Showing posts with label Corporations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Corporations. Show all posts

Monday, February 17, 2020

Notations On Our World (Weekly Edition): On the State of the Corporation


As a new week dawns here throughout properties, we hereby present the following courtesy of the team at Transnational Institute: 

Today, 78 of the 100 world’s largest economies are corporations. They have more power than ever before and shape our lives like never before. If you are an activist, you will invariably confront a corporation. Yet for such a powerful institution, we often know remarkably little about corporations. How they are structured, how they work, how they are changing, their strategies.

For our ninth flagship State of Power report, we decided to delve deep into the origins, nature and changing dynamics of corporate power today with contributions by prominent activists and scholars worldwide. We hope you find its mix of video introductions, illustrations and insightful essays useful for your work. If you enjoy it, please do two things: first share it with networks, movements, individuals via email and social media, and second consider donating to TNI. We really need your financial support to keep doing the work we do.


Video's
Interviews
Charming psychopaths: The modern corporation
In 2003, law professor Joel Bakan made a splash when his book and film, The Corporation, argued that corporations had the pyschological profile of a psychopath. Find out why Bakan believes 17 years later that corporations today may be even more dangerous.
> Read online

Rethinking the Corporation
Conversation with Tchenna Maso, Nomi Prins and Barnaby Francis

Human rights activist, Tchenna Maso works in a Brazilian movement that helped win criminal charges against 15 managers of the mining giant Vale. Nomi Prins was a Goldman Sachs executive before she left to advocate for radical reform of the financial sector. Artist and activist Barnaby Francis made a 'deepfake' video of Zuckerberg that exposed Facebook’s unethical publishing practices. Read this fascinating conversation by three leading figures on the nature of today's corporation, how to best mobilise against its power and impunity, and what could replace it.

> Read online
Essays
The intelligent corporation: Data and the digital economy
Anita Gurumurthy and Nandini Chami
The Corporation is on the cusp of achieving ‘quantum supremacy’ as a result of its massive accumulation of data powered by algorithmic-based intelligence. Social movements need to grasp this change quickly.

> Read online

Beyond ‘China, Inc.'understanding Chinese companies
Lee Jones
119 of the Fortune 500 list of the world’s largest companies are now Chinese, just behind the US (121). How does a Chinese transnational differ to a Western one and what are the implications for movements that confront their impacts?

> Read online

The corporate architecture of impunity: Lex Mercatoria, market authoritarianism and popular resistance
Adoración Guamán

Key to corporate power today is the way corporations have helped forge national and international law to protect them from accountability for human rights violations and to bolster a politics of market authoritarianism.
> Read online

Corporations as private sovereign powers: The case of Total
Alain Deneault
Canadian academic Deneault has faced lawsuits for his exposure of mining corporations. In this essay, he delves deep into oil giant Total to expose how corporations have effectively become private sovereign powers.

> Read online