Savage capitalism and globalization finished in the 1990s what dictatorship started in the 1970s. State policy favored big business that sought to seize the local markets.

I was proud of our cultural level in Argentina. It was our way of breathing and resistance and suddenly we were forced to avoid reality by choosing every word with concern.

Censorship has a long history in Argentina and has been used as the first weapon of terror.

Globalization is the acceleration of capitalism on a global scale destined for global imperialism.

We have to prove ourselves to the market. ... It has not been a major business area for us in the past.

We have not noticed how fast the rest has risen. Most of the industrialized world--and a good part of the nonindustrialized world as well--has better cell phone service than the United States. Broadband is faster and cheaper across the industrial world, from Canada to France to Japan, and the United States now stands sixteenth in the world in broadband penetration per capita. Americans are constantly told by their politicians that the only thing we have to learn from other countries' health care systems is to be thankful for ours. Most Americans ignore the fact that a third of the country's public schools are totally dysfunctional (because their children go to the other two-thirds). The American litigation system is now routinely referred to as a huge cost to doing business, but no one dares propose any reform of it. Our mortgage deduction for housing costs a staggering $80 billion a year, and we are told it is crucial to support home ownership, except that Margaret Thatcher eliminated it in Britain, and yet that country has the same rate of home ownership as the United States. We rarely look around and notice other options and alternatives, convinced that "we're number one.