"The US and Europe are committing suicide in different ways. In Europe it’s austerity in the midst of recession and that’s guaranteed to be a disaster. And there’s an dangerous growth of ultra xenophobia which is pretty threatening to any one who remembers the history of Europe... and an attack on the remnants of the welfare state. It’s hard to interpret the austerity-in-the-midst-of-recession policy as anything other than attack on the social contract. \\ In the US, it’s essentially off-shoring production and financialization and getting rid of superfluous population through incarceration. The US electoral system has been almost totally shredded. For a long time it’s been pretty much run by private concentrated spending but now it’s over the top. Elections increasingly over the years have been [PR] extravaganzas. It was understood by the ad industry in 2008 -- they gave Barack Obama their marketing award of the year. This year it’s barely a pretense." - Adriano