Thought

• The strength of Vulture Capitalism is in its powerful summary of developments over the past few decades.
• All these writers would presumably agree that the “neoliberal” policy approach adopted in the 1980s was a key inflection point towards today’s economic malaise.
• Widening income inequality, declining social mobility and reduced life expectancies are further examples of this policy failure.
• As examples she cites Amazon’s success at avoiding corporation tax, and Boeing’s change in management approach that prioritised profit maximisation over design safety.

The democratic deficit

• Further to the idea of disempowered workers, Blakeley argues that the lack of democratic accountability in key domestic and international economic institutions helps to drive vulture capitalism.
• They determine which businesses or individuals succeed, but ordinary people neither get told about these choices nor get any say in them.
• These enable investors to take legal action against governments using their democratic prerogatives to tax, regulate and prosecute corporations.
• Blakeley convincingly argues that this all adds up to a major democratic deficit in which “elite” classes operate without any accountability.

The way forward

• Businesses choosing profits over safety and governments bailing out bosses while letting people starve do not represent a perversion of capitalism.
• Several reach all the way back to the 1970s: trade unionists’ alternative plan to save ailing British firm Lucas Aerospace certainly demonstrated workers thinking strategically, but it was swatted aside by management.
• Similarly, the more widespread attempts at democratic planning in Chile under Salvador Allende were crushed by Richard Nixon.
• And if that worked effectively, there’s no reason why assemblies couldn’t be incorporated into, say, the negotiations around trade treaties.
• Addressing the democratic deficit won’t solve everything, but it would be an important step in the right direction.

Conor O'Kane does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• “The Teachers’ Lounge” wins the LUX Audience Award 2024
  “The Teachers’ Lounge” by German director Ilker Çatak won the 2024 LUX European Audience Film Award on Tuesday, in a ceremony in Parliament’s hemicycle in Brussels.
• The film, produced in Germany, tells a story about Carla, a young high school teacher, distinguished from her colleagues by her idealism.
• When a series of unsolved thefts sour the atmosphere among the teaching staff, Carla decides to investigate.
• Press conference and related events
  You can watch the press conference with the winner Evelyn Regner and Mike Downey after the ceremony on EbS and EP Live.

• This process has created not one English, spoken around the globe, but many Englishes.
• This has implications for universities that teach in English, and may have many non-native English speakers as students.
• Universities and lecturers should consider what their approach should be to marking work written in non-native or non-standard varieties of English.

Hierarchies of English

• For some, native speaker English is still seen as the “correct” variety, with native speakers seen as holding sole authority on how the language should be spoken.
• Even within England, regional dialects may be seen as inferior to “standard” English.

• In our current research, we focus on a specific world English – China English.
• While based on standard English, China English has its own specific and identifiable use of grammar and vocabulary, which is predictable and systematic.
• China English has its own expressions, such as “paper tiger”, meaning something that appears powerful but is in fact weak.
• This predictability distinguishes China English from “Chinglish”, which refers to translation errors from a Chinese language (usually Mandarin) into English.

Nothing to disclose Alexander Baratta and Paul Vincent Smith do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• The women’s Final Four garnered higher television ratings than the men’s Final Four.
• And more than 90,000 fans attended the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup final in Pasadena, California.
• Many fans, journalists and scholars are wondering if this is the dawn of a new era of women’s sports, with more coverage, increased viewership, heightened interest and bigger investments continuing in the future.

The long eclipse of women’s sports

• We’re in the middle of collecting data for the eighth time, the results of which will be published in 2025.
• Hundreds of studies on the routine coverage of sports have similarly found that media coverage of women’s sports rarely exceeds 10% of total sports coverage.
• This is a recurring pattern across media platforms – print, TV, radio, social – in English-speaking countries.

Leapfrogging the gatekeepers

• Podcasts like “Hear Her Sports,” “The Gist of It,” “Tea with A & Phee” and “Attacking Third” directly appeal to women’s sports fans.
• They can simply directly engage with them on social media, producing and pushing content that bypasses traditional media gatekeepers.

Leveraging feminism

• But my colleague Dunja Antunovic and I observed an important shift in sports media starting in the mid-2010s: the mobilization of feminism and principles of equality to promote and sell women’s sports.
• In one chapter of our latest book, “Serving Equality: Feminism, Media, and Women’s Sports,” we focus on how women’s sports leagues and teams, as well as their corporate sponsors, have used the imagery, language and slogans of feminism and social justice movements to sell merchandise and tickets.
• The video accompanying the campaign interspersed scenes of WNBA games with scenes from the 2017 Women’s March on Washington.

Being the change they want to see

• While corporations and leagues deserve credit for highlighting the value of women’s sports, it’s also important to acknowledge how female athletes themselves have been driving change.
• The activism of women athletes through the years has also created visibility for women’s sports.
• In March 2019, the U.S. women’s national team players sued the U.S. Soccer Federation for gender discrimination.
• Last year was the first year since the 1980s that the women’s tournament was broadcast on network television.

Cheryl Cooky has received funding and support from the Women's Sports Foundation. She consults on gender equality issues in sports and has partnered with Gatorade, Nike and Buick.