Ides: Watts and Tottenham, and ... A "global temper tantrum"

From: Matt Ides [mattides@gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, August 12, 2011 5:26 AM
To: epearlag@earthlink.net
Subject: re: Watts and Tottenham

Hi Ed, Here is something I wrote yesterday about Watts and Tottenham. I thought you might like it for distribution or not. Best, Matthew Ides

Learning from Watts, Los Angeles: Cameron Must Share Responsibility for Political Unrest

Hearing about the development of riots in London, I thought of the political unrest that occurred in Los Angeles, not in 1992, but back in 1965. The Watts Uprising began on August 11, when police stopped 21-year-old African-American Marquette Frye. Onlookers saw the treatment of the Fryes, Marquette, his brother Ronald, and his mother, as brutal and inhumane and began to harass the officers, and when they believed that the police mishandled Frye's mother, they began to throw stones at the officers' vehicles. Rather than intervene with trained public relation officers or involve community workers, the police retreated from the area allowing the community to establish its own order. The unrest in the Watts community lasted for several days, and the National Guard, including tanks, were called in to restore order. In the end, millions of dollars of damage were done and 34 people were dead.

The causes of political unrest in Watts and Tottenham should not come as a surprise to those who are familiar with the political transformations ongoing in the United Kingdom. With Cameron's austerity measures, services for lower-class citizens have been greatly reduced, including the elimination of programs that attempt to encourage young people to turn away from gangs. In addition, the reduction of officers and away from community policing in the United Kingdom mirrors mid-century Los Angeles' low per capita officer-to-citizen ratio.. In Los Angeles in the 1960s, Watts was distanced from the affluent metropolitan suburbs; transit services had been reduced and eliminated; a freeway gutted the cultural center of the community; and Californians had recently passed a referendum that rejected a law that made racial discrimination illegal. And in both cases, young people were largely unemployed, and for many poor citizens there was no ladder of class mobility but instead a wall of class apartheid. As the state could no longer make good on its guarantees of ensuring equality, citizens began to turn to alternative organizations for security and economic opportunity; these organizations are labeled "gangs".

 Cameron is now looking to former Los Angeles Police Department Chief William Bratton for strategies to deal with gangs. I am curious as to what Bratton would have to tell Cameron. Like most United States cities, Los Angeles' violent crime and gang activity largely decreased with the aging of a large demographic cohort--not the intervention of police. Further, much of the criminal activity based in Los Angeles has been merely pushed outside of its political boundaries, therefore becoming a problem that is not Los Angeles’ anymore. Once a sleepy rural region, the Inland Empire just east of Los Angeles has now seen a major up-tick in gang activity. Maybe Bratton will advise Cameron to take all of the nation's poor undesirable young people and send them to a remote penal colony where they could no longer do harm. A few hundred years ago this strategy was standard practice and it had many unintended consequences... the United States of America being one of them.

Young people from across the United Kingdom look at David Cameron and his pedigree as a symbol of class privilege and power. Lessons from Bratton that encourage more invasive policing techniques will exacerbate underlying social inequities; although it may quiet things on the surface, the political unrest will occur again as in Los Angeles in 1992.  Maybe its time for Prime Minister from Tottenham. 

Matthew Ides
mattides@gmail.com

 

* * *

 

From: David McReynolds [mailto:dmcreynolds@nyc.rr.com]

I don't want it thought that I support the violence we saw in London. But I

also think it is important not to let the right wing explain the depth of this crisis. The events are far too widespread (and for the most part they have been very peaceful).

 

My hunch is the ruling class can't want for hard rains and an early autumn.

 

David McReynolds

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/12/youth-led-revolts-shook-world

 

How Youth-Led Revolts Shook Elites around the World

 

    From Athens to Cairo and Spain to Santiago, old

    certainties are being challenged after the Arab

    spring and financial crises

 

 By Jack Shenker

 Guardian (UK):  August 12, 2011

 

Of all the millions of words expended in the global

media on this year's rash of youth-led revolts across

the globe, none are more relevant than those penned by

Alex Andreou, a Greek-born blogger who now lives in

Britain. "You have run out of ideas," he wrote in June,

echoing the message of Greek protesters to their

country's political and economic elites. "Wherever in

the world you are, that statement applies."

 

Andreou was writing as the occupation of Syntagma

Square - Athens's central plaza - was entering its

fourth week, and he went on to summarise what had moved

Greek demonstrators to take to the streets: a refusal

to suffer any further in order to make the rich even

richer, a withdrawal of consent and trust from the

politicians governing in their name, and finally that

simplest and most devastating of censures from one

generation to the next. Those in power, he said, were

devoid of fresh thinking, and this is why "the protests

in Greece affect all of you directly".

 

When the dust has settled on 2011 perhaps the aspect of

it that will prove most striking to historians is that

in a period where so many old certainties dissolved,

from the stability of dictatorships in the Middle East

to the sturdiness of the neoliberal economic framework

in Europe, America and beyond, those with their hands

on the levers of formal power had so few ideas to

offer. From Arab autocrats to eurozone finance

ministers, paucity of original thought has prevailed at

the top and the prescription has always been more of

the same: reheated rhetoric and stencil-cut solutions,

all worn lifeless with weary familiarity.

 

Little wonder then that from Santiago to Sana'a,

something else has arisen to fill the void - and that

those still rooted in the old models of thinking find

themselves lacking the linguistic tools necessary to

even describe the phenomenon, never mind understand it.

 

A "global temper tantrum" is the most historian and

empire cheerleader-in-chief Niall Ferguson could muster

in his effort to characterise this year's developments,

which have seen hundreds of thousands in north Africa,

led by the young, braving bullets to topple entrenched

regimes. Meanwhile in southern Europe, South America,

Wisconsin and London, city centres have been occupied

and youths have mobilised, challenging existing power

structures and fighting - with messy, uneven

consequences - to articulate an alternative.

 

We are witnessing, says Priyamvada Gopal, an English

professor at Cambridge, the "momentary transformation

of anger from a dirty word into the very currency of

political exchange".

 

Each of these struggles has been specific to local

contexts but they share more than just the imagery of

occupied squares, tents and teargas. They are bound

together by a common sense of disenfranchisement and

the belief that the participants have it in them to

create a new reality - and that at the moment, largely

inspired by the Arab spring and the global economic

meltdown, a window of opportunity to do so is open.

 

"The repression is brutal. and the teargas stronger

than ever," says Camila Vallejo, president of the

Chilean University student union which has brought

100,000 students on to the streets and taken control of

300 schools in an attempt to rebuild the country's

education system from scratch - holding mass kissathons

and Michael Jackson dance routines in the process. "We

have been protesting not about reform, but about

wholesale restructuring . if we don't have real change

now, it's not going to happen."

 

The scope of her ambition echoes that found in Syntagma

Square, where opposition to an EU/IMF bailout and its

accompanying austerity measures has morphed into a

broader critique of social injustice. "We are ordinary

people, we are like you," reads the mission statement

of the Real Democracy website - the online hub of the

Syntagma protests - before going on to explore the

alienation many Greeks feel from the organs of the

state. "Without us none of this would exist, because we

move the world . I am outraged. I think I can change

it."

 

It's easy to overstate the linkages; those joining the

anti-government uprising in the Syrian town of Hama and

los indignados of Barcelona and Madrid are striving to

confront very different enemies and are facing wildly

dissimilar levels of repression as a result. But

connections are apparent, not least in the protesters'

rejection of the old terms of debate and a commitment

to build something else in response on the streets - a

commitment most visible in Cairo's Tahrir Square, where

protesters congregated not only to face down the regime

but also to prove that an alternative was feasible; the

chant ahum ahum ahum, al masryeen ahum ('here, here,

here, the Egyptians are here) was a snub to Hosni

Mubarak, but also a reminder that the contours of

society were being reimagined from the ground upwards.

 

Elites have yet to grasp that hunger for meaningful

grassroots change and the desire to reclaim agency over

a future that appears depressingly predetermined, be it

under the crony capitalism and police brutality of

Middle Eastern despots or the more sanitised platter of

unemployment and austerity being handed down by

governments in the west. Those on the other side of the

divide have been unable to keep pace with the rapid

shift in thinking; in his analysis, Ferguson adopts the

kind of paternalistic tone that came easily to Mubarak

as the octogenarian gently chided Egypt's youth for

daring to question his authority, or to the unelected

rating agency chiefs who condemn whole nations to

poverty with a sad shake of the head and a well-

intentioned finger-wag against spending profligacy.

 

"Historically in any country and in any context it's

young people who are at the core of protests," says

Gopal. "But at this moment in history we're seeing a

shared sense of deprivation among the young, a shared

sense of there being a democracy deficit across the

world. In all these places neoliberal economic policies

have intensified their hold and affected young people

most directly, young people looking for employment,

study, prospects. I think it has cut young people to

the bone, and they're confronting it directly."

 

Two other common motifs run through this year's

rebellions. First has been the collapse in authority of

traditional institutions; from Mubarak's cult of

personality to the seemingly incessant scandals

engulfing Britain's arbiters of political, financial

and cultural control - bankers, MPs, and the Murdoch

media empire. The crumpling is contagious, fuelling

rebellions in the most of places.

 

"People are on the edge, you can't fool us anymore,"

says Avi Cohen, a 25-year-old drama student who has

joined a 2,000-strong tent protest on Tel Aviv's

exclusive Rothschild Avenue. The protesters say they

are campaigning for social justice, leaving the

question of Palestinian injustice off the table for now

in an effort to build the broadest possible consensus.

 

Like many of his counterparts elsewhere, Rotem Tsbueri

has lost faith in the official mechanisms of political

reform. "We're not interested in changing ministers or

governments, we want to change the way things are done.

It's not about who's in the government, it's about the

way they work and think."

 

The 15-M movement in Spain, which organised

demonstrations in 58 cities earlier this year under the

slogan "they don't represent us", embodies a similar

yearning for a new political framework to arise. "We

don't want to form a political party because it would

destroy the horizontal nature of the movement," says

Carlos Pederes, an IT worker who has been involved in

the protests from the beginning. "[Plus] the system is

rigged so that only the two big parties can win, so it

would be pointless."

 

The second commonality has been the tools used to

mobilise dissent. Although the role of online social

media in the Arab uprisings has often been overstated,

there can be no doubt that platforms such as Twitter

and Facebook have enabled diverse groups to quickly

garner broad support for acts of resistance - and that

this means of communication has coloured the internal

organisation of protest movements.

 

"One of the most unifying aspects between our own

organisation and other movements around the world is

that we're relatively non-hierarchical and

decentralised," says Steve Taylor, a campaigner with UK

Uncut.

 

"Today there may not be a single unifying ideology of

change among global youth protests of the sort that

united people in 1968, but there is a common ideology

embedded within our shared model of organisation - no

egos, no celebrities, no one telling anyone else what

to do and no one willing to take orders - one that

lends itself to online social media and has captured

people's imaginations."

 

The bonds between 2011's islands of youth dissent

remain limited. Although the root causes of anger may

be similar, the levels of politicisation among those

expressing that anger vary wildly; Gopal says she was

struck by the diffuseness and lack of direction in the

recent British riots, contrasting it with protests in

the Arab world, where "a focus and self-awareness that

comes from those countries' recent history of anti-

colonial struggle has been transmitted from one

generation to the next". But this year could still be

remembered as one in which, after many decades of

moribund political and economic realities, a new

narrative began to form.

 

As Andreou points out, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the

philosopher who coined the term "Black Swan event" -

denoting a hugely consequential event that is utterly

unpredictable and can only be explained afterwards -

was recently asked by Jeremy Paxman whether the

violence on the streets of Athens fell into that

category. He demurred - and said that the real Black

Swan event was that more people weren't rioting

elsewhere. Additional reporting by Jonathan Franklin in

Santiago, Stephen Burgen in Barcelona and Harriet

Sherwood in Tel Aviv

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