The G20: Protesting For A New Reality
Welcome to the new Post Modern global reality where almost nothing you see is real and certainly nothing you hear has any meaning. Enjoy it while it lasts because chilling reality has a historical record of making a showing sooner or later and the longer it is frustrated the worse the reality is when it finally makes its entrance.
What’s wrong with this picture? A handful of telegenic designer anarchists besiege the City surrounded by a mass of journalists as they vandalise a deserted retail branch of the almost state owned government scapegoat bank. Interviews with the protesters indicated that they have on the whole only the slightest grasp of what the financial crisis entails but are certain that bankers earn more than them which elevates their envy to political statement. Bank workers who grasped this ignorance were seen waving £10 notes at the hapless ignorant in the streets below and who can blame them.
What is really astonishing about these events is that we have reached a Post Modern watershed where we are witnessing a protest by a politically motivated but brainwashed group that rather than being at odds with the state works in the state’s favour by focussing public anger away from their complicit part in fermenting the financial crisis. Is it not usual for the public or doubly so acclaimed anarchists to be at odds with the state rather than their willing tool? Not any more, after decades of Post Modern indoctrination in state education our darling new generation are not taking to the streets to demand freedoms or to bring the state to task – no they want more controls and more state intervention in their lives.
State complicity in the financial crisis.
How The Fed created the housing bubble.
Dillon, Read & Co. Inc. and the Aristocracy of Stock Profits.
Not everyone there was entirely clueless I’m glad to say.
This guy understands the crux of the problem with the bailout. Right now taxpayers money is being used to replace the liabilities of mispriced derivative instruments – this is the crime that the G20 leaders are doing everything they can to avoid.
This guy recons that the suspension of the mark to market rule is the way to go, fine in the short term but otherwise its just evading the inevitable and ultimately results in nobody trusting anyone’s pricing strategy. At least it show he’s been thinking about it.
However check out that banner in the foreground. These people are actually demanding a single world currency? Do they have even the slightest clue as to how markets work?
almost nothing you see is real and certainly nothing you hear has any meaning
Sad but true!
designer anarchists
I would just call them Yobs!!! but maybe as you say they have been brainwashed and it is not their fault…
I listened to the conversation on Newsnight Review last night re: the riots, and it was all about designer protesters, trustafarians and British protest not being in the “great protest tradition” any more. The French apparently protest about specifics, so it is valid.
My thoughts:
1 – “Clause 28″ was pretty specific.
2 – Yes, the smorgasboard anti-capitalist is a living exercise in postmodernism.
3 – I am concerned how protest itself is being made impossibly difficult.
M.
Proof word: parasite. Really
This is a very thoughtful post.
I’ve just watched the President of the United States making a speech about rogue states and nuclear proliferation. He didn’t say ‘axis of evil’ or ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and a crowd of Europeans were cheering him.
As for the chap in the picture above that thinks our savings and futures are under threat I do tend to agree with him. What little savings I have has been removed from bank deposits and I’ve purchased some shares in things I think will survive the massive economic reform I think is coming. I’m also starting to agree with the pundits who are warning about inflation, although I don’t think that inflation is as evil as everyone makes out.
I do think President Obama looks like he is making some good decisions however. I think bankrupting inefficient subsidised US car makers and solving the problem of sustainable energy is a good way to go.
The more I think about it the more worried I get to be honest, I’m starting to wish I was a lot more ignorant.
“Do they have even the slightest clue as to how markets work? ”
No, not for a second
There was no coherent ideology which united those protesters, aside from a vague sense that someone really ought to do something to stop bad things
In fact, a good number of the protesters, ignorant as they were, were indeed calling for more of the same
Those of us who do have some radical, informed ideas about what’s going on are dismissed as conspiracy theorists and, quite deliberately, marginalized
No doubt to the great disappointment of revolutionary Marxists there is currently biff all indication that we are in pre-revolutionary stage
Where we’re at is a world where the things that are going to be done to people are going to be increasingly understood as being illegitimate and criminal, but without any credible alternative ideology or leadership that people can turn to to replace the criminals
It’s going to be a mess
Stef,
I don’t really see what ideology has to do with what’s happening except perhaps that multiculturalism and high levels of immigration is eroding national identity in such a way that allows the primary problem, that is corruption to flourish at a multitude of levels. I am quite perplexed by assertions that the current circumstances indicate that capitalism doesn’t work, if anything it indicates that globalization doesn’t work but that assertion receives the same treatment as conspiracy theorising. I find it interesting that there has been a much more honest debate about the role of globalisation in France lately than there has been in the English speaking world.
An Interview with Jerry Mander
A Mess – certainly.
If capitalism was working the banks that were claiming to be busted would have have been flushed down the toilet by now
I suspect that when you refer to ‘capitalism’ you’re referring to an idealised, genuinely competitive, genuinely free market system
We haven’t lived in anything like that for a long time, if ever
As we know I take a different line to you on the subject of immigration and can only point out that the corruption is not restricted to this country and that most of the high-level corrupting has been concentrated amongst people who aren’t recent migrants, with exception of the occasional oligarch
As for the unifying ideology I’m referring to, maybe I should use a different word. Outside of thinkers labeled as conspiracy theorists I’ve yet to encounter credible explanations which holistically and honestly account for the mess we’re starting to live through.
And without honest explanations, viable solutions are going to be thin on the ground
You and I both know we are not living in anything like a functioning capitalist system by any means. Neither has there ever been free-form market capitalism but I would argue that there has been semi-autonomous islands of capitalism which could function enough to provide a healthy means for development and wealth creation for ordinary people. Coupled with the pre-globalised economic structure it meant that corrosive regions did not infect healthy economies when dysfunction overwhelmed them periodically when reality readjusted the economic flows.
You misunderstand the thrust of my arguments regarding immigration, or more accurately unrestricted immigration and why and to what ends the elite are using it as a social weapon. Many Empires have used mass immigration to subdue populations in various ways over the centuries and it is important to note that the elite would have studied material common to any private classical curriculum. Here is the Wikipedia section on Gibbon :
According to Gibbon, the Roman Empire succumbed to barbarian invasions in large part due to the gradual loss of civic virtue among its citizens. [4] They had become weak, outsourcing their duties to defend their Empire to barbarian mercenaries, who then became so numerous and ingrained that they were able to take over the Empire.
Rings somewhat familiar does it not? The elite are already corrupt, what they need is to erode the civic standards of the people so that they are not held to previous standards of political life.
I don’t blame people for coming in search of a better life but in such large numbers it erodes what they came to find. Over Easter we met-up with friends who themselves are non-European migrants and they are furious that the corruption they fled from is following them here. It’s a highly contagious force not easily repealed because only a small percentage need to be involved before the honest, left behind for fools realise they must play the game too and before we know it we are living a new normal.
If you’re looking for a sociological unified field theory Stef forget it, there isn’t one. This is conspiracy mash-up at the end of a resource-cycle.
… but brainwashed group that rather than being at odds with the state works in the state’s favour by focussing public anger away from their complicit part in fermenting the financial crisis.
Yes, yes, yes and yes.
I agree with most of your last paragraph here. [We'd have to have a whole other debate on state education.] I’m not sure demonstrating is the way to get your message across any more, with so much tecnology at our fingertips. For the same reason, I’m not convinced there is any need for these summits in the first place.
Any idea where these images were first published? I desperately looking for their original source (they’re fantastic)