Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, took the knee last week before cameras at a branch of his bank. Larry Fink, CEO of giant investment fund BlackRock, decried racial bias. Starbucks vowed to “stand in solidarity with our black partners, customers and communities.” Goldman Sachs chairman and CEO David Solomon said he grieved “for the lives of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and countless other victims of racism.”

And so on across the highest reaches of corporate America, an outpouring of solidarity with those protesting brutal police killings of black Americans and systemic racism.

But most of this is for show.

JPMorgan has made it difficult for black people to get mortgage loans. In 2017, the bank paid $55 million to settle a justice department lawsuit accusing it of discriminating against minority borrowers. Researchers have found banks routinely charge black mortgage borrowers higher interest rates than white borrowers and deny them mortgages white applicants would have received.

BlackRock is one of the biggest investors in private prisons, disproportionately incarcerating black and Latino men.

Starbucks has prohibited baristas from wearing Black Lives Matter attire and for years has struggled with racism in its stores as managers accuse black patrons of trespassing and deny them bathrooms to which white patrons have access.

Last week, Frederick Baba, an executive at Goldman Sachs who is black, criticized managers for not supporting junior bankers from diverse backgrounds.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the CEOs who condemn racism lobby for and get giant tax cuts and fight off a wealth tax. As a result, the nation can’t afford anything as ambitious as a massive Marshall Plan to provide poor communities world-class schools, first-class healthcare, and affordable housing.

The CEOs resist a living wage and universal basic income. They don’t want antitrust laws jeopardizing their market power, so consumers have to pay more. They oppose tighter regulations against red-lining or prohibitions on payday lending, both of which disproportionately burden black and brown people.

Perhaps most revealingly, they remain silent in the face of Donald Trump’s bigotry. Indeed, many are quietly funding the re-election of a president whose political ascent began with a racist conspiracy theory and who continues to encourage white supremacists.

This goes beyond mere hypocrisy. America’s super rich have amassed more wealth and power than at any time since the “robber barons” of the late 19th century – enough to get legislative outcomes they want and organize the system for their own benefit.

Since the start of the pandemic, the nation’s billionaires have become $565 billion richer, even as 42.6 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits. Job losses have disproportionately affected black Americans, and America’s racial wealth gap continues to grow.

The oligarchy knows that as long as racial animosity exists, white and Black Americans are less likely to look upward and see where the wealth and power really has gone.

They’re less likely to notice that the market is rigged against them all. They’ll cling to the meritocratic myth that they’re paid what they’re “worth” in the market and that the obstacles they face are of their own making rather than an unjust system.

Racism reduces the odds they will join together to threaten that system.

This is not a new strategy. Throughout history, the rich have used racism to divide people and thereby entrench themselves.

Half a century ago, Martin Luther King Jr observed much the same about the old southern aristocracy, which “took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than a black man.”

Trump is the best thing ever to have happened to the new American oligarchy, and not just because he has given them tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks.

He has also stoked division and racism so that most Americans don’t see CEOs getting exorbitant pay while slicing the pay of average workers, won’t notice giant tax cuts and bailouts for big corporations and the wealthy while most people make do with inadequate schools and unaffordable healthcare, and don’t pay attention to the bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign donations.

The only way systemic injustices can be remedied is if power is redistributed. Power will be redistributed only if the vast majority – white, Black and brown – join together to secure it.

Which is what the oligarchy fears most.

#10 END MASS INCARCERATION NOW

Imprisoning a staggering number of our people is wrong. The way our nation does it is even worse. We must end mass incarceration, now.

If I’m walking down the street with a Black or Latino friend, my friend is way more likely to be stopped by the police, questioned, and even arrested. Even if we’re doing the exact same thing—he or she is more likely to be convicted and sent to jail.

Unless we recognize the racism and abuse of our criminal justice system and tackle the dehumanizing stereotypes that underlie it, our nation – and our economy – will never be as strong as it could be.

Please take a moment to watch the accompanying video, and please share it so others can understand what’s at stake for so many Americans.

Here are the facts:

Today, the United States has 5 percent of the world’s population, but has 25 percent of its prisoners, and we spend more than $80 billion each year on prisons.

The major culprit is the so-called War on Drugs. There were fewer than 200,000 Americans behind bars as recently as the mid-70’s. Then, a racially-tinged drug hysteria swept our nation, and we saw a wave of increasingly militant policing that targeted communities of color and poorer neighborhoods.

With “mandatory minimums” and “three strikes out” laws, the number of Americans behind bars soon ballooned to nearly 2.5 million today, despite widespread evidence that locking people up doesn’t make us safer.

Unconscious bias and cultural stereotypes lead to discriminatory enforcement of the laws – from who gets pulled over to where police conduct drug sweeps.

Even though Blacks, whites, and Latinos use drugs at similar rates, people with black and brown skin are more likely to be pulled over, searched, arrested, charged with a crime, convicted, and sent to jails and prisons where they can be subject to some of the worst human rights abuses.

As a result, black people incarcerated at a rate five times that of whites, and Latinos incarcerated at a rate double that of white Americans.

Even if you’ve “served your time,” you never escape the label.

A felony conviction can bar you from getting a student loan, putting a roof over your head, or even from voting. It might even disqualify you from getting a job which can make it impossible for people with felony convictions to pull themselves out of poverty. And many who end up in prison were living in chronic poverty to begin with.

All of this means a lot of potential human talent is going to waste. We’re spending a fortune locking people up who could fuel our economy and build strong communities, in some cases just to increase the profits of private prison corporations.

So what do we do?

First, enact smarter sentencing laws that end mandatory minimums and transform the way we treat people who enter the criminal justice system. Instead of prisons and jails, we need well-paying jobs, and to invest in proven and cost-effective alternatives to incarceration, like job training and mental health and drug treatment programs.

Second, stop the militarized policing and end discriminatory policing practices such as “stop and frisk” and “broken windows” that disproportionately target communities of color.

Third, stop building new jails, start closing some existing ones, and begin to invest in schools, public transit, and housing assistance or local jobs programs. States are spending more and more on prisons, while cutting funding for schools. That’s crazy.

Finally, “ban the box” – the box on job applications that asks whether you have ever been convicted of a felony on a job application. Already, dozens of states cities, and counties have passed bills requiring that employers consider what you can do in the future, not what you might have done in the past.

Instead of locking people up unjustly, and then locking them out of the economy for the rest of their lives, we need to stop wasting human talent and start opening doors of opportunity – to everyone.