anger and resentment are possible again. It’s official: capitalism is monstrous. Try talking about the benefits of free markets and you will be treated like someone promoting the benefits of rape. Honest resentment opens a space for the hope that one day language might regain some of its critical capacity, that it could even begin to describe social realities again.”
The big question may be whether the rest of us, in our own potential Argentinas and Icelands, picking up the check for decades of recklessness by the captains of industry, will be resentful enough and hopeful enough to say that unfettered capitalism has been monstrous, not just when it failed, but when it succeeded. Let’s hope that we’re imaginative enough to concoct real alternatives.
A Practical Policy 