#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
#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!
#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
#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
#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 🧵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
#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.”
#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 🧵 31/n I think the graph came from this New York Times piece but don’t have a subscription so can’t check.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/03/opinion/global-billionaires-tax.html
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 32/n Watched “The Founder” 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:
“McDonald'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.”
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 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 £2.3bn profit last year, while 49% of fruit and veg farmers fear they’ll be out of business before the end of this one.
#FollowTheMoney 🧵34/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 wasn’t working financially any more. 😢😢😢
And a fish merchant who we got smoked salmon for Christmas from closed this year too, for the same reasons. Plus Goldsmiths’ woes of course (#AcademicVenting). So many good, small organisations struggling and ending.
#FollowTheMoney 35/n #ClimateDiary #AcademicVenting
This is why:
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 36/n Here a positive, progressive use of money flows:
1400+ Columbia University alumni from its 20 schools have pledged to withhold all “financial, programmatic, and academic support” 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 🧵37/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 🧵 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 🧵 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 🧵 40/n haven’t added anything here in a while - but this needs to be posted!
Trump’s victory adds record $64bn to wealth of richest top 10
Share surge increases Elon Musk’s fortune by $26bn in a day as Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin and Bill Gates also benefit
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 41/n Ok so the reason for the long pause in this 🧵 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 🧵, tracing the whole sorry saga from first rumblings in Nov ‘23 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
#FollowTheMoney 🧵42/n Firstly, I am conscious of my own #redundancy being very much part of the wider hollowing out, draining out of both public services and professional, creative industries everywhere (see many posts ⬆️). I am really scared about this - it’s strange how this is happening but not really talked about; no #unemployment crisis narrative at all, as of course most people, like me, end up not being “unemployed” but doing smaller, precarious jobs; very few of us on benefiso no stats
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 43/n Now of course Elon Musk - having made 2/3 of Twitter staff redundant - has been hired by Trump to head the new “Efficiency Department”. 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 “efficient” about these kinds of cuts whatsoever. They are deeply destructive, nothing else.
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 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 don’t 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 🧵 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 🧵 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 “Doing Work You Believe in and be paid for it”, on the very day the Goldsmiths mass redundancies were announced (will see if I can upload recording here)
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 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 “selling out “ - my current work for the RSPB is really rewarding.
https://journals.librarypublishing.arizona.edu/jpe/article/id/4717/
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 48/n here also a link to the other paper on Eastbourne climate activism, i’ve 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 isn’t. 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?
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 49/n Anyway, just to end for today: a huge, HUGE shout out ❤️ to everyone on here who works “freelance”, going from one projec to another (more on “projects” and projectification later - so important in itself). I am now realising the immense privilege of a secure job (not secure in my case, as it turned out), where you don’t have to think about where your money will come from in 6 months or whatever. It is a fundamentally different state of being. Everything now existential.
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 50/n Today adding this excellent video by @RichardJMurphy on how “the City” is not our “Jewel in the Crown”, 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 🧵 51/n Richard’s 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 🧵)
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 🧵 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 “assets under management” 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 🧵 53/n I have to go now but over the next few days just want to talk about what this means: it means that so much of the world around us - restaurants, care homes, appartment blocks, student accommodation, etc etc, is all owned by private equity; that there is no escape.
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 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 it’s 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
![In 1956, Ray Kroc met Harry J. Sonneborn, a
former vice president of finance for Tastee-
Freez, who offered an idea to accelerate the
growth and investment grade of Kroc's
planned McDonald's operation: to own the
real estate upon which future franchises
would be built. Kroc hired Sonneborn and his
plan was executed by forming a separate
company, Franchise Realty Corp, to hold
McDonald's real estate. The new company
signed leases and procured mortgages for
both land and buildings, passing these costs
on to the franchisee with a 20-40% markup
and a reduced initial deposit of $950. [12][131
The "Sonneborn model" of real-estate
ownership within the franchise persists to
this day, and may be the most important
financial decision in the company's history.
McDonald'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.](/proxy/post_attachment/392501/59b9ec54b5.jpeg "In 1956, Ray Kroc met Harry J. Sonneborn, a
former vice president of finance for Tastee-
Freez, who offered an idea to accelerate the
growth and investment grade of Kroc's
planned McDonald's operation: to own the
real estate upon which future franchises
would be built. Kroc hired Sonneborn and his
plan was executed by forming a separate
company, Franchise Realty Corp, to hold
McDonald's real estate. The new company
signed leases and procured mortgages for
both land and buildings, passing these costs
on to the franchisee with a 20-40% markup
and a reduced initial deposit of $950. [12][131
The \"Sonneborn model\" of real-estate
ownership within the franchise persists to
this day, and may be the most important
financial decision in the company's history.
McDonald'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.")
