The 2008 financial crisis and the austerity programs that followed it are the starting point for this film's argument that the crash was not a natural disaster but a transfer of wealth, with no one jailed for what it calls the largest theft of public money in history. Interviews with Chris Hedges, Derrick Jensen, Michael Hardt, Leo Panitch, David McNally, Peter Gelderloos, and other writers and organizers lay out the ideological history of austerity, a term named Word of the Year in 2010, and connect it to cuts in public services and labor rights across multiple countries. The film travels to the debt crisis in Greece, follows the 2010 G20 summit protests in Toronto, and sits in on the public-sector solidarity actions in Madison, Wisconsin, treating each as evidence of the same fight playing out in different places. Rather than stopping at diagnosis, the interviewees are pressed on what comes next, and the film closes with their competing proposals for organizing outside the system that produced the crisis.