Media Madness: billionaires

Showing posts with label billionaires. Show all posts

Monday, October 10, 2022

Nina Bytes: Any Fool Will Do

Editor's note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web.

Understanding "longtermism": Why this suddenly influential philosophy is so toxic

In a number of recent posts, I've found myself talking about billionaires, ideology, and the mainstream rise of overt fascism in the Pig Empire. Today in Nina-Bytes then, I'd like to take a moment to look at this critically important August 2022 essay on Salon about the latest nightmare ideological fad for billionaire fascists and disillusioned neoliberals; longtermism. Just what is longtermism? Let's ask philosopher and historian Émile P. Torres, the author of this article:

"Longtermism is a quasi-religious worldview, influenced by transhumanism and utilitarian ethics, which asserts that there could be so many digital people living in vast computer simulations millions or billions of years in the future that one of our most important moral obligations today is to take actions that ensure as many of these digital people come into existence as possible. In practical terms, that means we must do whatever it takes to survive long enough to colonize space, convert planets into giant computer simulations and create unfathomable numbers of simulated beings."

At first glance, it may not be entirely clear to the casual observer why longtermism is in fact such a dangerous, and reactionary ideology. That is of course until you start asking who exactly these folks mean by "we" and what they're implying when they say "whatever it takes." Hint: we is more or less rich and powerful people, while whatever it takes pretty much consists of sacrificing the poor, and quite possibly the planet. After all, even billions of poor people probably aren't going to build super intelligent artificial minds that will "evolve" the human species and take "us" to Mars, or something.

In case my sarcasm doesn't make it clear, the plain truth is that I don't believe what so-called longtermists claim to believe matters at all. Rather, I think what matters is that longtermism is another ruling class word salad ideology designed to justify mass murder in order to maintain capitalism in the face of a dying planet; like neoliberalism before it, or eco-fascism today. Marketing murder for profit as an ideology takes all kinds of sales pitches, for all sorts of people, and ruling class billionaire freaks are no different.

At its root this longtermism is merely a mash up of fascism, futurism, and a little bit of neoliberalism for flavoring; and all three of those reactionary headcages have at least one key commonality - the idea that some deserve to live and rule, while some deserve to serve and die. Of course, adherents and acolytes will howl that the difference lies in how those decisions are made and who ends up in what bucket, but I think you'll find that whether the culling is based on racial animus, economic class, or a fake meritocracy, the end result of who lives in luxury, and who dies in bondage, doesn't really change much.

In other words the rise of ruling-class interest in both longtermism, and fascism in the Pig Empire, are intertwined phenomenon. They represent some, but not all, of the capitalist class's response to the objective reality that climate catastrophe cannot be stopped without ending capitalism. The capitalists, who possess outsized power in our society, have made their choice already, and now they're casting about for justifications and mechanisms to ensure billionaire reactionaries, not liberal democracies full of people, survive the coming apocalypse.

So what is longtermism? Another excuse to genocide poor people for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter what greedbag monsters and fascist killers tell themselves to fall asleep at night. What matters is that we stop them before they kill billions.

nina illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic, and analyst.

You can find my work at NIDC, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook.

Podcast at “Kropotkin’s Barbershop” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

Thursday, October 21, 2021

Nina-Bytes: Rigged Games, Supervillains, and Neofeudalism

Editor's note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web.

U.S. Billionaires Got 70% More Wealth Under COVID. They Didn’t Deserve Any of It.

A little over a week ago, I published a blog that briefly touched on the historically unprecedented levels of financial inequity in our society. In that post I theorized that this phenomenon was both a contributor to, and side effect from, our society's ongoing transition to a state of capitalism I, and others, have been calling neofeudalism. In this Jacobin article by Luke Savage, we get a glimpse of what that actually looks like in the context of an ongoing class war during a pandemic; and it's predictably infuriating.

Using data from an Institute for Policy Studies report, Savage reports that the combined wealth of America's billionaires has risen by seventy percent during the pandemic. This includes the minting of a hundred and thirty one new billionaires; creating a situation where just under seven hundred and fifty people "now own almost 70 percent more wealth than half the country combined." Although Savage doesn't mention it, the report also notes that this comes during a pandemic when eighty-nine million people in the U.S. have lost their jobs. "We're all in this together" my shiny pink ass.

Although the numbers are staggering, it's tempting to write them off as pandemic profiteering. As Savage notes however, the real driving force behind this intense concentration of wealth during the pandemic is keystroke hot money injected into financial markets by central bankers. In other words; this is plutocratic disaster capitalism on steroids. As nearly everyone on the left predicted, the pandemic relief strategy of just giving rich people a bunch of money to buoy the stock markets, worked out well for rich people and not so much for the rest of us.

This pandemic windfall is of course on the heels of, and in addition to, the unprecedented transfer of wealth granted to America's rich by Donald Trump's barely-remembered tax cuts. Furthermore, all of this wealth concentration must be understood in the context of a lobbying fight against even moderate tax increases, that these same rich people are waging against Joe Biden's Build Back Better Act as we speak. Clearly, it's always a good time to be rich in America; which brings me to my larger point.

Unfortunately, explaining precisely how I think neofeudalist capitalism works is beyond the scope of this blog. I can however easily tell you what it looks like. And what it looks like is a society rigged so that no matter what happens, good or bad, the billionaires always win. It looks like a society where the political solution to every crisis, or even the absence of a crisis, is to give billionaires more public money. Most importantly, it looks like a society prepared to herd eight billion people off the ecological cliff so knock off supervillains like Jeff Bezos and Charles Koch can pocket unheard-of wealth for just a little while longer.

I have seen the enemy, and he is Musk.

nina illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic, and analyst.

You can find my work at NIDC, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

Tuesday, October 12, 2021

Nina-Bytes: Class War, Inequity, and the Rise of Neofeudalism

Editor's note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web. This post is archival and originally appeared on October 11th, 2021 over on our Facebook page.

As Americans Demand Tax Reforms, Analysis Finds Top 1% Hold More Wealth Than Whole Middle Class

Look, I hate to keep beating this same drum here, but there’s a reason I loathe rich people and it sure ain’t envy. In this Common Dreams article, Brett Wilkins talks about a recent Bloomberg report revealing that Americans in the top 1% have more wealth than the entire middle class; these are of course the same Americans funneling cash into dark money groups to stop moderate tax reforms in the U.S. as we speak. Even setting aside the somewhat arbitrary and politically disempowering way the “middle class” is defined here, the federal data shows that 1.3 million U.S. households (making 500K or more) now have more wealth than the 77.8 million families in the middle 60% of income tiers.

As the article details, the super-rich are currently beating the “middle class” (which includes plenty of affluent people as the maximum income rate for this definition is 141K a year) 27% to 26.6% in terms of national wealth share. This represents a stark departure some similar figures released as recently as 1990, when the super-rich controlled roughly 17% of national wealth, to the middle-classes 36%. Please keep in mind that while this economists definition of the middle class does include people making as little as 27K a year, it does not include anyone our society is prepared to call “poor.”

What I don’t think really comes across in this article however, is how absolutely unprecedented this situation is in the history of the Pig Empire. Everyone knows that the so-called Gilded Age was an era of vast inequity, robber barons, and open corruption by a complicit political class under the influence of monopoly power and its rivulets of cash. What most people don’t seem to realize however is that the levels of financial inequity and open corruption in our very own society have long surpassed anything from the Roaring Twenties.

Indeed, as I have posited elsewhere, we’re approaching a point where this level of inequity is fueling a new, and yet disturbingly familiar form of capitalism I’ve taken to calling “neofeudalism.” The rich have captured enough wealth and political influence to transform our whole society into a machine whose entire purpose is funneling even more wealth and power into their greedy fingers; even at the cost of all life on earth. Given that this is still capitalism, this wealth is obviously being taken from everyonebeneath them on the socioeconomic ladder; as the numbers we just looked at demonstrate.

This fusion of money power and control of the state has now locked the whole of society into a parasitic relationship that resembles landed lords and serfs from the darkest ages of European feudalism, and there’s no indication the rich have plans to stop the machine anytime soon. The class war may not look any different on the ground, but the moneyed interests we’re battling against today are armed with more power and influence than ever before; which is allowing them to rig our governments to serve them, and snatch the wealth of a broader and broader swath of our society.

It’s a slaughter alright; but the fattest pigs are running the abattoir and everyone who isn’t with them, is next on the chopping block.

nina illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic, and analyst.

You can find my work at NIDC, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

Tuesday, December 29, 2020

Film Sessions: Oligarchs will let the world burn by Thought Slime (New)

Editor's note: well, it's been an interesting past couple of days for me to say the least; if you're wondering why I'm not on Twitter, please check out my latest article on ninaillingworth.com - have yourself a merry Christmas indeed. In light of the week I've been having and the fact that we're all still living through a nightmare, neofeudalist, Captain Trips holiday season, I thought I'd pick a video for this week's film session that is both viscerally satisfying and not particularly taxing on the memory banks; hopefully you enjoy this one as much as I did.

Well, despite the fact that I’m having one of the crappier weeks of my professional life, I have managed to continue picking my way through left wing YouTube channels and video creators in the middle of all the chaos. In today’s film session, I’m going to highlight a sixteen minute feature on a channel called Thought Slime. The creator behind Thought Slime first came to my attention when I was researching an article about fascism and looking for reliable citations about the crypto-fascist street gang, the Proud Boys. Although I only ended up using that video for a couple of citations, I remembered this person’s excellent (if perhaps a bit stripped down) work, and decided to check out their channel when I was poking around for more content to familiarize myself and my audience with.

Although I really don’t know that much about this creator that you can’t find on their Wikitubia page, and I must admit the delivery is at times a little dramatic, this video appealed to me because it opens by focusing on an area I’ve studied and one of the more inexplicably monstrous decisions by established American power in living memory – the wholly unnecessary bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the closing phases of World War II; conducted primarily for the purposes of intimidating the Soviet Union and opening up the era of “mutually assured destruction” in what we know today as The Cold War.

Much to my delight however, it turns out this was only the beginning of the discussion and the focus of the video is actually an issue I write about constantly, even though it seems to alienate many of the folks around me – the fact that rich people are absolutely fine with killing every last one of us for pennies on the dollar, while trying to enact out unhinged Lex Luthor-esque fantasies about running to Mars, rather than surrender one single iota of power, influence or ability to exploit their fellow man for profit. On this issue, Thought Slime and I could not be more in agreement (which perhaps makes sense, since we’re both apparently anarchists) and it is refreshing to find someone, anyone else, willing to say this out loud; I am absolutely chuffed about the mere existence of this video.

In addition to World Wars and nuclear annihilation, Thought Slime also touches on the fossil fuel industry, a coronavirus response that looks like eugenics and how the election of Donald Trump caused them to question fundamental assumptions about how the world works, eventually leading our host to anarchism (and me to a couple more Youtube creators to add to my “check em out” list.) The end result is a highly entertaining attack on rule by elites, the power of the state and Piers Morgan eating something called a “Santa’s Yum Nut” - and for a sixteen minute video that also features a brief side discussion about Indigenous Christian Anarchism in Taiwan, that’s probably the most you can hope for.

If I do have one quibble however, it’s that Thought Slime clearly uses “the state” and “elite rule” to mean precisely the same things and that’s a fine rhetorical position to adopt, but probably could have been explained better to an audience that is unlikely to have read most of the books on the wonderful reading list the creator shows at 8:11. Naturally, as an anarcho-syndicalist myself, I’m not looking to eliminate the state so much as eliminate the difference between state power and people power – in essence, through an aggressively participatory democracy, to make the common people, into the state itself. Obviously however Thought Slime and I both clearly agree that elite rule has gotta go and thus, I had no real problem with how they were using the terms interchangeably – and including my favorite Rudolf Rocker book on the reading list certainly warmed my heart to see.