Serving Society, For Profit

 J.P. MORGAN CHASE is the largest financial services firm in the world, a monstrous corporate behemoth made of many mergers, which moves trillions of dollars all over the world on a daily basis. Its CEO, Jaimie Dimon, is a dude about my age with whom I an confident I could sit down, have a cold beer and a hot pizza, and a friendly, interesting conversation. I'll buy. Dimon, a good lifelong Democrat, likes to contrast his allegedly humble origins to the millions of dollars handed to Donald Trump by his father. In fact Dimon, like Trump, benefited from the hard work and accumulated family wealth of his immigrant grandfather, and his ambitious business savvy father. The best predictor of financial success in America is not education or hard work, but the amount of wealth one's family has as one is growing up. Politically and economically, Dimon talks a good liberal line. he almost sounds like a born again Bernie sanders, almost, but not quite.J.P. Morgan chase funds educational, job training, and affordable housing projects for the disadvantaged. It has a program of low interest lending to small businesses, and invests in economically depressed areas of inner cities. All good, as far as it goes.  It does not, however, go very fare, not in comparison with the actual national need for such programs. These projects are, however, good public relations and advertising of the virtues of corporate America. In recent times Fortune Five Hundred corporations and their CEOs have paid a lot of lip services to something called "corporate social responsibility". "Corporate social responsibility has become a popular meme wonderful sounding three words which connote the virtues of corporate capitalism and supposed benefits of the existing economic system for everyone and all. Nearly agrees that for large businesses to have a sense of responsibility to serve their communities and society at large is a wonderful concept. but what exactly does it mean, in real terms? Does it mean anything more than relatively small investments in the community ? what about living wages for all workers, environmental health, and a fair and reasonable distribution of wealth throughout society? These things it does not seem to mean.Despite all the hype about corporate social responsibility, millions of working Americans remain in poverty, millions lack health insurance, and corporate profits soar like never before even as their employees struggle to make ends meet.Society, corporate America, and the global corporate oligarchy will not be repaired - and all are seriously broken - without undergoing fundamental structural transformation. Repeating" high sounding phrases like "corporate social responsibility" is an ingenious way of distracting attention from the reality that a tiny fraction of the world's population has almost all the world's wealth and political aw well as economic power. In the modern world monetary wealth is teh same thing as political power.The corporate leaders can give teh image of a new breed of leadership wanting to give the world a new and kinder gentler form of corporate capitalism, while maintaining the status quo of wealth for the few, poverty for the many.