#FollowTheMoney š§µ 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 itās 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 š§µ 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 š§µ 20/n
Now really is the time of monsters. #Gramsci
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 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 āthe new world is almost bornā. No itās 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 Schumacherās 1973 book #SmallIsBeautiful. Letās 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
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 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 itās here). #FrugalAbundance
Attached: 1 image Stone cooking supports used to grill skewers of meat by Minoans on Santorini, 3600 years old. The line of holes in the base supplied coals with oxygen. Many consider modern "souvlaki" street kebabs a direct descendant of this portable food system. Museum of Prehistoric Thera, Greece #archaeohistories
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 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. Mustnāt forget!
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 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 dentistryās 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 š§µ 26/n An outstanding review by Will Davies (my Goldsmiths colleague) of Brett Christopherās āThe Price is Wrongā: about our neoliberal political economy (using a Braudelian distinction btw āthe marketā and ācapitalismā - 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 š§µ 28/n But honestly, just read this piece - everything in this š§µ 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! āEcologically speaking, neoliberalism couldnāt have come at a worse time.ā
Here Christopherās book itself:
The Price is Wrong. Why Capitalism Wonāt Save The Planet.
https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/3069-the-price-is-wrong
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 29/n Another overlap with #AcademicVenting š§µ- because itās 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:
āUniversities 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.ā
āA lot of rich people donāt actually want an education system or the educated population that would come along with it. Sure, it would be better for everyone. But it would also mean having to share, and these people have let their greed literally drive them insane.ā https://www.okdoomer.io/im-a-professor-heres-why-im-walking-away-from-my-tenure/ 1/2
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 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 hadnāt lost to Reagan.
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 31/n I think the graph came from this New York Times piece but donāt have a subscription so canāt check.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/03/opinion/global-billionaires-tax.html
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 32/n Watched āThe Founderā on Netflix yesterday, about McDonalds. Really interesting- would recommend it. Particularly how the real breakthrough came when Kroc, advised by Sonneborn, went for real estate. Checked it on Wikipedia:
āMcDonald's present-day real-estate holdings represent $37.7 billion on its balance sheet, about 99% of the company's assets and 35% of its annual gross revenue.ā
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 33/n
Today an overlap with #ClimateDiary: British farmers are struggling due to climate change, Brexit AND supermarket power:
Most farmers receive less than 1% of the profit made from the food they grow. Of the 20% food inflation experienced by the public a minuscule proportion made its way back to the farmer. Tesco made a Ā£2.3bn profit last year, while 49% of fruit and veg farmers fear theyāll be out of business before the end of this one.
#FollowTheMoney š§µ34/n #ClimateDiary
We had a veg box for 12 years from Hankham Organics; 3 weeks ago we suddenly had a note with our box that they were closing, as it wasnāt working financially any more. š¢š¢š¢
And a fish merchant who we got smoked salmon for Christmas from closed this year too, for the same reasons. Plus Goldsmithsā woes of course (#AcademicVenting). So many good, small organisations struggling and ending.
#FollowTheMoney 35/n #ClimateDiary #AcademicVenting
This is why:
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 36/n Here a positive, progressive use of money flows:
1400+ Columbia University alumni from its 20 schools have pledged to withhold all āfinancial, programmatic, and academic supportā until school meets demands related to divestment, student discipline, and community safety.
Group website says over $63 million of donations at risk. #Gaza #studentprotests
#FollowTheMoney š§µ37/n
Even though all of us living in the UK know that homelessness is terrible (and has grown exponentially since 2010), it is still shocking to see this graph.
(There are notes on methods: all countries included both rough sleeping and invisible homelessness).
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 38/n
A rare silver lining to severe cuts in local council budgets: for the last few years Eastbourne have stopped spraying our streets and I love this time of year, flowers reclaiming the streets everywhere. #Rewilding #ClimateDiary
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 39/n
Have to add this here. The last 14 years summarised in 4 images #UKPolitics #GE2024
EDIT: here link itself too as images in screenshot i complete
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 40/n havenāt added anything here in a while - but this needs to be posted!
Trumpās victory adds record $64bn to wealth of richest top 10
Share surge increases Elon Muskās fortune by $26bn in a day as Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin and Bill Gates also benefit
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 41/n Ok so the reason for the long pause in this š§µ was being made rdundant in July, by my lovely (not) employer of 13 years, Goldsmiths University. You can read all about it in this long #AcademicVenting š§µ, tracing the whole sorry saga from first rumblings in Nov ā23 to the bitter end. But of course, #redundancy is all about money, and I think about money all the time now (I have to), so really should write it about it all here a bit
Half thinking of starting an #AcademicVenting hashtag here, about the dire, dire state of UK (global?) higher education. Sharing nuggets of senior management decisions, neoliberal language, and overall slow collapse. Wonāt work of course because most of us canāt risk honesty, but honestly: the everyday reality of what is happening deserves recording in all its depressing and damning detail. #Universities #AcademicChatter #neoliberalism
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 43/n Now of course Elon Musk - having made 2/3 of Twitter staff redundant - has been hired by Trump to head the new āEfficiency Departmentā. i find this prospect alone deeply, deeply scary - both in terms of public services disappearing and the 1000s who will lose their jobs. As you all know: there is absolutely nothing āefficientā about these kinds of cuts whatsoever. They are deeply destructive, nothing else.
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 44/n but also: #Redundancy has made me think deeply (of course!) about the role of money in personal decision making. I may be wrong but it feels like this is something we donāt talk about much, and yet it is is so central to everything! I DO want to talk about it, even if I have nothing insightful to say actually. Just a few observations.
1. Money was at core of my decisions around redundancy. I have two teenage children and a high mortgage.
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 45/n
I could not go for lovely 0.5 offered, or for tribunal; I had to opt for enhanced redundancy. If had chosen tribunal route i would have probably been able to keep my job as the 12 who did (who were able to do so due to different financial circumstances) were all reinstalled in an even lovelier deal btw management and union. (The 64 of us eho accepted enhanced redundancy by deadline did not know this would happen).
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 46/n
2. Money is now also so core to all my decision-making in how to spend my time, what jobs to go for - and balancing the need for money with wanting to do good, environmental work, and things I enjoy and am good at. It is quite strange, I gave a lecture at SOAS in Feb this year on āDoing Work You Believe in and be paid for itā, on the very day the Goldsmiths mass redundancies were announced (will see if I can upload recording here)
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 47/n
This was a combination of two papers: one on unpaid Eastbourne climate activism, one on sustainability professionals in the palm oil sector. It is very strange that I gave that lecture and wrote that paper - this is me now! I am out here in the wilderness, having to make a living, and yes, doing consultancy work. Which, of course, as I am rapidly learning, does not have to mean āselling out ā - my current work for the RSPB is really rewarding.
https://journals.librarypublishing.arizona.edu/jpe/article/id/4717/
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 48/n here also a link to the other paper on Eastbourne climate activism, iāve shared it before but doing so again as it has a brief section on what kind of work is rewarded by high salaries, and what isnāt. I still feel this is an incredibly important topic and not really talked about enough in #ClimateAction circles. Maybe we can talk about it more together here?
In July 2019, Eastbourne Borough Council declared a climate emergency and committed to making Eastbourne carbon neutral by 2030. In order to achieve this, citizens together with Council created a unique model of council-citizen collaborative climate governance, the Eastbourne Eco Action Network (EAN). EANās main strategy has been the setting up of targeted working groups, each bringing together Councillors, engaged citizens and providers, and each tackling a specific area of climate action through a combination of infrastructure, institutional and behavioural changes. As an environmental anthropologist living in Eastbourne, I was involved in this process right from the beginning, having had my own āecophanyāāthe realisation that the climate emergency required urgent actionāin February 2019. Two years and one pandemic later, in this paper I reflect on the overall experiences and challenges of EANās and Eastbourne Borough Councilās work towards town-wide carbon neutrality to date, discussing possible factors (structural and other) determining varying successes and failures. At the same time, this paper provides an auto-ethnographic account of what āengaged anthropologyā means in practice, mapping out the real contributions anthropologists can and should make in local climate action, but also reflecting on challenges encountered along the way.
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 50/n Today adding this excellent video by @RichardJMurphy on how āthe Cityā is not our āJewel in the Crownā, as Rachel Reeves put it, but a parasite extracting huge amounts of money for self-enrichment. It does not add any value to the economy.
So important to see the City for what it is.
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 51/n Richardās video has spurred me on to do a few posts now on #PrivateEquity. Long overdue here, because private equity is at the heart of how our world works!
(Just to state again: i am not an expert, just someone who is trying to make sense of our world by #FollowingTheMoney, in an eclectic š§µ)
To start with basics: what is private equity? I like this clear definition by Justin Robertson
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13563460903288270
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 52/n
The amount of wealth and assets held by private equity is vast. The biggest private equity firm of all is of course #BlackRock, founded by Larry Fink in 1988. Here is a lovely Statistica chart showing how its āassets under managementā grew from $1.31 trillion (i mean, not bad) to $10.41 trillion in 2024. Bloomberg predicts they will hit $15 trillion in a few years
https://www.statista.com/statistics/891292/assets-under-management-blackrock/
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 54/n
This article is hard to stomach for all those of us currently looking for work, and not finding anything suitable, or anything at all. But itās good that at least rising #unemployment is recognised now.
My own #redundancy last year and subsequent struggles have made me so alert to all these wider structural changes; I am really scared that this may be just the beginning. Terrible combination of AI and money going only to the rich
#FollowTheMoney š§µ55/n
āKeri said her father had been āpowered by unconditional loveā but he felt the government took advantage of the nearly 6 million people like him who care for a loved one, saving the taxpayer at least Ā£162bn a year.ā
This reminded of a thought I had a while back: how salaries/wages are directly negatively correlated with love.
When you do something you love, or out of love, this is instantly punished by capitalism.
Carers, nursery workers -
David Lodge died after being found next to his father and full-time carer Peterās body. His sister Keri believes the strain of caring and lack of government support contributed to their deaths
#FollowTheMoney š§µ56/n
- nurses, art gallery workers, conservation NGOs, academics, etc - all these jobs that people do out of love for something/one are poorly paid. Love is exploited. More love = less money.
Only love of money itself and nothing else is rewarded with money (high salaries, bonuses, etc). Maybe not surprising - what do you expect in capitalism - but not much honesty about it. All that neoliberal motivational #Passion talk (āmy work is my passionā) - exploitative bollocks.
#FollowTheMoney š§µ57/n
This LinkedIn post resonates ā¦ wanted to share here just in case there are others who are in this situation too.
Also one reason I hardly ever add to this š§µany more is that, of course, I am literally trying to #FollowTheMoney, or rather, divert some from somewhere to my bank accountš #JobSearch #FediHire
This week, a friend told me theyād taken a job with lower pay and a smaller title. āItās not my dream job,ā they said. āBut I need the money.ā My heart ached for him. The last two years have been the hardest Iāve seen in 30 years of watching the job market. Talented people who once had their pick of opportunities are taking lower salaries/titles because they donāt have any choice. This in a world thatās full of āFind your purpose.ā And āDo work that lights you up every damn day.ā F**k purpose for a minute. Thereās no shame in taking the job that feeds your family. Thereās no shame in staying in an industry you donāt love if it keeps the lights on. Some of us are just trying to get through the month. And thatās okay. This season wonāt last forever. I used to believe I had to ālove what I doā every day. That if I wasnāt perfectly aligned with my highest values, I was failing. What a load of privileged bullshit. I once seriously considered selling used knickers on eBay. It was twenty years ago and I was broke and desperate. I never went through with it but it tells you where my head was. To those of you who are between jobs, just remember you more resilient, more adaptable, more courageous than any job title can measure. And this too shall pass. | 158 comments on LinkedIn
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 58/n
I think so much about middle class-ness at the moment. More research in news this week how itās the top 10%, those with incomes over Ā£36,000, who are largely responsible for CO2 emissions; but itās even more than that; middle-class aspirations shape everything. So conscious of this now as I am so driven in finding work so as not to have to sell our (nice, middle class, highly mortgaged house). Then a friend just sent me this - must read. #ClimateDiary
#FollowTheMoney š§µ34/n #ClimateDiary
We had a veg box for 12 years from Hankham Organics; 3 weeks ago we suddenly had a note with our box that they were closing, as it wasnāt working financially any more. š¢š¢š¢
And a fish merchant who we got smoked salmon for Christmas from closed this year too, for the same reasons. Plus Goldsmithsā woes of course (#AcademicVenting). So many good, small organisations struggling and ending.
#FollowTheMoney 35/n #ClimateDiary #AcademicVenting
This is why:
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 36/n Here a positive, progressive use of money flows:
1400+ Columbia University alumni from its 20 schools have pledged to withhold all āfinancial, programmatic, and academic supportā until school meets demands related to divestment, student discipline, and community safety.
Group website says over $63 million of donations at risk. #Gaza #studentprotests
#FollowTheMoney š§µ37/n
Even though all of us living in the UK know that homelessness is terrible (and has grown exponentially since 2010), it is still shocking to see this graph.
(There are notes on methods: all countries included both rough sleeping and invisible homelessness).
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 38/n
A rare silver lining to severe cuts in local council budgets: for the last few years Eastbourne have stopped spraying our streets and I love this time of year, flowers reclaiming the streets everywhere. #Rewilding #ClimateDiary
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 39/n
Have to add this here. The last 14 years summarised in 4 images #UKPolitics #GE2024
EDIT: here link itself too as images in screenshot i complete
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 40/n havenāt added anything here in a while - but this needs to be posted!
Trumpās victory adds record $64bn to wealth of richest top 10
Share surge increases Elon Muskās fortune by $26bn in a day as Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin and Bill Gates also benefit
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 41/n Ok so the reason for the long pause in this š§µ was being made rdundant in July, by my lovely (not) employer of 13 years, Goldsmiths University. You can read all about it in this long #AcademicVenting š§µ, tracing the whole sorry saga from first rumblings in Nov ā23 to the bitter end. But of course, #redundancy is all about money, and I think about money all the time now (I have to), so really should write it about it all here a bit
Half thinking of starting an #AcademicVenting hashtag here, about the dire, dire state of UK (global?) higher education. Sharing nuggets of senior management decisions, neoliberal language, and overall slow collapse. Wonāt work of course because most of us canāt risk honesty, but honestly: the everyday reality of what is happening deserves recording in all its depressing and damning detail. #Universities #AcademicChatter #neoliberalism
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 43/n Now of course Elon Musk - having made 2/3 of Twitter staff redundant - has been hired by Trump to head the new āEfficiency Departmentā. i find this prospect alone deeply, deeply scary - both in terms of public services disappearing and the 1000s who will lose their jobs. As you all know: there is absolutely nothing āefficientā about these kinds of cuts whatsoever. They are deeply destructive, nothing else.
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 44/n but also: #Redundancy has made me think deeply (of course!) about the role of money in personal decision making. I may be wrong but it feels like this is something we donāt talk about much, and yet it is is so central to everything! I DO want to talk about it, even if I have nothing insightful to say actually. Just a few observations.
1. Money was at core of my decisions around redundancy. I have two teenage children and a high mortgage.
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 45/n
I could not go for lovely 0.5 offered, or for tribunal; I had to opt for enhanced redundancy. If had chosen tribunal route i would have probably been able to keep my job as the 12 who did (who were able to do so due to different financial circumstances) were all reinstalled in an even lovelier deal btw management and union. (The 64 of us eho accepted enhanced redundancy by deadline did not know this would happen).
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 46/n
2. Money is now also so core to all my decision-making in how to spend my time, what jobs to go for - and balancing the need for money with wanting to do good, environmental work, and things I enjoy and am good at. It is quite strange, I gave a lecture at SOAS in Feb this year on āDoing Work You Believe in and be paid for itā, on the very day the Goldsmiths mass redundancies were announced (will see if I can upload recording here)
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 47/n
This was a combination of two papers: one on unpaid Eastbourne climate activism, one on sustainability professionals in the palm oil sector. It is very strange that I gave that lecture and wrote that paper - this is me now! I am out here in the wilderness, having to make a living, and yes, doing consultancy work. Which, of course, as I am rapidly learning, does not have to mean āselling out ā - my current work for the RSPB is really rewarding.
https://journals.librarypublishing.arizona.edu/jpe/article/id/4717/
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 48/n here also a link to the other paper on Eastbourne climate activism, iāve shared it before but doing so again as it has a brief section on what kind of work is rewarded by high salaries, and what isnāt. I still feel this is an incredibly important topic and not really talked about enough in #ClimateAction circles. Maybe we can talk about it more together here?
In July 2019, Eastbourne Borough Council declared a climate emergency and committed to making Eastbourne carbon neutral by 2030. In order to achieve this, citizens together with Council created a unique model of council-citizen collaborative climate governance, the Eastbourne Eco Action Network (EAN). EANās main strategy has been the setting up of targeted working groups, each bringing together Councillors, engaged citizens and providers, and each tackling a specific area of climate action through a combination of infrastructure, institutional and behavioural changes. As an environmental anthropologist living in Eastbourne, I was involved in this process right from the beginning, having had my own āecophanyāāthe realisation that the climate emergency required urgent actionāin February 2019. Two years and one pandemic later, in this paper I reflect on the overall experiences and challenges of EANās and Eastbourne Borough Councilās work towards town-wide carbon neutrality to date, discussing possible factors (structural and other) determining varying successes and failures. At the same time, this paper provides an auto-ethnographic account of what āengaged anthropologyā means in practice, mapping out the real contributions anthropologists can and should make in local climate action, but also reflecting on challenges encountered along the way.
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 50/n Today adding this excellent video by @RichardJMurphy on how āthe Cityā is not our āJewel in the Crownā, as Rachel Reeves put it, but a parasite extracting huge amounts of money for self-enrichment. It does not add any value to the economy.
So important to see the City for what it is.
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 51/n Richardās video has spurred me on to do a few posts now on #PrivateEquity. Long overdue here, because private equity is at the heart of how our world works!
(Just to state again: i am not an expert, just someone who is trying to make sense of our world by #FollowingTheMoney, in an eclectic š§µ)
To start with basics: what is private equity? I like this clear definition by Justin Robertson
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13563460903288270
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 52/n
The amount of wealth and assets held by private equity is vast. The biggest private equity firm of all is of course #BlackRock, founded by Larry Fink in 1988. Here is a lovely Statistica chart showing how its āassets under managementā grew from $1.31 trillion (i mean, not bad) to $10.41 trillion in 2024. Bloomberg predicts they will hit $15 trillion in a few years
https://www.statista.com/statistics/891292/assets-under-management-blackrock/
#FollowTheMoney š§µ 54/n
This article is hard to stomach for all those of us currently looking for work, and not finding anything suitable, or anything at all. But itās good that at least rising #unemployment is recognised now.
My own #redundancy last year and subsequent struggles have made me so alert to all these wider structural changes; I am really scared that this may be just the beginning. Terrible combination of AI and money going only to the rich
@furqanshah yes it looks like one! But sadly no
@pvonhellermannn Iām very fortunate to be doing well myself.
Friends in Europe are finally, after 2 years, winning the lawsuits to get their severance.
I'm so sorry to read this post.
I had been wondering how you were doing at your place of employment and this is terrible news.
Whilst I agree on that, the abandonment of the gardens on the front is tragic.
Adoption of a Dutch style grass and perennial scheme rather than old-fashioned summer bedding would certainly make sense but what I saw there was abandonment.
It is difficult to attract tourism but the rot makes it even more difficult. It will create a downward spiral of further deprivation.
Time was, the Parks Department won awards. All that expertise thrown away.
I didnāt sign that letter- No one approached me.
I did write an email response directly to their alumni office (see pic) that my husband (financial engineering msc) and I (earth science PhD) would not be giving a dime (as alumni)
Email links to this message from Shafik
Missing from message is the reality on #columbia campus::
No students
Nypd everywhere
Kettling barricades everywhere
Nypd ID checks w no one in line because so few are being let in
Pauline von Hellermann
Rich š¶UK #RejoinEU
Jonathan Schofield
Kate Bowles
Furqan Shah
TomƔs LƔzaro
Dr. Sundancer
alihan_banan
P T R
Alex
Dean F.
Eye
Climate Jenny 2.0
BenBen
Cat - One Creative Cat she/her
Loukas (They/Them) š³ļøāā§ļø
MĆ©lani (Melanie) Bjornsdottir (she, Åi)
Josephine of the Spirits
LionelB
Davva
legraLeGra