Thread by @flanbites

I hate being thirsty, don’t you?

Hucksters know this; they leverage need. Your lack is big business.

“Water is the oil of the 21st century.” Andrew Liveris (of Dow then DuPont)

“[Water is] the petroleum for the next century.” 2008 Goldman Sachs report

nationalgeographic.com/environment/20…

“There are opportunities in the water space that haven't been seen for decades now that governments have run out of money.” Martin Kloeck (Signina Capital)

We hear of corporate influence in politics. Now take it to its natural conclusion. Rethink 2008. commondreams.org/views/2019/07/…

Scarcity is a huge driver of capitalist markets. We learned it in high school: supply and demand.

Now apply that to the basics of survival.

Governments fulfill universal needs.

As govs become less capable who fills their shoes? Think of oligarchical interference as investment.

I believe that on the backs of wealth-based interference in electoral processes alongside the dismantling of the perceived efficacy of liberal governance we will be presented with an alternative: the corporation as nation-state.

Buyer beware; wolves in sheeps’ clothing—all that.

Notice all the terrible shit lately?

Remember the crash of ‘08? The dot-com bust of 2000?

A lot of the same names—h funds/capital hubs—pop up.

“The economic crisis [of 2008] has been used to normalise reduced social policy standards and state capacity.” academic.oup.com/cjres/article/…

“While reduced state capacity along with deteriorating public services is a central impact another important effect is distributional. Cuts in public services, welfare and public sector employment may be pushed down to the local state where the effects are especially uneven.” OUP

As centralized governance is made less effective the onus lies more on cities and states to shoulder the burden of providing universal needs. Their stumbles justify privatization.

Pretty soon there will be no government left. No good one at least. nature.com/articles/d4158…

Think of Boris Johnson—a made-for-TV caricature. He just got elected PM and now Britain has its very own Trump. Same w/ Zelensky in Ukraine. That asshole played president on TV. Bolsonaro in Brazil—a clownish bigot rocketed to power by corporate interests. newscientist.com/article/221062…

Notice any similarities there? Trends?

It’s the same gd playbook each time: pick a walking, talking wedge issue and throw him in office. The true players here are their backers—those recurring agents of economic inefficiencies, of inequalities, of crises. beautifultrouble.org/theory/the-sho…

Ever notice how agents of crises are those who most profit from them?

Polluters generate climate change.

Water dries up.

Gov shrinks.

Water rights privatized.

Would you believe me if I told you those who profited from fossil are now investing in water rights?

Capital hubs.

“Other strategies display more cleverness. Electric vehicles and green power grids require, for their batteries, valuable minerals and metals. Spot prices for nickel and cobalt fluctuate by double-digits…while investors eye shares in lithium mines.” nytimes.com/interactive/20…

“Anticipating future food crises, strategists at Merrill Lynch advise clients to snap up vertical farms and ‘smart hydroponics’; anticipating water shortages, they also recommend investing in Chinese wastewater-recycling businesses.” nytimes.com/interactive/20…

“During 2007’s record melt in the Arctic, at least 15 water mutual funds launched globally; in two years, the amount of money under management ballooned tenfold to $13 billion. Credit Suisse, UBS, and Goldman Sachs hired water analysts…”

Capital hubs. motherjones.com/environment/20…

Capital seeks lack.

Supply and demand.

Simple.

As capital hubs (hedge, mutual funds etc.—wealth aggregators) divest from fossil they invest in those universal needs most essential to human life, those things most depleted by the effects of our use of fossil (pollution etc.).

Those universal needs also happen to be exactly what we’ve come together and built governments for. We’re just talking social organization. Different models have grown and died all throughout history. It’s happening again.

Things grow and die. It’s the circle of poo.

Some things can’t exist under threat of death; a belief in growth becomes growth.

Capitalism requires neverending growth. Growth requires space to fill. Your lack is that space. Your lack is big business.

Systemic inequality is not only tied to current crises—it’s the driver.

Monopoly capitalism at its base has always required free or cheap labor; the birth of American capitalism required Southern slavery. In a way all those rednecks are right—Amuhrrica.

But there’s a competing vision for our country and it is awakened by the aggression of capital.

It helps to think of foreign & domestic electoral aggressions—those of oligarchs let’s be real—in terms of business transactions. They’re shouldering out competitors for remaining resources—universal needs—in an evershrinking market made all the smaller by their unchecked growth.

Liberal governance has become the enemy of the hyperconcentration of capital (all $ in the hands of a few—oligarchs). Not only ideologically but practically. Representative democracy cannot coexist with monopoly capitalism.

Capital is devouring governments but in this lies hope.

Before, while witnessing all our grassroots and neighborhood businesses—mom’s ‘n’ pops—get pushed out by your Walmarts and Starbucks, we just shrugged and consumed something different.

But we can’t consume something different than water.

Capitalism has become a brainless beast.

It has no more markets left to conquer but life itself. The beast has begun to devour its body.

We are this beast; people comprise capital hubs. But our energy—output—has become so separate from labor that it’s taken on a whole greater than its parts. It cannot exist without us.

Therein lies our power and our opportunity. As monopoly capital—again, nothing crazy here; I’m just talkin’ oligarchs—turns to feed on the universal needs solved by governments—democracy itself, really—it will go too far.

Capitalism is a useful tool. But it’s not a way of life.

The free market is not God. And capitalism is not the Devil.

And social systems are just social systems.

There is no rational loyalty to a social system; we should use what works.

What we have now ain’t working.

Our present was inevitable but people slept through the past.

So when you read this shit remember that you’re doing it because you are awake. And it took all of that shit to wake us all up.

It’s the circle of poo righting itself to completion.

As monopoly capitalism devours itself we don’t need to let it take us with it into obsolescence.

We just have to reorient ourselves. The drivers of inequality as presently constructed cannot exist without our participation.

The power the oligarchs have over us—over our democracy—is granted by us.

We just need to take it back but in order to do that we must let the old die.

Neverending war, the privatization of water, the herding and detention and exploitation of human beings at our border and in our prisons—what do they all have in common?

The devaluation of people in service to monopoly capital: wealth concentrated in the hands of the few.

But what if wealth isn’t wealth? What if monetary success—profit/capital—is just a big fuckin lie taught us to pacify our longing for—or lack of—universal needs? What if the appropriation of those universal needs and our resultant lack has no purpose but the very lack it creates?

This is thirst for the sake of thirst—that’s the lie we’re sold. We must keep consuming in order to… what? Well that’s never made clear. We keep finding new things to “need” so that our current global economic system can continue its (impossible) endless growth.

Endless thirst.

We have come together to form liberal democracy so that we may self-determine our own paths peacefully within a collective. We all must satisfy universal needs.

The biggest need of all is love.

What if the solution was simply to love yourself? I know it sounds all poofy-cloudy.

Past all the retail therapy, past all the credit card bills and the want to get that new car or house—or the jealousy of the other who has that same car or house—lies a very simple unfulfilled need.

And in that need’s unfulfillment lies the oligarchy’s power over our collective.

The biggest animator of human function is connectedness with others. Recombination forms the basis of life. Absent that we have an endless hole to fill—one we can never seem to find. So we’re sold a solution—a bill of goods—and all the while, we—all of us—had it already.

Love.

So the wealthy take the remaining water but they themselves are not wealthy. For what is wealth—or true surplus—but an abundance in our fulfillment of universal needs? And if the biggest universal need is love—the one thing that can’t be traded on commodities exchanges—then what?

Well we’ve just found something they can never take away from us, that’s what. In this knowledge lies power. Love is an inalienable security.

And believe it or not, love—call it attachment or bonding of pairs or multicellularism—is universal to all life. pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/studi…

The oligarchs are empty. Let them have their water and their thirst. They fall apart without our cooperation.

And when they fall apart we will take our water back.

Each of us is wealthy already—we just have to see it. In fulfilling our need for love we are filled and not empty.

I’m going to leave you with this article. It’s short. It describes what I’m saying in scientific terms. This is just logic. It’s not foofyland. Love is real and its absence is emptiness.

Remember what’s important and we will never be undone. You are love.
astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/how-did-m…