3/n Have decided to turn this into a #FollowTheMoney 🧵, collecting pieces on how money flows in our system- more and more towards those already rich. As Kelsey McKenney, in this piece on #Hollywod, writes:
“The reality is that the people with the most money have devised, at every turn, new and more bulletproof ways for them to make and keep more money, and for the people who make things to make less. This is the eternal story of labor and management.”
This is happening in creative industries, in higher education, in literature: the more “content” - a lecture, an article, a role in a film - becomes a commodity divorced from its creators, the less creators themselves are paid and valued; they are workers, labourers like everyone else, the value of whose labour gets extracted by capital.
Capitalism isn’t over, replaced by #technofeudalism as some of claimed; it’s in full swing, in its purest form.
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 5/n Adding here a piece a group of us co-wrote at an #anthropology workshop, on “Understanding Growth”. This was experimental - co-writing on the spot! -, but i do come back to it: we distinguish between“Growth rooted in life” from “growth rooted in numbers”. Capitalism is pure number thinking.
Obviously there are many real experts on all this (Marx, Pikkety for a start), this piece is left field! But just thought of it again in this context.
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 6/n This is important: in contrast to most other Central Banks, which simply sit out losses, the Bank of England has an indemnity arrangement requiring the Treasury to cover its losses. This has resulted in £38-£40 billion going in effect from taxpayers to private banks in 2023, and same this year. Adding a second hashtag: #SEEtheOligarchy
FT article only for subscribers, I know (i get it through work). Here screenshots of key passages.
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 7/n Now something different - this really is a rag bag, really just adding things as they come along, occur to me, no careful crafting! Just things that enable you to trace and understand how money flows to the rich, how accumulation works. So here, a piece, with this fantastic map, of second homes in the UK, in #Cornwall in particular. Key arena of widening #WealthGap#Inequality
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 8/n Adding here a (somewhat sweary, apologies) Politics Joe interview with Gary Stevenson (see 1/n), talking about the rapid increase in inequality in the UK and the world, and also about how we need to make people SEE THIS. They need to realise that the reason their lives are shit, that they can't get houses, is growing inequality. Because the system is set up to make money flow to the rich. Everyone needs to understand this. #SEETheOligarchy
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 11/n Another key area money flows away from are local councils and social services and, therefore, the young and, again, community. In Birmingham, whose council declared bankruptcy in 2023, provisions for children will be cut by £52m in 2024-25 and £63m in 2025-26; youth services by £2.3m; and eleven community centres are being sold off. As John Harris says:
“In a drastic attempt to protect their beachfront homes, residents in Salisbury, Massachusetts, invested $500,000 in a sand dune to defend against encroaching tides. After being completed last week, the barrier made from 14,000 tons of sand lasted just 72 hours before it was completely washed away”
The #ICJ ruling followed so swiftly by 11 countries withdrawing funding from the #UNRWA (ie, cutting aid reaching Gaza) is despicable beyond words.
I have never ever felt so profoundly alienated. From those in power in my countries (UK and Germany) from the majority consensus, from my family. We are not the good ones.
👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 The president of Namibia, Hage Geingob, taking a strong, fantastic lead in speaking out against "Germany's inability to learn from its horrific history".
I am watching both full of gratitude that Institutions like the #ICJ exist, full of admiration for #SouthAfrica, but also full of fear, a lot of fear, that the case will not lead to any change in Gaza but to diminishing the power of the ICJ etc and the overall crisis of multilateralism. Let’s hope i am wrong
The planet-warming emissions generated during the first two months of the war in Gaza were greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations, new research reveals.
Another reason why Greta is, of course, right. No #ClimateJustice without peace
@aral thank you for sharing this. Really dispiriting to read, and quite something that you already went through all this in 2017. What are your thoughts now - it looks like even now Yanis and others in DiEM25 are still happy to use technofeudalist platforms?
Interesting piece by Carole #Cadwalladr on Yanis #Varoufakis’s latest book, “Technofeudalism: what killed capitalism”.
Maybe #Technofeudalism is its latest reincarnation rather than the end of #Capitalism, but a good term nonetheless to describe our age. Just a shame that neither Varoufakis nor Cadwalladr seem to have made it to #Mastodon yet (maybe not even left #X? I don’t know) - maybe soon
Regenerative Anthropology and/as Climate Action #ClimateDiary; writing book about palm oil; political and historical ecology, climate justice, commoning Avatar: a small person in a raincoat in a mirror with metal loops with LED lights swirling in front. This is the artwork “Sedibeng, It Comes with Rain” by Dineo Seshee Bopape, in Towner Gallery in EastbourneBackground: a palm oil mill in North Sumatra, in a luscious green landscape.