734 research outputs found
Sort by
The Political Economic Roots of Hollywood Strikes (A Series of Blog Posts)
Full text linkFROM PART 1 (pp. 1-4):
This multi-part blog post investigates the timing of strikes in Hollywood. A strike like the 2023 WGA strike makes sense when we have the hindsight to piece together the issues that built up over the years. But is 2023 a particularly ripe year for contract negotiations to break down? If the labour demands are reasonable, why do studios refuse to agree with them? Or why would job security be “unreasonable” at this point in time? How do we reach a point when studios fight against the labour they (theoretically) need to be creative?
FROM PART 2 (pp. 1-5):
From the post: Around the time of this post, the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) produced a tentative agreement in their 2023 negotiations. The WGA Negotiating Committee, the WGAW Board and WGAE Council all voted unanimously to recommend the agreement on September 26, 2023. As mentioned in Part 1, this series of posts looks at strikes in Hollywood over a period of 50 years. I am keen to analyze the 2023 Hollywood strikes in greater detail, but it will be at least a couple of months before published financial reports cover the period of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes in 2023. For now, consider my political economic analysis of strikes in Hollywood to be something that might still apply to what we have witnessed in the last few months. – J
FROM PART 3 (pp. 1-7):
Around the time of this post, SAG-AFTRA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) produced a tentative agreement in their 2023 negotiations. The SAG-AFTRA National Board approved the tentative agreement, and recommends for the ratification of the 2023 TV/Theatrical contracts. –
Mapping the Ownership Network of Canada’s Billionaire Families
Full text linkThe planet has a billionaire problem. According to Oxfam, the world’s billionaires have more combined wealth than the bottom 60% of humanity — some 4.6 billion people. Given this obscene situation, calls are growing to rid the world of the billionaire class. But how do we make that happen?
We think that part of the answer is to understand billionaire’s network of control. Many billionaires are happy to have their net worth tracked by Forbes — they treat it as an accumulation horse race.1 But what billionaires don’t like is for people to understand how they wield power. On that front, behind ever billionaire is a complicated network of corporate control — a network that is seldom made public.
We’d like to change that. In this post, we’ll map the ownership network of ten billionaire families in Canada.
Why Canada? Well, because we’re Canadian researchers. But more importantly, because the statistics arm of the Canadian government has done the heavy lifting for us. For the last decade, Statistics Canada has maintained a database on the inter-corporate ownership of Canadian corporations — a database that it bills as a “unique directory of ‘who owns what’ in Canada”.
This corporate-ownership database contains a trove of information about how the rich wield power. In this post, we’ll begin to explore the data by mapping the ownership network of the following billionaire families:
The McCain Family
The Katz Family
The Fidani Family
The Richardson Family
The Saputo Family
The Rogers Family
The Pattison Family
The Irving Family
The Weston Family
The Thomson Famil
Differential Harm: Patterns of Uneven Destruction
Full text linkThis essay opposes the idea that contemporary critical events like pandemics, global warming, environmental deterioration, et cetera, are to be considered as affecting humanity in a uniform way. Instead of seeing these phenomena like abstract universal threats, I propose to look at them through the lens of my concept of differential harm. By drawing on interdisciplinary sources, this concept aims at covering a series of processes that are best described in differential, rather than absolute, terms. By the same token, differential harm is a matter of scale. Moreover, this essay also suggests that macroscopic critical processes are better understood as instances of harm, rather than violence. Instead of framing macroscopic disruptive phenomena as simple calamities or crises, my approach also aims at acknowledging their social, political, and psychological dimensions
The Business of Strategic Sabotage
Full text linkIn a recent article, Nicolas D. Villarreal claims that our empirical analysis of the relation between business power and industrial sabotage in the United States is unpersuasive, if not deliberately misleading. Specifically, he argues that we cherry-pick specific data definitions and smoothing windows to ‘achieve the desired results’; that these ‘results are driven by statistical aberrations’; and that his own choice of variables pretty much invalidates our conclusions. In this brief response, we offer an easy-to-follow, step-by-step reply to his complaints
Unemployment and the Maturity of Capitalism
Full text linkIn my last post, I discussed the underwhelming relation between interest rates and unemployment. In this post, I’ll look at a better way to connect unemployment to interest income.
It turns out that if you take US net interest and divide it by corporate profit, you get a ratio that closely tracks unemployment. It’s a measure that Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler call the ‘maturity of capitalism’.
If this language sounds odd, that’s because Nitzan and Bichler see capitalism differently than your average economists. So before we get to the data, let’s review some of their thinking
Teknojätit ja pääoman vallankäyttö (Techno giants and the use of power by capital)
Full text linkPääoma valtana -viitekehys, jonka on kehittänyt Jonathan Nitzan ja Shimshon Bichler, esittää että liiketoiminnan tavoite ei ole ‘liikevoiton maksimointi’ vaan differentiaalinen yhteiskunnallisen vallan akkumulointi. Tätä viitekehystä teoreettisena lähtökohtana käyttäen analysoin Googlen ja Microsoftin vallan akkumulointistrategioita. Esitän kvalitatiivista ja kvantitatiivista näyttöä, josta käy ilmi, että huolimatta siitä että Google ja Microsoft tällä hetkellä saavat suurimman osan liikevoitostaan erillisestä liiketoiminnasta (ja näin perinteisen logiikan mukaan ne eivät ole toistensa suoranaisia kilpailijoita), nämä kaksi yritystä ovat kuitenkin kilpasilla keskenään tietojenkäsittelyteollisuuden kontrollista
מחירי הנפט, הקפיטליזם ו-7 באוקטובר (Oil Prices, Capitalism and October 7th)
No full textהאנליסטים שוב חוזים את עליית מחירי הנפט בעקבות מחסור? הם טועים ומטעים, כך טוענים ניצן וביכלר, ומסבירים מדוע מלחמת ישראל-חמאס משמחת את קואליציות הנפט-נשק • דם ונפט במזרח התיכון, סיבוב רווחים נוס
Unhealthy Profits
Full text linkFROM THE ARTICLE: At the end of November 2023, the New York Times published an editorial: Why Are Nonprofit Hospitals Focused More on Dollars Than Patients? It is certainly a valid question. Most people might assume that not-for-profit (NFP) organisations focus on providing a public benefit rather than profit. At most, common wisdom suggests that any income derived from providing a service should be reinvested into expanding or improving the service. There is no obvious reason why a NFP should accumulate large profits over years. Yet in the NFP world of large US hospitals, profit, rather than public purpose, seems to have become the guiding light
Massaging the Message: How Oilpatch Newspapers Censor the News
Full text linkFROM THE ARTICLE:
In their book Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky argue that the mainstream media functions largely as a propaganda arm for the state. When the war drum beats, the corporate media tows the government’s line, censoring facts that don’t fit the official narrative.
Outside of war, media bias is typically less overt. But to the careful observer, it can still be discerned. In this case, our careful observer is Canadian oil critic Regan Boychuk.
Boychuk lives in Calgary — a prairie city that is famous for two things. Calgary hosts the world’s largest rodeo. And it is the corporate heart of the Canadian oil business. Calgary … home to cowboys and crude-oil CEOs.
As you might guess, our story of media censorship is not about cowboys. Calgary’s main newspaper, the Herald, is staunchly pro-oil. And that means its editorial pages are filled with oilpatch jingoism. However, the rest of the paper is an archetype of neutral reporting. Just kidding.
Unsurprisingly, the Herald’s pro-oil stance shapes the content that appears in the paper. This post takes a quantitative look at the editorial ‘curation’.
Most of the heavy lifting has been done by Boychuk, who had the brilliant idea to track the reporting of environmental journalist Mike De Souza. Between November 2010 and July 2013, De Souza wrote a series of articles documenting scandals related to the Canadian oilpatch, and its staunch defender, the Harper government.
At the time, De Souza was working for Postmedia, a news conglomerate that operated a wire service for its many subsidiaries. So when De Souza’s pieces were published, they were delivered to local papers like the Ottawa Citizen, the Edmonton Journal, and the Calgary Herald.
Here’s the catch. Although owned by the same conglomerate, these local papers had leeway to edit (or shelve) their wire-service articles. The result, Boychuk realized, was a controlled setting to analyze media censorship. Earlier this year, Boychuk published his findings in a piece called ‘Proximity to Power: The oilpatch & Alberta’s major dailies’.
My contribution here is mostly visual. I’ve taken Boychuk’s investigation and translated it into charts. The results largely speak for themselves. As De Souza’s articles approached the center of Canadian oil-and-gas power in Calgary, they were increasingly gutted, and their message changed. It’s a fascinating case study of how business interests shape the news
Inflation! The Battle Between Creditors and Workers
Full text linkI’ve been writing about inflation for the better part of three months. It’s been exhausting. Most of my time has been spent debunking misconceptions promoted by mainstream economists. Fortunately, I’m ready to move on.
What’s interesting about inflation is not the fact that prices rise. What matters is that prices rise at different rates. In other words, inflation creates winners and losers — it redistributes income.
In this post, I’ll dive into the redistribution dynamics between wage workers and creditors.1 When inflation rears its head, both groups try to bolster their income. But they rarely have equal success.
Looking at over two centuries of US price history, I find (perhaps surprisingly) that inflation tended to benefit workers at the expense of creditors. Since the 1970s, however, the reverse has been true; inflation has systematically benefited creditors at the expense of workers.
So what changed?
Two things. First, the US labor movement was crushed. Second (and far less discussed), US policy makers adopted a new way to ‘fight’ rising prices. When inflation reared its head, central banks attempted to quell it by aggressively hiking interest rates. Today, it’s received wisdom that this policy ‘works’.
Of course, the policy does work — but not for its stated goal. Never mind ‘fighting inflation’. When you raise interest rates, you give creditors a raise.
Framed in this light, it’s unsurprising that inflation has recently become a boon for US creditors. Backed by monetarist ideology, the government is now dedicated to preserving the return on credit. When it comes to class struggle, there’s nothing like having the sledgehammer of the state to back you up.
With credit returns in mind, here’s the road ahead. Before diving into the dynamics of class struggle, I’ll take a quick look at the language used to describe rising prices. Next, I’ll quantify the price struggle between creditors and workers. Finally, I’ll measure how this struggle has changed over time, and how it relates to the ideological currents of the period