The London Riots...

[bruce90]

...are the rioters simply looters as this Government would have us believe or are they maybe doing all us ordinary working men and women a massive favour by showing the powers that be that if someone like bankers, power companies and the oil cartel doesn't start showing some restraint in their demands for profits, life in this country for the fatcats and the 'I'm alright Jack' politicians is going to get pretty complicated.

[PLM2]

Why dont all those evil people just close their businesses and you can all eat each other.

[gunnergoz]

Maybe a bit more complicated than that. It also reflects the damage wrought by modern economies that have evolved to require both parents to work in order to have a sufficient income, and as a result there is no one to stay home to raise and supervise offspring. It also reflects a media-obsessed culture where the influence of parents drastically falls off as soon as the TV set, computer and cell phone work their magic on the kids. Finally, it reflects a failure of the community to grasp the changes that these and other factors are having on the mindset of youth.

Of course there is a viable argument to be made that the issues I mention can also be laid at the feet of the "bankers, power companies and the oil cartel" (in the US we would point at "bankers, corporations and the wealthy") whose actions in the past 30 years have led to the accumulation of money and power in those centers at the expense of ordinary citizens.

[dieseltaylor]

Looters. If it were simply protest why are they stealing? Why destroy businesses that give jobs. Why burn flats?

Flexing their "gang" muscle is empowering, and getting stuff to use or flog on eBay is a nice bonus. Have they any genuine beef. Well if you don't work at school and you don't like to work anyway then you are likely to end up at the bottom of the economic heap. And whilst being a rapper/star looks good in the videos the odds against are higher than being struck by lightning.

I do know lots of working coloured folks both professional - doctors and dentists, and delivery drivers and refuse collectors. It is not impossible to be employed and to go up the ladder - its just some folk don't see the need to try.

[Boeman]

Looters. If it were simply protest why are they stealing? Why destroy businesses that give jobs. Why burn flats?

Flexing their "gang" muscle is empowering, and getting stuff to use or flog on eBay is a nice bonus. Have they any genuine beef. Well if you don't work at school and you don't like to work anyway then you are likely to end up at the bottom of the economic heap. And whilst being a rapper/star looks good in the videos the odds against are higher than being struck by lightning.

I do know lots of working coloured folks both professional - doctors and dentists, and delivery drivers and refuse collectors. It is not impossible to be employed and to go up the ladder - its just some folk don't see the need to try.

Those who have a legitimate beef as you put it, aren't the only attendees to these riots.

Here in Toronto, during the G20 summit last year, a number of different factions presented themselves. Most notable were the radical anarchist sect; a collection of youth whose only agenda was to disrupt the G20 proceedings and cause general mayhem (which they did as evidenced by the burning wrecks of police cars strewn about Downtown Toronto).

My understanding is that England also has a fairly large anti-government anarchist movement of its own. These individuals often intermingle themselves with a larger crowd before donning black garbs and masks just prior to wreaking havoc. Looting, vandalism and arson are all common activities in which they engage.

What many anarchists fail to realize is that the very people they are hurting the most are the ones whom they claim to be standing shoulder to shoulder with. Their violent methodology more often than naught, takes center stage on the six o'clock news - effectively overshadowing the pleas for government reform by those with real grievances.

[JonS]

Looters. If it were simply protest why are they stealing? Why destroy businesses that give jobs. Why burn flats?

Because they have no stake in that society.

Because they are relentlessly told that to be successful they have to have an iPad, a smart phone, and an $800 pair of jeans.

Because the means to get those things - primarily through education - have been taken away.

Because they had no responsibility for the global economic crisis, yet they've ended up carrying most of the results.

Because when you set up a society in which pervasive surveilance is a daily fact of life, occasionally people rebel.

Because when simmering rage finds a release, the results aren't even vaguely logical.

Because when the police use tactics like kettling on peaceful demonstrations, it is abundantly clear that the police do not have their interests at heart.

The funniest 'official' comment I heard was on Monday(?) from Boris Johnson, something to the effect that justice 'must be allowed to run it's course' and the police must be 'left to do their jobs.' Uh, Boris? I'm pretty sure it is failures on both those fronts that triggered the riots.

It's not all bad though. It's been super to see how well all those surveillance camera's are(n't) helping maintain law and order. Maybe now we can get rid of the fvcking things.

[JonS]

My understanding is that England also has a fairly large anti-government anarchist movement of its own. These individuals often intermingle themselves with a larger crowd before donning black garbs and masks just prior to wreaking havoc. Looting, vandalism and arson are all common activities in which they engage.

So ... yeah. That's a pretty poor reading of the situation, I think. A couple of years ago when someone from 'the Black Bloc' tried to start something, it turns out he was an undercover cop sent to infiltrate the protest and get some violence going so the uniformed police would have a pretext to crack down. It didn't work - he was told to stop behaving like a fvcktard by the actual protesters, and was soon after outed

Also, 'anarchists' aren't a monolithic entity, any more than 'christians' or 'lawyers' are. They believe all sorts of things across a very broad spectrum, and are primarily non-violent.

Still, cute pat answers blaming the poor and sort-of-identifiable ideologies are easy, so let's just run with that eh?

[PLM2]

Shouldnt this thread be locked as politics?

Bottom line is nobody burning down buildings or looting businesses deserves an ounce of respect from anyone. Anyone who gives them respect loses every molecule of respect from me.

The US should rent out the LAPD to foreign countries for situations like these. I guarantee you they won't ever whine about some low life getting shot again in self defense or executed by a police officer or whatever happened. Everybody on the streets, when we see 'em, **** em.

[dieseltaylor]

Shouldnt this thread be locked as politics?

Bottom line is nobody burning down buildings or looting businesses deserves an ounce of respect from anyone. Anyone who gives them respect loses every molecule of respect from me.

The US should rent out the LAPD to foreign countries for situations like these. I guarantee you they won't ever whine about some low life getting shot again in self defense or executed by a police officer or whatever happened. Everybody on the streets, when we see 'em, **** em.

AH! the voice of reason.

Bear in mind the start of the school holidays providing lots of extra testosterone and stupidty and gullibility.

However ther is no doubt that the collusion of the Met, News International, and the stupidity of Cameron/Osborne in using Coulson does reinforce the view that there is a "power" elite in the UK. And it is a corrupt triumvirate so therefore this justifies "protest". Of course they do not articulate it quite that way.

I think there is a widespread feeling of disgust with the situation including the niddle classes that punishment for the bubble and corruption seems not to happen. However the big winners still control the media and the parties so you do not see much about it in terms of sorting out the status quo.

The knowledge that 10trillion US$ is floating around the worlds economic system and is the proceeds of money laundering, crime, crooked dictators, and people avoiding tax - I find especially irksome. Most of it is invested through London and New York so the freezing of all these funds and confiscation if not legitimately claimed would bolster most of the worlds economy. The World Bank:

The World Bank has published a report under its Stolen Asset Recovery (STAR) Initiative looking at stolen assets. Entitled Barriers to Asset Recovery, it is a massive document, and we haven't read the whole thing yet, but we shall highlight a couple of important points. First, they accept estimates provided by our ally Raymond Baker at Global Financial Integrity (GFI):

Although the exact magnitude of the proceeds of corruption circulating in the global economy is impossible to ascertain, estimates demonstrate the severity and scale of the problem. The proceeds of crime, corruption, and tax evasion are estimated to represent between $1 trillion and $1.6 trillion annually, with half [$500-800bn] coming from developing countries.

One wonders if the existence of these special places for the rich and the crooked were taught at school and college how long they would be allowed to last. However a pre-emptive strike to grab this money would be the boldest and most sensible thing to do. It is all invested somewhere so simply making sure no money can be taken out of the country, or assets sold before a legitimate ownership was proved would be a huge revenge.

Millions of people have a queasy feeling that something is not right in the global economy – but they struggle to put their fingers on what exactly the problem is. Treasure Islands at last tells the real story of where it all went wrong. This is the great untold story of globalisation.

Tax havens are not exotic, murky sideshows at the fringes of the world economy: they lie at its centre. Half of world trade flows, at least on paper, through tax havens. Every multinational corporation uses them routinely. The biggest users of tax havens by far are not terrorists, spivs, celebrities or Mafiosi – but banks.

Tax havens are the ultimate source of strength for our global elites. Just as European nobles once consolidated their unaccountable powers in fortified castles, to better subjugate and extract tribute from the surrounding peasantry, so financial capital has coalesced in their modern equivalent today: the tax havens. In these fortified nodes of secret, unaccountable political and economic power, financial and criminal interests have come together to capture local political systems and turn the havens into their own private law-making factories, protected against outside interference by the world’s most powerful countries – most especially Britain. Treasure Islands will, for the first time, show the blood and guts of just how they do it.

Tax havens aren’t just about tax. They are about escape – escape from criminal laws, escape from creditors, escape from tax, escape from prudent financial regulation – above all, escape from democratic scrutiny and accountability. Tax havens get rich by taking fees for providing these escape routes. This is their core line of business. It is what they do.

These escape routes transform the merely powerful into the untouchable. “Don’t tax or regulate us or we will flee offshore!” the financiers cry, and elected politicians around the world crawl on their bellies and capitulate. And so tax havens lead a global race to the bottom to offer deeper secrecy, ever laxer financial regulations, and ever more sophisticated tax loopholes. They have become the silent battering rams of financial deregulation, forcing countries to remove financial regulations, to cut taxes and restraints on the wealthy, and to shift all the risks, costs and taxes onto the backs of the rest of us. In the process democracy unravels and the offshore system pushes ever further onshore. The world’s two most important tax havens today are United States and Britain.

Without understanding offshore, we will never understand the history of the modern world.

Poverty in Africa? Offshore is at the heart of the matter. Industrial-scale corruption and the wholesale subversion of governments by criminalised interests, across the developing world? Offshore is central to the story, every time. The systematic looting of the former Soviet Union and the merging of the nuclear-armed country’s intelligence apparatus with organized crime, is a story that unfolds substantially in London and its offshore satellites. Saddam Hussein used tax havens to buttress his power, as does North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il today. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s strange hold over Italian politics is very much an offshore tale. The Elf Affair, Europe’s biggest ever corruption scandal, had secrecy jurisdictions at its core. Arms smuggling to terrorist organisations? The growth of mafia empires? Offshore. You can only fit about $1 million into a briefcase: without offshore, the illegal drugs trade would be a fraction of its size.

Private equity and hedge funds? Goldman Sachs? Citigroup? These are all creatures of offshore. The scandals of Enron, Parmalat, Long Term Capital Management, Lehman Brothers, AIG — and many more? Tax havens lay behind them all. The rise of multinationals, the explosion of debt in advanced economies since the 1970s is substantially an offshore tale. Complex monopolies, frauds, insider trading rings — these corruptions of free markets always have tax havens at their heart. As Treasure Islands explains in vivid, thrilling, horrifying detail, every big financial crisis since the 1970s – including the great global crisis that erupted in 2007 – has been a creature of the tax havens.

These problems all have other explanations too. Tax havens are never the only story, because offshore exists only in relation to elsewhere. That is why it is called offshore.

Without understanding the tax havens, or the secrecy jurisdictions as I often prefer to call them, we cannot understand the world. Treasure Islands at last starts to fill this gigantic hole in modern history.

In short, it is the most important exposé of tax havens ever published.

[dieseltaylor]

And for JonS. How did this play in NZ?

Offshore Registration Business Forced to Halt Operations Tuesday, 28 June 2011 Stories

• Offshore Registration Business Forced to Halt Operations
  
• Crime Goes Offshore
  
• Laszlo Kiss - The Offshore Master
  
• Kiss: Police Arrest Kiss
  
• Kiss: The Taylor - Kiss Network
  
• Kiss: Hiding Ownership Offshore
  
• Kiss: Romania Almost an Offshore
  
• A Reporter Forms an Offshore
  
• Delaware - The Onshore Offshore
  
• Selling Offshores in Ukraine
  
• Solutions to the Problem

Taylor Network shut down by New Zealand Authorities

Business registration operations run by the Auckland-based Taylor family, including GT Group, NZCI, and companies in New Zealand and Vanuatu were shut down by New Zealand authorities in early June according to press reports and a letter from Ian Taylor to clients.

Through GT Group and other corporations, the Taylor family set up a vast enterprise that registered some 2,500 offshore companies. A number of these were used by criminal gangs including the Muslim militant group Hezbollah, Russian crime networks and the Mexico-based Sinaloa drug cartel. Offshore companies are often used as a way to mask the identity of owners, launder money or evade taxes.

According to several New Zealand news agencies and a letter from Ian Taylor to his clients, the registration agents have been forced to shut down their enterprises. The order came weeks after the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project published an in-depth feature explaining for the first time how Taylor’s network of companies and associates operate.

GT Group is linked to a network of clients spanning the United States, the Caribbean, Russia, Ukraine, Cyprus, Hong Kong, Latvia, Romania and Seychelles. Another company registered by Taylor, SP Trading Limited, chartered the planes that were caught smuggling 35 tons of North Korean weapons intended for Tehran in 2009. The interception of the planes by Thai authorities was the catalyst for a 16-month investigation into the Taylors by New Zealand officials.

Geoffrey Taylor founded the Vanuatu-registered GT Group in 1995, but the business is now run by his son Ian. Another son, Michael, is also involved in the family business. The elder Taylor also started Global Fin Net, which, according to a cached version of GT Group’s website, serves as their “onshore associate company,” offering financial services and registration consulting for new businesses. The company has offices registered in the UK, Australia, New York, China and Hong Kong.

Also according to the website archive, in addition to companies in Vanuatu and New Zealand, the family has established offshore companies in the Samoa, the Cook Islands and the Principality of Hutt River, an unrecognized breakaway section of Australia.

At the time of publication, none of the websites affiliated with Taylor businesses are operating.

In recent months, operations linked to Ian Taylor’s offices in Auckland, New Zealand have come under increased scrutiny. An OCCRP reporter posing as an oil dealer played a role in last year’s arrest of Taylor’s business partner Laszlo Gyorgy Kiss, a Romanian businessman charged with money laundering and complicity in embezzling. Former American bank Wachovia has been implicated in using a complex network of companies and banks in Latvia linked to Ian Taylor to obscure the laundering of up to $479 billion in Mexican cartel profits. And a company set up by Taylor and his father, Bristoll Export Ltd, has been investigated for funneling hundreds of millions of dollars in Russian tax fraud into protected Swiss bank accounts. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the case is also linked to the deaths of four people, including a lawyer who died in Russian police custody.

OCCRP obtained a memo written by Taylor in early June to his clients announcing a halt in operations. In it, he said the services his company provides were shut down due to “irresponsible media and a government department that was embarrassed by that media and looked to blame someone.”

The offshore agent told his clients that the situation was past legal resolution.

“Even our top level lawyers are afraid to stand by us because they fear what the government may do to them, despite the fact that WE are the victims,” he wrote in the same e-mail.

He said the firm would not accept new customers, but assured current clients that they would be transferred to another firm who would, for a fee, “incorporate a new structure in a reputable Asian jurisdiction” with services provided by “a bank you will already know and trust.”

Despite the activities of many of Taylor’s clients, most of his business dealings were legal in New Zealand. The rules for allowing business proxies in the New Zealand Companies Act of 1993 make the country a haven for offshore companies. Local authorities do not require financial statements, audits or records. A 2009 report by the inter-governmental Financial Action Task Force (FATF) warned the New Zealand government that the lack of legal requirements for financial companies to identify an actual owner could allow for terrorist financing and money laundering.

Representatives of the Taylor businesses did not respond to requests for comment.

http://www.reportingproject.net/offshore/index.php/offshore-registration-business-forced-to-halt-operations

[costard]

Corporate fascism coming to its predictable middle game. The dominant philosophy (ref. PLM2's wretched understanding) believes it is possible to run a twenty-first century economy with a pre-AD political system - slavery. Well, it is, but don't expect the slaves to be quite as ignorant of their power as the corporate fascists are of theirs. There is the potential here to end up with another dark age and the problems aren't going to be solved with the current, stupifyingly bad leadership we're seeing.

Anyone catch the news that the bullet found in the police radio has been ID'ed as police issue, most likely fired from an H&K MP5? It was the police who ID'ed it and announced it: they, at least, understand that telling more lies about the circumstances surrounding the shooting that ignited this ****fight isn't going to help anyone.

Hold tight, things will calm down eventually (provided the dispute isn't escalated, deliberately or otherwise). We're going to see more and more of this, by the way.

[gunnergoz]

And wait until the rotary oscillator hits the fecal matter in USA, where, thanks to the NRA and the 2nd Amendment, the rioters will be at least as well armed as the police...

[gautrek]

Well it would seem that some of the first court cases are going through.It would appear we have a Primary school mentor,a student,a graphic design, a soldier and other people with jobs.

So so much for it being the poor and unemployed at rioting here.

Its just wankers who should know better.We also have 3 dead Muslims(I think) who died trying to defend their business.It would seem that a car was deliberately ran over them.At least the father of them is not calling it a race issue.Good for him.

Plus in Birmingham we have the first signs of the general public fighting back.They tried to attack a load of shops owned by Turks.Who got a load of men out and chased the wankers down the street and caught a few.They did the right thing by giving them to the police.

[funkeesax]

Just "normal people" caught up in mob mentality. Same thing happened here in Vancouver earlier this year. Bunch of punks with iphones and blackberries taking pictures of the party, tweeting to their friends about all the cool sh*t they stole. You can kid yourself that this is about economics or politics, but I'd bet most of these people are just drunk idiots who've caught the fever. There's no ideology behind this, this isn't the revolution. The urge to partake in the destructive party is the main fuel for this fire.

[Boeman]

So ... yeah. That's a pretty poor reading of the situation

The same, ironically enough, could be said here.

, I think. A couple of years ago when someone from 'the Black Bloc' tried to start something, it turns out he was an undercover cop sent to infiltrate the protest and get some violence going so the uniformed police would have a pretext to crack down. It didn't work - he was told to stop behaving like a fvcktard by the actual protesters, and was soon after outed

Quebec is hotbed of authoritarian mistrust and has been ever since the French lost the city during the battle on the plains of Abraham. Nothing new to see here.

The undercover officer's intentions was certainly out of line, but hardly a representative sample when contrasted to numerous other riots throughout Canada in which anarchists sought to actively goad police and the crowd into violent confrontations. Black Bloc tactics were frequently utilized by the anarchists during the G20 summit in Toronto that resulted in many stores throughout the downtown area being smashed open and looted. The video footage is evidence enough that these black garb miscreants played no small role in the violence.

Also, 'anarchists' aren't a monolithic entity, any more than 'christians' or 'lawyers' are. They believe all sorts of things across a very broad spectrum, and are primarily non-violent.

Perhaps.

Nonetheless, to ignore the actions of the more aggressive sects of the anarchist movement is, at best, disingenuous.

Still, cute pat answers blaming the poor and sort-of-identifiable ideologies are easy, so let's just run with that eh?

Under which context did I insinuate this?

[JonS]

The undercover officer's intentions was certainly out of line, but hardly a representative sample

It's far from the only example.

[gunnergoz]

In the end, about all this proves is that irrational opportunism is alive and well in the human psyche.

[Tero]

In the end, about all this proves is that irrational opportunism is alive and well in the human psyche.

Who decides the standards which define what is irrational ? The looters have been classed as "unemployable 2nd-3rd generation drop outs from society". By definition that means they live under different rules outside "normal" society. Sure, they have the telly which blasts them with the consumerism they can only afford if they resort to crime.

I watched on SkyNews an interview with a few of the looters and it clearly showed how different the world looks from different banks of the Thames. What worries me is the fact that youth unemployment is at the same level all across the EU and with the capitalist economy on its way down the drain there is little the societies can do under the corporate fascism the economy of the region is being run.

The Finnish elections showing how people in general are longing for a change in the global economy run affairs of states towards a more localized decision making, the Norway massacre and the UK looting seem to be isolated incidents but if there was a big picture the shape it is taking does not foretell happy times.

[gunnergoz]

Who decides, Tero? Maybe the people whose businesses have been looted and destroyed? The very same businesses that previously sold products, provided services and were giving employment to some of these same looters and their families, friends and neighbors.

It may be a complex equation, but in the end it still comes down to people robbing others because they can, then later seeking to appear normal, if not victimized themselves.

[JonS]

then later seeking to appear normal, if not victimized themselves.

I think that's a gross distortion of what's being said here. I think we can all agree that burning, looting, and mugging are a bad idea. And we can probably get agreement on the idea that those folks should face the justice system for it. It'd be nice, though, if that justice were applied evenly.

The larger question is; do you want to go through this again next year, or the year after? Because, you know, if the ONLY thing you do is pummel the burners, looters, and muggers*, then sure as eggs get broken in a riot, you'll be calling out the fire department again, real soon.

Opinion.

Jon

* oh, and censor social media. Whoops, wrong repressive regime - try this one. Apparently rioters using social media is only a good thing in other countries. Great work team! *golfclap*

[gunnergoz]

Jon, I'm not distorting what's being said here, I'm simply commenting on what I have seen on TV and the web. I do not get my news feed from BFC's forums.

[JonS]

Fair enough, although I think it's a distortion of what's being said elsewhere too.

[Michael Emrys]

Who decides, Tero? Maybe the people whose businesses have been looted and destroyed? The very same businesses that previously sold products, provided services and were giving employment to some of these same looters and their families, friends and neighbors.

This aspect of the events has reminded me of the Watts riots of 1965. At that time there was widespread fear that armed negroes would fan out across the city, shooting people on freeways and committing all forms of mayhem. The fact is that there was virtually zero of that. The destruction stayed at home and was confined to the rioters' own neighborhoods. This was not a rational choice as it meant that the already impoverished district became even more so. Rioting is not usually—almost by definition—a rational act any more than an earthquake is.

Michael

[Tero]

By gunnergoz

Who decides, Tero? Maybe the people whose businesses have been looted and destroyed?

Percentagewise, how many of the looted businesses are privately/family owned and how may belong to nationwide/multinational chains who lose on a weekly basis more to shoplifting and inventory discrepencies than to these kinds of on-off calamities ?

The very same businesses that previously sold products, provided services and were giving employment to some of these same looters and their families, friends and neighbors.

Says who ? They do claim to give jobs to the youth in the area but (IIRC) ~40% youth unemployment levels do not exactly support that claim.

It may be a complex equation, but in the end it still comes down to people robbing others because they can, then later seeking to appear normal, if not victimized themselves.

From what I have heard/red the stealing/robbing is the norm in the council flat areas. And the phenomenon is not unknown to the local police. With that in mind the outrage over these lootings is hypocritical at best.

[gunnergoz]

Stealing/robbing on this scale is the norm in those neighborhoods? Really? Outrage is hypocritical? Having your store destroyed is normal? Every looted store was a corporate store? And mom and pop stores were not looted? The mom and pop stores that provide what few jobs there are in those neighborhoods? What kind of gibberish is this?

There are severe economic inequalities in modern societies, of that there is no doubt. And that those wealthy and influential people who perpetrate these inequalities influence the government to make things worse for the economically disadvantaged, is also probably the case. Further that those same wealthy and well-positioned interests mostly own the media is true, so the media largely trumpets what the high-and-mighty want it to say.

But in the end, I'm not going to forgive someone for looting just because they are jobless or angry about their socio-economic situation, no matter how unfair or unjust it may be. Looters' angst may explain their negative attitude, but the decision to participate in the looting is entirely their own.

It is no more morally correct to put down others because they are less well off than you are, than it is for the poor to strike out violently at those who despise them.

As I see it, wrong is wrong. There may be things more wrong than others, but they are still all on the wrong side of the ledger.