Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Christopher May writes that any full examination of political  dynamics needs to take into account corporations as sources of power, not merely economic actors:

(R)ecognising corporations as institutions of global governance encourages an analysis of the operation of power (in its various dimensions) within an important realm of the global system which remains obscured when accounts focus only on states and intergovernmental organisations. Crucially, this approach recognises that while specific corporate supply-chain constellations may be often rationalised as serving the goal of efficiency, they are actually the result of a continuing process of power relations, effective governance and the construction of legitimacy.

Research that has foregrounded private authority in the global system has gone some way in this direction, but the internal political economy of the corporate supply chain has not been extensively examined by these analysts. Thus, political economists might usefully move beyond this relative inattention to examine the realm of the supply chain as an interesting site of global governance in itself to reveal how global corporations shape their own political economic space. One way to respond to the often heard assertion that ‘corporations rule the world’ is to examine the global governance of the corporate supply chain to both offer evidence of where that rule does seem pervasive, but also to explore the limitations of such claims for corporate power’s influence across the global system.

- Meanwhile, Heidi Groover sees Bernie Sanders' campaign as a national extension of a movement to implement popular and progressive changes to economic policy over the self-serving objections of the corporate sector.

- Don Cayo follows up on the Institute for Research on Public Policy's look at the complex picture of inequality in Canada.

- Justin Wolfers takes a look at new research showing how inequality in children's living conditions leads to a massive gap in opportunity. And Robert Hiltonsmith and Sean McElwee point out that arguments against employment credit check bans (based on the specious reasoning that employers would simply discriminate in other ways instead) find no basis how those bans have worked in practice - while the case to prevent employers from limiting access to employment based on credit scores has held up to scrutiny.

- Finally, Anna Louie Sussman and Josh Zumbrun examine the spread of precarious work in the U.S., and note that it goes far beyond the more familiar examples of the gig economy. And Brent Patterson discusses the need to reform Canada's temporary foreign worker program to treat workers in Canada as people rather than commodities.