It must be an extremely frightening experience to be in the areas where the riots are occuring.

Tottenham riots: 'Do you expect people not to see an opportunity?'

Like many interviewed by the Guardian in the shell-shocked north London district , the men – aged 21 and 22 – would not give their names. But they were happy to give their version of events and claimed many people from outside Tottenham had come in and whipped up tension, transforming an intentionally peaceful protest over the death of Mark Duggan into a frenzied spate of rioting and looting. And, like others, their explanation for the rioters' motivations differed.

"It was all for the money," said the man with the neck tattoo – and he wasn't alone in casting the rioters as opportunists keen to make a profit from chaos. "We hit the jackpot! We hit the belly!" said one teenager, who tacitly admitted he had participated in Saturday's disturbances but would say little except: "The moral of the story is 'fuck the Feds'." The riot had kicked off, he said, when the police had allegedly attacked a teenage girl. When his friend admitted that the looting of local shops "wasn't right", he corrected him: "And it weren't wrong."

Such ambivalence and bravado was easy to find on the streets of Tottenham on Monday . But while many were quick to condemn the rioters and looters as thugs and thieves, others were more circumspect.
With the highest rate of unemployment in London and a population feeling the squeeze from the downturn and cuts, some locals appealed for understanding. Duggan's death, they said, had unleashed a tidal wave of anger. "This has been building up for a long time," said Leon, who refused to give his surname and said he "saw" a lot of what happened on Saturday night.

Yes, he said, there had been a large element of opportunism behind the looting: "This is an area with no opportunity for employment so do you expect people not to see an opportunity?" But, more than anything, it was about the police and politics. Young black people felt they were treated differently by the police, being stopped and searched on a "constant" basis. And, he added, he couldn't find a job: "Even if you do, it's on the minimum wage."

A friend of his, who gave his name as Rozay – the name emblazoned into the side of his neck – agreed. He was from Tottenham, he said, and had been part of a gang – but had left to start a new life for himself and his family.

He was not surprised by what had happened. "Tottenham is poverty. I'm surprised we ever got a football stadium," he said. "The streets of London are not happy. We don't agree with burning buildings but the police do treat young black people with shocking disrespect … labelling us like we're nothing."

More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/au...-youths-police

Another Londoner:

Months of conjecture will follow these riots. Already, the internet is teeming with racist vitriol and wild speculation. The truth is that very few people know why this is happening. They don’t know, because they were not watching these communities. Nobody has been watching Tottenham since the television cameras drifted away after the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985. Most of the people who will be writing, speaking and pontificating about the disorder this weekend have absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up in a community where there are no jobs, no space to live or move, and the police are on the streets stopping-and-searching you as you come home from school. The people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and certain knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and harassed by the police, after months of seeing any conceivable hope of a better future confiscated, they are finally on the news. In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:

"Yes," said the young man. "You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?"
"Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you"
Eavesdropping from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews and newspaper reporters interviewing the young men everywhere

There are communities all over the country that nobody paid attention to unless there had recently been a riot or a murdered child. Well, they’re paying attention now...

Tonight in London, social order and the rule of law have broken down entirely. The city has been brought to a standstill; it is not safe to go out onto the streets, and where I am in Holloway, the violence is coming closer. As I write, the looting and arson attacks have spread to at least fifty different areas across the UK, including dozens in London, and communities are now turning on each other, with the Guardian reporting on rival gangs forming battle lines. It has become clear to the disenfranchised young people of Britain, who feel that they have no stake in society and nothing to lose, that they can do what they like tonight, and the police are utterly unable to stop them. That is what riots are all about.

Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out: structural inequalities, as a friend of mine remarked today, are not solved by a few pool tables. People riot because it makes them feel powerful, even if only for a night. People riot because they have spent their whole lives being told that they are good for nothing, and they realise that together they can do anything – literally, anything at all. People to whom respect has never been shown riot because they feel they have little reason to show respect themselves, and it spreads like fire on a warm summer night. And now people have lost their homes, and the country is tearing itself apart.

Is it sad when even the conspricy theorists are piling on?

One of the reasons I really dig the digital age is the ability to spot trends in real-time. For instance what do you do when the riots reach your neighborhood but you happen to live in a quasi-police state that outlaws firearms? Why, you buy an American made baseball bat of course! And to think, some folks actually want to get rid of this capitalism thing.

Originally Posted by Justin '77

Another Londoner:

Wow! That sure says quite a bit about what desperation does to a person. And no one knows what they would honestly do having had to live in similar situations and walk in the exact same shoes as these young people. I suppose when you feel like your drowning and no one is throwing you a life line, you scream louder.

Originally Posted by The Rani

If they were specifically targeting members of Parliament, I might be impressed.
Setting fire to granny's flat and making her jump out the window, not so much.

While I tend to agree with you, attempting to do so would result in them being shot dead as a doornail. I think you would find that standard police riot gear would be replaced with more and more lethal weapons the closer one gets to Parliament.

Sadly, Hightower died the other day. Maybe Steve Guttenberg is available.

I was thinking of that chapter in Memesis where Auerbach is talking about the mutiny (from Tacitus) and later the riot (from one of those later Roman guys). I know (or at least guess) his point was that some things have changed since Roman times but I'm having trouble telling if those changes have made much of a difference.

Originally Posted by The Rani

What does that say about how serious the protesters are? Willing to fight for a cause ... as long as there's no real danger involved.
If this shit goes on long enough, the police WILL start killing people, and the majority of the country won't say a damned word about it.

I would not pretend to know. It is not my country and not my fight.

Originally Posted by The Rani

Mostly, they couldn't care less about the political aspects of any of it. They're more concerned about their own safety, and that of their loved ones.

Sure, but that is not unusual in situations with wide-spread violence and revolt. Most wars and revolutions are only actively fought by a very small percentage (supported by a few more). Everyone else is just along for the ride.

Originally Posted by The Rani

They aren't along for the ride. They want them to get tired of stealing TV sets and designer sports outfits and go the hell home.

Not in the sense that they bought a ticket to the ride, no. More like they fell in the river and are being swept downstream by the current. Any ride can be a scary one when the individual is faced with forces stronger than themselves.

I do not condone violence but there are such things as a building of tension due to oppression. The expression of that pain has exploded and is escalating. Sadly, it is now being fueld by a mob mentality.

The London Riots in Historical Perspective

Policing the Crisis
By ASHLEY DAWSON

The conflagration currently consuming London and other cities in the English Midlands is generating much heated debate. Little of this commentary demonstrates much of a sense of history.

Authorities such as Prime Minister David Cameron and London mayor Boris Johnson have, for example, been quick to condemn what they and significant segments of the mainstream British media represent as the wanton lawlessness of the ‘rioters.’ Metropolitan Police commander Adrian Hanstock condemned the riots as “absolutely unacceptable” on August 7, saying that a peaceful demonstration had been hijacked by a small number of “criminal elements” using it for their own gain. Racial and class stereotypes about the character of the rioters are not so carefully hidden behind these denunciations.

In the face of these stereotypes, it’s worth remembering that the riots began on Saturday following a nonviolent community demonstration outside a Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) station in the North London neighborhood of Tottenham. This demonstration was organized to demand justice following the death of Mark Duggan, a young Black Briton shot by the police during a planned operation. The London police initially reported that Duggan had fired on them, but subsequent reports by the Independent Police Complaints Commission have revealed that a bullet lodged in a police radio was in fact issued by the Metropolitan Police Service.

The killing of Duggan took place within the context of Operation Trident, a special arm of the MPS established in 1998 to investigate gun crime in London’s black communities. More recently, the MPS launched Operation Razorback in order to crack down on “troublemakers” planning to attend this year’s carnival in Notting Hill. As British activist Darcus Howe explained in a recent interview, these police operations come on top of a broader transformation in police-community relations facilitated by the war on terror that has allowed the police to engage in unimpeded stop, search, and arrest operations in Britain’s Black communities.

Despite the fact that most British police do not carry guns, being arrested in the UK is no joke. As Caroline Davies reported in an article earlier this year, 333 people have died in or following police custody in the UK over the last eleven years; not a single member of the police has been convicted for any of these deaths.
This pattern of police dragnets in Black communities has deep historical roots. As I discuss in my book Mongrel Nation, Black communities were targeted during the 1970s and 1980s by very similar special operations. In 1981, for example, Operation Swamp deployed huge numbers of police into the predominantly Black neighborhood of Brixton in South London. Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government oversaw the revival of Victorian “sus” laws that allowed police to detain anyone who they suspected might be either breaking or about to break the law. Not surprisingly, young Black men were disproportionately targeted, and a significant number of deaths in police custody ensued. In 1981, riots broke out in Brixton and quickly spread to Black, Asian, and white working class neighborhoods of cities such as Birmingham and Manchester.
Exactly the same pattern is repeating itself today. Given this fact

More: http://www.counterpunch.org/dawson08112011.html

"According to the through-the-looking-glass cosmology of mass media elitists, when a poor person commits a crime of opportunity, his actions are a threat to all we hold dear and sacred, but, when the hyper-wealthy of the entrenched looter class abscond with billions, those criminals are referred to as our financial leaders."

Life In An Age Of Looting:
"Some will rob you with a sixgun and some with a fountain pen"

By Phil Rockstroh

August 12, 2011 -- As the poor of Britain rise in a fury of inchoate rage and stock exchanges worldwide experience manic upswings and panicked swoons, the financial elite (and their political operatives) are arrayed in a defensive posture, even as they continue their global-wide, full-spectrum offensive vis-à-vie The Shock Doctrine. Concurrently, corporate mass media types fret over the reversal of fortune and trumpet the triumphs of the self-serving agendas of Wall Street and corporate swindlers…even as they term a feller, in ill-gotten possession of a flat screen television, fleeing through the streets of North London, a mindless thug.

More: http://www.informationclearinghouse....ticle28820.htm

Originally Posted by Deb C

"According to the through-the-looking-glass cosmology of mass media elitists, when a poor person commits a crime of opportunity, his actions are a threat to all we hold dear and sacred, but, when the hyper-wealthy of the entrenched looter class abscond with billions, those criminals are referred to as our financial leaders."

Life In An Age Of Looting:
"Some will rob you with a sixgun and some with a fountain pen"

By Phil Rockstroh

August 12, 2011 -- As the poor of Britain rise in a fury of inchoate rage and stock exchanges worldwide experience manic upswings and panicked swoons, the financial elite (and their political operatives) are arrayed in a defensive posture, even as they continue their global-wide, full-spectrum offensive vis-à-vie The Shock Doctrine. Concurrently, corporate mass media types fret over the reversal of fortune and trumpet the triumphs of the self-serving agendas of Wall Street and corporate swindlers…even as they term a feller, in ill-gotten possession of a flat screen television, fleeing through the streets of North London, a mindless thug.

More: http://www.informationclearinghouse....ticle28820.htm

"The law doth punish man or woman
Who steals a goose from off the common
But lets the greater felon loose
Who steals the common from the goose."

Originally Posted by The Grey Badger

"The law doth punish man or woman
Who steals a goose from off the common
But lets the greater felon loose
Who steals the common from the goose."

This would have made Woody Guthrie proud.

Originally Posted by The Grey Badger

"The law doth punish man or woman
Who steals a goose from off the common
But lets the greater felon loose
Who steals the common from the goose."

Or alternately,
"The Law, in all its majesty and equality, forbids the rich man and the poor alike from sleeping under bridges"

Originally Posted by Deb C

This would have made Woody Guthrie proud.

Or perhaps Bob Dylan who wrote "Steal a little they put you in jail. Steal a lot and they make you king."

Originally Posted by The Rani

This made me think of Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction .... "I won't be ignored!"

It didn't get her anywhere, either.

Philosophy of Western Europe: You may kill me, but my voice lives on after I'm gone. I die a martyr to my cause--someone to inspire multitudes to follow in the wake of my death, to bring change to this world.

Philosophy of Eastern Europe: You may silent my voice, but you will never kill me or my culture. I live life silently, in an inherently corrupt system, where I always get screwed over--no matter who's in charge. No one will remember me after I am gone.

~Chas'88

Originally Posted by herbal tee

Or perhaps Bob Dylan who wrote "Steal a little they put you in jail. Steal a lot and they make you king."

-Tell that to Bernie Madoff.

Of course, create a ponzi scheme and get the government to make it mandatory, they put your face on the front of a dime.

Originally Posted by JDG 66

-Tell that to Bernie Madoff.

Yeah, sure that he's sharing his cell with a lot of other finance types.

Of course, create a ponzi scheme and get the government to make it mandatory, they put your face on the front of a dime.

A ponzi scheme involves fraud. There is no fraud involved in creating a tax to fund a benefit that pays out later.
But then again we've been over this several times already.

Originally Posted by herbal tee

...But then again we've been over this several times already.

-Yes we have, but you still haven't learned what a ponzi scheme.

Originally Posted by herbal tee

...A ponzi scheme involves fraud. There is no fraud involved in creating a tax to fund a benefit that pays out later...

-Yes, an illegal ponzi scheme involves fraud, but the fraud consists not in whether it pays out later (I've never heard of one, including Bernie Madoof's, which didn't pay out), but in it's SUSTAINABILITY. The difference between Madof's ponzi scheme and FDR's ponzi schem is that FDR's ponzi scheme forces people into it by law whether they recognize the problem or not (Madoff's suckers were fully willing, if unwitting). This had the effect of prolonging the agony; Madoff's came and went quickly.

Originally Posted by JDG 66

-Yes we have, but you still haven't learned what a ponzi scheme.

Again, a tax is not a ponzi scheme.
Social Security funding is easy to fix. Just pop the income cap.

Originally Posted by herbal tee

Again, a tax is not a ponzi scheme.
Social Security funding is easy to fix. Just pop the income cap.

1) Raising the tax is the only thing keeping an inherently unsustainable progam alive. An unsustainable program has another term: Ponzi.

2) Poping the income cap merely means your paying out more on the other end. And even if they got no further benefits for all the extra cash (ha! not going to happen), it still won't quite do the trick. And that's not taking into account what happens when people switch their compensation to non-wage benefits. Oh, and assuming that they bother to pay. If the Secretary of the Treausury doesn't pay into the ponzi scheme at $100,000, why should someone pay on $200,000, if they won't get anything back? Classic Laffer Curve.

Originally Posted by JDG 66

1) Raising the tax is the only thing keeping an inherently unsustainable progam alive. An unsustainable program has another term: Ponzi.

There is unstable about funding a retirement plan.

Poping the income cap merely means your paying out more on the other end. And even if they got no further benefits for all the extra cash (ha! not going to happen), it still won't quite do the trick. And that's not taking into account what happens when people switch their compensation to non-wage benefits. Oh, and assuming that they bother to pay. If the Secretary of the Treausury doesn't pay into the ponzi scheme at $100,000, why should someone pay on $200,000, if they won't get anything back?[B]

You believe that funding formulas can't be changed.
There's a whole argument going on right now about the states taxing internet sales.
There's another argument about changing the funding source for roads as increased fuel effecncy leads to less gas tax revenue. Change over time does not affect just one side of any system.

Classic Laffer Curve.

yeah, the same Lafffer curve that's been failing to balance the budget for 30 years.

Next!

Originally Posted by herbal tee

...yeah, the same Lafffer curve that's been failing to balance the budget for 30 years.

Next!

No, teh Laffer curve that only takes you so far against ridiculous increases in spending. Revenues increased when Mellon cut income taxes in the 1920s, and Reagan in the 1980s. You'll notice that rates were doubled in the 1930s, but they sure didn't doubel the amount of income taxes, did they?

http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/151.html

Originally Posted by JDG 66

No, teh Laffer curve that only takes you so far against ridiculous increases in spending. Revenues increased when Mellon cut income taxes in the 1920s, and Reagan in the 1980s. You'll notice that rates were doubled in the 1930s, but they sure didn't doubel the amount of income taxes, did they?

http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/151.html

And we mostly abandoned the Laffer myth during the Clinton years and had budgets that were more or less balanced.

Of course the government, any government is going to have more revenues when the economy is good.
Reagan had a lot of advantages but could not balance the budget whereas Clinton could.
Two back to back decades with, unlike the 20's and 30's similarlly healthy economies.
Apples to apples. The one that didn't assume that trickle down works did better.
Period.

Originally Posted by herbal tee

And we mostly abandoned the Laffer myth during the Clinton years and had budgets that were more or less balanced...

...because we stopped spending so much, thanks to the Ronald Reagan peace dividend.

The Laffer Curve is simply common sense: When you tax something (like wealth production) you get less of it.

PERIOD.