after this i suspect other bankers will have to be written off as bad deaths, or their morts gaged on a mark to market basis. but if the price of citizenship continues rising for everyone without triggering a collective (& pro-refugee response), the asbotic reflux of 40 years of capitalist decadence will probably be articulated in ever more politically aphasic forms.

the grotesque ironies of this story include the fact that if bankers did not insist on reproducing a world where homeless lithuanian men are the target of brutal 'citizen' mobs they wouldn't have to (very rarely) die for being good citizens.

i suspect fassbinder scripted this whole story up on high, in collaboration with the zeitgeist, and that it will be revealed as a scam to distract from the mass bloodletting of financiers on the front pages. but if it is true, condolences to the survivors. viciously sociopathic as they may be in their anonymous get-up, mute violence, and brutal impact on the increasingly uninhabitable streets of our towns and cities, bankers are human too.

the price of citizenship has for a long time been death for (non-citizen) humans and it's time citizenship was done away with en masse. Brutal mob murders are just the logical expresion of a society created to reproduce bankers and citizens, and in the end capital prefers a few financiers to get wasted (check the front pages) and millions to end up in asbotic penury (check the favelas) than for anything to really change. if this killing makes you sick, kill capitalism. 

B

The brother of a banker fatally injured while trying to help two people being assaulted said he paid the "ultimate price" for being a good citizen.

Frank McGarahan, 45, chief operating officer of Barclays Wealth, suffered head injuries in the attack near a taxi rank in Norwich, early on Sunday.

He died at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge the next day.

Norfolk Police said three local men, aged in their early 20s, had been arrested in connection with the death.

The men are currently in custody in police stations across Norfolk and detectives said they will be interviewed later.

Tony McGarahan said his brother's death was a "mindless murder" from which his family would "never truly recover".

He said his brother "did what was natural to him to try and help someone because they needed help".

"He would not and could not stand by and watch a defenceless young lad and his girlfriend, who were in a taxi queue after enjoying being out together, being mindlessly attacked by a large group of grown men," Mr McGarahan added.

Strip club bouncer

"We will always be proud of Frank and we will never ever forget him.

"We will never understand how or why anyone could murder such a decent, caring and loving man."

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Frank McGarahan was chief operating officer of Barclays Wealth

Mr McGarahan said his family's immediate priority was to care for his brother's wife and children.

He urged anyone with information "however small and insignificant" to come forward.

Norfolk Police said Mr McGarahan, from Hertfordshire, had been spending an evening out with friends and family.

He witnessed a 35-year-old homeless Lithuanian man, who was walking his dog, being attacked while he walked with his girlfriend, 45, from Norfolk, police said.

Officers added that a bouncer from a nearby strip club, Darryl Lawton, had his jaw fractured after intervening in the fight, which involved Mr McGarahan, his brother and cousin.

Detectives are hunting a group of four men, aged in their late teens to mid-20s, who fled following the fight.

Det Supt Chris Hobley said: "(Mr McGarahan) witnessed an assault while queuing for a taxi on Guildhall Hill, after which he sustained a fatal injury.

"Officers are reviewing CCTV footage from around the city centre area and following up a number of lines of inquiry."

Barclays Wealth employs 7,700 staff in 20 countries and manages assets worth £133bn.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/england/7644616.stm

Published: 2008/09/30 16:18:57 GMT

PS

who said there were no more dialectical images? i take this as one more clear and poetic sign that after thirty years of pseudo events the Event is back in its true and proper form: the collapse of the real abstractions and - if only at lumpen hands - their bearers. the current meltdown makes 9/11 look like the tawdry reality porn it in fact was. it might as well have been a US scam, yet another plot device in the narrative of fictitious capital expansion. today's crisis is the real (abstraction) thing, and it began exactly where marx would have expected it to - in the virtual, apparitional sphere of prices. 40 years of pomo reductivism and hyper-realist non-happening will hopefully now begin to dissipate. the trouble is, asbotic violence is the Real of fictitious capital as much as environmental collapse is, perhaps more so since its a matter of decomposed political-social relations. we need to murder the dead capitalists collectively, as a social class, before they murder anymore living or dead labour. In this sense, this banker bashing was merely a pantomime and we need to repeat the farce as collectively organised tragedy - a tragedy for capitalism, for a change. rather than killing people, we need to kill capital and replace it with real human community.