"If we tighten the belt any more, we are going to suffocate," she says.
"Realistically, if we tighten up defensively we will take something away from the offensive play; to get the balance just right is difficult to do and that's the key to it," he said.
The organisers of the action – Ums Ganze and Beyond Europe – said the blockades proved that "if we tighten the right screws and break the right circuits, we can show how vulnerable this complex system is".
"If we are tightening up our belts all over, we should be tightening up the belt at City Hall," said Harry Nespoli, the head of the city's sanitation union and the president of the Municipal Labor Committee.
If we can tighten up at the back, we are always good for a goal.
"If we can tighten the race up in the next few days we can get some more money out of the party,"he said as he left the dinner, at the Regent Wall Street Hotel.
We are kidding ourselves if we think tightening the purse strings is a matter of morality: if a culture of austerity had any, other disabled children in 21st-century Britain would not be sitting in their own urine because their parents can't afford the heating, and benefit sanctions would not be leaving people with mental illness to go without money for three months.
"I realized in the late 1980s that we were on a track where if we kept tightening things up for energy reasons, we weren't going to get enough air for ventilation reasons, so we were going to need to define minimum ventilation standards," Sherman says.
"It's very tantalizing to look at any one of these cases and look at the technology in isolation and think, if we could only tighten that up, we could stop terrorists," he said.
The Conservatives, of course, are entirely entitled to set out their stall about what we do as a country if we have to tighten our belts further, as we, indeed, were at our party conference.
