The Bullingdon is an ancient dining club for undergraduate toffs at Oxford, all male, by invitation only. You need pots of money to join, partly to fork out for the uniform of white tie'n'tails with trimmings, but mostly to pay for the property damage wrought at the club's notorious orgies of drinking and destruction.

The British Prime Minister, David William Donald Cameron (Eton, Brasenose), his Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Gideon Oliver Osborne (St Paul's, Magdalen, and heir to a baronetcy), and the Tory mayor of London, the blond, bicycling and batty Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (Eton, Balliol), were all Bullingdon chaps in the '80s.

A few years ago, in a glow of nostalgia, Johnson recalled an evening where a pot plant was heaved through a restaurant window and ''the party ended up with a number of us crawling on all fours through the hedges of the botanical gardens and trying to escape police dogs". The mayor remains a gilded creature, once famously dismissing his £250,000 stipend for writing a newspaper column as "chicken feed".

Ho ho.

There, in a nutshell, you have Britain today. As ever, the Establishment rules by its own rules. Trashing a restaurant is a jolly wheeze for the upper classes. Plundering the life savings of the middle classes is all in a day's work for the bonus'n'Bollinger banking brigade in the City of London.

So, too, is tax dodging: to pluck just one small example out of the ether, Rupert Murdoch's London Sun newspaper and his loathsome but now defunct News of the World made a profit of £89 million in 2010 but, through various corporate pea and thimble tricks, paid just £415,000 in tax.

Then there were those MPs, of all parties, building their country duck ponds and refurbishing their Knightsbridge flats courtesy of the voters.

At the bottom of this seething social pile you have Britain's underclass, the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, trapped in those urine- and graffiti-splashed housing "estates", where the syringes crunch underfoot and unemployment and crime are a way of life. Chavs, they call the youth there: Council House And Violent. Eventually the pressure builds up and the whole show erupts, as we have seen.

But there is another rule for the plebs. Torching shops and police stations or looting Marks and Sparks for trackies and trainers is "sickening ... wrongdoing and criminality", as Cameron put it on Tuesday after dragging himself away from his summer holiday in Tuscany (or Chiantishire, as people like him wittily call it). The full force of the law would be brought to bear. Johnson, also hurriedly back from a foreign holiday, promised similar condign retribution.

Which is very necessary, of course. The social order must be restored, and quickly. Perhaps it would help if some of the chavs were invited to join the Bullingdon.

The fall of free market capitalism rushes towards us, accelerated by the greed and stupidity of those in charge.

The rot began in the '80s with the Reagan-Thatcher embrace of supply-side economics, the iron follies of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman's Chicago economists. It has been spreading ever since.

Any lingering notion that a deregulated market operates as an efficient allocator of the means of production, distribution and exchange has been crushed by the convulsions we've endured since 2008.

Eventually, with the decline of the American imperium, the Chinese will take over. If you want to know how the world will look then, think Singapore on a global scale. There will be a glittering facade of free enterprise and quasi-democracy controlled from above by a flinty oligarchy in Shanghai.

In the meantime, the lunatics are running the asylum. The world must be mad when greasers like Silvio Berlusconi or the gun-totin' Momma Grizzlies of the American Tea Party get anywhere near the levers of power. Barack Obama, cried up as the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt, turns out instead to be the new Jimmy Carter - well meaning but hopelessly ineffectual.

The panic that followed Standard & Poor's downgrading of the US government's credit rating to AA+ was beyond bizarre. These turkeys were up to their necks in the crash of 2008, willy-nilly dishing out their AAA approval to junk investment "products", sub-prime housing debt and the like. To hear them posturing now as an arbiter of financial purity is a thunderclap of cognitive dissonance, akin to learning that Ivan Milat has come out for gun control.

Happily, much of this week's misery has bypassed our sunny homeland. This is because Tony Abbott has been overseas, spreading his feral negativity elsewhere. It has been delightfully peaceful without his silly media stunts on TV every night.

Unfortunately he will be back, no doubt to bluster that Penny Wong's imminent baby is yet another sign of a rotten and incompetent Labor government out of touch with community standards.

I have been away for a week myself, in Indonesia, where people are naturally cheerful and optimistic. With reason. Those two staples, rice and cooking fuel, are at OK prices. Inflation is under control, foreign investment is rushing in and the economy will grow by about 6 per cent this year. All good. Such a change from the whingeing pessimism of Australia.

At my hotel in Jakarta, I filled an idle hour watching Australia TV, the network funded by the federal government and broadcasting, allegedly, to some 44 countries.

You'll recall there's been some shouting about whether the ABC should continue to run it or if the $223 million contract ought to be handed to Murdoch, via Sky News.

Nobody seems to have discussed a third option, of scrapping it altogether. They should. God, it was awful.

I saw a news bulletin so grey and stodgy it might have been glued together back in the '70s. If the newsreader had sported a hat with corks dangling from the brim it could hardly have been more naff.

After that, a woman clad in Steve Irwin-style khaki explained how to bottle feed a tiger cub, and another "reporter" breathlessly told those 44 countries that sharks had been spotted in the Yarra River.

It was cringe-making stuff, especially compared with the slick outpourings of the BBC, al-Jazeera and CNN available at a flick of the remote. Kill it off now, Senator Conroy, before any more damage is done.

Mike Carlton

meanwhile .....

While 68.3 million Americans struggle to get enough food to eat and wages are declining for 90 percent of the population, US millionaire household wealth has reached an unprecedented level. According to an extensive study by auditing and financial advisory firm Deloitte, US millionaire households now have $38.6 trillion in wealth. On top of the $38.6 trillion this study reveals, they have an estimated $6.3 trillion hidden in offshore accounts.

In total, US millionaire households have at least $45.9 trillion in wealth, the majority of this wealth is held within the upper one-tenth of one percent of the population.

If all this isn't obscene enough, to further demonstrate how the global economy has now been completely rigged, Deloitte's analysis predicated, based on current trends, that US millionaire households will see a 225 percent increase in wealth to $87.1 trillion by 2020. Accounting for wealth hidden in offshore accounts, they are projected to have over $100 trillion in total within the next decade.

Most people cannot even comprehend how much $1 trillion is, let alone $46 trillion. One trillion is equal to 1000 billion, or $1,000,000,000,000. To put it in perspective, last year the entire cost of feeding all 40 million Americans on food stamps was $65 billion.

Meet the Global Financial Elites Controlling $46 Trillion In Wealth