GET A GRIP Profile picture
Jul 22 10 tweets 5 min read
Terms & phrases to look out for during the #ToryLeadershipContest, as used EVERY DAY by right-wing politicians & pundits, right-wing media, the alt, hard & far-right, Spiked, The Spectator, & a global network of billionaire funded free-market think-tanks:

link.medium.com/LMfODfYUJrb
The Right's creative, divisive, & profoundly misleading use of language has evolved over the last forty years, emerging hand-in-hand with deregulated free-market capitalism, which Britain's next PM will continue & accelerate with the introduction of antidemocratic Charter Cities.
The manufactured war on woke is a distraction, designed to keep voters divided. Under cover of COVID, wealth has been transferred from poor to rich on an unprecedented & unimaginable scale, eroding democracy & resulting in hardship, conflict, mass death & environmental collapse.
Wealth transfer has been accelerating for forty years, brought on by the #neoliberalism, which increased ‘growth’, but also resulted in low-paid, insecure work, grotesque inequalities, poverty, failing public services, polarisation, & the near collapse of democratic institutions.
The push to ‘deregulate’ in order for the “free market” to function more “effectively” has driven down worker, consumer, citizen & environmental protections, while increasing exponentially the power of unelected & unaccountable corporations & grotesquely wealthy individuals.
These individuals & corporations have slowly infiltrated then ruthlessly taken over political parties & Governments across the world — including the Tory Party in the UK & the US Republicans — who simply represent elite interests, at great cost to the masses & to the environment.
A key mechanism they use to continue exploiting human & environmental resources is by keeping a facade of democracy, while investing $BILLIONS in media outlets, think tanks, lobbying, PR & other forms of sophisticated divisive #propaganda, using the language described above.
In the UK we can see this process playing out by the (largely unreported) FACT that since 2009, the collective wealth of Britain’s richest 1,000 individuals has INCREASED by £480 BILLION, while millions suffer hardship resulting from unnecessary & purely ideological #austerity.
Globally, at least $30 TRILLION is hoarded offshore by the elite, resulting in widespread protest & civil unrest across the world, all they have left is populist rhetoric & the scapegoating of anyone or anything but the sociopathic libertarian elites whose greed caused this mess.
"He was funny, charismatic, & popular... Almost imperceptibly at first, the democratic rights, institutions, processes, & protections built up over centuries were quickly, systematically, & ruthlessly rolled back..."

Are we there yet? Yes. Yes we are.

russjackson.medium.com/are-we-there-y…

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More from @docrussjackson

Jul 21
Over 50 years ago, the Chicago Daily News published this editorial by Sydney J Harris. It was almost certainly a response to invective levelled at anti-war protesters, possibly after the 1968 Democratic convention, but it certainly still has resonance today.

(Transcript below).
One of the most ignorant & hateful statements that a person can make is “If you don’t like it here, why don’t you leave?”

That attitude is the main reason America was founded, in all its hope and energy & goodness.
The people who came here, to make a better land than had ever been seen before by the common people, had been rebuffed & rejected by their neighbours in the Old World.

They didn’t like conditions where they lived, & wanted to improve them.
Read 19 tweets
Jul 21
#THREAD

In Chapter 2 of 'The road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective', edited by Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe, Keith Tribe clarifies the ways in which Friedrich von Hayek’s revisionist history of British liberalism was accomplished.
Tribe claims that Hayek misleadingly presented the increasing weight of government in the British economy as a result of the intrusion of Germanic ideas (Hegel, Marx, List, etc.) rather than as a result of industrialization & imperialism.
Whereas political freedom traditionally was regarded as a prerequisite of economic freedom in the British liberal tradition, economic freedom was now advocated as quintessential to preserve a new kind of political freedom of (limited) individual choice.
Read 28 tweets
Jul 21
#THREAD

Prescient article from 2019, by Dan Fisher.

In her 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein investigated natural & man-made disasters that enabled a more aggressive & ruthless capitalism to form – something she termed “disaster capitalism”...

theconversation.com/deregulation-a…
"Klein’s work brought to light how neoliberal policies are pushed through following disasters, allowing for deregulation & wholesale corporate seizures of public services."

Sorry to write this sentence, but Liz Truss is the ERG's & Global Disaster Capitalists' wet dream.
Britain currently faces multiple crises.

"When comparing Brexit to the events highlighted in Klein’s book, such as the economic crisis in Bolivia that started in the late 70s, we can observe similar patterns emerging in the UK since the 2016 referendum."

link.medium.com/0zZDvMpuQrb
Read 14 tweets
Jul 21
#THREAD

Each year for the last 20 years the number of children identified by the National Referral Mechanism has been rising. Last year there were about 5,500 child slaves in the UK - children like Mo, trafficked either for labour or sexual exploitation.

transformingsociety.co.uk/2022/07/19/mo-…
'Some UK-based child slaves freed from bondage by the police go on to be victimised by the courts, who – not understanding the nature of slavery - charge enslaved cannabis growers, for example, as criminals, sending them to prison and then deporting them.'
Some years ago the coalition of expert organisations Anti-Trafficking Monitoring Group, concluded the NRM was institutionally racist: Black African victims seeking to be identified as such had about one third the chance of being accepted as victims as did white European victims.
Read 5 tweets
Jul 21
James McGill Buchanan was a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Koch-funded US think tank, the Cato Institute.

In 2018, Liz Truss visited them, saying “a thicket of regulation & control” is holding back business, & called for a new “Anglo-American dream”.

In 2018, Liz Truss met with representatives of five libertarian groups, including the opaquely funded anti-abortion Heritage Foundation, & the American Enterprise Institute, that aim to shrink the size of the US government & scrap environmental protections.
Truss also met with ALEC, which brings together corporate interests & politicians to draft business-friendly legislation that is then enacted across the US, & a roundtable with Americans for Tax Reform, strongly linked with the UK’s TaxPayers’ Alliance, founded by Matthew Elliot.
Read 4 tweets
Jul 20
The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Eds Mirowski, P & Plehwe, D).

Modern #neoliberalism was born at the "Colloque Walter Lippmann" in 1938, but came into its own with the 1947 founding of the Mont Pèlerin Society.

uberty.org/wp-content/upl…
The Mont Pèlerin Society's original membership was made up of transnational economists and intellectuals, including Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Karl Popper, Michael Polanyi, & Luigi Einaudi.

From this small beginning, their ideas spread throughout the world, fostering, among other things, the political platforms of Margaret Thatcher & Ronald Reagan & the Washington Consensus, & leading to the potentially catastrophic & #neofascist present.

Read 6 tweets

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