Joseph Baines The corn-ethanol boom represents one of the most dramatic changes in the world food system in recent decades. The ethanol sector now absorbs around 40% of the corn produced in the US. Surging biofuels production (of which US corn-ethanol production accounts for about half) is widely considered to have played a key role […]
Continue ReadingBaines, ‘Wal-Mart’s Power Trajectory: A Contribution to the Political Economy of the Firm’
Abstract This article offers a power theory of value analysis of Wal-Mart’s contested expansion in the retail business. More specifically, it draws on, and develops, some aspects of the capital as power framework so as to provide the first clear quantitative explication of the company’s power trajectory to date. After rapid growth in the first […]
Continue ReadingBaines, ‘Food Price Inflation as Redistribution: Towards a New Analysis of Corporate Power in the World Food System’
Abstract This paper outlines the contours of a new research agenda for the analysis of food price crises. By weaving together a detailed quantitative examination of changes in corporate profit shares with a qualitative appraisal of the restructuring in business control over the organisation of society and nature, the paper points to the rapid ascendance […]
Continue ReadingNo Way Out: Crime, Punishment & the Capitalization of Power
Presentation at the Department of Political Science, York University. 12 November The United States is often hailed as the world’s largest ‘free market’. But this ‘free market’ is also the world’s largest penal colony. It holds over seven million adults – roughly five per cent of the labour force – in jail, in prison, on parole and […]
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