just a naive thought...

     So I read here that the wave of riots in Engelond is 'not a revolution (though it may be part of a revolutionary sequence) and I’m fairly certain no one has suggested it is. It is a heterogeneous expression of rage.'  I don't know enough to say one way or another, but a thought occurs to me - what if the riots in the UK, in Greece, the incipient unrest in Spain and Italy, are of a piece with the crisis that spread from Tunisia to Syria since the winter?  What if, that is to say, we have here a general crisis, at least in its early stages?  
     Here in the US, we have spreading protests as well, though they go unnoticed.  Especially troubling is the 'flashmob' phenomenon, where young people will spontaneously mass to cause carnivalesque chaos.  You see, we have a similar legacy of broken promises, promises that should never have been made in the first place.
     More disturbing still, is the growing sense that our economy, such as it is, has become far too complex and technocratic to be the province of representative governance - that, in short, politics as we know it must yield to Finance, and thus to technocratic management of one kind or another.  This is far different from politically mandated wealth redistribution in the form of taxes and government social programs.  And it certainly isn't the same thing as Socialism, which is rather quaint by comparison.  What's more, it's far from clear to me that a new regime of managerial expertise, with balanced budgets and zero debt, all taken out of the hands of elected representatives, would be any kinder to the poor and disenfranchised than the current arrangement of things.
     Again, it seems that Finance has rapidly replaced politics - which itself long ago replaced religion - as the ordering principle of our social lives, and Finance is a mystery religion that makes the Cult of Isis look downright transparent.  Food and gas prices are on an upward tack, all due to the mysteries of Finance, you see, and that shows no sign of coming to an end any time soon.  Those upward price pressures are enough, dear reader, to send an incipient general crisis into a spiral of destruction the likes of which we have not seen since the seventeenth century.  Consider - the riots and uprisings we've seen around Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, those are confoundingly political responses to problems the Powers have framed in essentially technocratic terms as matters of Financial Management.  The violence, however stupid and unacceptable it may be, cannot be dismissed out of hand as pointless - it's a confounding anachronism in a world dominated by the IMF, the World Bank, and the Fed. 
     In short, the Powers seem to have missed the point.  They are trying to manage their way out of what is essentially a political crisis.  Which leads to a still more disturbing question - if wider and wider protests against, say, Qadafi or Assad signify the loss of legitimacy by their 'regimes', what do the riots in the UK, Greece, and such signify?  And what happens when roughly representative governments, whether parliamentarian or republican, show themselves no better able to withstand the tender mercies of Finance than good old-fashioned dictatorships?  Makes me wonder, that's all I'm saying...