"The Bank of England’s governor points out that, in this situation, all you can do is for individual countries to try and restart their economies through structural measures, not monetary ones. Since they can’t borrow and spend their way out of the crisis, they have to “reform” their way out of it. But how? Carney does not spell out the details but in the G20 parlance, the main tools in the toolkit of “structural reform” are ripping up labour protections, privatising public assets, cutting business taxes, boosting state investment – and direction of investment – into the major industries and projects, and privatising education. Naturally, in all countries where this is tried it provokes resistance, and is therefore done gradually. But Carney points out doing things slowly does not work, because austerity, low growth, high debts and falling wages feed off each other." Paul Mason blogging for Channel4
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51