Back  in 2019, 181 CEOs of the Business Roundtable issued a statement promised to deliver more corporate responsibility to communities. Some optimists declared it was the beginning of the end to the primacy of the share-holder.

But a study (pdf)  by the Test of Corporate Purpose (TCP) initiative showed that amid 2020’s disastrous public health, economic, social, and environmental challenges—the coronavirus pandemic, massive unemployment and worsening inequality, persistent police violence and racial injustice, and intensified climate crisis—”stakeholder capitalism” has failed to follow through to do more to benefit workers and communities, continuing to “put profits ahead of people” instead. 

TCP’s study, which was conducted with KKS Advisors and supported by the Ford Foundation, summarized it this way: “The interests of stockholders and other stakeholders will not always align.” Their analysis showed that U.S. companies that signed the BRT statement “performed no better than their non-signatory counterparts through the 2020 crises.”

Researchers pointed to stock buybacks, political spending, tax evasion, and unchecked pollution as additional examples of practices reflecting the continued prioritization of shareholder interests despite pledges to pursue “inclusive prosperity” for all stakeholders. 

In the words of the report’s authors, many companies still “campaign for one world while publicly proclaiming a vision of another.”

The report noted that only a handful of the signatories to the BRT statement even submitted it to their companies for approval, which is why some scholars have argued that the promises made by proponents of “stakeholder capitalism” are a public relations gimmick that will not improve social welfare. 

According to the New York Times reporter Peter Goodman, “The study enhances doubts that corporations can be depended upon to moderate their quest for profits to pursue solutions to challenges like climate change, racial injustice, and economic inequality.” 

 Marjorie Kelly, executive vice president of The Democracy Collaborative, argued that the study noted: “Given the enormous influence major corporations have over the trajectory of policy and regulation, no analysis of corporate purpose and its alignment with a stakeholder primacy model would be complete without incorporating an evaluation of companies’ lobbying and political spending activities,” which often contradict the information coming from marketing departments. “Any talk of corporations being responsive to a broad spectrum of stakeholders is just that—talk—as long as stakeholders don’t have power,” said Kelly. “And power means ownership.”

Economists Emily Kawano, former director of the Center for Popular Economics, and Julie Matthaei, co-founder of the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network, argued that profit-maximization is intrinsic to capitalism and the privately owned corporations that characterize it, so even the “stakeholder” variety is incapable of balancing moneymaking with competing objectives like greater equality and sustainability. 

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/22/study-shows-stakeholder-capitalism-failing-live-promises-corporations-continue

 Palani is one of about 500,000 workers in the Sri Lankan tea industry. Like most of them, she descends from Tamils who were brought to British Ceylon from the Indian mainland in the 1820s. Tea cultivation was introduced to Sri Lanka by the British after coffee cultivation had failed. To get the industry going, plantation owners needed lots of manual labor, and people from India’s southern Tamil regions were recruited into an indentured labor system that tied workers to plantations. Although slavery was outlawed in the British Empire, these workers were unpaid and completely at the will of plantation owners. They arrived indebted and had to pay for their own transportation, until this rule was changed in 1922. Workers lived in crowded shacks, without sanitation, running water, medical facilities or schools for their children. Working conditions were very harsh, with long hours and heavy quotas. When Sri Lanka became independent in 1948, the tea workers were legally designated as “temporary immigrants” and were denied citizenship. In the 1980s, after more than 200 years living in Sri Lanka, the descendants of Indian Tamil indentured servants were granted Sri Lankan citizenship rights. However, they continue to be among the most marginalized and impoverished people in the country. There are few people advocating for the plantation workers, and their living wage remains below €5 a day.

Sri Lanka currently produces around 300 million kilograms of tea annually. It is the fourth-largest tea producer in the world, behind China, India and Kenya. But tea workers remain mired in poverty. Tens of thousands of plantation workers throughout Sri Lanka have united in recent years to demand a minimum wage of 1,000 rupees a day (about €5).  The “1000 Movement” is one of the largest mobilizations of Sri Lankan workers.  The last agreement between workers and owners was in October 2018. Companies refused the demand for 1,000 rupees daily. A wage increase from 500 to 700 rupees was tentatively agreed to, although the agreement still needs to be signed by the tea companies. However, taking into account attendance and productivity incentives, the old wage was actually 730 rupees, say workers. These incentives were removed under the new 750 rupees agreement, resulting in an actual increase in wages of only 20 rupees (about 10 cents). 

To earn a daily wage of 700 Sri Lankan rupees (€3.50, $4.15), Palani has to collect a minimum of 18 kilograms (40 pounds) of tea leaves.

https://www.dw.com/en/sri-lanka-tea-workers-and-a-legacy-of-exploitation/a-55006963

 California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has sent hundreds of people to Ice at the end of their prison sentences. Even though the law doesn’t require the transfers, and Newsom positions himself as a leader in the resistance to Donald Trump’s xenophobia, the Democratic governor continues to funnel immigrants into the president’s deportation machine.

In his inaugural speech in January 2019, Gavin Newsom said he would stand up to Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, fight family separation and ensure California remains a “sanctuary for all”. But despite the state’s high-profile “sanctuary” law, intended to limit local law enforcement collaboration with Ice, CDCR has a close working relationship with federal immigration authorities. 

When the governor ordered the expedited release of thousands of prisoners due to Covid, at least 78 people were sent from prisons to Ice. In the first three months of the crisis in northern California, state prisons and jails were the number one source of new Ice detentions (94 people, representing 59% of immigration arrests in the region), according to a study by advocacy group Centro Legal de la Raza.

Some prisoners aren’t aware that they are facing transfers until they happen.

When his release date came on 6 August and his sister was waiting on the other side of the barbed-wire fence to take him home, California prison guards did not let them reunite. Instead, officers handed the 41-year-old over to a private security contractor who shackled his hands, waist and legs, put him in a van and drove off. After 22 years in prison, Kao Saelee, was placed into US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) custody and flown 2,000 miles to an Ice jail in Louisiana. He is now facing deportation to Laos, a country his family fled as refugees when he was two years old.

 In 2018 and 2019, he worked as an incarcerated firefighter, battling the kinds of blazes that are currently devastating huge swaths of the western US. California has for decades deployed thousands of incarcerated people to respond to wildfires, paying $2 to $5 a day for the grueling work, whether clearing brush or saving lives and property.

“I paid my debt to society, and I think I should have a chance to be with my family,” Saelee told the Guardian in a recent call from the Pine Prairie Ice jail. “What is the point of sending somebody back to a country where they don’t have no family?”

Saelee was born in Laos in 1979, the oldest of four. His parents were farmers and his family is of Mien descent, an ethnic minority that sided with the US during the Vietnam war and faced subsequent persecution. After fleeing to a refugee camp in Thailand, his family ended up in California in 1987.

“His story is similar to that of a lot of south-east Asian refugee youth who got resettled in neighborhoods in California that had really high rates of violence, poverty and incarceration,” said Anoop Prasad, a staff attorney with the Asian Law Caucus (ALC), who is representing Saelee.

Ice issues “detainers” for people in state custody eligible for deportation, which could include undocumented residents, as well as longtime Californians and refugees with green cards who could be deported due to their criminal record. CDCR complies with Ice requests, meaning the state proactively informs the agency about the release dates for prisoners with detainers – and facilitates the transfers.

While the state has no legal obligation to respond to Ice’s requests, Newsom has said this is standard protocol. When asked about the criticisms of this practice, he recently responded that “it’s been done historically” and was “appropriate”.

State data from January through May of this year suggests that CDCR released more than 500 people to Ice custody, according to the Asian Law Caucus. And the state has not backed away from this practice in the wake of mass Covid outbreaks within CDCR, which have claimed 60 lives so far.

Newsom’s policy risks shipping Covid from state prisons to Ice jails, and in some cases, to other nations, advocates said. Ice has been a key domestic and global spreader of the virus, regularly deporting sick detainees.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/22/california-inmate-firefighter-ice-deportation

The United States has been the world’s leading producer of major weapons systems and the leader in global arms sales for the past several decades.

Many of these sales have taken place in the globe’s most volatile region, the Middle East, than in any other region of the world.  The so-called peace deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, which were brokered by the United States, were business deals designed to expand U.S. arms sales in the Persian Gulf.  The Trump administration has made arms sales to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other Middle East countries the focus of its foreign policy in the region. No sooner had the ink dried on these agreements than disputes emerged over whether Israel had agreed to permit the sale of U.S. F-35 fighter aircraft—the most expensive weapons system in the U.S. arsenal and the most sophisticated jet fighter in the world—to the United Arab Emirates.  Until now, no Arab country had been allowed access to this aircraft.

U.S. arms sales generally have contributed to tensions in some of the world’s most sensitive arenas.  Saudi Arabia’s misuse of U.S.-supplied fighter aircraft in Yemen, the world’s worst humanitarian nightmare, has contributed to the rising civilian death toll there.  For the past five years, the United States has earned billions of dollars in sales to the Saudis, whose coalition has considerable responsibility for many of the deaths of more than 127,000 Yemenis, including more than 15,000 civilians. In 2016, the Department of State’s legal office concluded, in fact, that U.S. officials could be charged with war crimes for approving bomb sales to the Saudis and their partners.  

The Trump administration is currently taking on a great risk in proposing seven large weapons packages to Taiwan. The weapons would represent one of the largest sales to Taiwan, and would include long-range missiles—Boeing’s AGM-84H—that would allow Taiwanese fighter aircraft—Lockheed Martin’s F-16—to hit distant targets in China.  Last year’s sale of 66 F-16s for $8 billion represented one of the largest arms packages to Taiwan in history.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/09/23/arming-the-planet-the-usa-as-the-worlds-leading-weapons-dealer/

The 11 richest people in the world control in their combined net worths $1.106 trillion.

The total wealth of these 11 multi-billionaires is greater than the combined GDPs of Austria and Belgium, for instance.

But what is a trillion dollars?

 A trillion dollars stacked up in one dollar bills would stretch nearly one quarter of the way to the moon. That stack of dollar bills would weigh about 10 tons. 

To put one trillion into perspective in time—going back a billion seconds in time would take us to 1989. A trillion seconds in the path would land you in 30,000 B.C..

You could spend more than $54 million every single day for 50 years and still leave several thousand dollars left.

With $1 trillion, you could spend $1 million a day for more than 3,000 years. 

 In terms of what you could buy—well $1 trillion could but you every single professional sports league in the U.S. You could buy the NFL and then go out and snap up the NBA, NHL, and NASCAR and still have ¾ of your money left.

You could  pay a year’s salary for 18 million teachers.

#1. Jeff Bezos: $205 billion

#2. Bill Gates – $126 billion

#3. Mark Zuckerberg – $112 billion

#4. Elon Musk – $110 billion

#5. Bernard Arnault – $86 billion

#6. Warren Buffett – $82 billion

#7. Mukesh Ambani – $80 billion

#8. Steve Ballmer – $81 billion

#9. Larry Page – $78 billion

#10. Sergey Brin – $76 billion

#11. Larry Ellison – $70 billion

= $1.1 TRILLION

 Federal Reserve figures show that household net worth went up 6.83 percent in the second quarter, reaching nearly $119 trillion.

The data also reflected a “rebound in stocks and housing,” but, as Bloomberg reported, ” 45% of the U.S. population doesn’t own equities and about one-third of households don’t own a home.”

According to (pdf) a survey released this month from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, more than half of households in the nation’s four biggest cities—Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, and New York City—reported facing serious financial problems during the public health crisis.

Robert J. Blendon, executive director of the Harvard Opinion Research Program at the Harvard Chan School, warned that “it’s going to get worse because there is nothing for the people we surveyed who earn under $100,000 a year to fall back on.”

In August, consumer finance company Credit Karma conducted an analysis of nearly 20 million members in the U.S. and found that they have a total of $45 billion of medical debt in collections, which averages to about $2,200 of debt per member. Medical debt has been growing further during the pandemic, rising 7% from the end of last year and just over 3% from when the pandemic started.  Experts expect it to continue to rise in the coming months since there’s a 180-day lag before unpaid medical debts can show up on consumers’ credit reports

“This is a lot of money when you consider nearly half of Americans don’t have $400 saved in case of an emergency,” says Colleen McCreary, chief people officer at Credit Karma. “What’s worse, this number is expected to rise in the coming months as Americans begin sorting out their finances in the aftermath of the pandemic.”

The nation’s billionaires, meanwhile, have been enjoying fatter pockets over the past six months. An analysis released last week by Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) showed that 643 billionaires saw their wealth surge $845 billion, or 29%, since the Covid-19 crisis began six months age.

The redistribution of wealth to the richest 1% over the past 45 years is hard to comprehend. In a Time report on a study by the Rand Corporation, it is estimated that the $50 trillion shift from the bottom 90% to the top 1% would pay every working American an additional $1,144 a month, every single month, year after year. If wealth distribution since 1975 had continued in the same manner as between 1945 and 1975, today’s $35,000 salary would be over $60,000. It’s little wonder that so many Americans are lashing out at the broken system.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/21/rebounding-stocks-surging-wealth-haves-and-widespread-economic-misery-have-nots

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/09/21/how-hypocrites-high-places-have-contributed-riots-streets

 Trump is a far-right politician and chauvinistic nationalist. Biden too plays the patriot card also declaring America is the greatest nation in the world. What makes the US so exceptional is that its nationalism and patriotism is shared across the political spectrum. USA Number One is something Republicans and Democrats agree on. In the United States the national anthem is played at every sporting event whereas other countries will play it only on international occasions. 

Americans are proud of their democracy yet they are oblivious to the numerous flaws and faults that are obvious to many observers from other parts of the world. Gerrymandering and voter suppression affect almost every state. 

 Economically, America ranks eighth in GDP per capita. In terms of its Gini coefficient, the indicator of economic inequality, the US ranks 51st – sandwiched between Djibouti (50) and the Ivory Coast (52). Other indicators of development, like corruption (23), education (26) and healthcare (30), the US also scores far below a long list of other countries. 

No wonder Americans are only the 19th happiest people in the world.  

The aspirations of American progressives are for goals long ago achieved by most European countries: free healthcare for all, access to abortion provisions, strict gun laws, affordable education and so on.

Americans have to face reality. The World Socialist Party tells our fellow-workers they are not, and never have been, the greatest country in the world.

The two-party system is why the choice is demented Trump or dementia Biden. Both fight for Wall Street and maintaining America as the world’s dominant military power. The Democrats are the ‘left’ wing and the Republicans the ‘right’ of the Capitalist Party.  On all the issues vital to the plutocrats and oligarchs they are at one, offering their masters bipartisan support. It is a fake rivalry creating an illusion of choice in America. Biden and Trump are aligned on many crucial issues, from opposing universal Medicare4All, supporting fracking, financing the military and deploying it in foreign countries, to the support of Israeli apartheid and Saudi Arabian despotism.In the one-sided class war the capitalists have been waging against the working class for decades. The two-party racket rests on duplicity. During election time the candidates of the major parties masquerade as dedicated servants of the peoples’ welfare in order to solicit votes and win office. The Republocrat partnership to secure funds for campaigning and to stay in office must do the bidding of business interests on all major questions of foreign and domestic policy. 

Biden is seen by many as the knight in shining armor who will come to the peasants rescue and do battle with the evil baron. A romantic fiction. Biden is no champion of the people and he is not the sworn enemy of the bourgeoisie. He is no savior who will throw the money-changers out of the temple. The Democratic Party cannot become a vehicle to raise progressive politics, as was shown by the rejection of Sanders in 2016 and in 2020. 

The Justice Democrats, the DSA, and all the other progressives will never be a voice within the Democratic Party machine. They have fallen into the trap of voting for the lesser evil. Such electoral tactics are pretty much a ploy by the ruling class and eventually lead to the same, or very similar, outcomes. For sure, an independent party of labor, a real socialist party, will not be a majority for many years to come with the capitalist parties dominating but it gives a choice to those of us who will not accept the status quo. It offers a possibility of progress. Business interests, the plutocracy, rule the land and loot the people. The capitalists who rob within the law will feel secure for four more years if either Trump or Biden is sent to the White House. The greatest liar is he who sees only liars in others. The thought of four more years of Trump certainly is frightening. No one would dispute that. And it is the message of the sheep-dogs to shepherd us all into the the Democratic fold, as the “the lesser evil”. We should not be accomplices to any illusion of substantive change with Biden. People think they are electing Democrats to fight for them. It turns in reality, that the Democrats barely believe in fighting for what little they believe in, and that what they believe in isn’t much worth fighting for.

The World Socialist Party recognizes that lesser evil capitalist politics can never free workers from exploitation and domination.  Backing any candidate of the most powerful military industrial complex in the world is impossible for a genuine socialist. We appeal to our fellow-workers to quit capitalist parties of whatever name and join the World Socialist Party, the only party of the working class in the United States. This election is a splendid time for an educational campaign against the capitalist state; and not for a reformist party to take governmental office as a handmaiden of capitalism, but for a party to overthrow the capitalist system. It is a splendid time to campaign for a revolutionary socialist party. This is the splendid time when our fellow-workers can learn about the liberating ideas of socialism from its genuine proponents and work towards a fundamental socialist transformation of the United State

The World Socialist Party completely divorces itself from the Democratic and Republican electoral machines and declares a war to the death upon them. We pledge intransigent opposition to the capitalist parties. While Debs urged people to climb out of the two-party swamp, the Left today has become totally immersed in it with its path of lesser evilism. The price to be be paid by the pseudo-realists and opportunists of the “lesser evil” choice, practitioners of coalition politics with the capitalist candidates is that a viable independent socialist movement never materializes because the Left will never enjoy the harvest without first tilling the soil and sowing the seeds for a new departure in American politics.

The result of the November 3rd election will likely be further demoralizing for the social movements and for working people. But ultimately — we do not pretend to predict when — capitalism will try to cross a bridge too far in their lust for profit and power. When that happens, the fight–back may well break out for real and change politics forever.

The richest one-tenth of Americans owned more than two-thirds of the nation’s wealth, according to Fed data through the end of March, the latest period for which data are available. 

The top 1% owned 31%.

Workers everywhere have an underlying common interest around which to unite. Capitalism, in contrast, is fundamentally anarchic; the capitalists cannot overcome their divisions. The coronavirus pandemic and Black Lives Matters protests have showed the enormous hatred growing against the horrors of capitalism. That hatred has to be turned into dedication to overthrow the entire capitalist system.

Labor has no voice in nominating the candidates. Labor has no say in drafting the platforms. Labor will have no control over the victorious politician. The lords of commerce and barons of industry rule. 

The capitalists understand this clearly. American labor will be suckered again in the 2020 election. Big Business possesses two parties under its control, with one always in reserve when public dissatisfaction has temporarily exhausted the other.

Our task is to organize the labor vote for socialist candidates rather than for the candidates of Wall Street. The myth that Biden is a “liberal” continues on, despite all evidence to the contrary. It is carefully nurtured by the media monopoly. Whatever the rhetoric emanating from the progressive left, corporate America, the banks, Wall Street and the hedge funds can be sure that the Democratic Party remains in safe hands with Biden and Harris. Even Sanders concedes, “it’s Wall Street that regulates Congress.”

The progressives have one great choice before them from now on. Two roads remain before them. They can take the road of independent political action, or they can continue the present policy of tying themselves to capitalist politics, which in essence means support to the political representatives of the economic rulers whom it fights on the economic field. It would mean a sharp break with capitalist politics and its organizations. How many times must labor have to repeat its experience with the two old capitalist-dominated boss parties, before it learns that nothing can be gained through playing ball with them? Democrats have joined the Republicans in protecting the interests of employers. The side-lining of Sanders should have been instructive to those who still believe that the Democratic Party can be transformed into a “party of the people,” or that labor can defend and advance its political interests without building a new party of its own.

The working class should not support any of the presidential candidates, as none offer any program which would benefit the working people of the United States.

The policies advanced by Trump and Biden differ only in superficial respects. Both would continue the assault on the living standards of working people, boost corporate profits, continue to slash social services and take back reforms won through hard struggle over the past years, and step up U.S.  war preparations.

This year the Democrats and Republicans have never looked so similar, with both reflecting the conservative mood within the U.S. ruling class. When the voters enter the voting booth they will face no real choice other than the different candidates’ personalities. The working class should reject the big business candidates and their common programs of economic austerity, repression and war preparations. Working people must reject the “lesser evil” argument for Biden (or for Trump, for that matter) – there is no such thing when the choice is between chickenpox and measles. The “lesser evil” fallacy serves only to underestimate the danger of the poison you pick, and keeps the masses chained to the bourgeois political system and its two parties. By not voting for any candidate working people will register their rejection of the big business candidates. Voting in the presidential election would only strengthen the two-party system and hold back the process of forging a political trend independent of the elite. The presidential office is the highest in the land, and is therefore controlled most tightly by the Big Business

The word on every politician’s lips in this election season is “change” but nothing will change, despite millions of working class people desperate for relief from years of hardship, hope the elections will make a difference. 

Elections are always difficult for capitalist politicians. They must appeal to the workers for their votes while reassuring the ruling class that its interests will be protected. The more the candidates can find a theme that can unite the working class behind capitalist interests, the better. In these elections, the vague promise of “change” has fit the bill perfectly, since the ruling class itself is for the most part desperate for a change in government. Of course, the workers have a very different idea of what “change” means.

The answer to this world of exploitation, oppression and war is working-class revolution that will overthrow the capitalists and their profit-driven system and build a socialist world of freedom and abundance. We don’t have to take what the powers-that-be give to us. We can create a new politics. Readers interested in an alternative to the parties of capital in the Capitol may look at the WSPUS website.