work in progress
Well-Known Member
Just a thought....will anything be done about the robbers in government who made a bad situation worse with their austerity budgets? No jobs, cuts to benefits for the poor, closing recreation facilities, and everyone seems to be shocked and dismayed when the pressure cooker blows its lid! For any Brits here - your tool of a Prime Minister, and Lord Mayor of London seem to think it's just a crime issue - it was just young people looking to steal and get free stuff. Well, that may be part of it! If you're bombarded by ads and images of products and lifestyles that you know you will never be able to reach, you might be inclined to smash a store window and help yourself to some free stuff. But, if it was just about stealing, why were so many setting fires? Thieves don't usually burn down stores that they have robbed, so I'm assuming there's more to this story than what is usually reported in the news.
A little insight for me comes from one of my heroes - Naomi Klein "Daylight Robbery, Meet Nighttime Robbery"
This is said in all seriousness. As if the massive bank bailouts never happened, followed by the defiant record bonuses. Followed by the emergency G-8 and G-20 meetings, when the leaders decided, collectively, not to do anything to punish the bankers for any of this, nor to do anything serious to prevent a similar crisis from happening again. Instead they would all go home to their respective countries and force sacrifices on the most vulnerable. They would do this by firing public sector workers, scapegoating teachers, closing libraries, upping tuitions, rolling back union contracts, creating rush privatizations of public assets and decreasing pensionsmix the cocktail for where you live. And who is on television lecturing about the need to give up these entitlements? The bankers and hedge-fund managers, of course.
Yes, it looks just like Wall Street! If you're a big enough thief, in a three piece tailored suit, you are dictating the terms to the Government, instead of rotting in a jail cell!
At last years G-20 austerity summit in Toronto, the protests turned into riots and multiple cop cars burned. It was nothing by London 2011 standards, but it was still shocking to us Canadians. The big controversy then was that the government had spent $675 million on summit security (yet they still couldnt seem to put out those fires). At the time, many of us pointed out that the pricey new arsenal that the police had acquiredwater cannons, sound cannons, tear gas and rubber bulletswasnt just meant for the protesters in the streets. Its long-term use would be to discipline the poor, who in the new era of austerity would have dangerously little to lose.
This is what David Cameron got wrong: you can't cut police budgets at the same time as you cut everything else. Because when you rob people of what little they have, in order to protect the interests of those who have more than anyone deserves, you should expect resistancewhether organized protests or spontaneous looting.
Yep! Here in the Great White North, we discovered that we now lived in a police state, even equipped with secret laws that were created just before the G8/G20 Summit. I'm sure David Cameron is going to change that last part - cutting police budgets, since next year London will be hosting the Olympics, and the venues close to Olympic events will probably have Chinese level security.This is what David Cameron got wrong: you can't cut police budgets at the same time as you cut everything else. Because when you rob people of what little they have, in order to protect the interests of those who have more than anyone deserves, you should expect resistancewhether organized protests or spontaneous looting.
