Notices by Pauline von Hellermann (pvonhellermannn@mastodon.green), page 7

We’ve shown Gaza’s suffering for over 200 days. Don’t look away now

Palestinians have been the sole journalists persistently reporting from the ground in Gaza. Yet it feels that the world is losing interest in our stories.

By Mohammed R. Mhawish
May 3, 2024

https://www.972mag.com/gaza-suffering-palestinian-journalists/

#FollowTheMoney 🧵 24/n. Like, watching the blue tits busy building their nest in the box outside our kitchen window, feeding their young, flying back and forth: most of us humans are so much closer to them than to scheming billionaires.

And: this forever (i hope forever- in peril due to other!) reality - of birds, trees, parents hugging children, just enjoying being together - this is perhaps the real reality. Or at least always also there. Mustn’t forget!

#FollowTheMoney 🧵 25/n back to a reality most of us in the UK inhabit on a daily basis: the crumbling public sector. Found this report on NHS dentistry’s struggle for survival really very moving just now. #NHS #dentistry #UKpolitics

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001y0kf?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

#FollowTheMoney 🧵 26/n An outstanding review by Will Davies (my Goldsmiths colleague) of Brett Christopher’s “The Price is Wrong”: about our neoliberal political economy (using a Braudelian distinction btw “the market” and “capitalism” - SO useful) and how this explain why investments in fossil fuels continue to vastly outstrip those in renewables. Key point: Capitalism IS rent-seeking.
#ClimateEmergency

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n07/william-davies/antimarket

#FollowTheMoney 🧵 29/n Another overlap with #AcademicVenting 🧵- because it’s all of a piece! Because the crisis in HE is a key phenomenon in all this!

This great piece by Jessica Wildfire really needs to be read in full, but this extract most apt here:

“Universities aren't institutions of knowledge anymore. They're assets. They're revenue streams. If they're not generating money for the top, then they only pose a threat, and they have to be weakened and destroyed.”

https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/112359018143961300

#FollowTheMoney 🧵 30/n

Wow. As Bregman says: Stunning graph: the plummeting tax rates of the richest Americans. For the first time in history, billionaires have a lower effective tax rate than working-class Americans.

Look at 1980 - I do continue to think that *everything* could have been different if Carter hadn’t lost to Reagan.

#FollowTheMoney 🧵12/n Of course, things were never rosy for everyone. Nevertheless, key shared assumptions about the #commongood informed post war public spending and that is all eroding now.

“Continuing austerity does not just kill people’s services; it has long since warped most political debates about what we should expect from the state. In lots of places, squalor, mess and festering social problems are now seen as the norm. “
#TheCrumble

#FollowTheMoney 🧵 13/n and i have to mention UK universities too, since I am directly affected myself (see #AcademicVenting).

40% of UK universities are in debt, with major reduncancies right now (incl at Goldsmiths). All in arts, humanities and social sciences. All of this is crumbling, with too little money flowing into it. Another industry, another #CommonGood
being eroded. Check out this constantly updated tally. #TheCrumble

https://qmucu.org/qmul-transformation/uk-he-shrinking/

#FollowTheMoney 🧵 14/n Just realised the title of this really excellent article by Sam Knight is actually perhaps the real theme of this 🧵:

What Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule have Done to Britain

As Sam says, #Austerity is not even talked about so much anymore, but it has just broken the #UK . Please do read the whole piece, so well written, so damning (and I’ve even managed to ignore an aside criticism of Corbyn - usually makes me hate any writer! 😊)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/04/01/what-have-fourteen-years-of-conservative-rule-done-to-britain

#FollowTheMoney 🧵 15/n

“The average worker is now £14,000 worse off per year than if earnings had continued to rise at pre-crisis rates—it is the worst period for wage growth since the Napoleonic Wars. “Nobody who’s alive and working in the British economy today has ever seen anything like this. This is what failure looks like.” “

A Herefordshire case workers has developed a phrase to describe people needing help, “for her paperwork”:

“Overwhelming Distress”

#FollowTheMoney 🧵 16/n Back to who the money flows towards:

Nobody had a better year than Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose net worth has increased by more than any other billionaire, up by nearly $113 billion over the past 12 months, to an estimated $177 billion #AI #Meta

https://www.forbes.com/sites/phoebeliu/2024/04/02/tech-billionaires-have-added-an-astonishing-750-billion-to-their-fortunes-over-the-past-year/

#FollowTheMoney 🧵 17/n and here the whole Forbes Rich List for 2024. The planet has a record 2,781 billionaires now who are worth a record $14.2 trillion.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2024/04/02/forbes-38th-annual-worlds-billionaires-list-facts-and-figures-2024/

#FollowTheMoney 🧵 18/n

Spotify too. Everywhere money is being sucked out (or who has the agency here really? More in next post) from artists to billionaires

https://mstdn.ca/@ned/112249803518261424

#FollowTheMoney 🧵 19/n

This is what I am thinking about now. Not at all the first to say this or even think it myself, but just to emphasise: better not to think of billionaires as evil scheming money grabbers - i mean, they are - but as vessels for money, capitalism itself. Like, sci-fi wise, human bodies that look like humans from the outside but have been taken over by an AI - money itself. And it’s ruling everything!

https://mastodon.green/@pvonhellermannn/112251122729288252

#FollowTheMoney 🧵 20/n

Now really is the time of monsters. #Gramsci

#FollowTheMoney 🧵 21/n Suddenly remembered that at the end of 2022 I posted this here. So embarrassing - cringe, as my children would say! That I actually wrote “the new world is almost born”. No it’s not. The time of monsters is in full, full swing, the new world really is not born yet. All we can do is to keep on trying to organise to make it happen one day. #Gramsci

https://mastodon.green/@pvonhellermannn/109607575259368216

#FollowTheMoney 🧵 22/n Last point and then I will stop for today: saw #Hamilton a few weeks ago and was really struck by how then it was possible to start a revolution, raise an army and WIN! Like, that would just be totally impossible now. The imbalance in military power, just as in wealth (and control over media etc etc) is just so VAST now. It’s impossible to beat. That’s why noone really even tries anymore.

#FollowTheMoney 🧵 23/n. Sorry- one more! Just to end on a less bleak note: seeing this toot reminded me that, of course, that billionaire military might AI bleak dystopia is real,IS our world, but there is actually an even bigger reality here every day, in all of us, since forever. Which is that the vast majority of us humans basically just want a simple life, with family, friends, barbecues (ok maybe not perfect example but since it’s here). #FrugalAbundance

https://ohai.social/@archaeohistories/112251349725100974

#FollowTheMoney 🧵27/n The piece btw contains a necessary critique of my sci-fi “money rules” take a few posts above. Although i still like the idea of all this being a kind of superorganism. But yes, it is about power - political economy, not just economy.

#FollowTheMoney 🧵 28/n But honestly, just read this piece - everything in this 🧵 in one brilliant analysis. And, crucially, using to explain lack of climate action. This is what everyone, each one of us, needs to think about! “Ecologically speaking, neoliberalism couldn’t have come at a worse time.”

Here Christopher’s book itself:
The Price is Wrong. Why Capitalism Won’t Save The Planet.

https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/3069-the-price-is-wrong