#followthemoney

#FollowTheMoney 🧵 97/n As Gary says again and again: the only way out of this is #WealthTax. Governments have to address massive inequality not just for everyone’s wellbeing, but also to regain some power. And we need to bring all those assets now owned by the wealthy (water, energy, education, everything) back into public ownership. As the rich have long known: it is ALL about who controls assets.

#FollowTheMoney 🧵 98/n In my attempts to launch #RegenerativeAnthropology a bit, i am interacting with so many amazing, creative, brilliant people working in #Regeneration. It is nourishing, exciting, inspiring. But all of us, all of us, are scrambling around for sources of funding all the time. So little money in these spaces! This has made me think again about how money doesn’t go towards life, it goes towards death, dead things. Or, to put it differently:

#FollowTheMoney 🧵 99/n I think we need to start thinking of #Billionaires as black holes. That’s what they truly are: they suck up money forever and never spew it out again; they just swallow up all life, they are zones of death and nothingness. Truly!

#FollowTheMoney 🧵 100/n Happy the 100th (!) here is about something positive and exciting - #RegenerativeFinance. This episode of Nate Hagen’s rather wonderful “The Great Simplification” really chimes with last two posts: Matthew Monahan talking about his Ma Earth project financing regenerative projects, about “How Money Can Serve Life”. Enjoy! #RegenerativeAnthropology https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/226-matthew-monahan

#FollowTheMoney 🧵 101/n Sitting in pub garden after Eastbourne #GreenParty meeting this Thursday, Rachael said to me: “I just want to make a living”. I suddenly realised that this one sentence contains everything I have been trying to say here in the days before, and indeed throughout this 🧵. We want a world in which everybody can make a living, not one in which a few can make a killing. #RegenerativeFinance #RegenerativeAnthropology

#Soft2Bet #FollowTheMoney

BRIEF Mason's data center: shared revenue, unsigned costs Mason's data center won't cost residents, the city says. Revenue is shared; protections unsigned. 🔗 https://rhinocerosmedia.org/mason-data-center-who-pays #Lansing #Michigan #FollowTheMoney #Energy

#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) #FollowTheMoney https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/05/banker-budget-mega-rich-traders-jeremy-hunt?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

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.” https://defector.com/the-money-is-in-all-the-wrong-places

#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/

#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. https://on.ft.com/4bUtp80

#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 https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/mar/06/were-on-a-cliff-edge-cornish-village-where-52-of-houses-are-not-first-homes?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other #SEEtheOligarchy

#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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVvoyRpxG-A

#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 🧵 10/n But note the title ⬆️ - what is going on here? Turns out quite a bit of of the program was about how “Zombie firms”were kept alive artificially for years by low interest rates; that it’s good if they die and others take over. Really struck and appalled by utter coldness, distance and dehumanisation by people who say this - as @PippiPunkstrumpf@todon.eu just said, they really think of others just as numbers (see also our “Understanding Growth” piece above 5/n).

#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 #UKPolitics #Birmingham #Austerity https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/17/birmingham-britain-state-cuts-austerity-local-services

#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