Riots Across Britain: Perhaps More than Meets the Eye: Stephen Lendman

By Stephen Lendman (about the author)

opednews.com

Riots Across Britain: Perhaps More than Meets the Eye - by Stephen Lendman

A previous article said the following:

On August 6, rioting began in Tottenham, North London after police shot and killed Mark Duggan, a 29-year old father of four. It triggered other outbreaks on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday in Brixton, Enfield, Walthamstow, Islington, Hackney, Croydon, Lewisham, Peckham, Clapham, Ealing, central London, and Birmingham, Britain's second largest city.

They also spread to Liverpool, Manchester, and elsewhere as raging anger set Britain ablaze.
Observers attribute public anger to unemployment, poverty, inequality, and overall social injustice, but perhaps more is also involved. More on that below.

In response, Prime Minister David Cameron responded arrogantly, saying riots were unconnected to police shooting Mark Duggan on August 4, despite evidence of a pre-planned operation, more sinister perhaps than just killing another Black youth,

Addressing Parliament on August 11, Cameron said:

Riots are 

"criminality pure and simple. And there is absolutely no excuse for it....We will not allow a culture of fear to exist on our streets. And we will do whatever it takes to restore law and order and to rebuild our communities."

"It is completely wrong to say there is any justifiable causal link" between Duggan's killing and street riots. "It is simply preposterous for anyone to suggest" it relates to him. "(I)t was about theft," not outrage, he claimed.

"As I have made clear, nothing should be off the table. Every contingency is being looked at. The police are already authorized to use baton rounds." Water cannons, rubber bullets, and other harsh measures were approved. 

Consideration is also being given to deploying military forces and shutting down social media. In short, police will be given full discretion to do whatever it takes to restore order. "(T)here will be no complacency."

Cameron, of course, avoided culpability by blaming victims, the usual tactic used to shift debate away from where it belongs. Instead blame:

-- decades of destructive neoliberalism;

-- an unacceptable new normal;

-- appalling wealth disparities;
-- a corrupt political/corporate nexus;

- imperial wars benefitting profiteers, not people; 
-- grand theft on an unimaginable scale; and

-- disdain for human need, causing a loss of public trust and rage because things keep getting worse, not better.

Perhaps also, however much more is involved beyond reacting violently to festering social injustice.
Appearing on Russia Today, Michael Ruppert offered a thought provoking analysis, saying:

 "I am extremely suspicious that there is deliberate provocateurism, undertaken by industrialized governments," especially America, Britain and other Western states, "to provoke race riots. And I'm really worried that's what's happening."

 "They (also) want to incite further civil unrest because that will serve as a distraction from the economic chaos. It's a diversion from what's really causing all this suffering around the world right now."

In fact, war, especially nuclear war "is the ultimate diversion. All wars....come from a place where there's nothing to go to economically to cover up your economic mistakes" or malfeasance.

"The only way to fight (back) is to withdraw any investments you have in any financial instruments anywhere in the world. Stop feeding" the beast. Starve it by opting out, "because once you invest in it, you want to keep it alive. You have a (vested) interest in what is killing the planet," 

and ultimately your own welfare.

Catherine Austin Fitts recommends local financial permacultures, saying:

Everywhere, "people and local institutions have financial capital, typically retirement capital or various kinds of savings and reserves." Instead of investing them in "centralized institutions and financial centers," use them for community "permaculture developments and the businesses that supply them."

The more development becomes local, "the easier it will be for people to withdraw" savings from destructive centralized institutions. In other words, build local self-sufficiency, free from government/corporate predation, benefitting wealth and power at the expense of ordinary people.

"The patterns are very disturbing," especially inflammatory media coverage, heightening tensions. "It suggests that 'they' really want to trigger unrest. The 'they' is anyone in service of the infinite growth monetary paradigm."

"That would be the banks, the oil companies. That would be the absolutely corrupt financial institutions." They trigger unrest "because it's more profitable to destroy things now in this infinite growth paradigm."

"It's infinitely more profitable to kill than save. It's just the reality of the world we live in."

In Gone with the Wind, Rhett Butler explained it saying, there's "much more money to be made in the destruction of civilization than in building it up."

In America's wars, profiteers benefit enormously from mass destruction, reaping lucrative contracts to rebuild.
In Britain, "(t)here's a very suspicious pattern to the way the riots are breaking out....One of the primary incentives or directives or interests of the establishment of putting down (US) civil unrest in the sixties was to prevent any alliance between Blacks and Whites."

"And they went to any lengths possible to create tension, and that's what I see happening" across Britain. Moreover, "the civil unrest we see around the world," including the so-called Arab Spring, "has nothing to do with Arab, Black or White. This is a generational revolution."

It's about young people with "no hope."

However, violence is the wrong tactic. "There's a better way to fight the beast that's doing this."
Cui bono also is at issue. "These (events) are being used as test runs to test command and control systems for (eventual) larger riots."

I'm mad as hell. How about you? Dylan Ratigan

Yesterday, on TV, I exploded. I spent two minutes giving a primal yell at our political system, demanding the extraction of our money and dignity end. It was my most heartfelt and emotional moment on television, ever.
And the emails poured in. I hit a chord, because it's something we all feel. Take a look.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

With the markets in turmoil and the global financial architecture groaning under the weight of fraud and corruption, it's a good time to think about what leadership would look like. Believe it or not, we have had good leadership, purpose, integrity, and aligned interests in this country.
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy faced a dilemma -- how could he direct our intense competitive passion with the Soviet Union in a direction other than war? The answer was his call for America to beat the Soviets to the moon. Kennedy understood power; if he did not lead us towards peaceful productive competition, that same animus would have turned violent (see this key memo on the real rationale for the space race). So he took the passion and focus of our society, the technology of war and missiles, and turned it into a great mission to explore space. He gave us a shared goal.
But that's not the full story. Kennedy also demanded we use the finest scientists and engineers to design the rockets, and made sure that the path to the moon was based on the best possible solution to get there. For large rocket boosters, he was open to chemical, nuclear, liquid fuels, or any combination. He did not put a commission of astrologers in charge, and he did not put political cronies with no scientific background in charge of designing the rockets.
We had a shared goal, and we had a problem-solving process with integrity and aligned interests. Kennedy was the leader of this initiative, but Americans at that time, possibly because of a shared experience in World War II, had a shared purpose. They believed in prosperity as a goal, and they had a shared set of problem solving values to get there. They believed in education, in health and welfare, in mutual security, in dignified work and in Americans making things. The moon shot didn't just avoid war with the Soviets, it created the largest surge of American students into math and science in history.
Today, we face the same demons as decades past. We have passion, and focus, and we want to compete. What we lack is a set of shared prosperity goals, and a shared problem solving values to get there. There's no consensus, for instance, on the need to solve the problem of climate change. But even where we have some consensus, say on creating jobs, there's no integrity or aligned interests in how we're approaching the problem. It's well-known in DC among lobbying firms that every policy initiative must be wrapped in the shared goal of creating jobs. It's unclear whether anyone there has that as an actual goal, but even if they did, there's no integrity in the way they are going about creating jobs. We still trust the same corrupted economic establishment, an establishment with no ethos of the importance of problem solving. Astrologers (like S&P) are in charge of job creation.
So now we are locked in a war of ideas and mechanics in a battle for power. But power to what end? The political solutions proposed by DC today are the opposite of Kennedy's moonshot. We are taking our collective passion and focus and turning it toward manipulating power for the self-preservation of a few instead of working together towards shared goals with shared values knowing our ideas and mechanics will change as long as we try to get there.
Whether it's full employment, clean energy, building a bridge, whatever -- there's no mutual consent to a set of shared goals, integrity on how to achieve them, or aligned interests. Even where there are policy discussions on, say, how to cut our debt load, it is the opinions of discredited ratings agencies that seem to matter. So our choices are organized around austerity measures that we know will not cut debt loads. Again, it's using astrology to get to the moon.
I've realized, over time, that it isn't policy ideas we need. We need, as citizens, a shared purpose. And we need a commitment to integrity of process, and aligned interests so the incentives exist for all of us to contribute. You can talk to billionaires -- and I have -- who are scared for their children, for their country, and for the world. And if billionaires can't create the changes we need in the machine, if Congress can't, if the President can't, then we must look to ourselves.
When Kennedy called for the country to go to the moon, he said that "no single space project will be more impressive to mankind... and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish." The difficulty and expense were great problems to overcome, not reasons to shrink from greatness. He said we would experiment with different rocket technology, "until certain which is superior." Every engineer, politician, and bureaucrat focused on the overall goal -- not how to look like America was getting to the moon to get power and credit, but how to actually do it. And it was not his project, or even the project of the astronauts who went there. "It will not," he said, "be one man going to the moon... it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there."
This is shared purpose -- Americans paid taxes, worked on rockets, trained as astronauts, cleaned NASA buildings, or did whatever they could do -- to get each one of us to the moon using shared values to solve problems that got us closer to our objective. Later on, the space station in the 1970s, using even more advanced technology that could have been used for war and weaponry, helped us develop a new cooperative posture with the Soviet Union, cooling off the Cold War. This remarkable problem-solving value set helped create not just leadership in the space program, but the technological spinoffs we enjoy today.
This is the spirit we need today. We need to fight against the great ideological machine that lacks purpose, lacks integrity, and lacks aligned interests. The first step is to recognize our own place in it. If we believe that our problems are all due to the Tea Party, or Obama, or corporate power brokers, or liberals, then we're lacking the integrity necessary to reach any goal. The reality is, by boxing ourselves into a tribal two-party state, we are all part of the machine. And so, in order to change it, we must simply change our own minds. We must reorient our own ways of thinking, to a leadership driven model of citizenship. It isn't enough, or even necessarily important, to care about which politician is in charge. We must seek within our own lives and our own politics, food, culture, families, and schools, values. We must share a set of prosperity goals -- full employment, clean energy, patient driven health care, high-quality universal education -- and push our leaders and ourselves to achieve them.
Ultimately, peace and prosperity will not be made because we get rid of the animal instincts within us, the competitiveness, the passion, the need to argue. It will happen because we will use those instincts, as we did with the moonshot, to build a society that lets us take care of each other and solve our problems. And so we must figure out how to stop giving our consent and legitimacy to an unthinking mechanical beast that runs our lives, a beast which enslaves us to accounting mechanisms like debt ceilings instead of the shared prosperity we seek as a culture and society. We must figure out how to restore the integrity necessary to actually solve our problems and we must understand how to align all of our interests so we each have the incentives to solve them. That way, we can ensure our bridges don't fall down and our job creation initiatives actually create jobs.
I have no doubt that by rededicating ourselves, another moonshot is inevitable. That's just what happens when problem-solving people dedicate themselves to prosperity as a goal, make sure that integrity is the keystone of how they achieve it, and align their interests so it is doable.
My book Greedy Bastards coming soon. For more on jobs, see Jobs Wanted: Ending Rigged Trade = Jobs.

Follow Dylan Ratigan on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DylanRatigan  

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~ Make Them Pay! TAX DAY ACTION COALITION ~

Tax Day: Make Them Pay

The right wing is on the attack: slashing public services, eliminating workers' rights, and destroying jobs. Their excuse? "America is broke"—and yet big corporations and the wealthy are raking it in, and continue to get tax break after tax break. Something doesn't add up.

America is not broke. The right-wing wants to convince us we're broke so that they can push through their radical agenda. And well-connected corporations continue to use their political power to dodge their taxes. In 2009, after helping crash the American economy, Bank of America paid $0 in taxes. GE had a tax bill of $0 in 2010. Republicans want to give a $50 billion tax bailout to big oil companies—and at the same time take away food aid to hungry pregnant women and children. This is immoral and un-American.

Enough is enough! On Tax Day, April 18, as millions of Americans patriotically pay their taxes, we will call on corporations and millionaires to pay their fair share. At hundreds of events from coast to coast, we'll present tax bills to corporate tax dodgers for the billions of dollars their legions of lobbyists helped them avoid. We'll organize a peaceful, dignified, and powerful day of action to call on corporations to pay their fair share. And we'll demand that our elected leaders make them pay.

It's time to demand that everyone pays their fair share to rebuild the American Dream. We invite frustrated taxpayers, underwater homeowners, vilified public servants, job-hunting students, and unemployed veterans—everyone facing cuts or cutbacks, a pink slip or a shrinking paycheck—to join in.

Host your own Tax Day: Make Them Pay event or sign up for an event near you.