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No one wants to see carnage and death, but this is what happens to a society that ignores and widens the wealth and income gap:

For a society already under severe economic strain, the rioting raised new questions about the political sustainability of the Cameron government's spending cuts, particularly the deep cutbacks in social programs. These have hit the country's poor especially hard, including large numbers of the minority youths who have been at the forefront of the unrest.

Prime Minister Cameron didn't need to cut every social program right away. Look at him: vacationing in Tuscany while those less fortunate in poor areas have NOTHING: no jobs, no prospects, no future. It's environments like these that are ripe for exploitation by criminal elements.

Beware: this is coming to America. It's a long-simmering condition, this income inequality. We ignore it at our own peril, and is just one reason why the right-wing in this country (i.e. Tea Party, hello!) is going to bring us all down with this strict anti-tax platform. When a hedge-fund billionaire pays a federal income tax rate of just 15% and his secretary pays 25%, don't be surprised to wake up one day with many cities in this country in flames.

These riots are just a symptom of the underlying malady.

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post-script:This article from The Telegraph captures these sentiments perfectly:

The real causes are more insidious. It is no coincidence that the worst violence London has seen in many decades takes place against the backdrop of a global economy poised for freefall. The causes of recession set out by J K Galbraith in his book, The Great Crash 1929, were as follows: bad income distribution, a business sector engaged in “corporate larceny”, a weak banking structure and an import/export imbalance.

All those factors are again in play. In the bubble of the 1920s, the top 5 per cent of earners creamed off one-third of personal income. Today, Britain is less equal, in wages, wealth and life chances, than at any time since then. Last year alone, the combined fortunes of the 1,000 richest people in Britain rose by 30 per cent to £333.5 billion.

Europe’s leaders, our own Prime Minister and Chancellor included, were parked on sun-loungers as London burned. Although the epicentre of the immediate economic crisis is the eurozone, successive British governments have colluded in incubating the poverty, the inequality and the inhumanity now exacerbated by financial turmoil.

Britain’s lack of growth is not an economic debating point or a stick with which to beat George Osborne, any more than our deskilled, demotivated, under-educated non-workforce is simply a blot on the national balance sheet. Watch the juvenile wrecking crews on the city streets and weep for all our futures. The “lost generation” is mustering for war.

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