The Whole World Is Rioting as the Economic Crisis Worsens -- Why Aren't We?

[Serge_Tomiko]

Re: The Whole World Is Rioting as the Economic Crisis Worsens -- Why Aren't We?

This is a ridiculous statement...

"...It's also the case that European societies tend to be more homogenous than the mishmash of tribes we call the United States. Whereas Americans are divided by religion, region, ethnicity, urban-rural tensions and all the other trappings of the "culture wars," the primary split in most European countries is class..."

Don't know what "homogenous European societies" this author has been spending his time in, but he needs to sign on with a new travel agent...one who won't send him to those all inclusive Club Med resorts where you can say you've "been to a country", but you never actually interact with any of the locals other than the chambermaid.

Maybe you aren't aware that most of Europe is not London or Paris?

[ProdigyofZen]

Re: The Whole World Is Rioting as the Economic Crisis Worsens -- Why Aren't We?

Ron Paul congressman TX, Jim Demint senator from SC, that is all I can think of off the top of my head, haha.

[Jim Nickerson]

Re: The Whole World Is Rioting as the Economic Crisis Worsens -- Why Aren't We?

Ron Paul congressman TX, Jim Demint senator from SC, that is all I can think of off the top of my head, haha.

"Christians" 2, Lions all the rest.

Actually, I believe if you really knew what went on in the lives of elected officials, then none of them is honest in the sense that they place considerations for the country above their own--and I am not looking to argue that Paul might actually be different. Odds are he might be the least bad.

[ProdigyofZen]

Re: The Whole World Is Rioting as the Economic Crisis Worsens -- Why Aren't We?

I agree, i can speculate to a certain degree but just by sheer statistics a few have to be quote un quote GOOD

[GRG55]

Re: The Whole World Is Rioting as the Economic Crisis Worsens -- Why Aren't We?

Maybe you aren't aware that most of Europe is not London or Paris?

Maybe the author in the original article that started this thread wasn't aware that America isn't LA or NY?

Of course "most of Europe" isn't London or Paris. And just like the rural regions of France, and much of the non-urban locales, there's lot's of white bread territory in the USA as well. The author was spouting stereotypical bullshzt. I called bullshzt. Maybe my less subtle attempt this time will get the message across. Maybe...

[flintlock]

Re: The Whole World Is Rioting as the Economic Crisis Worsens -- Why Aren't We?

I agree that things will simmer for a while until they reach a boiling point. And the police have been arming for this for some time now. But I wouldnt want to be one of them when the poop hits the fan. This won't be kicking in drug dealer doors.

Frankly, the mob won't be happy until they see some heads on a pike. So Obama had better start lining up someone to blame. But more than likely, the real culprits will be long gone by then.

[strittmatter]

Re: The Whole World Is Rioting as the Economic Crisis Worsens -- Why Aren't We?

I agree that things will simmer for a while until they reach a boiling point. And the police have been arming for this for some time now. But I wouldnt want to be one of them when the poop hits the fan. This won't be kicking in drug dealer doors.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSQarX2bNtQ

[metalman]

Re: The Whole World Is Rioting as the Economic Crisis Worsens -- Why Aren't We?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSQarX2bNtQ

looks like i'm gonna need a tin foil suit to go with my tin foil hat.

[BadJuju]

Re: The Whole World Is Rioting as the Economic Crisis Worsens -- Why Aren't We?

The military has a cave troll.

[flintlock]

Re: The Whole World Is Rioting as the Economic Crisis Worsens -- Why Aren't We?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSQarX2bNtQ

Funny its our Military that is developing a "non lethal" ray gun. Planning ahead for the day they get turned against the mob?

[due_indigence]

Anecdotally, as I watch my fellow Americans waddle into the local Gas Mart buying their processed food --obese, slothful, ill-kempt, diabetic, slack-jawed-- I'm hard-pressed to imagine a more vulnerable population in the history of the world. Okay maybe Easter Island. Less obelisks, more McDonalds.

Suppose these people were suddenly deprived of food. How would they riot? They suffer from hypertension and anxiety attacks! The banking class has created a nation of people just waiting to have their heads chopped off. I'm not convinced the great American civilian militia will fire a shot. You see the fattest asses at gun shows, I swear. Guns are more a security placebo. I know guys in my area who have 30+ weapons. They tend to be paranoid and terrified of their own shadows, not so much warriors. I can't picture them in a firefight unless it's with the wife.

Grasshoppers and locusts devour things. So do Americans. Doesn't this make us, on some level, a pestilence? Now we await a brand new field of borrowed wheat so that we can dine again.


I should have been born a Rockefeller. All the patrician contempt without the bankroll.

[Guest]

Re: The Whole World Is Rioting as the Economic Crisis Worsens -- Why Aren't We?

Serge - this GRG55 guy is one of the most reflexively polite posters on this website. He is unfailingly diplomatic at all times, so much so that sometimes one concludes he must be a Canadian! :eek: So when he descends to such horrific profanity as to say" "The author was spouting stereotypical bullshzt. I called bullshzt. " it is downright alarming, and one can expect to see one or two of the rivets start to pop out of the aluminum superstructure of the GRG55 flying machine. :eek: I guess he really means it. From what I understand he's spent a good number of years living in the Middle East and travels extensively, having kept a pied a terre in London (lucky bugger). So he's not altogether unfamiliar wth the European continent.

I lived in Europe half my life, mostly between Italy and the UK but had friends scattered all over the place there. My two cents input into your discussion is that the US in it's cultural aggregate, is more ethnically diverse than any part of Europe, albeit with some variation due to cities or rural area sampled. What's more important even is that the culture in the US is really more open to ethnic diversity than any part of Europe. Europe is of course much also intrinsically quite ethnically diversified in that there are 35 odd nations there and each one is a different "tribe". But they are the same tribes who have been planted in those locations for a couple of thousand years and they don't really mingl much given how close together they are.

Here in the US the "tribes" are so mixed around and recently arrived that the entire nation is effectively a "minestrone soup". Though some white anglo saxon protestants may still have a mental picture of this land as an English / Scots / Irish (eh, what happened to the Welsh?) peoples in origin, a fairy tale due to the massive waves of immigration which occurred. The reality is this nation is so jumbled up that we are effectively all "mongrelized" by stay-at-home old world standards, and that is a very special thing sort of unique to America.

As you also must note, in the major urban areas of America, e.g. Chicago, DC-Philly-NY-Boston corridor, SoCal, etc. the mixing up of ethnic groups is highly progressed at this time and quite functional. It is in fact America's single greatest progressive achievement, and no other country in the world does this as well as the US. Like it or not, and despite the quite nasty legacy of racial intolerance that lingers in our country, we know how to "do the minestrone soup" far more successfully than any European country, or any country in the world for that matter. Oh, and those Canadians? When they start introducing "mild expletives" into their replies they are on the edge of going berserker. Beware a Canadian berserker. A lifetime spent in mild-mannered politeness can yield in an instant to all the ferocity of a wounded grizzly bear! :rolleyes:

Maybe the author in the original article that started this thread wasn't aware that America isn't LA or NY?

Of course "most of Europe" isn't London or Paris. And just like the rural regions of France, and much of the non-urban locales, there's lot's of white bread territory in the USA as well. The author was spouting stereotypical bullshzt. I called bullshzt. Maybe my less subtle attempt this time will get the message across. Maybe...

[Sapiens]

Revolt Spreads Across the Globe as "Crisis" Continues to Unfold

http://www.gnn.tv/articles/3954/Revo...nues_to_Unfold

Revolt Spreads Across the Globe as "Crisis" Continues to Unfold
Unrest rocks the streets of China, France, Russia, Mexico, and elsewhere. And it is spreading...
By Nathan Coe, GNN
Published: Wednesday February 4th, 2009

“They say that the fires of revolt will spread everywhere, and we see acts like damage to bank branches or state buildings and claims of solidarity with the Greek rioters.”

After numerous European governments expressed fear that the unrest in Greece would spread to neighboring countries and perhaps around the world, the spreading global revolt has taken on another tone: that of confronting the elite for their manipulation of the economic “crisis” (which is really a systemic collapse) in order to consolidate yet even more wealth as the masses of the world suffer the brunt of the former’s greed. The spirit of the Greek revolt has not been forgotten, however, for it is clear whose interests the police serve and protect (as America was recently reminded in Oakland).

As Iceland became the first country to fall due to popular revolt against the economic elite, and then proceeded to elect their first female PM, who is also openly gay, things are heating up around the globe. Recently, over 1,000 protesters assembled illegally to protest the World Economic Forum in Geneva, Switzerland, and while the protests were overwhelmingly peaceful, fear of unrest prompted the police to systematically target and arrest known and identified militants and revolutionaries.

As GNN’s Grady reports, in China “2,000 workers and farmers held wage protests for twelve days outside of Shanghai” in December 2008, “striking workers and security guards clash in a textile factory in Dongguan” on January 15th, and on January 16th, “100 police officers stage a rally in Shenzhen after being sacked from their jobs.” The Times Online also reports that in the southern province of Guangdong, “three jobless men detonated a bomb in a business travellers’ hotel in the commercial city of Foshan to extort money from the management.” In the 12 days of mass demonstrations last December, the Times reports:

...angry workers besieged labour offices and government buildings after dozens of factories closed their doors without paying wages and their owners went back to Hong Kong, Taiwan or South Korea. In southern China, hundreds of workers blocked a highway to protest against pay cuts imposed by managers. At several factories, there were scenes of chaos as police were called to stop creditors breaking in to seize equipment in lieu of debts.

In France, an estimated 2.5 million people hit the streets in a national general strike in response to the global economic collapse, and in disdain of the handling of the so-called “crisis” by their country’s ruling-class economic elite. The Telegraph reported that “the streets filled with flag-waving protesters and in Paris protesters clashed with police, throwing bottles, overturning cars and starting a fire in the street. After a day of peaceful protests, violence erupted on the fringes of the Paris protest. Dozens of young men wearing scarves across their face were charged down by riot police after throwing stones and bottles, tearing up manhole covers and lighting fires in the Opera district.”


Anger is growing in France and around the world

The Beeb reports:

Across Europe, victims of the economic slump who are losing their jobs in their tens of thousands are furious that public money is being doled out to the banks. In some countries, they are more willing to vent their anger. As huge crowds took to the streets across France this week, in a national day of protests and strikes, the far left points to a boost in the number of its supporters in times of financial gloom.

Certainly, ministers in Paris are wary of some form of insurrection. Recent intelligence reports talk about an “elevated threat” from an “international European network… with a strong presence in France” and a “new generation of activists”, possibly a “re-birth of the violent extreme left”. A spokesman for the interior ministry, Gerard Gachet, told the BBC that the threat was real. “The term ‘ultra-left’ was used by the interior minister to set this group apart from the extreme left who turn up for elections and keep within the parameters of democratic debate,” he says. But talking of more radical groups, he points to recent pamphlets and books published anonymously, but sometimes with a circulation of about 20,000, with titles such as How to Start a Civil War and The Insurrection That is Coming. “They say that the fires of revolt will spread everywhere,” he says, “and we see acts like damage to bank branches or state buildings and claims of solidarity with the Greek rioters.”

The Guardian reported that “the French government fears a wave of extreme left-wing terrorism this year with the possible sabotage of key infrastructure, kidnappings of major business figures or even bomb attacks. Last week hundreds of fly-posters around Paris called on young people ‘forced to work for a world that poisons us’ to follow the example of their Greek counterparts. ‘The insurrection goes on. If it takes hold everywhere, no one can stop it,’ the posters said.”

In another article entitled “Governments across Europe tremble as angry people take to the streets,” The Guardian reported: “France paralysed by a wave of strike action, the boulevards of Paris resembling a debris-strewn battlefield. The Hungarian currency sinks to its lowest level ever against the euro, as the unemployment figure rises. Greek farmers block the road into Bulgaria in protest at low prices for their produce. New figures from the biggest bank in the Baltic show that the three post-Soviet states there face the biggest recessions in Europe.”

Across Russia, thousands of protesters demonstrated against their government’s economic policies and response to the global economic crisis, echoing the grievances of others around the globe. Al Jazeera reports that “Russian police forcefully broke up many of the anti-government protests on Saturday, arresting dozens of demonstrators.”

In Mexico City, the BBC reports, thousands of people “protested against what they say is the inadequate response by the government to growing economic problems in Mexico.”

As the global economic collapse continues to unfold, the spirit of revolt and resistance is being rekindled within the hearts of the masses, and the people of the world are rising up. Resistance is spreading from Athens, Riga, Paris, Budapest, Kiev, Reykjavik, China, Mexico, and elsewhere.

Chris Hedges recently wrote that “the daily bleeding of thousands of jobs will soon turn our economic crisis into a political crisis. The street protests, strikes and riots that have rattled France, Turkey, Greece, Ukraine, Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Iceland will descend on us. It is only a matter of time. And not much time.” He continues:

At no period in American history has our democracy been in such peril or has the possibility of totalitarianism been as real. Our way of life is over. Our profligate consumption is finished. Our children will never have the standard of living we had. And poverty and despair will sweep across the landscape like a plague. This is the bleak future. There is nothing President Obama can do to stop it. It has been decades in the making. It cannot be undone with a trillion or two trillion dollars in bailout money. Our empire is dying. Our economy has collapsed. How will we cope with our decline? Will we cling to the absurd dreams of a superpower and a glorious tomorrow or will we responsibly face our stark new limitations? Will we heed those who are sober and rational, those who speak of a new simplicity and humility, or will we follow the demagogues and charlatans who rise up out of the slime in moments of crisis to offer fantastic visions? Will we radically transform our system to one that protects the ordinary citizen and fosters the common good, that defies the corporate state, or will we employ the brutality and technology of our internal security and surveillance apparatus to crush all dissent? We won’t have to wait long to find out.

Joshua Holland, in a recent piece on AlterNet entitled “The Whole World Is Rioting as the Economic Crisis Worsens — Why Aren’t We?,” reported that “explosive anger is spilling out onto the streets of Europe. The meltdown of the global economy is igniting massive social unrest in a region that has long been a symbol of political stability and social cohesion. It’s not a new trend: A wave of upheaval is spreading from the poorer countries on the periphery of the global economy to the prosperous core.” He continues:

Over the past few years, a series of riots spread across what is patronizingly known as the Third World. Furious mobs have raged against skyrocketing food and energy prices, stagnating wages and unemployment in India, Senegal, Yemen, Indonesia, Morocco, Cameroon, Brazil, Panama, the Philippines, Egypt, Mexico and elsewhere. For the most part, those living in wealthier countries took little notice. But now, with the global economy crashing down around us, people in even the wealthiest nations are mad as hell and reacting violently to what they view as an inadequate response to their tumbling economies. At least in Western Europe, cries of “burn the shit down!” are being heard in countries with some of the highest standards of living in the world — states with adequate social safety nets; countries where all citizens have access to decent health care and heavily subsidized educations. Places where minimum wages are also living wages, and a dignified retirement is in large part guaranteed. The far ends of the ideological spectrum appear to be gaining currency as the crisis develops, and people grow increasingly hostile toward the politics of the status quo.

How will the people of America respond to the systematic consolidation of wealth within their own country, coupled with environmental degradation and the unfolding police state? At what threshold will the people of America have had enough? At what point will we stand up and resist our own destruction? The choice is ours.

“You shouldn’t be so timid—you are not alone. There are millions of us waiting for you to make yourself known, ready to love you and laugh with you and fight at your side for a better world. Follow your heart to the places we will meet. Please don’t be too late.” — Fighting For Our Lives

Nathan Coe is a guerrilla journalist and rebel insurgent residing in the mountains of Southwest Colorado, who also works with SW(A)RM, subMedia, and Indymedia. He can be contacted at autonomousresistance@riseup.net or via his blog at ShiftShapers.gnn.tv.

I would say sore losers, except for the fact that the Banksters have not won fair and square with their scam/fraud of fractional reserve banking.

[due_indigence]

Re: The Whole World Is Rioting as the Economic Crisis Worsens -- Why Aren't We?

I see a unique opportunity presented by the pathlogic greed of the bankers in this cycle. They have so overshot the intrinsic wealth of the planet that their balance sheets can never be reeled back into reality. There is no storehouse of wealth on the planet that can bail-out a gazillion dollar derivatives complex (or is it larger yet?) They have fractionally reserved themselves into absurdity. This current bail-out nonsense is fueled by abject denial. Thus the financial elite is vulnerable like it hasn't been in 400 years. It's a hollow shell. Of course this makes our politicians no less in thrall to their benefactors. Right now, the politicians are trying to re-seat the elite (with our money) so that the cash-cow can be resumed. Obama's progressive credentials didn't last a week. No surprise. But let's not forget that our money is their money. The TARP funds will be manufactured by the Dept of Treasury and handed over to square up balance sheets, more fiat monkey business.

Funny things happen on the way to the forum. In America at least, we have a surfeit of housing stock and a massive pool of perfectly viable used cars for example. The FIRE economy built this stuff for us, almost be accident. The stuff was an alibi for the paper. But the stuff is bricks and mortar. It ain't goin' anywhere. Meanwhile the paper's three sheets to the wind.

The communist party vanguard was suppoed to lead the proletariat to a Workers' Paradise at which point it was to 'wither away'. Yes, very naive. What instrument of power ever withers away? Well, we need to HELP the FIRE economy wither away. To do this, we need politicians who will actuate the withering process. It will fight against all reasonableness to remain. Obama ain't the guy. It remains to be seen if 'the guy' can arrive in time within the systen we have. I'm doubtful.

[cobben]

Grab Your Torch ‘n Pitchforks! At-risk homeowners storm mansions of mortgage CEOs

http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local...itchforks.html

" . . .
On Sunday, hundreds of angry homeowners and volunteers traveled in vans and minibuses and protested outside Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack’s multi-million-dollar mansion to tell the wealthy finance czar how they really feel.
The group, led by Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America (NACA), also went to Greenwich Finance CEO William Frey, among others, as part of what NACA calls the “Predator’s Tour.”
Sporting bright yellow shirts that read, “Stop Loan Sharks,'' protestors demanded more accountability from the CEOs of the financial institutions responsible for the millions of unaffordable mortgages in the state and across America.
"We can’t let them live quietly in a lap of luxury while they throw hard working Americans out on the street," NACA explains on its Web site. "This action is within our legal rights as Americans to peacefully protest and meet with those who control our family’s livelihood."
NACA coordinated the protest as part of its “Save the Dream” forum – a weekend of workshops to counsel stressed-out homeowners on ways to refinance their mortgages amid the nation's housing market meltdown.
. . ."