The dream has turned into a nightmare, alongside the billionaires the homeless are rampant
At the beginning of a nightmare there is always a dream. This is the time of fire and looting: apocalyptic images arrive from California, to represent in a plastic way the passage from dream to nightmare. In the last few centuries it has been the most advanced point in the development of capital. First with the gold rush and then with the imaginary one, from Hollywood studios to the big techs of Silicon Valley, the West Coast state alone has come to be worth a fifth of the American GDP. But time has changed, time has run out. California is burning today, due to fires caused by logging and intensive agriculture. Today California is plundered by hordes of desperate people cut off from wealth, deprived of the minimum and acceptable conditions of life. Everything is missing, the house is missing. In the city of San Francisco alone, one person in a hundred is counted as homeless: they sleep on the street, amidst cartoons and makeshift tents, live for the day, make do. They show the world the other side of development. They disturb the sight of the billionaires who, from the large windows of their villas and skyscrapers overlooking the Bay Area, were convinced that they were living in the Dubai of the Pacific. And they crumble the certainties of the New York Times columnists, who reduce the question to a problem of public order.
It is time to tell why all this happened, why all this had to happen. Injecting money, moving money. After the great subprime crisis of 2008, the greatest economic and financial crisis of modernity, a huge amount of new money was injected. A sort of quantitative easing on a global scale. However, this money has not been distributed equally, not so much on a social level, that never happens, but on a financial level. The zero interest rates, due to the almost zero cost of the new currency, have in fact helped the unstoppable proliferation of new technological start-ups and their beating heart: Silicon Valley. Small companies born in garages and university dormitories, as the American dream prescribes, have been able to borrow at no cost to compete in the new technological market.
Thus was born technofinance. Insurance companies, foundations, sovereign wealth funds can support these new businesses. But this leads to the disappearance of the old economy of the production of material goods, slow, pachydermic, in need of time and development. Less attractive for investments. It’s the Cantillon Effect, named after the 18th century Irish economist who first theorized that new money is worth much more than old money. Monetary expansion policies are never neutral. The new currency, lower interest rates, close to zero, global quantitative easing, have created an inequality with no possibility of return. The purchasing power of those who receive the money and can seize capital at relatively low prices grows out of all proportion to those who can only do so when the prices fail.are already increased. Technofinance points to Mars, the old industrial economy collapses under the weight of the reactors of the new tourist missiles. It is time to say that the growing inequality in American society, the economic, environmental and social disaster that reigns in every corner of a city like San Francisco, the old heart of counterculture and the new esophagus of techno-finance, is due to the Cantillon Effect. .
L‘global rise in temperature, intensive farming, the clearing of old millenary forests replaced by plantations of feed or ready-to-use wood, have made California a region in flames. Expansive monetary policies, zero interest rates, the explosion of techno-finance, have reduced what was once the Golden State to one of the areas with the highest social risk in the West: hunger, misery, disease. Hordes of homeless, jobless men, women and children. Suicides, addictions, overdoses, infections are increasing. The dream that becomes a nightmare. The omen of the future that occurred to Michel Foucault when he saw the boat people fleeing from Southeast Asia. Hordes of desperate people flock to the walls of a brazen and unsustainable wealth and decide to attack it, as it comes, without any organization or political program. Burning and looting, fires and looting, Bo’s prophecy seems to have come trueb Marley, who in the same song also asked: “How many rivers will we still have to cross before the end?”. San Francisco like the new Babylon, where the end has already been, only we are seeing it broadcast in differeng. It is time to take note.
*with the collective I Diavoli
Unlimited access to all site content
€ 1 / month for 3 months, then € 3.99 / month for 3 months
Unlock unlimited access to all content on the site
#climate #crisis #technofinance #golden #age #ends #San #Francisco