Market Riot: 8 August 2011

This week has seen the ‘markets’ rioting. They burnt property worth £150bn from the UK’s top 100 companies. World wide the rioters destroyed £2.8 trillion worth of share values. Some think this is simply a crime against property. But many owners are simply switching to gold. Gold hit record highs in Asian trading nearing $1,700 an ounce. Capitalists are looking to buy assets that offer less risk. But the loss in share values will translate into lost jobs, redundancies and pay cuts. Somebody will be made to pay.

Don’t expect the Crown to act. The police have not surrounded the Stock Exchange and arrested the rioters or confiscated their computers. It is ‘the rich what gets the pleasure and the poor what gets the blame’.

Local difficulty in Tottenham spreads

Meanwhile not many miles away from the City the social consequences of market madness are being played out on the streets of Tottenham. The spark was the shooting dead of a local man from Broadwater Farm estate. The police have given their account, but as we know after the Charles De Menezes shooting their story cannot be taken at face value. It has already begun to change. Meanwhile there was a political demonstration to the police station by the family.

This became the focal point for alienated young people who came to vent their anger about this and everything else they are fed up with. This is why connection has been made with the Thatcher riots in 1981 and 1985. Youth unemployment is at the root of all this. This riot was a political act growing out of a definite event but broadening out into a spontaneous outburst against the state (i.e. The Crown) as represented by Her Majesty’s constabulary.

As in all riots the Crown loses control of (some of) the streets. Then along comes a few ‘entrepreneurs’ from the ‘lower classes’, quick to seize the opportunity to redistribute property. This is the old fashioned way. Grab the goods and cart them off down the road. This surely proves that the much lauded entrepreneurship is not confined to the rich classes or to ‘Marketers’ with computer screens. Given the right opportunity many more join in. Looting is not confined to asset strippers.

Who is being blamed for the Cameron-Clegg riots? Police, protesters, young people, criminal elements, lower class entrepreneurs? Everybody is being blamed except those in charge. The Con-Lib or Tory government backed up by the likes of Simon Hughes must be put in the frame or better still the dock. They are responsible for the economic disaster, the social anarchy, and the massive alienation felt by young people. Like Murdoch they will be quick to say they know nothing about it and put the blame on ‘criminals’ and ‘outsiders’. But as we know banksters, politicians and press barons are all in it together.

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