Earlier this week, the Guardian reprinted a piece by Naomi “Shock Doctrine” Klein on “Looting with the Lights On“:
… Argentina, circa 2001. The economy was in freefall and thousands of people living in rough neighbourhoods (which had been thriving manufacturing zones before the neoliberal era) stormed foreign-owned superstores. They came out pushing shopping carts overflowing with the goods they could no longer afford – clothes, electronics, meat. The government called a “state of siege” to restore order; the people didn’t like that and overthrew the government.
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Argentina’s mass looting was called el saqueo – the sacking. That was politically significant because it was the very same word used to describe what that country’s elites had done by selling off the country’s national assets in flagrantly corrupt privatisation deals, hiding their money offshore, then passing on the bill to the people with a brutal austerity package. Argentines understood that the saqueo of the shopping centres would not have happened without the bigger saqueo of the country, and that the real gangsters were the ones in charge. But England is not Latin America, and its riots are not political, or so we keep hearing. They are just about lawless kids taking advantage of a situation to take what isn’t theirs. And British society, Cameron tells us, abhors that kind of behaviour.
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This is said in all seriousness. As if the massive bank bailouts never happened, followed by the defiant record bonuses. Followed by the emergency G8 and G20 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 tuition fees, rolling back union contracts, creating rush privatisations of public assets and decreasing pensions – mix 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.
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This is the global saqueo, a time of great taking. Fuelled by a pathological sense of entitlement, this looting has all been done with the lights on, as if there was nothing at all to hide. There are some nagging fears, however. In early July, the Wall Street Journal, citing a new poll, reported that 94% of millionaires were afraid of “violence in the streets”. This, it turns out, was a reasonable fear…
Until I skimmed the Guardian comments, I hadn’t realized that the Bullingdon Club was still in existence… or that Prime Minister Cameron and London Mayor Boris Johnson had been BC members during their youth. They were careless people…
Jewish Steel
Typically meandering essay by Žižek on the same topic, if you like that kind of thing (I do).
http://www.lrb.co.uk/2011/08/19/slavoj-zizek/shoplifters-of-the-world-unite
some guy
start at the top. Indict, convict, and imprison Geithner. then Blankenfein and Dimon. then work downward from there.
MikeBoyScout
Yeah, but Clubs are different from Gangs.
Corner Stone
@some guy:
Ha! You throw Jamie Dimon in the pokey and his lieutenants will be beating at the AG’s door that afternoon, spilling their guts and begging for mercy.
PeakVT
Some times I think the UK is a great place; other times I think it’s become the best, most subtle implementation of 1984 yet.
@some guy: Oh, come on. There’s almost never enough evidence to convict the top guys unless some people farther down the ladder are flipped first. For whatever reason, that hasn’t happened.
Citizen Alan
Luckily for the U.S., our peasant class is much better behaved than the peasants of Argentina or the UK. Indeed, many of them are politically active in support of their feudal lords and, if asked will proudly and defiantly state their belief that if the oligarchs are just given a bit more in tax cuts and windfalls, eventually they will reward their loyal vassals with a modest increase in the general standard of living. Or perhaps just a slightly less precipitous drop in the general standard of living.
Bill Murray
@PeakVT: wrt your second point that is what RICO is for. Not that it will get applied
gnomedad
@Citizen Alan:
“Better-behaved peasant class” should become a tag.
Stillwater
@PeakVT: For whatever reason, that hasn’t happened.
But it can happen – look at Murdoch’s crumbling empire. Whether he personally sleeps with the fishes is yet to be seen.
You throw a few cuffs on various people in the middle, make gestures at throwing them on a few more, see what shakes out. If corporate America has shown us anything it’s that loyalty can be leveraged.
rcman
Luckily, we here in liberal Massachusetts are taking care of people who rob from the disadvantaged:
An Athol man was sentenced in Orange District Court for the theft in September of $12 from a Jimmy Fund can in the lobby of the Athol Police Station… He was sentenced Monday to one year in jail in the Franklin County Jail and House of Correction and began serving his sentence immediately after the sentence was handed down.
TheMightyTrowel
Having lived in Oxford i can tell you that the bullingdon club and its ilk are alive and well. The key is to remember than when the property damage is caused by students it’s high-spirited, youthful hijinks and when it’s done by townies it’s rioting and looting. All clear?
Also, a must read: open letter to David Cameron’s parents
PeakVT
@Stillwater: I agree it can happen. I just don’t want to prompt another Obagger/Firebot war by assigning blame for why it hasn’t.
aimai
@TheMightyTrowel:
Thanks for posting that, MightyTrowel. My father sent it to me and I was madly scrolling through my emails to post it here. Its well worth a read.
aimai
JenJen
If you’ve never seen it before, do have a look at the famous photo of Boris Johnson, David Cameron and other future masters of the universe, all dressed up in their Bullingdon finery in 1987.
There’s always been something unsettling to me about the photo. Can’t really put my finger on it, except I get a very heavy “we were born to run the world, and you’re not invited” vibe.
Yutsano
@JenJen:
The highly faboo 80’s hairstyles don’t seem to quite mesh with the mental image of British overlording. That and the whole concept is just creepy. No wonder the British refuse to give up the monarchy.
karen marie
Al-Jazeera English posted an op-ed attributing the British riots to a lack of manners being taught in the home.
I almost spit my coffee out.
It wouldn’t have been nearly as surprising if it were a piece in WaPo or Newsweek or on Fox, but Al-Jazeera?
TheMightyTrowel
@JenJen: Don’t forget the goat [email protected] George Osborne. He is chancellor of the exchequer, a multi-millionaire, a smug arsewipe, and his only previous econ experience was as treasurer of the bullingdon club (in which capacity he was serving when that photo was taken)
TheMightyTrowel
@aimai: It’s among the best things I’ve read in weeks.
catpal
@TheMightyTrowel: thanks that is great writing and another example of Cameron as complete oozing-slime.
recently saw appropriate quote somewhere that I can only get part correct “Theft is a crime for most of the population, but if you are Stealing wearing an expensive business suit – it is called Commerce.”
I’m so disgusted about all of this crap – and still absorbing Matt Taibbi’s amazing SEC atrocities story.
Jason
As it turns out, Cameron took in the cricket yesterday at the Oval and shared some cakes with Aggers. Nice work if you can get it.
JenJen
@Yutsano:
Exactly. It’s as though the Masters of the Universe were really just members of Spandau Ballet.
@TheMightyTrowel: That open letter kicks so much ass, I’m sending it to everyone I know who seems to think they understand what happened in the UK and especially London recently.
Xenos
Great Gatsby? Has no-one here read Waugh’s Decline and Fall? The ‘Bollinger’ club victimizes the poor, dreary protagonist and gets the whole story going. I think it was just a bit too late to be out of copyright.
patrick II
Naomi Klein is brilliant and is among the most important writers of our time. She writes those things that you recognize as true the moment you read them, the connections that are there but unsaid. I learn something everytime I read her.
Xenos
@karen marie:
FWIW, Russia Today has been all over the history of class struggle in London. You would think they had gone back to the old ways, to hear it.
Commenting at Ballon Juice since 1937
I’ve been reading Jack London’s The Iron Heel.. Its very prescient. Scarily prescient. This has happened before.
El Cid
The Western power structures are now able to apply to their respective domestic populations the same sorts of austerity and ‘structural adjustment’ programs our ‘experts’ gleefully imposed upon 3rd world economies in the 1980s and 1990s.
At the time, though, South American, African, and Asian local activists and scholars as well as concerned Westerners in similar positions pointed out that the US & Europeans via IMF/WB/IDB etc were giving those economies “advice” which they would not apply to their own nations — since they were designed to turn economies to the needs of international investors and to dismantle social welfare programs.
(Particularly cute were cuts to primary school funding in Africa so that families had to pay for their children to learn reading & writing, because, you know, you have to teach those peasants to learn how to pinch pennies.)
Now they have that chance.
parsimon
@Citizen Alan:
I realize that this is sarcastic, but this may truly be lucky. (Or not.) The US is heavily steeped in the importance of adhering to the rule of law, and it serves us well a lot of the time. I’m not going to dismiss that, to be honest.
The problem, of course, is that the system is supposed to be set up to allow for legal and peaceable recourse when injustice is being done. It used to be much more set up for that; now, not so much. We fail to prosecute bankers and so on.
I heard a brief interview on NPR recently about the differences between the 1980s savings and loan crisis and the recent 2008 debacle: the interviewee noted that there were 10,000s of prosecutions brought back then, and thousands of these were found to have enough merit to go forward. The comparison to now, the interviewee said, was “obscene”. There’s a particular government agency involved in such things — I’m realizing now that I was hearing this while distracted, and didn’t quite register how incredibly important it is — and that agency’s staffers were reassigned to the Dept. of Homeland Security post-9/11 and not replaced, so that there are simply not enough staff to address these things now.
parsimon
We should look into that.
Quiddity
If you want to understand the riots, check out this short clip from the 1994 rap-mocumentary, Fear of a Black Hat;
youtube
Ronbo
We’ve already seen the use of shutting down phone service in SanFran BART. It (the shut-down) will be criticized; but also, used abundantly, as necessary, to limit citizen outrage to writing letters to the editor.
Notice how the English Uprising has been charactized as a racial situation? Odd how this follows Austerity, college rate hikes and a plethera of budget-cutting moves. Couldn’t happen here. If it does, it will not be reported by the MSM. We must ensure that the Bush/Obama agenda is maintained for the good of our owners. Trickle-down, you know.