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Why capitalists aren't eager to stop the Middle East wars. (Duration: 25 minutes) NOTE: There is an error in the interview. Nitzan notes that, in 2000-2005, the four leading oil companies earned one trillion dollars in net profit. The correct number is one third of a trillion ($338 billion).

This paper builds an empirical and theoretical model to analyze how the financial goal of risk reduction changed the insides of Hollywood's star system. For the moviegoer looking at Hollywood cinema from the outside, the function of the star system has remained the same since the 1920s: to have recognizable actors attract large audiences to Hollywood's biggest and most expensive productions. The composition of this system is, however, sensitive to many historical changes in the business and culture of cinema. If the evolution of Hollywood's star system is shaped by broader social factors, risk reduction would be a key factor after 1980. This paper uses Internet Movie Database (IMDb) casting data to analyze how the star system was a factor in this period of risk reduction. Film casting assists risk reduction when a star system is built on controlled repetition. Repetitive casting — choosing the same people to star in a series of films — is a form of control because repetitive selection is the inequality of opportunity by another name: if an in-group is internally repetitive when alternatives exist, an out-group is repeatedly excluded. There are two key conclusions to the analysis of the IMDb dataset. First, casting repetitiveness/inequality in the blockbuster era of Hollywood (1980-present) is low compared to Hollywood's "classical" studio system (1930-1948). Second, the historically low repetitiveness/inequality can be misleading if we ignore sector characteristics such as firm size and level of theatrical distribution. Within the top-tier, whether measured by size of distributor or number of opening theatres in theatrical release, Hollywood relies on repetitive casting. The theoretical part of this paper will identify the role of capitalist power in the formation of a star system. Capitalist power, in this case, is defined as the ability of Hollywood to control everything from the industrial production of films to the broader social relations of cinema. This control is never absolute, but the role of capitalist power in the star system has a key purpose: to make sure that casting decisions are complementary to business interests.

For much of the 20th and early 21st centuries, U.S. unemployment and incarceration went hand in hand. This is how the rulers disciplined their subjects while bolstering the upward distribution of income.

The interaction of oil exports from the Middle East in the 1970s with arms imports to this region has drawn attention from several researchers. The existing literature, however, is seriously flawed for it ignores the large corporate players whose actions synchronize the two flows of income and, thus fails to identify the significance of these corporations for the political economy of armaments. This present paper is the first of a series of four essays that attempt to relate the dynamics of market structures to the escalation of military sales. Here we briefly asses some neo-Marxist and institutional writings that offer insight into the subject of relevant issues. We find them deficient and perhaps outdated in some respects.

FROM THE ARTICLE: Just as the war was grinding on, I got hold of this study of what was going on in Lebanon, in global political economy perspective . . . from two of the most reliable and insightful researchers it has been my good fortune to read -- Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler's 'Cheap Wars'. . . . It is a bit irritating that both of them are Israelis and as usual are way ahead of us Arab journalists and our conspiracy theories -- me included -- but there's no harm in getting an inside account of what went wrong with the Israeli war. . . . And they figured it out before the war even 'went' wrong!

AbstractThe election of Donald Trump and his decision to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) represented a shock to the Canadian and Mexican governments and business elites. Drawing on the New Regionalism(s) Approach (NRA), this article reviews the response of the Canadian state to the crisis in the North American regional project. I argue that this newer theoretical approach better explains the dynamics of regionalization or regional decomposition than mainstream theories by integrating the role played by uneven globalization, normative and ideational dimensions, and civil society in processes of regional integration and/or decomposition.

The challenge of northern regions is becoming clearer every day. They have less to do with physical conquest of nature than with subtle social and political choices. The final response of our 'developed' and 'advanced' industrial nations remains uncertain, however. What is most remarkable may be the fact that despite different national traditions and geography, the challenges and responses are similar among the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries surveyed here. The papers in this volume are each part-report and part-interpretation. Each is written by a specialist with many years of field study and reflection behind his or her comments. Each author was asked to think about current political and socio-economic issues in the north - the north of Australia, the north of North America and northernmost Europe. On 12 July 1990, all the authors spoke to their papers in a one-day forum where each could question the others. The northern public was invited to join us. The results stimulated the participants as well as many in the audience from whom we have had follow-up requests for more discussion, more information, etc. No more important role vis-a-vis the basic issues in northern life could be played by the North Australia Research Unit (NARU), Darwin.

The agrofuel boom has brought about some of the most significant transformations in the world food system in recent decades. A rich and diverse body of agrarian political economy research has emerged that elucidates the conflicts and redistributional shifts engendered by these transformations. However, hitherto, less attention has been given to differences within agri-food capital. This paper contributes to the existing literature on agrofuels, by showing how one cluster of agri-food corporations and farmers within the US have benefited from soaring ethanol production at the expense of another cluster. More specifically, by adopting the method of disaggregation found in the capital as power approach, I delineate and chart the power trajectories of two corporate-led distributional coalitions that have vied over the course taken by the US ethanol sector: the 'Agro-Trader nexus' and the 'Animal Processor nexus'. My main finding is that the US ethanol boom has been a vector of redistribution: increasing the earnings of the Agro-Trader nexus and Corn Belt farmers while reducing the earnings of the Animal Processor nexus and livestock farmers outside of the Corn Belt. This finding points to the limits and contradictions of agrofuels capitalism and the acute tensions that exist at the heart of the corporate food regime.

Economists tell us that the current crisis is our punishment for letting the fiction of finance distort the real economy. But what exactly is this "real" economy and how does finance distort it? Do the economists have a clue?

Economists tell us that the current crisis is our punishment for letting the fiction of finance distort the real economy. But what exactly is this "real" economy and how does finance distort it? Do the economists have a clue?