In Argentina the bubble burst awhile ago, in 2001. An article in TheNation.com posted Feb. 12 2009 tells us what they went through and how they feel now and how thinking here may eventually go as well.

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Rebecca Solnit begins her article in the "Nation" by describing what is now going on in Iceland.  Then she compares this to what has already happened in Argentina. I go right to the part on Argentina and quote her.   

• THE NATION FOREIGN AFFAIRS ICELAND

 

Under the Icelandic Volcano

by REBECCA SOLNIT   February 12, 2009

"In mid-December 2001, the Argentinean economy collapsed. In its day, Argentina had been the poster child for neoliberalism, with its privatized economy guided by International Monetary Fund policy. The economy's managers, foreign and domestic, were proud of what they'd done, until it turned out that it didn't work. Then, the government tried to freeze its citizens' bank accounts to keep them from turning their plummeting pesos into foreign currency and breaking the banks....

When the banks were frozen, however, middle-class Argentineans woke up broke--and angry....

On December 19, 20 and 21 of 2001, they took to the streets of Buenos Aires in record numbers, banging pots and pans and shouting "all of them out." In the next few weeks, they forced a series of governments to collapse. For many people, those insurrectionary days were a revolt not just against the disaster that unfettered capitalism had brought them but the time when they recovered from the years of silence and withdrawal imposed on the country in the 1980s by a military dictatorship via terror and torture."

(For more info about South American dictatorships and U.S. backed dictatorships around the world listen to Noam Chomsky on  a DVDentitled "Imperial Grand Strategy: The Conquest of Iraq and the Assault on Democracy." I rented it from Netflix.)

"After the crash of 2001, Argentineans found their voice, found each other, found a new sense of power and possibility and began to engage in political experiments so new they required a new vocabulary. One of the most important of these experiments would be neighborhood assemblies throughout Buenos Aires, which provided for some of the practical needs of a now-cashless community, and also became lively forums where strangers became compañeros.

Such incandescent moments when people find their voices and power as part of civil society are epiphanies, not solutions, but Argentina was never the same country again, even after its economy recovered. Like much of the rest of Latin America in this decade, it swung left in its political leadership, but far more important, Argentineans developed social alternatives and found a new boldness that had previously been lacking. Some of what arose from the crisis, including workplaces taken over by workers and run as collectives, still exists....

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."

Authors Bio:
I am a hippy that never dropped out. I have held on to impossible idealism and will not give up. I think the human race is a ticking time bomb and we are at the last tick. So what is the good of slow careful pragmatism that allows time for it all to happen with less than miraculous speed ? Right now we need near-impossible idealism or we need to go extinct so we can stop killing our planet. Other life forms may need it after we have almost destroyed it. Humans seem to be a very clever but unwise species that is not making it. At the very least we could go down with a little dignity. We have no planetary culture with both head and heart. And our numbers are so great we must have that. See you next lifetime on another planet incarnated in another species, I guess.