The importance of overt levers of business political influence, notably campaign donations and lobbying, has been overemphasized. Using executive branch policymaking during the Obama administration as a case study, this article shows that those paths of influence are often not the most important. It places special emphasis on the structural power that large banks and corporations wield by virtue of their control over the flow of capital and the consequent effects on employment levels, credit availability, prices, and tax collection. At (...) times, business disinvestment, combined with demands for government policy reforms, constitutes a conscious “capital strike,” which has the potential to shape political appointments, legislation, and policy implementation. At other times, the threat of disinvestment, the hint of a drop in “business confidence,” or rhetoric about job creation is sufficient to achieve those objectives. The present analysis has important implications for our understanding of political power and social change in capitalist economies. (shrink)

As one example of how modern Western societies are increasingly obliged to reconcile questions of civility and justice against common, indeed revered, practices that compromise nonhuman animals, this paper examines the recent history of public debate regarding the use of animals for public entertainment in the Canadian West. Using media-based public dialogue regarding the annual Calgary Stampede as a case study and couching the high-risk use of horses in the sociological language of “sports-related violence,” the paper explores the various arguments (...) for and against the continued use of horses at the self-proclaimed “Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth” despite unambiguous evidence of the harm that regularly, and sometimes graphically, occurs. (shrink)

Award-winning poet and critic Kevin Young traces the history of the hoax as a peculiarly American phenomenon--the legacy of P.T. Barnum's 'humbug' culminating with the currency of Donald J. Trump's 'fake news'. Disturbingly, Young finds that fakery is woven from stereotype and suspicion, with race being the most insidious American hoax of all. He chronicles how Barnum came to fame by displaying figures like Joice Heth, a black woman whom he pretended was the 161-year-old nursemaid to George Washington, and 'What (...) Is It?', an African American man Barnum professed was a newly discovered missing link in evolution. Bunk then turns to the hoaxing of history and the ways that forgers, plagiarists, and journalistic fakers invent backstories and falsehoods to sell us lies about themselves and about the world in our own time, from pretend Native Americans like Nasdijj to the deadly imposture of Clark Rockefeller, from the made-up memoirs of James Frey to the identity theft of Rachel Dolezal. This brilliant and timely work asks what it means to live in a post-factual world of 'truthiness' where everything is up for interpretation and everyone is subject to a pervasive cynicism that damages our ideas of reality, fact, and art."--Dust jacket flap. (shrink)

This paper explicates a Marxian theory of management that suggests that the social relation to be managed in capitalism is the separation of the political from the economic. While it is commonly understood that this must be an active process of management taken up on behalf of modern capitalist states, this paper suggests that the market mechanism itself also assumes this role without the active intervention of any managerial direction. The intensive expansion of the market facilitates a management function of (...) subverting the political deliberation which challenges the political-economic separation that could otherwise be expected in neoliberal restructuring. Both the changing nature of consumption and the growth of the small business sector are cited as examples of ways in which neoliberalism reproduces itself in the presence of social contradiction but in the absence of any actively planned strategy of management to deal with those contradictions. (shrink)