[...] the main ideologues and beneficiaries of neoliberalization managed, amazingly, to spin the collapse they precipitated into a story about the profligate irresponsibility and unrealistic expectations of workers, students, and the unemployed. The massive holes in every capitalist nations public and private finances were perfuntorily redefined as the result of popular desire to "live beyond our means," from which the masses must be weaned once and for all. The answer elites proposed, and proceeded to impose, looked a lot like an IMF structural adjustment plan--austerity, privatization, liberalization--with an emphasis on austerity, a program of vicious cuts in public subsidies and state retrenchment designed and managed by exactly the same individuals and institutions who created the crises in the first place.

[...] to listen to Euro-American austeritites talk, you would think austerity is how capitalists say the rosary, a market-imposed penance for "our" sins.