Obama is making some profound comments re Baltimore and elsewhere right now

[Joe Chi Minh]

25. I'm reading a lot about the criminality of violence, and rightly so, but the context

of this violence demands a far deeper analysis than that. Who exercises the greater violence, the rioters, some of whom diversified into theft and arson of commercial property, or Mr Big? Mr Big, comprising for the purposes of this situation, all those who, at different levels of officialdom, are complicit in protecting the daily murder of innocent African Americans by police. Murder, by the way is a capital offence.

For just one murder to be swept under the rug bespeaks a barbarous society, particularly when it is an 'open and shut case', and, as if that were not enough, by the very people who should have been serving and protecting the African American community just as respectfully as they generally do middle-class, monied white folk. (I'm not talking about employed and unemployed working-class folk, who like to think they are a cut above the African and Americans, and so call themselves middle class. They can be electrocuted and/or shot dead by the police, too, if they're a little unlucky.)

On a more normal, political level, in the UK, the PM, Ted Heath, was able to pick up the phone and put the country on a 3-day week. That is power, and, in a sense, 'violence', albeit in a relatively anodyne sense. In fact, someone in an earlier post put the matter very succinctly, when he compared the looting of several commercial stores with the looting of the country by the Banksters, the financial movers and shakers at the top.

The complacency of racist white people is astonishing. Already they can be 'disappeared' without being allowed recourse to a lawyer or the family's being informed. It puts me in mind of the saying of Pastor Martin Niemoller: First they came for the Socialists...