The customer is always right, but only as a customer.

Not a new one, but Wuthering Heights is funnier than I remembered as well as being bold for the time in terms of structure.

Could be. Point being that "we must stop the far right, at all costs" is at same time correct and deeply insufficient.

I'm reading the draft report. Looks strong and ambitious.

It's a shame, from my POV, that the various proposals touching on corporate power aren't put together so as to treat the institution of the very large, profit-maximising corporation as a single, structural obstacle to eradicating poverty.

And they too will fail in the end, after having caused a great deal of harm, so the question will still be there.

A brief history of rentierism An interview with Brett Christophers, author of 'Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?'

The Fairness Foundation‬ @fairness.bsky.social‬ does really important work. It was a privilege to get to talk to them about asset manager power and rent extraction in housing and infrastructure

www.faircomment.co.uk/p/a-brief-hi...

An excellent, very informative discussion of asset managers and rentierism between @fairness.bsky.social and @brettchristophers.bsky.social

Recommended reading! It starts with the UK property market and broadens out.

www.faircomment.co.uk/p/a-brief-hi...

How to take on the power of Big Pharma and democratise the global supply of medicines.

Nick Dearden, author of "Pharmanomics", explains.

Listen or read here:

criticaltakes.org/society-and-...

It's unnerving, trying to imagine what policymakers must be seeing when they look out at the world.

Especially bizarre in the case of the EU, which is allowing itself to be lobbied by the same kinds of giant US firms that its "competitiveness" strategy is supposed to be warding off.

Microsoft now writing EU policy on data centres, according to this.

Alternatives to corporate power: medicines Nick Dearden explains how to curb the power of Big Pharma with a public-led system for inventing, making and supplying medicines.

Big Pharma is unable to produce the medicines we need at a price we can afford. I chatted to Critical Takes about how we can build a medicine system that really meets our needs 👇

criticaltakes.org/society-and-...

Including:

- Why giant drug firms are more like hedge funds

- How Trump and Big Pharma bullied the UK into paying more for drugs

- Cuba, South Africa and lessons from Covid

- What a public-led alternative would look like.

For more from Critical Takes, see:

www.criticaltakes.org/our-takes/

New on Critical Takes on Corporate Power:

Alternatives to Big Pharma.

@nickdearden.bsky.social talks about why the concentrated power of Big Pharma is a problem and what a public-led system for supplying medicines would look like.

Listen or read here:

www.criticaltakes.org/society-and-...

1/2

Big Pharma in a nutshell in this story.

Here are this month's takes on alternatives to the dominance of corporate power:

1. Farming

criticaltakes.org/society-and-...

2. Financing

criticaltakes.org/society-and-...

Coming up soon: alternatives to Big Pharma and Big Tech.

What other alternatives would you like to hear or read about?

A useful reminder that when we talk about "Big Oil" we're talking, among other things, about a small number of immensely rich and arrogant men whose actions show that they don't give a damn about anyone else on the planet.

It concludes that future work needs to "confront Bigness through an engagement with questions of antitrust ... coupled with an ambition to engage with various forms of resistance against mutating corporate power more generally."

Very much so ...

www.criticaltakes.org/the-corporat...

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Excellent! A very useful paper which cites numerous authorities to describe "Bigness" - the concentrated power of Big Finance, Big Tech and Big Agriculture, in its various forms.

Definitely worth a read.

1/2

New on Critical Takes on Corporate Power:

Why agroecology offers a more just and sustainable alternative to industrialised Big Agriculture.

@tammois.bsky.social talks to Critical Takes.

Listen or read here:

criticaltakes.org/society-and-...

The EU's current #deregulation agenda resembles nothing we have seen before, in terms of scope, level of ambition, speed and degree of corporate capture 🚨

New must-read report presents the workings of the deeply undemocratic #deregulationmachine that Commission President von der Leyen has built ⬇️

Wow. "Five countries including Germany, Italy and Spain call for a common solution to the energy crisis - a month ago they spoke of shock, now it’s crisis - starting with the introduction of an EU windfall tax on energy companies"
@isabellamweber.bsky.social
www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

Yes. Shell certainly will.

It's irritating, but not surprising, that the debate in the UK about the North Sea and the climate crisis is so parochial.

No sense at all that what the UK decides, as a major economy, might influence other countries one way or the other.

I wonder if Milliband has done a deal with the Treasury: yes to Jackdaw, which might actually supply some fossil gas to the UK, in return for a no to Rosebank which won't.

Not in favour of either, FWIW. The govt is whacking itself on the shins again, in return for small volumes of energy.

Critical Takes on Corporate Power is two years old today!

Forty-six articles and interviews with interesting thinkers from across civil society on human rights, tax justice, monopoly power, food and farming, tech and many other topics.

Read them all here:

criticaltakes.org/our-takes/

If the UK's decision not to issue new licences in the North Sea is reversed, oil industry lobbyists will milk it everywhere else.

They'll say: "The UK had a hard line on getting off fossil fuels and now they've wised up and retreated and so should you."

A big propaganda win for the industry.

Tax Justice Network podcasts Podcasts on corruption, tax havens and financial secrecy - and how to fix it.

Thank you! Here's the @taxjustice.net podcast website with all seven of our podcast family members, talking tax justice, how to combat corruption and make lives and economies fairer across the world podcasts.taxjustice.net

Big Tech sets unfair terms and conditions for AI data workers globally - SOMO Behind most AI products are thousands of workers who label, annotate, and clean data. Their work is essential but largely precarious and invisible.

Big Tech relies heavily on thousands of data workers for their AI products.

While these workers are hired through intermediaries, Big Tech firms are responsible for their unstable and unfair working conditions.🚨

Read our analysis: www.somo.nl/big-tech-set...

There seems to be an impulse in parts of the British media to seek out the most powerful and reactionary position on a given debate, then present that position to others as if it were fact.

There's something deeply pathological about it.

War, corporate power and food prices.

Plus optimistic takes on public banks and the UN tax convention.

Critical Takes Newsletter No. 21 is out!

criticaltakes.org/newsletters/

If you like what you read, please share it.

... imposing lasting accountability on very large corporations will, in the long term, mean shrinking their power by changing them as institutions.

Who owns them, what their purposes are, what they are allowed to do and forbidden from doing, etc.

criticaltakes.org/the-corporat...