Thread by @proustmalone

One of the more facile arguments I hear all the time is that "capitalism has lifted more people out of extreme poverty than any other economic system in history."

Do you know what the U.N.'s metric for "extreme poverty" is? $1.90 a day. 13 bucks a week. A meaningless threshold.

This talking point, which was generated by the Cato Institute, uses the fact that globalization has risen more people's consumption levels above ***$1.90 per day*** to justify a system that allows ten men to own half the world while one in nine human beings is currently starving.

Capitalism is the word we use to explain the increasingly unregulated accumulation of wealth by a smaller and smaller collection of individuals who use that power to manipulate global political systems through lobbying and violence to further accelerate the consolidation.

This orthodoxy promotes its fraudulent moralism through all institutions of a capitalist society. In the U.S., our information channels are owned by a handful of billionaire-controlled media and telecoms empires. The same is true with our state and federal political systems.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the political and media establishments' mythologizing of the military industrial complex, whose purpose is not to "fight for our freedoms" but to smash any threat to corporate interest anywhere in the world for the past century and a half.

Some better metrics to use than the meaningless threshold of "extreme poverty" ($1.90/day) to evaluate globalism's true impact on us all.

-Wealth inequality
-Suicide rate
-Cancer rate
-Gun violence
-Greenhouse gas emissions
-Mass migration
-Weapons corporations' stock futures

Please share this thread with your respective networks so I can get my message over to globe emoji twitter's chief econ analyst Morton Smithington who will explain to me why war and pollution are good actually.