Corporate Social Responsibility is a Sham; Super Rich Doing Well, and Curbing Police Brutality

I. Corporate Social Responsibility: a Sham
 "Last August, the Business Roundtable -- an association of CEOs of Americas's biggest corporations -- announced with great fanfare a 'fundamental commitment to all our stakeholders' and not just their shareholders. They said 'investing in employees, delivering value to customers, and supporting outside communities' is now at the forefront of their goals -- not maximizing profits. [1]

Americans know that this claim of corporate social responsibility is a sham. "A record 76 percent of U.S. adults believe major corporations have too much power. One Business Rondtable director is Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors. Just weeks after making the Roundtable commitment, and despite GM's hefty profits and large tax breaks, Barra rejected workers' demands that GM raise their wages and stop outsourcing their jobs. Earlier in the year GM shut its giant assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio.

Nearly 50,000 GM workers then staged the longest auto strike in 50 years. They won a few wage gains but didn't save any jobs. Barra was paid $22 million last year. How's that for corporate social responsibility?

Another prominent CEO who made  the phony Business Roundtable commitment was AT&T's Randall Stephenson who promised to use the billions in savings from the Trump tax cut to invest in the company's broadband and create at least 7,000 new jobs. Instead, even before the coronavirus pandemic, AT&T cut more than 23,000 jobs and demanded that employees train lower-wage foreign workers to replace them."

"Oh, and the chairman of the Business Roundtable is Jamie Dimon, CEO of Wall Street's largest bank, JPMorgan Chase. Dimon lobbied Congress personally and intensively for the biggest tax cut in history, and got the Business Roundtable to join him. JPMorgan raked in $3.7 billion from the tax cut. Dimon alone made $31 million in 2018.

That tax cut increased the federal debt by almost $2 trillion. This was before Congress spent almost $3 trillion fighting the pandemic --and delivering a hefty portion as bailouts to the biggest corporations, many of whom signed the Business Roundtable pledge."

"The only way to make corporations socially responsible is through laws requiring them to be -- for example, giving workers a bigger voice in corporate decision making, requiring that corporations pay severance to communities they abandon, raising corporate taxes, busting up monopolies, and preventing dangerous products (including faulty airplanes) from ever reaching the light of day."

II. Super-Rich Doing Well
"Although most Americans currently face hard times, with unemployment urging to the levels of the Great Depression and enormous numbers of people sick or dying from the coronavirus pandemic, the nation's super-rich remain a notable exception. [2]

Financially, they are doing remarkably well. According to the Institute for Policy Studies, between March 18 and April 28, as nearly 30 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits, the wealth of America's 630 billionaires grew by nearly 14 percent. During April 2020 alone, their wealth increased by over $406 billion, bringing it to $3.4 trillion. According to estimates by 'Forbes,' the 400 richest Americans now possess as much wealth as held by nearly two-thirds of American households combined."

"During this time of economic crisis, two features of the U.S. government's economic bailout legislation facilitated the burgeoning of billionaire fortunes: first, the provision of direct subsidies to the wealthy and their corporations, and second, the gift of huge tax breaks to rich Americans and their businesses. Consequently, although the U.S. economy continues to deteriorate, stock prices, helped along by this infusion of cash, are once again soaring."

III. Curbing Police Brutality
Political science professor Lawrence Wittner, who taught at New York's Albany University -- and with whom I have served on the Peace Action Board -- recounts an experience in early November  1966, when he and his sister put up "Vote No" posters, to defeat a referendum put on the New York City ballot by the Patrolman's Benevolent Association to remove civilians from the Civilian Complaint Review Board. [3]

Professor Wittner recounts the efforts to create a civilian review board with real teeth. The objective was achieved in 1993, when Mayor David Dinkens  and the New York City Council re-organized the Board as an all-civilian operation.

"Even so, the Board remained weak and fairly ineffectual. The Board's minimal impact can be attributed in part to Dinkens's mayoral successors, Rudy Giuliani  and Micheal Bloomberg who limited its funding while instituting 'zero tolerance' and 'stop and frisk' programs that dramatically enhanced the power and impunity of the police. Between June 1996 and June 1997 the city administration settled 503 police brutality cases in court, but no member of the police department associated with them was punished."

"The weakness of the Board is underscored by the New York Civil Liberties Union, which, in March 2019, pointed out that,although the agency has the authority to investigate and, in certain instances, prosecute cases of  police misconduct, 'its recommendations on disciplinary outcomes are ultimately not binding' on the New York Police Department. The reason is that the police commissioner retains 'exclusive authority to decide and impose discipline' for police officers."

Professor Wittner says that New York City's "lengthy history of efforts to curb police brutality,as well as the sabotage of such efforts, [may] provide useful background information for the current nationwide debate over reforming police practices. Overall, it leads to the conclusion that, however difficult eliminating police misconduct might be, the job cannot be left to the police."

ADDENDUMS;
*Donald Trump Jr. called Joe Biden "a pedophile" and Covid-19 "a Democratic ploy."
*Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) called the firings of inspector generals "a threat to accountable democracy."
*Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) has said that Trump's tweets about "shooting looters" and unleashing "vicious dogs"  were not constructive.
*On May 5, 2015, Trump tweeted that "Nobody would fight for free speech than me."

Footnotes:
[1] "Corporations Will Not Save Us: The Sham of Corporate Social Responsibility," The PeaceWorker, May 30, 2020.

[2] https:/historynewsnetwork.org/article 175516

[3] Lawrence Wittner, "The Subversion of New York City's Official Policy to Curb Police Brutality," June 8, 2020.