G20 updates

Written By: - Date published: 4:06 am, April 3rd, 2009 - 8 comments
Categories: activism, International - Tags:

The Guardian has excellent video of the G20 protests. Gives you a real feeling of what things are like in the ground.

So much better than our coverage. No twit talking all the time and trying to dramatise things.

Most of the people there are completely peaceful, the Police seem to be looking for trouble and the anarchists provide it. Watching the video I’m reminded of the old joke: ‘those anarchists could really change the world, if only they could get organised’.

8 comments on “G20 updates ”

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  1. Andrew 1
    3 April 2009 at 7:23 am

    Having been there on the groud for the last 2 days i can say that most of the protesters were indeed very peaceful. There were 2 main protest sites in the city, the climate change protest that was on Bishopsgate where they all set up tents, and the other bigger site that was converging on the bank of england.

    There was virtually no trouble at all on Bishipsgate. The real problems were by the BOE. There were groups of people there that were intent on causing trouble, they came over from Italy, France, Spain, and of course England. These were the people that were causing the problems.

    From what i saw and what most people are saying the police did a great job. They did barricade the remaing protesters in after lunch when RBS got trashed. They did that so they could let everyone out one at a time and identity the trouble makers that they then arrested. There would no doubt have been a lot more trouble around the city if they just left everyone to their own devices.

  3. Bart Hanson 3
    3 April 2009 at 11:58 am

    Capitalism should have been allowed to fall over and market forces left alone to pick up and rebuild. Poorer nations with market economies will hardly even feel this “global credit crisis” anyway. It’s actually laughable, using centralized socialist intervention methods to prop up capitalism. Nothing has been learned and the true cost of facing reality has merely been pushed into the future. Meanwhile we will be enslaved with carbon credits trading and other bullshit like that.

    • Quoth the Raven 3.1
      3 April 2009 at 12:05 pm

      Centralised intervention is not neccesarily socialist at all. In fact socialists can and have supported a free market and no government whatsoever. I prefer not to use the word socialist becasue there is too much definitional madness behind it. Centralised intervention is a characteristic of capitalism.

  4. Bart Hanson 4
    3 April 2009 at 12:00 pm

    Sorry, I meant poorer nations with “village” economies.

  5. Bart Hanson 5
    3 April 2009 at 2:10 pm

    QtRaven,
    I agree socialism is just a euphemism for a fairer distribution of wealth in my book, but I thought the primary benefit of capitalism was the trait of market forces being able to self-correct any excesses. Now that that idea has been well and truly proved to be wrong, can we agree that some government intervention is necessary?
    I draw the line at printing more money though, which simply hides the problem till later and depreciates any money currently in existence. I think this latest move to print 1 trillion dollars (thats a thousand billion?) will be the death knell for money as we know it and we’ll all end up living off government credits or something similar.

    • Quoth the Raven 5.1
      3 April 2009 at 3:13 pm

      Bart – I think it is just difficulty with terminology. To some, like Ayn Rand followers, capitalism does mean a free market. To others capitalism does not mean a free market. I think the latter because that’s based on the historical usage of the word. Market forces are constrained by government, I know this seems odd to many coming from a lefty. You’ve got to look at how the government interferes in the market and where the general thrust of that interference goes and who it benefits. I’m telling you it’s not to benefit the bulk of people. Big business has often been the biggest lobbyist of government to interfere in the market. Market forces are good, but they most obviously can’t apply to everything in society. Neverthless I still think a freer or a freed market would be more egalitarian. And eventually, one day, when society is ready no government intervention will be neccessary and who knows whether market forces would predominate at all then.

      I found this article interesting: Market anarchism as stigmergic socialism. Though I kinda sort of hold to a LTV

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