@jeff_bilbro @Hannah_Cristine @herdyshepherd1 @SpenceSpencer01 @alexbronzini @DanielDenvir 1/4 "The poor will always be with us." There is something deeply sinister in the way that verse is routinely deployed as a tranquilizer for the affluent: poverty is inevitable, therefore nothing need change. It is the greatest scriptural alibi of the Capitalist Christian con.
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Copy of tweet and quote tweet beginning here: This sentence, in a 2021 US Federal Reserve document: “The primary role of mainstream economics in our society is to provide an apologetics for a criminally oppressive, unsustainable, and unjust social order." - Hildenbrand, 1994. Image: World Inequality Report 2022 Image: “In 2021, after three decades of trade and financial globalization, global inequalities remain extremely pronounced: they are about as great today as they were at the peak of Western imperialism in the early 20th century.” QT The Alston report is the most serious challenge yet to poverty triumphalism, to the political apologias that it has supported, and to the fiction that economies of massive inequality are destroying poverty rather than destroying the poor. @unitethepoor
@tenshi_anna @thomasowaller @TRIERTIUM 1/2 As it happens, it was life lurking at the highest reaches of global political economy that first turned me toward the apocalypse of the Jesus Event; then 30 years of mendicancy embodying a post-economic ontology. Kingdom prophetology, an essential interpretive lens, I find.
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“It is my contention that theological language and prophetic call is the only language of justice left to counter the language of the market.” Laurie Zoloth, "The Coming Storm: Climate Change and Jewish Thought", p.29. Sufis call the human soul the 'Nafs Natiqa', the speaking soul. As for the radical devalution of the market, a planetary prophetological wedding of World Soul and Word proclaims "an eschatological state of affairs, a reversal of fortunes and transvaluation of values" - Ben Meyer I am becoming increasingly convinced that the abstract concept of "the economy" is a demonic principality. Not even joking. You're not alone. No matter their era or area of origin, planetary prophets universally identify moneytheism and its full-spectrum dominance over the moral and ontological imagination, as ‘The Big Lie that economic logic is the only model that will work.’ - Shoshana Zuboff 6/ “...Jesus was executed because the Empire is scared to death of a neighborly economy.” And, the Holy Qu’ran: “And we never sent a warner to a community but its affluent members say, ‘We reject what you were sent with.’” Quote tweet: 1/2 Forty years ago, investigating a white hot trail of systemic, criminal connivance at stratospheric levels of international finance, the UK's Official Secrets Act shut me down. Then again, in complete defeat, my initiation: I'd seen the truest face of global political economy. “Who will police the police?” Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? #juvenal I can answer that question. No one. My first career? Journalism, with a specialist interest in oversight of the international financial system. 2/2 “Notes and References 10. Nick Routledge, ‘How The Bank of England Failed The JMB Test’, Euromoney, February 1985, pp. 49–56. Google Scholar”
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