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The Greatest Depression - by Stephen Lendman
One sign is the enormous worldwide financial shock, erasing nearly $8 trillion of equity wealth since late July. Another is teetering global economies, notably across Europe and America.
Still another is growing poverty, deprivation, and despair for millions without jobs, enough income, or futures. Combined they indicate Depression in its early stages and deepening.
In 2008, trends analyst Gerald Celente predicted it, saying:
"All levels of government will be caught up in the private sector collapse as tax bases shrink and tax revenues sharply decline. Attempts to make up shortfalls by raising taxes, tuition and tolls, and imposing higher user and license fees, will do little to resolve the problems, but will do a lot to infuriate citizens."
Indeed so disruptively across Europe - in Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland, Britain and elsewhere with much more potentially anywhere for long denied social justice.
On August 6, rioting began in Tottenham, North London after police shot and killed Mark Duggan, a 29-year old father of four. It triggered other outbreaks on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday in Brixton, Enfield, Walthamstow, Islington, Hackney, Croydon, Lewisham, Peckham, Clapham, Ealing, central London, and Birmingham, Britain's second largest city.
They also spread to Liverpool, Manchester, and elsewhere as raging anger set Britain ablaze. On August 9, London Guardian writers Vikram Dodd and Caroline Davies headlined, "London riots escalate as police battle for control," saying:
"Buildings were torched, shops ransacked, and officers attacked with makeshift missiles and petrol bombs (as) youths laid waste to streets right across the city. The sheer number of incidents (rage) on a breathtaking scale."
Celente warned about it numerous times on a global scale, saying:
"When people lose everything and have nothing else to lose, they lose it."
In Britain, across Europe, and potentially anywhere under intolerable social conditions, a spark can ignite a firestorm, triggering anything from peaceful protests to violent rage.
Britain's ablaze from the latter. Since mid-July, Israel experienced the former, unprecedented nonviolent street protests for long-denied social justice.
On August 9, Jeff Halper's article headlined, "The Tent Protests in Israel: Can They Break Out of the Zionist/Security/Neo-liberal Box?" saying:
Weeks of protests "constitute a grassroots challenge to Israel's neo-liberal regime." On August 8, 320,000 turned out, involving all sectors of Israeli society from students to seniors to mothers to taxi drivers to doctors to teachers, and many others - everyone struggling to make ends meet in a grossly unequal society. Israelis call it "proteksia," a system of rule by money and connections, the same one destroying America.
Having finally had enough, they demand change and are going for broke to get it. At the same time, "it remains to be seen what will happen as the government stonewalls and pushes back. This is an uprising worth following. Not an Arab Spring perhaps, but a promising Israeli Summer. Not a true revolution, but a return to a welfare state that is nonetheless structurally discriminatory."
