London Riots

I'm a social liberal, a fiscal conservative and registered independent. I was and am suspicious of Obama just as much as Bush, I didn't vote for either thank you very much. Also didn't vote for Palin... err... McCain. Reagan is the one that loosed the corporate world completely, handing them their own reigns in return for his power. You must have completely forgotten that our national debt ratio went crazy (rose more during his term than any other president to date except for Bush II ironically with Obama hot on his tails), our wages stay depressed and inflation went up right along with everything else involved in the cost of living. We got $2 trillion in debt from his smart economics and it was during his administration that we went from the world's largest credit holder to the world's largest debtor. So debt and spending is not partisan either. People only feel good about him now, he was not popular the way I recall it. I'm sure his approval ratings are published, he only had a few peak periods and that related mostly to external politics and his endorsement of the religious right wing. This is not a partisan issue, this is economics and matters of historical fact. Remember that Reagan's policy was approved by a democratic congress. You've been deceived by statistics, those numbers imply nothing about the overall health of the economy or of the individual. They say that the top 0.5% (almost all democrats, by the way- Buffet, Batey, Gates) stopped paying as much taxes and nothing more. Did you even look at the birth rate during those times? The population grows much faster than the taxes and the number of working folks increases proportionally, so the amount of taxes doubling is nothing, especially when considering the national debt tripled. And what does it mean to say unemployment dropped- we already know that only counts people who are claiming it and during his era, the amount and time you could claim were reduced. Funny how you can just play with the numbers to try to make them say what you want. They have to be taken in context. Trickle down never trickled down, our wages stayed the same but everything else became more expensive. That is the key concept in that model and it failed. Mostly because that was a period of trickling up, at an alarming rate, of both money and power.

There is ample economic literature available, especially now, detailing the Reagan policies, the effect of trickle down and the inherited economic time bomb which has already exploded, be informed if you're going to tout him as a hero. Politics should not be governed by 'feelings'. His crappy policies made wall street what it is today which made the economies of the world what they are today and thus is directly related to the riots in all of the countries with collapsed economies.

But as usual, a conservative always has to make it partisan- let's not ever accept any responsibility, even when we grow up I guess. Sounds a bit like racial hysteria too, sorry to say. No one else mentioned anything about race at all.

…”or who derailed it.”
I guess this is a rhetoric question?
Sergey

Ex-Touterse,
Thank you for explaining what does matter and what doesn’t.
Anyway, the name of a person who recently started two unnecessary, oil-inspired wars and therefore, “derailed longest peacetime economic growth the USA ever had” is well known to anyone who are lucky enough to have Internet connection and/or cable TV. That guy is still at large, and the FBI is desperately trying to find him. Am I right?

Lamprima - I asked if I was right. I did not get an answer about those in England being embarrassed by the spotlight and according to the interviews I've seen on the internet and on cable TV, I a think it was likely a bit of an embarrassment. To answer you. You're welcome and no. You should start a politics thread to discuss any hatred toward a political figure/ party/ truthfulness of media in politics/ and the veracity of things you can find on the internet. That is a pretty big cast net so I suggest you start one for each topic.

Good points Starlight. I'd like to toss in that China is having cracks as well and has been allowing some capitalism to occur as well. The Chinese have recently begun to refuse to work for poor wages and so some manufacturing companies are beginning to look elsewhere. I agree, China is looming large in power though. They do have extremely poor pollution controls though....

But no one sees the connection between this type of behaviour and the economically depressed? Dertodes, you point out how this is a cyclical trend and is linked to people "living off taxes"- I wonder, what kind of life you would have living off the meager government checks you might get. It's the part where uneducated people don't emphasize education with their children (social and school education- many aren't at home asking if their kids did their homework or where they are at night when they are only 11 years old- appalling really), probably because their parents didn't either, and so on and so on, that starts the whole ball rolling. If you don't have much worth anything then what else is there? You could say that these people don't have much to lose, that they don't much regard for a country that has little opportunity for them. It's not to absolve either party of guilt but just to say that people are much more easily ignited by convenient excuse when they aren't worried about consequences in their normal life. If your normal life is marginal at best, it's not much of a threat.

But you are absolutely right, there is a social component to all of this as well. It's really both- one group not interested or able to elevate themselves, another group that has no interest in elevating the poor and right now, not able too either. Like you pointed out, it is cyclical. Problems here in the US often also come from groups of people who are less likely to know where their 11 year old child is during a riot at night. That in and of itself should indicate that this is a class issue, not actually related to the shooting of the drug dealer even though that may be the specific even that catalyzed this particular mess. I think it's easier to blame poor people than politicians because, unlike politicians, they have no platform to stand on and are usually not articulate enough to say anything in their own defenses anyway, while politicians are trained to talk out of both sides of their mouths and have huge resources available to them to ensure that they are heard loud and clear.

I wouldn't say, though, by any stretch of the imagination that people living off government welfare are at all "actually better off than most people who DO work." There is a reason why no one wants to be poor given the option and it's not because you have some lavish lifestyle that makes you really enjoy all the time you have to spend while you aren't working. Most people that are very poor can't do much about their position, it's well documented that it is extremely unlikely for anyone to ever move out of their born socio-economic class, whether you are collecting government subsidies or if you were born a Kennedy or Tudor or a Hilton. Simply blaming poor parenting or laziness doesn't entirely address the issue and so won't prevent future riots. We need to look at the respective conditions of our poor- they are the meter by which the rest of our countries are gauged. Places with extreme differences between the richest and the poorest, like Mexico for example, are constantly plagued with problems like these. You let it go far enough and you hand power over to a Cartel that can provide when your government can't. You see? Now how to fix poverty... oh boy.

Poverty is a comparative state, you need something to relate it to and that is defined by your surrounding. Of course these people are not poor related to third world countries where children and everybody dies of horrible sickness and starves but these people have never been there and never seen such. They feel just as poor compared to the upper and midclass in England and thus they are as poor. So yes, the UK has a poverty problem.

Just to respond to your trivia- look up the riots in Cleveland in 1933. Just one example, there are others. Eerily similar to our current predicament, no?

I also notice that same trend, Dertodes. A general lack of emphasis on education which is never a good sign. Goes back to my point about the inability to articulate your own struggles clearly and in such a way that they are palatable rather than distancing.

All things are relative, that is a very important point. You can find extremely happy people living in what we coming from our respective relative wealth would find appalling. On the other hand, how many super-wealthy celebrities that seem to have the world at their fingertips end up spiraling rapidly out of control until one day they are a headline, a casualty of too much "happiness." Since this was about London originally, I can't help but think of a certain recently deceased starlet who was asked to go to rehab and said "no, no, no" (bad joke, I know, but couldn't resist).

The dichotomy which I am interested in exhibiting is that of people who seemingly have everything and the segment of society which is unable to have this for themselves.

I am in the medical community myself and also know lots of folks from all over the world that came from very little to make themselves better (interesting that MD is almost always the choice- in most people's eyes MD= Money, so again we go back to wealth and happiness being equivocated for those don't have wealth to begin with), many are best friends and colleagues. Note that anyone who was able to up and leave a disadvantaged country to make a "better" life was not the lowest end of that country to begin with. They may have had very little relative to you but you don't just get on a plane from the top of an isolated mountain in Honduras one day, you are already starting off ahead of most of the people around you who are no doubt as envious of your position as you are of the people in the place you are trying to get. There are always exceptions of course, we talk about science all the time and we almost never say 100% anything, but a kid that leaves India to become a doctor in the UK started off in a relatively better position than one born in a UK ghetto. One goes to a place where everything is up, the other starts at the bottom of the top with not much hope of going anywhere. If all it took was a desire to be improved then the populations of India, rural China and Southeast Asia, much of Africa and lot of Latin America, all those who have so little relatively and are generally considered ambitious peoples would have immigrated to somewhere with more opportunity already. But most of them, like most of the children that are born into "first-world" squalor, aren't able to do anything about it because you have to have a little to get started in the first place or at least someone who is willing to offer you a freebie to get you going.

The people who uproot themselves and leave everything behind to move to another country to make a better life are obviously naturally extremely ambitious, so this is another apples to oranges issue. You have to compare the people who live in India that sell their daughters into sexual slavery to feed their son to our own disadvantaged kids to see the same. There are many examples of people attempting to intervene by providing educations, offering a ticket out, and so on to said families and they ultimately rarely take advantage of them. The daughter's nearly always end up back in the brothel. Why?

It is a fascinating and tragic subject, lots of factors that guide what people can and can't do by virtue only of the context of their births.