Having created the conditions that make markets possible, democracy must do all the things that markets undo or cannot do.
Benjamin BarberMcWorld is a product of popular culture driven by expansionist commerce. Its template is American, its form style. Its goods are as much images as matรฉriel, an aesthetic as well as a product line. It is about culture as commodity, apparel as ideology. Its symbols are Harley-Davidson motorcycles and Cadillac motorcars hoisted from the roadways, where they once represented a mode of transportation, to the marquees of global market cafรฉs like Harley-Davidson's and the Hard Rock where they become icons of lifestyle.
Benjamin BarberI don't divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and failures...I divide the world into the learners and non-learners.
Benjamin BarberIndependence used to be the ticket for liberty. But today, security and freedom, whether it's in the Arab Spring, whether it's in Iraq or whether it's right here in the United States, means working cooperatively and interdependently with others.
Benjamin Barber9/11 was a signal that we were living in a new world - a world of interdependence, a world in which people could attack the United States not from the outside, but from the inside. It was a sign that the United States, the most powerful country in the world, could watch the cathedral of capitalism at the Trade Center and the heart of its defense at the Pentagon be struck internally, not really across borders, so that borders don't matter anymore.
Benjamin Barber