Month: August 2011

The answer, in London, is at least 333 since 1998, and no convictions of cops.

Much higher percentage of blacks than their percentage of the population, of course.  333 dying in police custody.

Per year, that’s about 25.

Now, there are two possibilities as I see it. Either:

1) the police are beating a ton of people, and some of them can’t take it; or,

2) they are deliberately beating certain specific individuals to death.

Which do you think it is?

Added on top of what we know about the London police’s relationship with Murdoch’s papers, where they were receiving millions of pounds in bribes, I think it’s a safe conclusion to reach that the Met police are rotten from top to bottom.

(note: corrected from “mostly blacks” to much higher percentage.  My bad.)

Correction #2: the IPCC reports show most died due to neglect rather than deliberate harm.  Not sure I entirely buy it, but there it is.  Mea culpa, I jumped the gun.  Beat me up in comments as appropriate.

The oligarchs are overplaying their hand.

Noone expected this. The so-called leaders who have taken three solid days to return from their foreign holidays to a country in flames did not anticipate this. The people running Britain had absolutely no clue how desperate things had become. They thought that after thirty years of soaring inequality, in the middle of a recession, they could take away the last little things that gave people hope, the benefits, the jobs, the possibility of higher education, the support structures, and nothing would happen. They were wrong. And now my city is burning, and it will continue to burn until we stop the blanket condemnations and blind conjecture and try to understand just what has brought viral civil unrest to Britain. Let me give you a hint: it ain’t Twitter.

Notice some other things: Kettling doesn’t work against prepared protesters.  They broke the kettling attempts with bolt cutters.  Notice the masks.  These people have put some thought into what they’re doing.

Next step, next riots, if they keep thinking things through, will be systematic destruction of the CCTV system, taking out police stations, and occupation of the financial district.

Another quote:

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.

What was that quote from someone whose named started with J?  Something about those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable?

Don’t think this isn’t a big deal. This is a major capital.  London is one of the world’s great cities and a hub of the financial system.  And the rioters are showing it can be done, that if people fight the police rather than sitting passively, the police suddenly aren’t all-powerful.

Oh, and don’t take hope, a future and respect away from young men in large numbers. Smart oligarchies/aristocracies understand that you have to keep a certain number of the violent classes employed. Not for their sake, but for the oligarchs.

As I wrote before:

Meanwhile in England, the Cameron government’s massive slashes to education hit virtually all at once, making an entire cohort of young people know exactly who just did their level best to destroy their lives.  This is important, to put it bluntly, young males who don’t have enough money to settle down with a young female are extraordinarily dangerous to the state.

The Conservative austerity measures are destroying the possibility of a future for a generation of young people.  There is this weird idea amongst English elites, which I encountered in person during my London visit, that the problem in England is their welfare culture.  In other words,after a financial crisis virtually entirely caused by the rich, the response has been to slash spending on the poor and middle class to pay for bailouts for the rich, who, by any sane reading of the crisis, caused the disaster.

Round after round of bailouts have failed, because they keep just throwing money at the problem.  As I wrote in 2008:

So you’re in a boat, and it starts taking on water. You grab a bucket and start bailing. What do you tell the rest of the crew?”Find the hole, and plug it.”…

… If you don’t patch the hull, if you don’t make significant regulatory changes at the same time as you are creating a bailout bill, you’re just buying time. The ship may stay afloat as long as you don’t stop ferrying buckets of money to the financial sector, but it’s still got a massive hole in the hull and it’s still taking on water.

Any bailout bill that does not have significant regulatory changes will not solve the problem. It will, at best, kick it down the road for as long as taxpayers are willing to fork over a hundred billion a month or so to keep it from exploding. It may even make the problem worse because of moral hazard—heads the financier who makes a bet wins, tails the government bails him out.

This has played out again, and again, especially in Europe, where lawmakers do bailout after bailout of banks (they’re not bailing out the governments, they’re bailing out their creditors), refusing to do what must be done, which is a massive restructuring of all the debt in the key nations (100 year bonds, paying 1%, say) or an outright default.  They are making ordinary people pay for their masters sins.  And they are putting the worst of it on the people who they feel are least powerful: the young, immigrants, the poor and so on.

The response to a system which refuses to do the right thing, which offers Coke-Pepsi politics (if you don’t like Coke, you can always have Pepsi!) is turning more and more violent. If electoral politics offers no solution, people will look for one elsewhere.

Our elites live in a bubble. They think that what happens on the street doesn’t really effect them.  There will come a day when many of them will be wrong.  They’re playing with their lives, with our lives, and with the lives of their families and loved ones.

What will happen in each country will be different.  Some will get a man on horseback, some will screw in the repression and hang on, turning into aristocracies, others may find what many on the left are insisting on, a Robespierre. And maybe one or two will do the right thing, stop the bailouts, stop the reforms, and make a commitment to restructure in a way which creates a future for everyone.

Maybe.