Bankers like numbers. Numbers tell the story. No emotion gets in the way. So let’s look at the numbers: Over the past three years — that is, in the years after the world came together in Paris to try to slow climate change — JPMorgan Chase lent $196 billion to the fossil-fuel industry.

Over the past three years, JPMorgan Chase lent more money to the fossil-fuel industry than any bank on Earth — 29 percent more. And over the past three years, JPMorgan Chase lent more money to the most expansionary parts of the fossil-fuel industry (new pipelines, Arctic drilling, deep-sea exploration) than any other bank — 63 percent more.

That’s not to say that other banks don’t do plenty of damage: Citi, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America are all in the hundred-billion-dollar club. But Chase is in a league of its own. It’s the First National Bank of Flood and Fire. It’s Hades Savings and Loan. It is the Doomsday Bank.

It’s possible that could start to change as early as Tuesday, Chase’s annual investor day, when CEO Jamie Dimon comes out to greet the public. The bank has been under unrelenting pressure from activists — just last week, on successive days, they besieged the company’s Pacific Northwest headquarters in Seattle, leading to more than two dozen arrests. And on Friday, a private memo to high-end clients from company economists, in which they explained that climate change could produce “catastrophic outcomes where human life as we know it is threatened,” was leaked to the British press. Perhaps Chase management will follow the recent lead of other players like giant asset manager BlackRock or investment bank Goldman Sachs and make at least some concessions. Perhaps it won’t.

The story of Chase Bank is a big part of the story of how the planet warmed 1 degree Celsius, melted the Arctic, and burned a billion animals in Australia over Christmas. And the fight to change Chase — which will culminate in massive civil disobedience in late April — is a big part of the fight to keep that one degree from becoming three, and the planet becoming a wasteland.

Chase Bank had its birth in a different, smaller environmental disaster. New York in 1798 had 60,000 residents, and 1,000 of them died in a yellow-fever epidemic. No one knew the cause, but Aaron Burr seized the moment to form the Manhattan Co., with the ostensible aim of bringing clean water from the Bronx River down to Wall Street. According to historian Gerard Koeppel, who details the Machiavellian backstory in his book Water for Gotham, it was really more of a front for launching a new bank to rival Alexander Hamilton’s Bank of New York.

Burr managed to insert into the charter for his water venture a clause allowing the company to “employ surplus capital” in “any monied transactions or operations,” giving it powers “nothing like any company that existed in America.” The “unsuspecting believed a water company had been born,” Koeppel writes. “Burr knew he had sired a bank.” It did lay water pipes under some of Lower Manhattan, but few customers were served, and epidemics continued; the company’s monopoly prevented the city from building its own system for decades, producing “an enduring agony for New Yorkers.”

A century and a half after its shady birth, the Manhattan Co. merged with Chase National Bank, which had in turn acquired the Equitable Trust Co., owned by the original oilman, John D. Rockefeller. (Chase Manhattan settled on its logo in 1961 — the stylized octagon is supposed to represent the primitive wood water pipes of Burr’s original company.) At various points along the way, it acquired giant Chemical Bank (which had itself acquired the slightly less giant Manufacturers Hanover Corp.) and also JP Morgan and Co., named for the most important 19th-century banker and the man who helped found U.S. Steel and General Electric. All of which is to say: an incredibly big, incredibly rich, and incredibly well-connected bank.

Its most prominent leader was David Rockefeller, grandson of the oil pioneer, who ran it from 1969 to 1980. He established it as a global giant — some of his internationalism seems prescient now (he set up the first U.S. banking operations in Moscow and Peking) and some less so (he helped get the Shah of Iran to America for medical treatment, which in turn helped reignite hostilities still ongoing).

Whatever your take on Rockefeller’s politics, he didn’t subscribe to the “money is the only thing that matters” ethos that marked Wall Street’s next generations. When Rockefeller was in his nineties, his granddaughter Miranda Kaiser remembers accompanying him to a meeting at the bank. “Jamie [Dimon] was presenting with all the other top officials to a very select group of investors,” she recalls. “All of their presentations were very focused on one thing: how they were going to maximize returns. Grandpa was the last one to go. ‘All that is great,’ he said, ‘but let’s not forget our social responsibility as a major corporation.’ He was not well-received — as I remember, there was a lot of glowering. The guys in the expensive suits, they looked jazzed-up when Jamie was talking about returns, but when Grandpa was talking they looked profoundly uncomfortable.”

The Rockefeller family, outspoken in their efforts to combat Exxon, their original family business, over climate change, is now beginning to challenge Chase. Says Kaiser, 48, who runs the refugee resettlement charity USAHello, “It is disturbing that JPMC has continued to be the world’s largest investor in fossil fuels despite the clear role of that industry in climate change and its devastating global effects.”

Jamie Dimon is one of the two key characters in this story. The son and grandson of stockbrokers, Dimon started his career at American Express, where his father was an executive VP. Dimon worked with Sandy Weill to form Citigroup, and after a falling out, ended up as CEO of Bank One; when that was purchased by Chase in 2004, he became president and CEO of the company, and has built it into the biggest bank in the country. He’s reaped the requisite rewards — a net worth nearing $2 billion, a $10 million Park Avenue apartment, and a Westchester estate in Bedford, New York, where, according to Vanity Fair, he’s “perfectly happy spending his two-week vacation alone, making his own coffee and wandering around the local Target in his jeans.” (Perhaps some adviser should tell him that these are hobbies one can pursue with mere millions.)

Anyway, Dimon was friendly with President Obama, and has insisted that he wants “a more equitable society,” and added, apropos of Jesus, “I do think we’re our brother’s keeper.” On climate change, especially, his public pronouncements are fairly progressive: In the lead-up to the Paris climate talks, he joined with other financial executives to say, “We call for leadership and cooperation among governments for commitments leading to a strong global climate agreement.” When Trump pulled the U.S. out of the climate accords, Dimon said, “I absolutely disagree.”

But maybe not that much. Unlike Tesla CEO Elon Musk or Disney CEO Bob Iger, the Paris decision didn’t cause Dimon to resign from Trump’s various business advisory boards. Instead, he told reporters that Trump “is the pilot flying the airplane,” and that “when you get on the airplane, you better be rooting for the success of the pilot,” and that “I’d try to help any president of the U.S. because I’m a patriot.”

And really, who cares what he said, because what his bank was doing was at least as damaging to the Paris accord as Trump’s pronouncements. Presidents can do only so much — Trump hasn’t even been able to stem the collapse of America’s coal industry. But bankers can supply the thing the fossil-fuel industry needs above all, which is money.

Here’s the score: In the years since the Paris accord, Chase has been the biggest global funder of liquefied natural gas; the biggest American funder of coal mining and of tar-sands oil; the biggest Arctic oil-and-gas funder in the world; the biggest funder of ultra-deepwater oil-and-gas drilling on the planet; and the second-biggest funder on Earth of fracked oil and gas. Right before the Paris climate accords were signed, scientists at the journal Nature published a landmark study detailing precisely which fossil-fuel resources absolutely had to be left in the ground. It’s as if Dimon and his bankers took the list and used it as a guide for booking business: If you had a particularly damaging project in mind, the kind that would open up a whole new area for oil development or some infrastructure that would lock us in to depending on fossil fuels for decades to come, then Chase was the window you lined up at. “Chase is number one with a bullet,” says Jason Opeña Disterhoft, a senior campaigner for the Rainforest Action Network team that tracks banks and their fossil-fuel investments.

To explain that — to explain how Chase became more than garden-variety bad, how it became first-in-class, all-chips-in-the-middle bad — requires more than Dimon and his hypocrisy. You need to meet the second player in this drama, a man named Lee Raymond. He’s not a high-profile player like Dimon, always jetting off to Davos; in fact, until very recently, if you googled news stories about “Lee Raymond,” you’d mostly get accounts of an actor named Raymond Lee who features in HBO’s Made for Love; and another man named Raymond Lee who is currently director of public works for the city of Amarillo, Texas; and a longtime photographer at the South Bend Tribune named Joe Raymond, who once took a famous picture of a Notre Dame running back named Lee Becton. That all changed earlier this month, when a shareholder advocacy group, Majority Action, called for Raymond’s ouster from Chase.

But despite his relative invisibility, if there’s a single Bond villain of the climate crisis, it’s him; this is the guy sitting at the head of the table stroking his cat as destruction nears. Or maybe that’s too harsh — let’s assume he wasn’t hoping for the inferno. But the fact is that no single human being was better positioned to do something that might have slowed the chaos now engulfing us.

Short course: Lee Raymond went to work at Exxon after earning his Ph.D. in chemical engineering. He spent his entire working life there, joining its board in 1984, becoming president of the company in 1987, and eventually winding up as CEO from 1993 to 2005, a job that paid him $686 million, or $144,573 a day. Long before his retirement from Exxon, he also joined the board of Chase, and he has remained there ever since, becoming, in 2001, lead independent director, the closest thing Dimon has to a boss. That is to say, he has led the biggest oil company and the biggest oil lender from the beginning of the global-warming era to the present.

And he has done more than lead them. Here’s how Majority Action put it when it launched the campaign to get him removed from the board: “He was the architect and public face of ExxonMobil’s efforts to promote denial of the risks and likelihood of climate change, even after Exxon scientists warned executives of the danger.” Thanks to intrepid investigative reporting from the Pulitzer-winning Inside Climate News, the Los Angeles Times, and the Columbia Journalism School, we know that beginning in the late 1970s, Exxon’s scientists started intensive study of global warming (of course they did — they were the largest private company on Earth, and their product was carbon). Those scientists reported accurately and frequently to senior executives about how much and how fast it would warm — one chart, discovered in an archive, showed a spot-on, perfect prediction for what CO2 concentrations and temperatures would be in 2020. And they were believed — Exxon actually began building its offshore oil platforms higher in order to compensate for the rise in sea level they knew was coming, and they started plotting their Arctic drilling schemes for the days when they knew the ice would be melted.

So, in June 1988, when NASA scientist James Hansen went to Congress to say that global warming was real and underway, one possible version of history could have gone like this: Exxon President Lee Raymond could have taken to the TV that night and said, “You know, our researchers have found much the same thing.” Had he done that, no one would have been likely to describe Exxon as a climate-alarmist Chicken Little. But he didn’t do that. Instead, Exxon, with its peers in the oil, gas, coal, and utility businesses, set about the job of supplying the money and talent to the endless front groups that concocted a phony debate about whether or not global warming was “real,” a debate that has consumed decade after decade, when we could have been hard at work. So instead of beginning with modest steps, like a small carbon tax, to bend the curve of emissions, we went full speed ahead with business as usual. Humanity has produced more carbon since that day in 1988 then in all of human history before, and as a result, we now face almost impossibly steep cuts in emissions if we are to meet climate targets.

Raymond, arguably the most important oilman on Earth, didn’t spend much time on TV or talking to reporters even then, but there are a few moments when his behind-the-scenes role broke through. In October 1997, he addressed the World Petroleum Congress, meeting in Beijing. The timing was crucial — it was about two months before the world would meet in Kyoto, Japan, for the first attempt at a global agreement to limit greenhouse gases. The Clinton administration was on board, but unlike Dimon and his “the president is the pilot” rhetoric, Exxon was not. (“I’m not a U.S. company, and I don’t make decisions based on what’s good for the U.S.,” Raymond once explained).

There’s no video of that speech in Beijing, just a smudgy Xerox of the typescript, but it ranks as one of the most irresponsible addresses an American has ever delivered (granted, there’s stiff competition). Bloomberg News summarized his words like this: “First, the world isn’t warming. Second, even if it were, oil and gas wouldn’t be the cause. Third, no one can predict the likely future temperature rise.” In fact, he went even further, telling the Chinese — then beginning to embark on the fossil-fueled expansion that would make them the world’s biggest carbon emitters — that the Earth was cooling. Even if the scientists were right about the greenhouse effect, he said, “It is highly unlikely that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be significantly affected by whether we act now or 20 years from now.” As it turns out, nothing could be further from the truth: Because we didn’t act then, we’re in a crisis now, and one we may have waited too long to solve.

It’s too hard to find anyone at Chase who wants to talk on the record about Raymond — the closest I came was a former managing director, John Fullerton, who now runs a nonpartisan think tank called the Capital Institute. Raymond “was the one director management feared,” says Fullerton, “because he ran the compensation committee and is a hardass.” His nickname at Exxon, according to Steve Coll’s magisterial book Private Empire, was indeed “Iron Ass”; even The Wall Street Journal once noted his “disdain for gay rights” and his “strikingly politically incorrect character for a modern-day, big-company CEO.” Given Exxon’s global-warming record under Raymond’s leadership, Fullerton continues, “how he is not on trial for crimes against humanity is beyond me.”

It’s hard to know what Chase thinks about any of this. Dimon joined some other CEOs in 2019 at the Business Roundtable for a discussion of “purpose” in the modern corporation, explaining that  “major employers are investing in their workers and communities because they know it is the only way to be successful over the long term,” adding that “these modernized principles reflect the business community’s unwavering commitment to continue to push for an economy that serves all Americans.”

Since that is a little short on specifics, I’ve repeatedly sent Chase representatives lists of questions and requests for interviews with Dimon and Raymond, and received back only a few paragraphs of what one spokesman called “broader context.” This included the news that Chase “promotes inclusive economic growth and opportunity in communities where it operates,” that it is “installing efficient LED lighting across its operations,” and that it has a “commitment to facilitate $200 billion in clean financing by 2025.” I’ve asked what that money is going for and have gotten no reply.

It’s much easier to track down the people trying to deal with the projects that Chase bankrolls. Consider, for instance, the Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring tar sands down from Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf of Mexico. For more than a decade now it’s been the subject of fierce opposition from indigenous people along the route in Canada and the U.S., from farmers and ranchers who don’t want their land taken to scientists who point out that these are precisely the kind of projects we must abandon if we have any hope. (Hansen, who delivered the original greenhouse-gas warning to Congress, once declared that pumping the economically recoverable oil from the tar sands would be “game over” for the climate). Nonetheless, year after year, TC Energy, the Canadian firm building the pipeline, has been Chase’s single biggest fossil-fuel client, taking 6.7 percent of all of Chase’s energy financing.

“I would ask Mr. Dimon to come visit us here in the middle of America, where we protect our land and water with everything we have because the land is everything we have,” says Jane Kleeb, the chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, who has devoted much of her life to fighting the pipeline. “Our culture, identity, and livelihoods are tied to the land. If he met us, if he sees the land, if he feels the water, I’m confident he would stand with us. It’s easy to forget us and discount us and instead focus on your shareholders when you don’t have to look us in the eye and tell us we don’t matter.”

Or go a little farther north, to Minnesota, where Chase-funded Enbridge is hard at work trying to build another tar-sands pipeline, this one called Line 3, which would double the capacity of current pipes and reroute them through country held sacred by Ojibwe bands and other indigenous groups. “It’s time to move on, Jamie,” says Winona LaDuke, leader of the native group Honor the Earth (and a Harvard undergrad in the years that Dimon was at the university’s business school). “Enbridge is militarizing the north country, funding hate, and shackling pristine lakes to a dirty-oil pipeline. After 60 hearings and 68,000 people testifying against this pipeline, Enbridge is going to cause a civil war in northern Minnesota — there will be blood,” she says. “And after $38 million of military repression at Standing Rock [the Dakota Access Pipeline was another Chase-funded project], we want a transition. Line 3 is the equivalent of 50 new coal-fired generators. What we need is renewables and efficiency.”

Or go to Australia, or the Marshall Islands, or Paradise, California, or Bangladesh, or the Mekong Delta, or anywhere else on a long and growing list. They could even ask the 2,900 Chase employees relocated from their downtown headquarters after Hurricane Sandy crashed into Manhattan in 2012.

Almost 40 years ago, a few months out of college, I was a newly minted staff writer at The New Yorker. I persuaded the editor to let me do a Talk of the Town story on the other recent grads arriving at Chase for their first jobs in finance. I joined the first three days of Credit Course 8-2, meeting on the 10th floor of those Lower Manhattan headquarters. In only 200 days, a second-vice-president assured them they’d be ready to “go out there and lend some money.” The highlight of those opening classes was a trip to the vault in the bank’s basement, which was described not only as “the world’s largest,” but also as “A-bomb-proof.” Everyone got to touch the gold bars.

I thought of that experience in January, when I was sitting in the Chase branch nearest the U.S. Capitol with a dozen other protesters, waiting to be arrested. (I noted the energy-efficient LED lighting). We were helping launch what is turning into a nationwide spring offensive that will culminate April 23rd with protests at thousands of Chase branches in the 40 states where it operates. Maybe it’s all pointless and hopeless — maybe it would have been wiser (certainly more lucrative) to stick with the gold bars.

But there’s actually reason to think that StopTheMoneyPipeline.com might work. For one, Chase’s lending to the oil-and-gas industry is vast, but it’s only about 7 percent of its business — it’s not like Exxon, which has no real option but to fight. And if the electoral map is tilted toward the red, the money map goes the other way: The people Chase really cares about, the ones with funds to invest, are mostly in those pockets of blue, where people care deeply about the climate crisis. (That’s why BlackRock, the biggest asset manager on Earth, started moving some money out of fossil fuels in January, a seismic development that drew widespread coverage. BlackRock wasn’t alone; in the past few months, Goldman Sachs announced that it would stop lending for coal projects and drilling in the Arctic, and the European Investment Bank, the largest public bank in the world, swore off fossil-fuel lending altogether).

It’s possible Chase will follow suit at its annual investor day tomorrow; perhaps the prospect of thousands of people starting to cut up their credit cards or moving their accounts will make them blanch — a video of Jane Fonda with a sharp pair of scissors and a Chase card has circulated widely in the past few weeks, as she joined young climate activists and faith leaders in a call for actions on April 23rd (the day after Earth Day) in thousands of branches across the country. “If you don’t move your money, we’ll move ours,” she said. All the polling indicates that for young people, the climate crisis is the number-one political issue, so maybe the Doomsday Bank will even begin to find it hard to recruit the next class of bright-eyed young loan officers for the trip down to the vault.

Chase blinked last March, after a long campaign by people calling them to task for lending to private prisons. So who knows? Right after our January arrests, a Chase spokesman told Politico that “we have a significant amount of work underway to further build upon our efforts on climate-related risk and opportunity, and we look forward to sharing more in the coming years.” Activists will have a harder time forcing broad action on fossil fuels than on prisons, because oil and gas make a lot more money for Chase. But if the bank took even the obvious first step — deciding to stop lending to the kinds of projects that expand an industry that every scientist agrees must now contract — the results would reverberate everywhere, bouncing from one stock market to the next as the sun rose around the planet. The speed of that reaction — far faster than political change is likely to come — might let us start catching up with the physics of global warming.

Given the stakes, it’s worth a full-on try. Maybe you’re one of that fast-growing group of people beginning to feel queasy about the climate crisis — beginning to feel like you need to do more to make a difference. You probably don’t have a coal mine in your neighborhood, or a fracking well in the cul de sac. But the odds are high there’s a Chase Bank branch not far away. So here’s your chance to take a stand.

Ten years ago, faced with mass bankruptcies and the very real prospect of a rerun of the Great Depression, the US Federal Reserve took the fateful decision to unveil a new policy called “quantitative easing” or QE.

This anniversary may seem unimportant but it should be commemorated because the policy of QE changed politics more profoundly than almost any other event or policy initiative in the past decade. Ironically, a policy that was supposed to protect the balance sheets of the wealthy has unleashed forces that may lead to the appropriation of those assets in the coming years.

The issue this article wants to address is whether QE, designed to protect the assets of the Baby Boomers that were threatened in the 2008 crash, has caused a lurch to the left in the millennial generation (Generation Y) and their younger siblings, Generation Z.

Will these age groups ultimately vote for much higher wealth taxes, wrestling these now more valuable assets from the Boomers?

But before we look forward, let’s look back a bit.

In March 2009, the Fed abandoned caution and undertook to exchange trillions of dollars of bad, old assets sitting on banks’ balance sheets, for trillions of dollars of good, new money that the banks could then lend out.

This dramatic change in policy was designed to offer a lifeline to the banks. The alternative would have been to allow the widespread default of debts incurred in the worldwide boom. Mass defaults would have bankrupted the banks.

The Fed believed that letting the banks go bust in the 1930s was what turned the post-1929 crash recession into the Great Depression. It didn’t want to risk that again, despite widespread and legitimate concerns about bailing out banks that had largely caused the crash through profligate lending in the boom.

The central idea was that the new lending would avoid defaults by pushing up asset prices, repairing balance sheets that had been broken by the crash. In March 2009, QE started in earnest and so began the largest “cash for trash” scheme the world has ever seen.

From the start of the financial crisis through to the conclusion of the final round of QE in October 2014, the value of assets exchanged from the broken banks to the Fed rose nearly 420 per cent, from $870 billion to $4.5 trillion.

The intended consequence of this policy – copied by all the major central banks – was to drive up asset prices across the world. The supposition was that rising asset prices would make people who owned assets feel better, they would then borrow a bit more and the economy would right itself. Indeed, this is what came to pass, eventually. The US and the world economy did recover but something else happened.

Who do you think benefited more from a policy that drives up assets? Rich people or poor people? Obviously, rich people because they own the assets, that’s why they are rich!

The political consequences of this are enormous – and to date they have been only partly felt.

Increased inequality

As asset prices rose much faster than wages, the average person fell further behind. Their stake in society weakened. The faster this new, asset-fuelled economy has grown, the further behind the average person has fallen.

This threatens the political status quo because our politics is based on the notion that the faster the economy grows the better, because a rising tide is supposed to lift all boats. The accepted implication is that growth is good for lessening inequality.

But what if this is wrong? If asset prices rise faster than wages, then when the economy grows, inequality increases. What then?

The political ramification is that the people left out of the asset bonanza, which is the majority, vote to claw back their share and vote for people shouting slogans such as “Take Back Control” or “Make America Great Again”.

The message in these slogans is that the countries in question needs to be shaken up and the spoils shared more evenly.

In short, popular revolts against the elites have as much to do with recent economic decisions as with historical nostalgia about former national glory. Furthermore, as the old and the middle-aged own assets, is it any surprise if the young vote left in much bigger numbers?

Housing issue

The battleground for the new politics is the property market, where the reality of QE is most evident. In Ireland, lots of free central bank money sloshing around has driven up house prices, so much so that accommodation is out of reach for the young.

As a result, all over the world the young are moving to the left. In the UK this shift has been most dramatic. Research shows that if only the votes of the under-25s were counted in the last UK general election, not a single Tory would have won a seat.

Housing is the great divider there too. Property ownership amongst the over-65s in Britain has risen over the past two decades or so, from 63 per cent in 1996 to 77 per cent in 2016. Home ownership among the under-35s has declined from 54 per cent to just 34 per cent over the same period.

In the US we see a similar gap emerging between the generations. Just 27 per cent of millennials approve of Trump’s job performance, compared with 44 per cent of Baby Boomers.

Asset-fuelled capitalism

Opinion is not divided on Trump only, but on a range of social issues. For example, 52 per cent of millennials suggest racial discrimination as the main reason many black people cannot get ahead; just 36 per cent of Baby Boomers cite it as the main cause.

Similarly, while 79 per cent of millennials believe immigrants strengthen the country, just 56 per cent of Baby Boomers agree. In terms of foreign policy, millennials are far more likely than Boomers to believe that peace is best ensured by good diplomacy rather than military strength.

Exciting new politicians have emerged in the US, such as New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is calling for a 70 per cent tax on the wealthy. This would have been unheard of a few years ago.

Time will tell if such a person emerges in Ireland. For now, the parties of the centre can rest easy enough, but if asset-fuelled capitalism continues apace, a big political change will follow.

Ten years ago, QE was unveiled to usher in a new period of trickle-down economics; its unintended consequence was to spark a bottom-up revolt against the elites which is far from over.

Stephanie Kelton joins Hayes to discuss ‘the national deficit, the nature of money itself, federal spending, and why it’s time to stop comparing the deficit to a household budget’.

Boeing recently fired CEO Dennis Muilenburg in order “to restore confidence in the Company moving forward as it works to repair relationships with regulators, customers, and all other stakeholders.”

Restore confidence? Muilenburg’s successor will be David Calhoun who, as a long-standing member of Boeing’s board of directors, allowed Muilenburg to remain CEO for more than a year after the first 737 Max crash and after internal studies found that the jetliner posed an unacceptable risk of accident. It caused the deaths of 346 people.

Muilenburg raked in $30 million in 2018. He could walk away from Boeing with another $60 million.

Last August, the Business Roundtable – an association of CEOs of America’s biggest corporations, of which Muilenburg is a director – announced with great fanfare a “fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders” (emphasis in the original) and not just their shareholders.

Rubbish. Corporate social responsibility is a sham.

Another Business Roundtable 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.

Some 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. Meanwhile, GM’s stock has performed so well that Barra earned $22 million last year.

Another prominent Business Roundtable CEO who made the commitment to all his stakeholders is AT&T’s Randall Stephenson, who promised to invest in the company’s broadband network and create at least 7,000 new jobs with the billions the company received from the Trump tax cut.

Instead, AT&T has cut more than 30,000 jobs since the tax cut went into effect.

Let’s not forget Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and its Whole Foods subsidiary. Just weeks after Bezos made the Business Roundtable commitment to all his stakeholders, Whole Foods announced it would be cutting medical benefits for its entire part-time workforce.

The annual saving to Amazon from this cost-cutting move is roughly what Bezos – whose net worth is $110 billion – makes in two hours. (Bezos’s nearly-completed D.C. mansion will have 2 elevators, 25 bathrooms, 11 bedrooms, and a movie theater.)

GE’s CEO Larry Culp is also a member of the Business Roundtable. Two months after he made the commitment to all his stakeholders, General Electric froze the pensions of 20,000 workers in order to cut costs. Culp raked in $15 million last year.

The list goes on. Just in time for the holidays, US Steel announced 1,545 layoffs at two plants in Michigan. Last year, five US Steel executives received an average compensation package of $4.8 million, a 53 percent increase over 2017.

Instead of a holiday bonus this year, Walmart offered its employees a 15 percent store discount. Oh, and did I say? Walmart saved $2.2 billion this year from the Trump tax cut.

The giant tax cut itself was a product of the Business Roundtable’s extensive lobbying, lubricated by its generous campaign donations. Several of its member corporations, including Amazon and General Motors, wound up paying no federal income taxes at all last year.

Not incidentally, the tax cut will result in less federal money for services on which Americans and their communities rely.

The truth is, American corporations are sacrificing workers and communities as never before, in order to further boost record profits and unprecedented CEO pay.

Americans know this. In the most recent Pew survey, a record 73 percent of U.S. adults (including 62 percent of Republicans and 71 percent of Republicans earning less than $30,000 a year) believe major corporations have too much power. And 65 percent believe they make too much profit.

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, making 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.

If the Business Roundtable and other corporations were truly socially responsible, they’d support such laws. Don’t hold your breath.

The only way to get such laws enacted is by reducing corporate power and getting big money out of politics.

The first step is to see corporate social responsibility for the con it is.

Anti-capitalists had a miserable year. But so did capitalism.

While the defeat of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party in the UK this month threatened the radical left’s momentum, particularly in the US, where the presidential primaries loom, capitalism found itself under fire from some unexpected quarters.

Billionaires, CEOs, and even the financial press have joined intellectuals and community leaders in a symphony of laments about rentier capitalism’s brutality, crassness, and unsustainability. “Business cannot continue as usual,” seems to be a widespread sentiment even in the boardrooms of the most powerful corporations.

Increasingly stressed and justifiably guilt-ridden, the ultra-rich – or those with any sense, at any rate – feel threatened by the crushing precariousness into which the majority are sinking. As Marx foretold, they form a supremely powerful minority that is proving unfit to preside over polarised societies that cannot guarantee non-asset owners a decent existence.

Barricaded in their gated communities, the smarter among the uber-rich advocate a new “stakeholder capitalism,” even calling for higher taxes on their class. They recognise the best possible insurance policy in democracy and the redistributive state. Alas, at the same time, they fear that, as a class, it is in their nature to skimp on the insurance premium.

Proposed remedies range from languid to ludicrous. The call for boards of directors to look beyond shareholder value would be wonderful if it were not for the inconvenient fact that only shareholders decide directors’ pay and tenure. Similarly, appeals to limit exorbitant power of finance would be splendid were it not for the fact that most corporations answer to the financial institutions that hold the bulk of their shares.

Confronting rentier capitalism and fashioning firms for which social responsibility is more than a marketing ploy requires nothing less than re-writing corporate law. To recognise the scale of the undertaking, it helps to return to the moment in history when tradable shares weaponised capitalism, and to ask ourselves: Are we ready to correct that “error”?

The moment occurred on September 24, 1599. In a timbered building off Moorgate Fields, not far from where Shakespeare was struggling to complete Hamlet, a new type of company was founded. Its ownership of the new firm, called the East India Company, was sliced into tiny pieces to be bought and sold freely.

Tradable shares allowed private corporations to become larger and more powerful than states. Liberalism’s fatal hypocrisy was to celebrate the virtuous neighborhood butchers, bakers, and brewers in order to defend the worst enemies of free markets: the East India Companies that know no community, respect no moral sentiments, fix prices, gobble up competitors, corrupt governments and make a mockery of freedom.

Then, toward the end of the 19th century, as the first networked mega-companies – including Edison, General Electric, and Bell – were formed, the genie released by marketable shares went a step further. Because neither banks nor investors had enough money to plough into the networked mega-firms, the mega-bank emerged in the form of a global cartel of banks and shadowy funds, each with its own shareholders.

Unprecedented new debt was thus created to transfer value to the present, in the hope of profiting sufficiently to repay the future. Mega-finance, mega-equity, mega-pension funds, and mega-financial crises were the logical outcome. The crashes of 1929 and 2008, the unstoppable rise of Big Tech, and all the other ingredients of today’s discontent with capitalism, became inescapable.

In this system, calls for a gentler capitalism are mere fads – especially in the post-2008 reality, which confirmed the total control over society by mega-firms and mega-banks. Unless we are willing to ban tradable shares, first introduced in 1599, we will make no appreciable difference to the distribution of wealth and power today. To imagine what transcending capitalism might mean in practice requires rethinking the ownership of corporations.

Imagine that shares resemble electoral votes, which can be neither bought nor sold. Like students who receive a library card upon registration, new staff receive a single share granting a single vote to be cast in all-shareholder ballots deciding every matter of the corporation – from management and planning issues to the distribution of net revenues and bonuses.

Suddenly, the profit-wage distinction makes no sense and corporations are cut down to size, boosting market competition. When a baby is born, the central bank automatically grants her or him a trust fund (or personal capital account) that is periodically topped up with a universal basic dividend. When the child becomes a teenager, the central bank throws in a free checking account.

Workers move freely from company to company, carrying with them their trust-fund capital, which they may lend to the company they work in or to others. Because there are no equities to turbocharge with massive fictitious capital, finance becomes delightfully boring — and stable. States drop all personal and sales taxes, instead taxing only corporate revenues, land, and activities detrimental to the commons.

But enough reverie for now. The point is to suggest, just before the New Year, the wondrous possibilities of a truly liberal, post-capitalist, technologically advanced society. Those who refuse to imagine it are bound to fall prey to the absurdity pointed out by my friend Slavoj Žižek: a greater readiness to fathom the end of the world than to imagine life after capitalism.