For a decent all round read into the US and its puppet the IMF I would recommend that everyone read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. The whole use of disasters both man made and natural has long been a tool used to implement economic shock measures. From South America, to Russia, to the western states today the 'shock' doctors are hard at work. If ordinary people have the chance to reject their impositions then so they should.

Seemingly the only way to overcome it in the west is through a massive expansion of the protest movement and maybe even through it's radicalization as we have seen recently in Greece.