The Tulsa Forum by TulsaNow

And liberalism, according to this gentleman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Hastings) in the Daily Mail, is the cause of it and the riots in England.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2024284/UK-riots-2011-Liberal-dogma-spawned-generation-brutalised-youths.html

Very much worth reading this screed in its entirety, mostly because it's simply breathtaking. 

If this is in any way the voice of the English establishment, holy crap, the riots in Britain really ARE the first shots of a class war.   

We have friends in London and the term they use to describe the looters (and I have heard it used here too) is "Feral Humans."  We talked with yesterday morning (afternoon) to make sure they were alright, and they mentioned that this is not that uncommon (it's been happening for years), but has just gotten far worse.  He works for a tool company here in Tulsa, but grew up there.  He has friends from school that have been on "the dole" all their lives, and never sought employment, except for the occasional bar or cafe job where they could get paid under the table.  It's a culture based on their open ESA system.

He is by no means wealthy, but his perspective is vastly different than what we get from the media here.  He says these riots are less about protest than they are about "having a bit of fun, and getting a free TV without buying a license."

There is a lot of anger between working people and those on ESA, and the hatred has grown over the years.  Now that rising fuel costs have increased the cost of goods, it's becoming harder for people on ESA to live at the same level they have been accustomed to.

It seems they've bred a generation of entitlement hooligans.

How ironic.  What sparked the rioting wasnt so much the white police that stopped a taxicab and shot the unarmed black passenger, but their position afterward that it "was their right".

No one is wearing the white hat in this horse opera.

Good article and we have much the same thing going on here.

I think the good news is that eventually our youth has to go flip a burger or something and make that choice between the chains of dependency or the reward of hard work and innovation.

If we continue to allow our social dependency systems to grow, we will get to this state.

+1

I wonder what would happen with the economy if everybody had a job 10 years ago, would the economies be able to handle 100% employment?  Do you think that everybody CAN have a job that wants one?  Obviously not now, but say 1998 or so.  The incentive to work coupled with their skill sets probably has the same outcome.  1) they can work at a low paying job and barely get by 2) they can do nothing and get assistance and barely get by .  It probably starts at the schools and their parents.

The truth is there is always a certain amount of unemployment and low wage paying jobs. That is part of a healthy economy. In the past the low paying jobs were temporary waystations for young people as they moved up the ladder. They were part time for students or full time for those working towards a career or pulling themselves up out of poor circumstances.

I don't see that now. What I see is insistence on ever increasing work loads for these employees, frozen or retreating wages with less and less upward mobility available. In fact these temporary jobs are in demand by a new demographic that simply needs to pay bills to survive. That increasing demand keeps the workplace severe and the wages low. And the cost of just surviving is not frozen or decreasing along with the wages. This has changed the outlook of that segment of the nation. That population is somewhat educated (though not very well or recent), demoralized, unaware of what is happening in the economy around them, distrustful of their employers, disdainful of government (as well as clueless as to how it works) and resentful of authority in general.

Our pre-occupation domestically with the welfare of corporations, the destruction of organized labor, the dismantling of public education and the protection, nay, growth of wealth disparity has put us at risk. We now are in the position that 18th and 19th century Europe was in: a small, super wealthy ruling class that everyone loathes, fears and admires- a somewhat larger Gentry class complete with Princes and Nobles to extract cheap labor and taxes through the authority of the government- and the great, and getting greater, mass of poorly educated, overworked, peasants. That period also created wars around the world to seed the economic and social systems prevalent at the time so that they may defend their ways of living in the homeland. Sounds familiar eh? Add in food shortages, climatic disasters and disease and you have a heady brew.

We should be scared. Very scared. That period of time was cathartic, chaotic, violent. Blaming political parties, underclasses and political systems different than our own, is moving deck chairs on the Titanic. This is a cycle where doing that will ensure that we devolve.

As I understand it, economists consider "full" employment somewhere near 94-95% of the employable population.  In any sample of a given economic timeframe, there will be people not working -- thought the mix of reasons for this may be that they aren't able, aren't willing, or are in transition between two jobs. 

I posted this article because I was so taken aback by the language used to describe the rioters.  I don't know the author, and don't really know his politics, but it scans almost exactly with popular sentiment back during the heyday of the Industrial Revolution in England.  If you have a sense of labor history, not only was Victorian England the birthplace of modern industry (which was quickly adopted by the US), but it was also one of the places where the basic ideas of labor's relation to capital coalesced, and where a Marx actually spent the last 40 years of his life.  It was also a center of the class struggles of the late 1800's that Marx was chronicling in his theories.

When you read literature from that time, the people who represented capital and ownership spent a lot of time describing the workers as benighted, animalistic, unredeemably lesser beings -- subhumans even -- whose place was rightfully in the dank factories doing the dangerous work. There was that deeply Calvinist streak to wealth and ownership back then that implied very clearly that being having money indicated that you blessed explicitly by God; of course the opposite also held true:  if you were poor, you were that way by the grace of God as well.  Wealth and poverty were each essentially your lot, and you should live in that lot without complaining.  Or fighting to change it.

But this man's absolute denigration of the rioters -- skipping whatever other political motives there might be and focusing exclusively on their supposedly feral, uncontrollable, animalistic nature -- literally took me back to some of my college lit classes when we were reading Victorian authors. If the voices of the establishment in Britain are back to calling their rioters subhuman -- which, really, this man does in no uncertain terms -- that tells me we've dug right back into the dynamics that made for decades of unrest like this. 

Or what Aquaman said.

Well said. Think anyone is listening or comprehending?

You do have a point, but it's not the aristocracy that has taken to using this terminology.  It IS the working class.  The very people that the Labor Party used to represent, until they figured out that it was easier to buy voters through social programs.

It's the workers, shop owners, and other producing members of society that have, in many cases rightfully, pinned these names on those willing to simply be supported.  Matt says that they are "feral," both in living conditions and psyche.  They are the product of several generations of government dependence.  Very different than the Victorian class system.

This is a failed social engineering project.  Something we need to dissect and learn from.

Looks like a bunch of punks that have been coddled and need a boot in the donkey.....

I always enjoy your contributions. Thanks for poking your head in!

You're contradicting yourself. You say that it is not aristocracy coining the phrases as though that is even meaningful. Who cares who refers to them as "feral". Then you later say that it is working class people who are saying these things and include shop owners and "other producing members" without much specificity. I guess the writer is part of "other producing members".  Bear in mind that the writings in England describing American revolutionaries were similarly coded. Not comparing these folks to revolutionary American's just pointing out the similar misunderstanding of that movements root causes.

You are so confidant that this is a systemic failure due to "Labor party pandering" and "failed social engineering", (both popular vernacular for failed liberalism) that you seem to have missed the direct parallels we pointed out. I could just as easily allege that they are the result of several generations of widening income disparity, decreasing opportunity and reduced public education funding.

I agree it needs some serious non-aligned dissection. One of my very conservative friends who hails from England assures me the decline of their society commenced with the huge arrival of Muslims there. If we just come up with blaming Muslims, Liberals and lazy welfare chiselers, then what's the use.

Can someone PLEASE explain to me why the "widening income disparity" is such a HUGE problem. Because in my opinion it sounds like a giant case of penis envy and nothing more.

Marie Antoinette?

We're honored your highness.

Widening disparity directly affects income mobility . . . or more succinctly, the availability of the American Dream.  It means that money is silo'd at the top of the scale and is increasingly not available to the other levels.  It also means that the middle class, which we've traditionally valued highly in the US, is shrinking.  

You can just call it "liberalism."   ;)

The adjective is implied.  That's why it is constantly absorbed with "reforming" it's own programs.

Have you ever noticed how statists are constantly "reforming" their own handiwork? Education reform. Health-care reform. Welfare reform. Tax reform. The very fact that they're always busy "reforming" is an implicit admission that they didn't get it right the first 50 times. – Lawrence W. Reed, economist

You're already on the lawn chair with the Bud aren't you?

The whole thing may just be mob mentality at work. Yahoo reports that many of the arrested are neither poor, welfare slugs, downtrodden or maligned. So far they include an Olympic ambassador, a student from Exeter college and the daughter of a wealthy family, a musician who wanted a violin, a social worker, etc. IOW pretty mainstream people caught up in the excitement of the moment.  

Just warms your heart.

BTW, I think you've done an admirable job without your home boys, Conan and Guido, to cover your back.  :)

Ironic then, that the riots come after significant cuts to social programs and schooling. Funny that something that's being dismantled would be the cause. Or maybe Gassy is just unable to conceive of a causation for anything that doesn't involve liberal programs, dependency, or laziness.

And Reed is clearly an idiot. It's not the liberals that are reforming, it's the neoliberals, conservatives, and neoconservatives who insist that the old programs must be dismantled or reformed.

Let's at least assume a decent beer.

A.  Being poor doesn't equal being violent and destructive.  I came from dirt "poor" people, but we worked hard and made something of ourselves.

B.  Reform has to happen.  Even if you could snap your fingers and create a perfect program today, the world would change and then the program would have to change/reform as well.  Not to say that the program or system may or may not have been perfect in the first place, but just because something has to be reformed, doesn't mean it was wrong.  However,  I wish our school system for instance, had in place methodologies that constantly evaluated how things are working and what needs to be reformed/changed.  My old school for instance worked perfectly well when my demographic went there, but as the demographic changed, the school and its teaching methods did not, and thus the results got worse.  The school was perfectly fine, but because it did not reform to meet the current situation, things got worse.  Its obvious that our school system needs to put in place a sytem that constantly evaluates the situation and "updates"/ reforms each and every school to meet current curriculum and teaching methodology needs. But I do not see that happening?  Why not?

Inertia.  Threre's plenty of blame to share so let's not turn this into some kind of war of ideology.

How many more years (or sooner?) do you think it will take the upper class to collect all the money/wealth and have none available for anyone else?

When that happens the economy will really collapse.  As the rich will run out of money as well.
It's the uneducated masses that buy the stuff that make the rich rich.
No money to spend = not giving money to the rich folk

Since there is (supposedly) a finite amount of wealth and the rich are hoarding everything they can get their fingers on, when is it going to happen?

Wealth is an illusion. It is only quantifiable as purchasing power or power over others. Truly, what value was it for a king to own jewels, gold and land if he couldn't force others to provide food and defense for him. In the end, power is wealth. Power gets you food and defense.

This little construct we have of income/class mobility is a fairly recent thing (last 100-200 yrs. It coincided with the rise of democracy, something we can proudly take credit for. There is no guarantee it will last, though I think the current concentration of wealth is an economic aberration, not a profound social change.

I think I can "buy" that.  (Pun intended)