What The Street Protests Really Mean For Business

The public reaction to both the brazen killings of two New York City policemen sitting on duty in their patrol car by a gunman asserting revenge for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner blamed on police, and the original Brown and Garner deaths, is revealing a sharp class divide in Western information society.

The dividing line is not what you might suspect.

The street protests, sometimes as violent as any seen in the United States since the urban looting during the three-day Great Blackout of 1977, may be using the cited reason of alleged police brutality as a pretext. Careful observation indicates the protests are physical group exercises (sans yoga mats), expressions of rage, very much in search of a cause. The undercurrent behind the scenes, the back-chatter, reveals something else.

The new class consciousness has a fault line. But we theorize it is not socioeconomic. It is not class. There is something else at work here.

 

Ziad K Abdelnour: Ziad K. Abdelnour is President & CEO of Blackhawk Partners, Inc., a New York based private equity ”family office” that focuses on originating, structuring, advising and acting as equity investor in management-led buyouts, strategic minority equity investments, equity private placements, consolidations, buildups, and growth capital financing's in companies and projects based both in the US and emerging markets.