Newsletter No 25

Date: 30 September 2026

 

The global plastics crisis and accounting for harms

This month on Critical Takes on Corporate Power, Rob Ralston of the University of Edinburgh discusses the global crisis of plastic pollution and waste. He talks about corporate power’s co-optation of the concepts of recycling and the circular economy and its alliance with petrostates to weaken a global plastics treaty.

Jeremy Nicholls of Social Value International explains why corporations should be required to account for the harms they do to society and nature as costs on their balance sheets, which would make the most harmful business activities less profitable.

 

Corporate power as a driver of human rights abuses

This month I was encouraged to read a new global survey of human rights NGOs which finds that they increasingly see corporate power as a systemic driver of human rights abuses.

The report was written by Ignacio Saiz, a veteran campaigner and an independent adviser to human rights organisations and philanthropic foundations, and it’s a stocktake based on survey responses from 87 human rights groups and some interviews with funders.

The report notes the sweeping changes which the human rights movement has brought about in the last decade and considers what’s needed now in a perilous era for the world: deeper attention to the structural drivers of abuse, renewed investment in narrative and more recognition from funders that change takes time.

Against this broader background, the report says (on Page 9) that:

Many [respondents] cite the concentration of corporate power across political, economic, security and technological spheres as a defining systemic challenge. ‘Governments and corporations working in more blatant collusion to amass power and wealth’ have coopted governance at all levels and entrenched an economic model that prioritizes profit for the few over the rights, wellbeing, and dignity of the majority, as well as the health of the planet’.

I set up Critical Takes on Corporate Power more than two years ago because I knew there were widespread concerns about corporate power across civil society but those concerns hadn’t cohered into a common agenda which treats that power and all its manifestations as a single, structural problem.

Many ideas which could go into that common agenda already have widespread currency across civil society. The challenge now is to combine them.

 

Forever blowing bubbles …

Sceptics have long been saying that AI optimism has inflated a giant bubble in the US stock market and there’s no still sign of profits to match the vast scale of investment in AI so the bubble must one day burst or at least subside.

A bizarre sign of the times is that Anthropic is simultaneously warning loudly that AI could wipe out humanity and planning to list on the stock market in order to raise even more money to invest in … AI.

Reuters has looked at some of the documents for Anthropic’s initial public offering and they show that the company thinks it could be worth more than two trillion dollars, despite continuing to lose money hand over fist.

This weird blend of apocalyptic talk and huge numbers makes you think of Doctor Evil and his giant "laser". 

No-one can be sure when the bubble might end. But when it does, there will be global reverberations which critics of corporate power must be ready to exploit, not just with denunciations but also with bold plans for a better digital world.

On that note, I’m looking forward to talking about Big Tech in London next month at the Ethical Consumer conference.

Ethical Consumer are developing their own ambitious approach to corporate power and they’ve convened a group of people from across civil society in the UK (including me) to talk about it. This is a very exciting development as one possible outcome is a joined-up civil society agenda on corporate power in the UK of the kind that Critical Takes has been calling for. There’ll be more about that here soon.

 

Coming up soon:

The UK as a hub for Big Oil and a look at an important new book on Big Tech.

 

Till next month, good luck with your work!

Diarmid