Newsletter No 11

Date: 30 April 2025

 

Giants of the meat industry

Brazil’s JBS, the world’s biggest meat processing firm, is heading for a listing on the New York Stock Exchange with a long tail of controversies behind it, from the state of the Amazonian rainforest to its tax practices.

This month Critical Takes published a close-up look at the role of government support in the rise of JBS and another “national champion” firm in the global meat industry, WH Group from China. The effect has been to concentrate market power still further in an industry with many environmental, health and labour problems.

The authors – researchers Kate Sievert, Phil Howard, Alex San Martim Portes and Marina Yamaoka – pose a question: given that BlackRock and other Northern asset managers own shares in these “national champions”, how far is this an assertion of national interest by large Southern countries and how far just a shuffling of the deck at the top end of global capitalism?

The article ends with an intriguing idea: a global competition treaty to regulate takeovers across borders and deter giant firms from exploiting their concentrated power.

 

Reflections on tax justice

Tax Justice Network Africa have published the Critical Takes interview with their chief executive, Chenai Mukumba, about why a UN tax convention matters for Africa.

It’s a really lucid and informative interview and well worth a listen: among other things, it touches on the particular sensitivity to illicit financial flows in a continent which has seen centuries of plunder by outsiders.

Also on a theme of tax justice, Carolina Rodrigues Finette of Tax Justice Network offered a very interesting reflection on some of the lessons she’s learned from collaborating with education campaigners, who also want more public revenues to be raised from taxation.

I’m keen to publish more of these reflections on Critical Takes because corporate power is such a huge and multi-dimensional phenomenon that the responses are always going to require joint working by reform-minded people who might be starting from quite different places.

Carolina’s article got me thinking about my own experiences of working with others. I certainly made some mistakes and the design of Critical Takes was partly inspired by a desire to avoid repeating them. Maybe I should write about that one day when it’s really quiet out there.

 

News from elsewhere

Here’s an idea for reining in corporate power from Leonore Palladino in the US: dethrone shareholders from their primacy within corporations and recognise that they mostly don’t contribute to productive activity: they just trade the stock and collect the payouts.

She calls for “new rules for corporate governance that balance the interests of stakeholder groups, including workers, managers, customers, and shareholders.” Read more here.

Still in the US, Google has lost another big anti-trust case, this time over web advertising. Google says it will appeal. Last August another US court found that Google had been operating an “illegal monopoly” on internet search.

And Big Tech wants to get together with petrostates to keep the oil flowing, like some unholy alliance of villains from a superhero movie.

 

Coming up soon on Critical Takes

Public pension funds are supposed to be socially responsible investors of workers’ savings, so why do some of them act like private equity firms? 

Also: reviving a UN commission for multinationals, the problem of corporate monopolies of knowledge and stopping new fossil fuel extraction in the North Sea.

Till next month, good luck with your work!

Diarmid