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Showing posts with the label ownership

The BBC and the Fragmentation of Modern Social Thought

A senior correspondent with a degree in Politics and History.  American power, unilateralism, interventions…,but nothing about the global capitalist economy in the last 40 years or so and the social reconfigurations in the US and the world. The most Little could say in passing: “ In any age of economic stagnation and extremes of inequality, popular trust in democratic institutions corrodes …” Words like economy and China do not feature even once. The innocent liberals are in denial. Robert Brenner and Dylan Riley: The current form of capitalist democracy, characterized by regular universal-suffrage elections and the alternation in power of competing parties of government, was largely an achievement of the post-war epoch. If the cataclysm of the First World War largely destroyed the  ancien régime  in Europe, it was the Second that opened the way to universal suffrage, under American military predominance, and at least began the process of unravelling Jim Crow in the...

Dismantling AI Capitalism

A very good analysis in an accessible language “This article starts with considering AI as a GPT and argues why we need to focus on power when thinking about the impact of AI. I explain the contribution of  critical political economy (CPE) for analysing AI capitalism. CPE investigates control and ownership of communication systems and its impact on society (Hardy  2014 ). Using CPE as a framework, this article analyses the tendencies of concentration and monopolisation in AI capitalism. The article then considers the commons as an alternative framework for enabling that the benefits of AI can be shared with society at large.” ****** “Economists study the impact of GPT in terms of the emergence of winners and losers. The  winners  are those associated with the emerging GPT, whereas the  losers  are those who cannot benefit from the unfolding GPT. We need to be aware that AI can facilitate a further polarisation of already unequal societies (Crawford  20...

US Economic Decline Has Been Greatly Exaggerated

Sean Starrs’s key points : The global nature of US-led capitalism since 1945, and especially since the 1990s, means that some states can extract vast resources from others. GDP tells us where the world’s production of goods and services is geographically concentrated, but in the age of globalization, it does not tell us who owns and therefore profits from it. Global profit share is a more appropriate measure of national economic power, as it encompasses the global profits stemming from production and finance owned abroad, not just within the home territory. The global dominance of Wall Street (financial services in figure two), for example, helps to ensure that the US dollar remains the de facto world currency. The dominance of American tech firms helps to ensure the continued supremacy of the US military, while the dominance of American media helps to ensure that the US state can shape the ideological narrative (including support for US capitalism and imperialism). The United States c...

05 July 2009

Sunday between noon and 1pm on 104.4 FM (London) Or resonancefm.com (worldwide) Iran: Background article by Kaveh Ehsani Survival Through Dispossession: Privatization of Public Goods in the Islamic Republic More: Tehran, June 2009 by Kaveh Ehsani