#Budget #UKPolitics This article by Gary Stevenson is so good, please read every word of it.
“Whatever Jeremy Hunt says, traders know the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. And they’re paid millions to bet on it.”
This is what the world is - it is run by a minute elite for a minute elite and the rest of us, the masses, the natural world, we just don’t count. It is a #TragedyOftheNonCommons (will reshare my own piece on this below 1/n)
Attached: 1 image I've just published my first ever blog: "The Tragedy of the Non-Commons" I wrote it in July, frustrated by a Twitter thread about how the Tragedy of the #Commons continues to be taught at universities. I then left it (it's somewhat experiemental) but with #COP27 and #Twittermigration coinciding this week, I just wanted it to be out there. Would love for it to be shared here on our #digitalcommons and grateful for any comments https://medium.com/@p.vonhellermann/the-tragedy-of-the-non-commons-4bfad884cdbe
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.”
You can always tell who in Hollywood has family money by their Instagrams. People like Dakota Johnson, who have a Hollywood lineage deeper than the Mariana Trench, post only rarely. They post about social justice causes they care about, or personal announcements. Even someone like actress and musician Maya Hawke mostly posts previews of upcoming […]
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 4/n
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.
https://undisciplinedenvironments.org/2023/10/26/anthropology-and-degrowth-where-to-next/
Why should Anthropology engage with Degrowth, and why should Degrowth engage with Anthropology? This blog offers a set of reflections around these questions, based on the contributions to the workshop “Anthropology and Degrowth: Deepening the dialogue”.
#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 🧵 9/n So far the has been more about who the money flows towards, but now also some posts about who it flows away from. Again, random collection, no comprensive analysis - just snippets of what’s going on!
Yesterday I listened to this really heartbreaking and deeply worrying programme about the rapid rise in bankruptcies in the UK. Of course we see this all around us - all those closing restaurants, Debenhams etc. the #DeathOfTheHighStreet speeding up
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001x55h?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile
#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:
The state is abandoning its people
#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
#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! 😊)
#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
#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.
#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
Attached: 1 image "Spotify’s CEO is now a billionaire but it takes artists 334 streams to make $1. The company just enacted a plan to completely demonetize smaller artists. Under the new policy, tracks that get under a certain threshold of annual streams will receive no money from the company. Groups like United Musicians and Allied Workers (ig: weareumaw) are fighting to save their industry." #Union #capitalism
I started pointing this out back in the days of #MyopicMaggie . Unrestrained capitalism is doomed to failure. I think of it like this:
"If you let people do what they want, what will they do?"
Answer :
"They'll do what they want"
It is literally, as simple as that. The problem now is getting people to understand that 'legislation is a *good* thing' and also how to deal with global level international money-laundering.
To be fair to old MyopicMaggie, she did primarily go on about 'red tape', which is fair enough. You always want things to be of maximum efficiency. 'Legislation' is a completely different question.. but slowly over the years, the two have been blended together.
She also profoundly misunderstood, that if you let people do what they want to do *and* offer them privatised virtual monopolies, e.g. sewage treatment.. the world will start to stink.
I had a little look at Southern Water. 😱 Are you doing some community delving?
Well.. that'll keep you busy!!!
Climate change.. pollution.. capitalism.. science.. marine loss.. fishing rights.. public health.. King Charles owns the coast.. corruption.. collapsing coastlines.. wildlife loss..
(I didn't mean to put corruption after King Charles, but as a Scotsman, it's too hard to resist).
#Budget #UKPolitics This article by Gary Stevenson is so good, please read every word of it.
“Whatever Jeremy Hunt says, traders know the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. And they’re paid millions to bet on it.”
This is what the world is - it is run by a minute elite for a minute elite and the rest of us, the masses, the natural world, we just don’t count. It is a #TragedyOftheNonCommons (will reshare my own piece on this below 1/n)
Attached: 1 image I've just published my first ever blog: "The Tragedy of the Non-Commons" I wrote it in July, frustrated by a Twitter thread about how the Tragedy of the #Commons continues to be taught at universities. I then left it (it's somewhat experiemental) but with #COP27 and #Twittermigration coinciding this week, I just wanted it to be out there. Would love for it to be shared here on our #digitalcommons and grateful for any comments https://medium.com/@p.vonhellermann/the-tragedy-of-the-non-commons-4bfad884cdbe
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.”
You can always tell who in Hollywood has family money by their Instagrams. People like Dakota Johnson, who have a Hollywood lineage deeper than the Mariana Trench, post only rarely. They post about social justice causes they care about, or personal announcements. Even someone like actress and musician Maya Hawke mostly posts previews of upcoming […]
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 4/n
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.
https://undisciplinedenvironments.org/2023/10/26/anthropology-and-degrowth-where-to-next/
Why should Anthropology engage with Degrowth, and why should Degrowth engage with Anthropology? This blog offers a set of reflections around these questions, based on the contributions to the workshop “Anthropology and Degrowth: Deepening the dialogue”.
#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 🧵 9/n So far the has been more about who the money flows towards, but now also some posts about who it flows away from. Again, random collection, no comprensive analysis - just snippets of what’s going on!
Yesterday I listened to this really heartbreaking and deeply worrying programme about the rapid rise in bankruptcies in the UK. Of course we see this all around us - all those closing restaurants, Debenhams etc. the #DeathOfTheHighStreet speeding up
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001x55h?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile
#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:
The state is abandoning its people
#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
#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! 😊)
#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
#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.
#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
Attached: 1 image "Spotify’s CEO is now a billionaire but it takes artists 334 streams to make $1. The company just enacted a plan to completely demonetize smaller artists. Under the new policy, tracks that get under a certain threshold of annual streams will receive no money from the company. Groups like United Musicians and Allied Workers (ig: weareumaw) are fighting to save their industry." #Union #capitalism
#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!
#AcademicVenting That is what this is: we are governed by money itself, and it brings cruel unimaginative rightwing mediocrity to the top everywhere. (Second crossover with #FollowTheMoney 🧵 here!) Sadly forgotten name just now, (will edit), but remembering podcast with Cambridge prof saying people worry about being ruled by AI , nonhuman entities, but that is exactly what corporations are. Nonhuman entities are already running everything. https://mastodon.green/@pvonhellermannn/112047945347154458
#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
Attached: 1 image 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of Schumacher’s 1973 book #SmallIsBeautiful. Let’s make it a turning point year for everyone recognising that indeed Small Is Beautiful, a year of #Transition towards #CommunityBuilding #Commoning, #Degrowth #AgroEcology #2023 1/5 The new world is almost born
Yes! The system has a mind (or rather, an instinct) of its own and there's nobody at the helm.
Scott Alexander calls it Moloch: https://mas.to/@jackofalltrades/110073652879895365
Nate Hagens described it as a "mindless, energy-hungry superorganism": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800919310067
There's not much point focusing on individual ants when it's the structure of the hive that's the problem.
"I know that “capitalists sometimes do bad things” isn’t exactly an original talking point. But I do want to stress how it’s not equivalent to “capitalists are greedy”. I mean, sometimes they are greedy. But other times they’re just in a sufficiently intense competition where anyone who doesn’t do it will be outcompeted and replaced by people who do. Business practices are set by Moloch, no one else has any choice in the matter." https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ #capitalism
I started pointing this out back in the days of #MyopicMaggie . Unrestrained capitalism is doomed to failure. I think of it like this:
"If you let people do what they want, what will they do?"
Answer :
"They'll do what they want"
It is literally, as simple as that. The problem now is getting people to understand that 'legislation is a *good* thing' and also how to deal with global level international money-laundering.
To be fair to old MyopicMaggie, she did primarily go on about 'red tape', which is fair enough. You always want things to be of maximum efficiency. 'Legislation' is a completely different question.. but slowly over the years, the two have been blended together.
She also profoundly misunderstood, that if you let people do what they want to do *and* offer them privatised virtual monopolies, e.g. sewage treatment.. the world will start to stink.
Meanwhile, those whose mortgage was paid decades ago make statements like "well the UK has always been a low-income economy", and ask "why did you come here" when pressed about reasons for the decay and what's the plan going forward (at that point they are letting you know they are upset at you). At best, they'll offer a "there's nothing that can be done" and, if taking it personally, "it's not my fault". In private conversations, they may even say, "no more colonies to plunder, so what were the rich supposed to do?"
Perhaps a whole generation needs to retire. But even then their votes will continue to count – in the wrong direction.
I am hoping beyond hope that someone understands the UK economy well enough to come up with a feasible plan, and has the political savvy and clout to pull it off.
@pvonhellermannn @PippiPunkstrumpf
"If they die and others take over" seems like a strange assumption - the number of closed-up businesses I'm seeing suggest that nobody is taking over, because it's simply no longer possible to run a business in that niche any more.
@pvonhellermannn @PippiPunkstrumpf
To me it feels like an ideological assumption. They believe that the market will somehow always provide solutions, and that the only sort of destruction is "creative destruction."
I'm coming to believe that capitalism just doesn't work outside of a very particular set of environmental factors, much as human life can't be sustained outside of a particular range of temperature and pressure. To people who have only ever lived within that environment, however, it must seem like it's everpresent and natural.
@pvonhellermannn interesting angle/metaphor.
To play devil’s advocate, capitalists often cite ‘creative destruction’, which is an analog for decay in the non-economic world.
So, although I’ve often done this myself, I think it’s wrong to characterise ‘growthers’ as advocates for ‘limitless’ growth. For me, the key factor is the externalisation you cite. And externalisation is a drug that fuels the pursuit of power
@pvonhellermannn yes, content creators are just there to enable #surveillancecapitalism companies to harvest our behavioural data.
When we are very predictable, we are malleable.
@pvonhellermannn no place left to run https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/112008267893309484
I wonder later in that thread whether the returns *required* by pensions are perhaps part of the pinch point that capital ‘sees’.
Maybe someone who know what they’re talking about re pensions could comment
@pvonhellermannn
Hi there, just a thought on posting a URL to a Fediverse post as the sole content: It looks weird because the URL doesn't display any text you might have written in that post. In some cases it won't even display a potentially attached image.
And the way how clicking on a URL works in the browser is not user-friendly because the click opens the original post in a new tab – by losing the connection to my login-session. So I won't easily be able to boost nor comment (unless I absolutely want to and want to go through the motion of pasting the URL into my Fediverse search window...).
In your case here, I don't have a better idea than posting both, a link to your actual blog , and if you really want to, also the URL to the original Fediverse post, but then also include a quick summary of that post.
"We're not in Kansas/on Twitter anymore." 🙂
Thank you for sharing this, Pauline.
The finance sector does not produce anything of value. Its sole purpose is to siphon off wealth from the rest of the economy and allow the rich to gamble for their share of it. This is not capitalism, this is rent-seeking, or "technofeudalism".
I loved the part of the article that said to "look at the world with your fucking eyes."
When I look around in my upper-middle class bubble I see many people striving to replicate what the rich are doing. Parents of my daughter's school friend just bought (i.e. took a mortgage for, leveraging their credit score) fourth apartment. Colleagues from work are trading bitcoin or otherwise participate in the FIRE movement.
Hell, even I bought government bonds. This is free money for those that have spare capital. Meanwhile, those that live from paycheck to paycheck are getting squeezed out.
@jackofalltrades @pvonhellermannn Look at capitalism from the perspective of the mid-18th century: it's a fantastic way to take the little surplus in society and create a larger surplus. The fact that the surplus is not shared equitably is less important than the idea of making more surplus, because almost everyone is one bad harvest or one new virus away from an early death.
Now it's 300 years later. The planet mostly creates enough calories for our massive population to live without the constant threat of starvation. We've got enough medical care to live most people a decent life span.
Now we can afford to reign in the excesses and transition to something more equitable.
In the meantime, #EatTheRich
All so true. And thank you for adding #EatTheRich! How could i forget! Will add to 🧵 😊
There is one problem with this point of view: capitalism itself is not the source of the surplus or its growth. Capitalism, like any other economic system, is about organizing production and distribution.
The growth historically came from technology and from an ever accelerating exploitation: of people, of Earth's crust, of ecosystems.
I am reminded of the words of Kohei Saito: https://mas.to/@jackofalltrades/111977170799718193
We are nearing the end of growth, the road ahead unclear.
"Capitalism has subsumed the entire planet now because of globalization. That means we externalized all the costs. Now, we don’t have any more space to externalize because China is expanding, Brazil is expanding, India is expanding: Everyone tries to be a capitalist and it doesn’t work anymore. We are encountering the global ecological crisis, the pandemic, the climate crisis, competition for resources — and these things are closely related to capitalism and the tendency to constantly expand."
@ahm42 😊 indeed it’s not “newsworthy”, but of course this is an opinion piece, not “news”.
How to start? I don’t know. I’ve been thinking recently about how setting an upper limit per person/corporation on party donations (maybe $10 or so; really low) would make a huge difference. But will never be implemented by anyone who got into power through large donations..
@pvonhellermannn There are somewhere around 3000 people that control the vast majority of the world’s capital.
I’m just sayin.... it seems like a relatively simple numbers problem....
True, Madame did see her fair share of vengeance heads, but also note that things eased up in a whole lot of other kingdoms once the aristos realized how easy the guillotine was to build.
And should we care to put it in 21st Century terms, i.e., The Century of the Lunatic Kakistocracy, think of the streaming revenue! The live stream would be lit! And honestly, you take out the top 10-15, and I'm willing to bet the rest of them will see the logic in paying taxes and restoring the Commons.
(Dear 3 initial agencies, I'm not the droid you're looking for.)
Pauline von Hellermann
Grant
Jack of all trades
The Luddite
Albert Cardona
thoughtsinuserspace
Passenger
Jonathan Schofield
Charlotte Walker
JeniParsons
Tim Schofield 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺🗺
Mark Burton
Patrick Leavy
Murat Cem Mengüç
anlomedad
Grumble
Just Tom...
Rene Gat
MissConstrue
MarjorieR