Back at the beginning of February 2011, I wrote a post titled ‘I predict a riot!‘ that sparked an interesting debate.

The post itself questioned the importance of social media in the context of the Arab Spring and asked what might happen in the Western world and particularly the spiritual home of ‘social media’ – the US – as financial challenges worsened.

Almost 2 years have passed since that post and I have been revisiting some of the things that have happened since then.

I’ve just finished reading ‘Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt’ . If you want to continue your days looking on the bright side – then do not read this book!  It is staggeringly depressing.

By way of a brief summary, the book covers the following accounts …

1. Days of Theft – looks at the legacy of the euro-american driven persecution of the indigenous American Indian population and very effectively juxtapositions the ‘belief systems’ of these very different Peoples to get the reader questioning which offers the better way of life.

2. Days of Siege – looks at how once thriving areas of the US and the people living in them have been utterly abandoned by the corporations who once benefitted from them and supported them. It makes it very clear just how ‘disposable’ people are in the pursuit of the American Dream but also how they are essentially ‘medicated’ into accepting their dismal fate.

3. Days of Devastation – this describes in words and illustrations the immense level of destruction in the Appalachian mountains as corporations look to extract fossil fuels in the most profitable way.  Aside from the sheer tragedy of eradicating 500 majestic mountaintops already from the face of the planet and turning them to vast areas of useless wasteland this account spells out in no uncertain terms the level of suffering such rapid and massive energy extraction has had on the local population.

4. Days of Slavery – this is a sobering account for those of us who have enjoyed the hedonistic tourist nirvana of the US sunshine state. If you thought that slavery was abolished in 1833 then this harrowing analysis of the lives of workers on Floridian farms today makes it clear how slavery has simply evolved rather than been consigned to history.

5. Days of Revolt – the main thrust of this section is that the facade of Western capitalism is crumbling as more and more people realise they have been used and robbed. In commentary that echoes a popular post of mine a couple of years back – where I compared Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World with George Orwell’s 1984 – the book describes how the configuration of wealth and power in our world today is very much as Orwell described. As the book says, “The largest deficits in human history mean we [in the West] are trapped in a debt peonage system” which, it believes, will lead to a stark form of ‘neo-feudalism’.  It supposes that now the fraud has been exposed we are entering an era of ‘naked force’ where our corporate ‘overlords’ will use the security apparatus established to fight the ‘war on terror’ to control other forms of unrest with increasingly draconian measures.

The last chapter of the book makes a lot of references to the Occupy Movement which first gained public attention in September 2011 with the Occupy Wall Street protests. This was the essence of my original blog post at the beginning of 2011 where I questioned if/how the US in particular would use social media to create a groundswell of public opinion.

The Occupy Movement looked promising in the way it was organised and the Wikipedia entry documents its philosophies, approaches and successes since September 2011 very well. It  includes reference to the results of the US Congressional Budget Office report that illustrated “the top 1 percent of income earners nearly tripled after-tax income over the last thirty years”, inspiring the movement’s powerful ‘we are the 99%’  slogan and highlights the following summary of US wealth distribution …

In 2007 the richest 1% of the American population owned 34.6% of the country’s total wealth, and the next 19% owned 50.5%. Thus, the top 20% of Americans owned 85% of the country’s wealth and the bottom 80% of the population owned 15%

It also has a rather telling and disheartening line in its narrative referring to how President Obama “no longer mentions the Occupy movement by name, which analysts say reflects the fact that by early 2012 Occupy had become a divisive issue, unpopular with much of the public”

One of the repeated themes of Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt is how, when pushed into austere and challenging circumstances, individuals and communities often turn on those closer to them to vent their frustrations.

This same observation is made in a BBC article today which looks at the Beveridge Report from 70 years ago and asks “How did welfare claimants come to be seen as scroungers?”. It includes an observation by Times columist David Aaronovitch who suggests working people on tight budgets could blame the bankers but they are more likely to round on people who are like them but claiming benefits

“The very rich are not like you – you might resent them from afar. But these people, the claimants are very close to you, you might even know them. You don’t feel you are making enough money so you resent people asking for help”

Having just read such a stark assessment of modern day America it’s easy to sit back and be thankful that the bit of the UK I live in is literally and metaphorically thousands of miles away from such harrowing tales of life in other parts of our 21st Century world – but the warning signs are here too and in this age of globalisation we are undoubtedly all in the same boat. As the BBC article on Beveridge concludes …

“He’d be quite horrified by the current welfare state. His system was designed to support economic activity to the fullest extent. He’d think that was not the case today.”