WASHINGTON — 

Democratic presidential contender Michael R. Bloomberg cut ties with a contractor that used prisoners to make calls for his presidential campaign, he said in a statement Tuesday.

The former New York mayor said his campaign was unaware of the arrangement until a reporter sought comment. Earlier Tuesday, online news site the Intercept reported that Bloomberg’s campaign contracted a New Jersey-based call center company that, in at least one instance, used Oklahoma inmates to make calls on behalf of the billionaire’s campaign.

“We only learned about this when the reporter called us, but as soon as we discovered which vendor’s subcontractor had done this, we immediately ended our relationship with the company and the people who hired them,” Bloomberg said in the statement.

“We do not support this practice and we are making sure our vendors more properly vet their subcontractors moving forward,” he said.

Bloomberg has come under fire from criminal justice reform advocates for his support for controversial tough-on-crime policies while mayor of New York. He launched his presidential campaign with an apology for his embrace of “stop-and-frisk” policing tactics, which give police wide latitude to detain individuals suspected of committing a crime and have been found to be used disproportionately against minorities.

With the 2020 presidential campaign in full swing, it is clear that the defining issue of the election will be economic inequality — and that puts America’s billionaires in the dock.

Proposals for a tax on extreme wealth have been put on the table by Democratic candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, eliciting responses of varying vehemence from the billionaires lobby.

These responses, as we’ve reported, have been mostly negative, although here and there a few billionaires have allowed that, yes, they may have too much money and it might be good public policy to redistribute some of it through taxation.

Saez and Zucman, UC Berkeley

The wealth tax proposals are part of a general attack on economic inequality that all the Democratic candidates share, to some extent.

“The middle class is getting killed,” former Vice President Joe Biden said during the Dec. 19 Democratic debate. “The middle class is getting crushed. And the working class has no way up as a consequence of that…. The idea that we’re growing — we’re not growing. The wealthy, very wealthy, are growing. Ordinary people are not growing. They are not happy with where they are.”

Even the two certified billionaires in the Democratic race have expressed support for raising taxes on the ultra-wealthy. “I’ve been for a wealth tax for over a year,” Tom Steyer said during the debate. Michael R. Bloomberg, who did not appear at the debate, said at a campaign event in Phoenix three weeks ago that while a wealth tax of the variety proposed by Warren or Sanders “just doesn’t work,” he supports “taxing wealthy people like me.”

Sanders has proposed a graduated tax on net worth starting at 1% on wealth above $32 million for a married couple, rising in steps to 8% on wealth over $10 billion. The brackets are for married couples; for singles the thresholds would be halved.) Warren’s tax would begin at 2% a year on household net worth over $50 million, with an additional 4% surcharge on wealth over $1 billion.

Both proposals would raise trillions of dollars over a decade. Both are also designed explicitly to break up big family hoards. Sanders says that under his plan, “the wealth of billionaires would be cut in half over 15 years which would substantially break up the concentration of wealth and power of this small privileged class.”

And in the words of Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, the UC Berkeley economists who are advisors to Warren on her wealth tax plan, “if the rich have to pay a percentage of their wealth in taxes each year, it makes it harder for them to maintain or grow their wealth.”

On the other side of the debate are commentators such as Erskine Bowles, a White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton, and Henry Paulson, a treasury secretary under George W. Bush, who called the wealth tax proposals “wishful thinking” in a recent op-ed and lumped it together with proposals such as universal healthcare (“Medicare for all”) as policies that are “fundamentally misguided and would result in economically harmful outcomes that could put our economy on an unstable and precarious path.”

Billionaires have been speaking for themselves, too. In October, money manager Leon Cooperman erupted to Politico about Warren’s plan: “This is the [blankety-blank] American dream she’s [blankety-blanking] on,” he said, using slightly more descriptive language.

A couple of weeks later, Jamie Dimon, the chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, groused on CNBC that Warren “uses some pretty harsh words … some would say vilifies successful people.”

For all their dudgeon, Cooperman and Dimon were rather more measured than the late billionaire Silicon Valley venture investor Thomas Perkins, who in 2014 sought in a letter to the Wall Street Journal to “call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its ‘one percent,’ namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the ‘rich.’”

It’s proper to note that more than 200 of the world’s wealthiest individuals and families have signed on to the “Giving Pledge” created by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, a commitment to donate a majority of their wealth to philanthropy. The signers include Michele B. Chan and Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of The Times.

Whether such charity solves the social and economic problems of extreme wealth concentration is debatable, however, since the choice of how to distribute their wealth would remain in the hands of a small number of wealthy persons and underscores the issues raised by how their wealth became so concentrated in the first place.

Even a signer of the pledge has questioned whether it is accomplishing its goals. The pledge is growing “perhaps not as rapidly as we hoped,” stated telecommunications billionaire Leonard Tow in October.

Skepticism about the extreme wealth disparity isn’t a new phenomenon. Given the passage of time, and social and economic evolution, it’s difficult to pin down how the wealth inequality that has developed in this country compares to that of bygone eras and distant climes. But in 1929, according to historian William E. Leuchtenburg, 36,000 families — the top 0.1% of that era — received as much income as the bottom 12 million households, or 42%.)

The extreme concentration of wealth in the United States in the late 1800s and again in the 1920s were major contributors to recurrent economic slumps and market crashes (once known as “panics”), climaxing with the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression.

Those crises led to two congressional investigations early in the last century, in which lawmakers tried to hold the millionaire nabobs of those eras responsible.

In the first, Democratic Rep. Arsène Pujo of Louisiana put the Wall Street “money trust” on trial in 1912-1913, when the market crash of 1907 was still fresh in Americans’ memories. Pujo’s chief quarry was J. Pierpont Morgan, whose death in 1913 may have been hastened, his doctor reported, by the pitiless interrogation he was subjected to from committee counsel Samuel Untermyer.

With the Great Depression casting its pall over the country in 1933, the Senate Banking Committee again put Wall Street in the dock. This time the star witness, grilled by committee counsel Ferdinand Pecora, was J.P. Morgan Jr. The hearing’s enduring image is that of “Jack” Morgan at the witness table with Lya Graf, a diminutive performer from the Ringling Bros. circus, cradled on his lap, where she had been perched by a circus publicity agent. (Graf was mortified by the scene, but Morgan used it fortuitously to soften his image — “No longer a grasping devil whose greed and ruthlessness had helped bring the nation to near ruin,” as the financial journalist John Brooks would report, “but rather a benign old dodderer.”)

The Morgan enterprise survived — it’s the banking giant now headed by Dimon — though the family’s name remains a potent symbol of plutocracy.

Can anyone really dispute that the level of wealth held by the richest Americans today has reached absurd levels? The wealthiest individual in America, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is worth $114 billion, according to the 2019 Forbes ranking of the 400 richest Americans. This is a sum that defeats efforts at human comprehension, but let’s try. If Bezos spent $100 million a year on himself, it would take him 1,140 years to spend it all.

Saez and Zucman calculated what would happen to the Bezos fortune if it had been subject to a 3% wealth annual tax applied to the excess over $1 billion since 1982. It would now be worth $86.8 billion, meaning that his $100-million annual spending would exhaust his nest egg in a mere 868 years. (Saez and Zucman used as their starting point Bezos’ $160-billion fortune in 2018, but he gave his ex-wife Mackenzie a settlement of about $36 billion in their divorce this year.)

One common defense of billionaires is that they’ve earned their wealth through hard work and the discovery of a product or service that brought the world beating a path to their door and therefore a wealth tax is unjust.

But that’s a simplistic view of the billionaire economy. For one thing, it overlooks that virtually no one on the Forbes list got there without the assistance of armies of employees, or that judging from the extreme concentration of the gains from the product or service, many of those employees were not paid the full economic value of their contribution.

Nor does the argument acknowledge that some billionaires reached the list not due to their own hard work and intellect, but that of their forebears or late spouses. The widow of David Koch, who died this year, is in at No. 13 by virtue of her inheritance of a 42% stake in Koch Industries.

Descendants of Walmart founder Sam Walton occupy three of the top 15 slots; two surviving grandchildren of candymaker Frank Mars (and children of his son Forrest Mars Sr., who made the family company a global force) share No. 19. Mackenzie Bezos is at No. 15.

Some of these heirs may have worked or even presided over the family enterprise, but in many cases the hard work of building a family fortune was done before their arrival on the scene.

The defense of huge fortunes as just deserts evades the question of how much even a successful entrepreneur should retain from his or her effort, or how to measure it against the social utility of the fortune’s source. How should we evaluate Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s roughly $69-billion fortune against damage his company is alleged to have done to the democratic process, or its merciless exploitation of personal data for its own profit?

In more general terms, wealth inequality places immense resources in the hands of people unable to spend it productively, and keeps it out of the hands of those who would put it to use instantly, whether on staples or creature comforts that should be within the reach of everyone living in the richest country on Earth.

As Warren stated in defense of her wealth tax during the Dec. 19 debate, “You leave two cents with the billionaires, they’re not eating more pizzas, they’re not buying more cars. We invest that 2% in early childhood education and childcare, that means those babies get top-notch care. It means their mamas can finish their education. It means their mamas and their daddies can take on real jobs, harder jobs, longer hours.”

That brings us to the putative drawbacks of a wealth tax. Some contend that heavy taxation on the income or assets of the affluent will sap them of a willingness to work, depriving the economy of their energy and intellect. Even if that were plausible, it suggests that millionaires and billionaires should be subject to a work requirement before receiving a tax cut, much as conservatives advocate work requirements on low-income Americans seeking coverage from Medicaid.

Critics of the wealth tax proposals argue it would be difficult, even impossible, to fairly value private assets outside established markets, such as fine art and private companies, and that it would prompt widespread asset concealment by billionaires intent on evasion.

Saez and Zucman counter that most nonliquid assets be valued based on known metrics — reported sales and profits for nonpublic businesses, comparable property appraisals for real estate. Artwork can be evaluated based on their insurance coverage, and in any case account for a relatively small share of billionaires’ wealth.

As for evasion, “tolerating tax evasion is a policy choice,” they observe. Both Warren and Sanders advocate increased funding for the Internal Revenue Service and more stringent standards for auditing big taxpayers.

It may be hard to divine today what form a wealth tax may take, but pressure to bring extremely large fortunes under control is unlikely to ebb.

Among the Democratic candidates, the only real disagreement on economic policy appears to be over how aggressively to go after concentrated and inherited wealth, not whether it’s worth reining in at all. Come the general election, the Democratic candidate will draw a distinction between that viewpoint and the Republican mantra, which is that the economy has been growing overall, so why should anyone — rich, poor or middle class, complain?

Some billionaires evidently perceive that there’s danger for their own wealth and the economy at large in today’s level of inequality.

“America has a moral, ethical and economic responsibility to tax our wealth more,” wrote 20 millionaires and billionaires, including George Soros, heiress Abigail Disney, and venture investor and entrepreneur Nick Hanauer, in an open letter in June. “A wealth tax could help address the climate crisis, improve the economy, improve health outcomes, fairly create opportunity, and strengthen our democratic freedoms.

“Instituting a wealth tax,” they concluded, “is in the interest of our republic.”

Lara Briehl had a desperate client who was itching to accept an offer.

The man was struggling to pay his bills, and an online lender had offered him a personal loan to pay off some 10 credit cards. Accepting, he thought, would help him escape crushing debt. The interest rate offered, however, was about 10 percentage points higher than on his plastic.

“I told him I would not take that deal in a million years,” said Briehl, a Bremerton, Wash.-based credit counselor at American Financial Solutions, a nonprofit that helps distressed borrowers repair their finances.

Online personal loans were easy to come by for years, enabling millions of Americans to borrow cheaply to pay down costly credit card debt. In the last year, though, companies, including LendingClub Corp., have been tightening the spigot, following a revolt by investors upset over years of unexpected losses. Easy credit has given way to cautiousness, with financial technology upstarts now seeking households with higher incomes, above-average credit scores and less debt relative to their wages.

“We, together with others, are being increasingly picky about the loans that we are booking,” LendingClub Chief Executive Scott Sanborn told investors last month on the San Francisco company’s earnings call. “Across the board, you’re seeing a number of people, LendingClub included, kind of prudently pulling in and tightening a little bit on the credit they’re offering.”

Last quarter, the average personal loan in the United States went to a borrower with a 717 credit score, the highest average ever recorded, according to preliminary figures from credit-data provider PeerIQ. The typical borrower reported $100,000-plus in annual income, also a record. Fintechs are now so focused on borrowers with pristine credit, only about a quarter of their new unsecured loans this year have gone to households with below-prime credit scores — making the companies more conservative than credit unions, according to TransUnion.

The internet-first financial companies that emerged in the aftermath of last decade’s credit crisis promised to upend the industry by lending to risky borrowers shunned by banks. Instead, online lenders are looking more and more like their old-line rivals. Analysts who follow the companies are split on whether that newfound prudence reflects concerns about where the economy is headed or an evolution of the lenders’ business models.

Open field

No company better exemplifies the trend than LendingClub, the biggest online lender.

Founded in 2006, it started as a platform for matching borrowers needing credit with individual retail investors willing to provide it. Without branches to operate or thousands of loan officers to pay, marketplace lenders offered the promise of cheaper loans at a time when the biggest U.S. banks were reeling from the financial crisis. Loan growth took off in the wake of the Great Recession, when interest rates hovered near record lows and banks were choosing their borrowers carefully.

“Banks left the playing field open,“ said Nat Hoopes, executive director of the Marketplace Lending Assn.

Companies such as LendingClub marketed themselves as better than banks at judging risk, claiming to use all sorts of data that enabled them to give borrowers the lowest rates possible. One investor in marketplace loans, Theorem Partners, claims that bus drivers are 25% less likely to default than administrative assistants (greater job security), while wedding loans are 10% more likely to be repaid than business loans (marriage means financial stability).

Banks generally lend to borrowers with super-prime and prime-plus credit scores. That created an opportunity for new entrants to make money lending to households with prime and near-prime credit scores, said John Wirth, vice president of fintech strategy at TransUnion. These borrowers “were the sweet spot of the market,” he said. LendingClub’s borrowers were often in areas underserved by traditional banks, according to research by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

Until 2018, more than 60% of fintech personal loans went to borrowers whose credit scores were prime and below, TransUnion data show. Some 53% of LendingClub’s borrowers between 2008 and 2015 were rated internally as C, D, and E on an A-through-G scale, according to the Treasury Department. A-rated borrowers enjoyed interest rates as low as 5.99%, while E-rated borrowers paid as much as 28.26%.

Disappointment

Loss rates on loans fintechs sold to investors ended up much higher than forecast “almost across the board,” said John Bella, who oversees coverage of U.S. asset-backed securities at Fitch Ratings. “Even in a relatively benign economic environment, these issuers are underperforming their own models and expectations.”

Jackson Walker, a 32-year-old San Francisco tech worker, said he started funding LendingClub loans in 2014, drawn in by promises of annual returns as high as 20%. Walker concentrated on funding lower-rated loans, thinking they’d generate the highest profit. He ended up with 4% annual returns before yanking his money and vowing to never again do business with LendingClub.

“It turns out banks are pretty good at lending,” Walker said.

It’s not just investors in loans who are hurting. LendingClub, which went public in 2014 at a market valuation higher than all but 13 U.S. banks — $8.46 billion — has since lost almost 90% of its value.

“I’ve been in hundreds and hundreds of meetings, and equity investors are screaming at businesses to take risk off the table,” said John Hecht, a Jefferies analyst who follows consumer lenders. For the publicly traded fintechs, such as LendingClub, “if you look at their stock price, they had no choice but to tighten.”

Fintechs have raised prices on loans to customers with less-than-stellar credit and shut some out completely. On an earnings call in February, Chief Executive Sanborn said LendingClub has cut loan approvals by 17% and raised borrowing costs by almost 1 percentage point.

“We’re being selective about who we’re bringing in,” he told investors a few months earlier at an industry conference.

The company has since become even more restrictive. It’s stopped lending to borrowers who would’ve received its three lowest internal grades, and more loans are going to top-rated borrowers, company data show. Anuj Nayar, a LendingClub spokesman, said the company’s shift toward less-risky borrowers reflects investor demand.

LendingClub isn’t alone: Competitor Prosper Marketplace Inc. told investors this month that its borrowers in 2019 have the highest credit scores and income, and lowest debt-to-income ratios, in at least six years.

“We have tightened massively,” said Ashish Gupta, Prosper’s chief credit officer. Climbing delinquency rates on Americans’ credit cards — the lender uses the metric to assess whether households are able to pay their bills — are part of why Prosper’s loan approval rate has fallen “dramatically,” he said.

For subprime customers, fintechs’ pullback mirrors what they’ve experienced generally when borrowing money in the last several years, according to the Financial Stability Oversight Council, made up of U.S. banking and market regulators. The group said in a report this month that total loan balances for borrowers with subprime scores remain well below pre-crisis levels, which it attributed partly to “somewhat tight” credit availability for higher-risk borrowers.

Briehl said she’s seen this play out in her neighborhood in the Seattle suburbs. Until recently, subprime borrowers could get loans with favorable terms. Now, she said, it’s rare for them to get better rates than they’re already paying on their credit cards.

Nasiripour writes for Bloomberg.

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America’s top shale field is becoming increasingly gassy as drilling slows down, undercutting profits for explorers at a time when investors are demanding better returns.

Natural gas has long been a nuisance in the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico, where a massive glut weighs on prices, with crude producers sometimes having to pay to get it hauled away or burn it off in a controversial practice known as flaring. Now the problem is intensifying as wells age and fewer new wells are drilled.

Shale wells produce a spew of oil when they’re first fracked, but over time, production falls — sometimes as much as 70% in the first year — and gas can more than double, becoming a bigger part of the mix.

It’s an issue that’s made worse when subsequent wells are drilled too close to the initial one or when there’s interference from another producer’s neighboring wells.

Diamondback Energy Inc. emerged in November as a victim of this phenomenon when it reported third-quarter well results that were disappointingly gassy. The percentage of oil was 65%, the lowest since at least 2011.

Then there’s the fact that in recent years investments have shifted to the western part of the Permian Basin known as the Delaware, where output is much gassier than in the eastern Midland portion.

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“Almost all, if not all, of the gas supply growth next year is coming from the Delaware Basin, whereas most other basins are staying flat or even decreasing,” said Ryan Luther, a senior research associate for RS Energy Group Inc. “It’s something that can be particularly challenging for the Permian operators because there is that pipeline constraint.”

In April, gas traded at the Waha hub in West Texas dropped to minus $4.63 per million British Thermal units. In other words, producers had to pay to get their gas taken away.

Smaller producers with rising gas ratios have taken the hardest hit as prices tanked. Over the last year, Approach Resources Inc. has reported oil production that was less than one quarter of its total output. The company filed for bankruptcy protection in November.

Rather than pay to have more of their gas taken away, producers in the Permian are already burning off record levels of it. The Texas Railroad Commission, which oversees the oil and gas industry in the state, has granted nearly 6,000 permits this year allowing explorers to flare or vent natural gas. That’s more than 40 times as many permits as granted at the start of the supply boom a decade ago.

Flaring gets rid of the methane, but it still releases carbon dioxide and other particulates into the air. The agency’s tendency to approve all flaring permits is the subject of a lawsuit brought by pipeline operator Williams Cos. The company recently lost a case in front of the commission, arguing that producer Exco Resources Inc. should use Williams’ pipeline system instead of burning off unwanted gas.

U.S. Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette put the Permian’s gas problem down to infrastructure. “Even if we could capture the gas, it’s not clear we could get it to the marketplace,” he said last week. “We just need more pipeline capacity.”

Not everyone agrees. “Pipeline capacity is going to end up helping, but it’s not going to solve the issue,” said Colin Leyden, senior manager of regulatory and legislative affairs at the Environmental Defense Fund in Texas. “Folks are absolutely fed up with the amount of waste and pollution coming from the Permian Basin.”

Milton Friedman has had a tough year. The Chicago economist died in 2006, but his legacy lived on in corporate boardrooms.

That changed in 2019 as chief executives lined up to disavow the doctrine that the Nobel laureate popularized in a landmark 1970 essay: that a company’s sole social responsibility is to produce profits for its shareholders.

In its place came a new, cuddlier vision of capitalism, in which stakeholder-friendly CEOs put “purpose” at the heart of their business models; offered their staff mindfulness classes, good coffee and reskilling programs; purged wrongdoing from their supply chains; and stepped up in front of reluctant governments to improve the lot of immigrants, tackle gun violence and save the planet from a warming climate.

“Capitalism as we know it is dead,” Salesforce chief Marc Benioff told a conference in October. A new model of business was taking its place, he said, driven by values, ethics and a desire to take care of employees — not “the Milton Friedman capitalism that is just about making money.”

Change at the core vs. generous gestures

A decade after a global financial crisis that shattered trust in large companies, the people who run them are keen to recast themselves as constructive social actors.

Their ways of doing so were varied. Some have changed core business practices, such as Royal Dutch Shell investing more in low-carbon energy technologies or Levi Strauss & Co. distressing its jeans with lasers rather than chemicals. Others have made less costly shows of corporate virtue, such as Morgan Stanley and BASF signing a “cool food pledge” to serve “climate-friendly” foods in their cafeterias or Cisco Systems Inc. and Delta Air Lines Inc. backing music festivals to promote the United Nations’ sustainable development goals.

Much of the repositioning has come in the form of letters signed by scores of chief executives. In the last year, the likes of Walt Disney Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. have joined forces with AFL-CIO union leaders to urge the Trump administration to stay in the Paris climate agreement; H&M and Slack Technologies Inc. have been among the companies campaigning to defend women’s access to abortions; and 145 chiefs including the leaders of Uber Technologies Inc. and advertising giant Publicis Group urged U.S. senators to insist that gun buyers undergo background checks.

Companies have also made splashy gestures of generosity toward staffers, such as Citigroup Inc. putting Peloton bikes in its new headquarters gym and PayPal Holdings Inc.’s Dan Schulman promising to raise wages after discovering that 60% of the company’s hourly employees were struggling to make ends meet.

“Dan is the future of American capitalism,” declared Paul Tudor Jones, the hedge fund manager who founded Just Capital, which ranks companies on how they treat stakeholders.

‘Business as usual’ is under threat

Business groups have amplified the message, with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce telling members that “empathy” drives free markets and Britain’s Institute of Directors calling for a more ambitious exploration of “new ways to combine the profit motive with social responsibility.”

Most notably, Washington’s Business Roundtable ditched its long-held allegiance to Friedman-style shareholder primacy.

“That was a profoundly significant moment in the debate,” said Colin Mayer, a professor at Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford. It happened in part, he argues, because CEOs are looking to deter interventions by left-wing politicians such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn.

“I don’t think you should underestimate the extent to which the corporate community feels under threat,” he said. “There is a real sense that unless they grasp the initiative, it’s going to be grasped by somebody else who’s going to do much more damage.”

John Ruggie, a Harvard professor and human rights expert, agrees that “a defensiveness about the role of the corporation in modern society” has contributed to the rethink.

Veteran Wall Street lawyer Marty Lipton has pointed to another defensive reason for companies to adopt a more stakeholder-friendly stance. “When significant costs to society from climate change and the depletion of resources are tallied, as they will be, an armada of regulators and plaintiffs’ lawyers will appear,” he warned in September.

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But companies have also found more positive reasons to embrace their softer side. One is the desire to attract younger employees.

“This generation [has] a desire to understand where their company stands. My generation just thought the best job was the one that paid the most,” said Scott Stephenson, CEO of data analytics company Verisk Analytics Inc.

A clearer financial incentive has come from the boom in environmental, social and governance investing, also known as ESG investing. By the Global Sustainable Investment Alliance’s calculations, funds managing $31 trillion — one-quarter of the world’s total — apply some form of ESG screen to their investments.

The evidence that companies that score well on ESG standards outperform financially is growing, Anne Richards, chief executive of Fidelity International, noted in a recent speech.

As that draws in more investors, companies are positioning themselves to benefit, with Factset spotting a 29% rise in the number referring to ESG on earnings calls between the second and third quarters of this year. Companies including Chevron Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc. have added ESG-related goals to executive compensation schemes.

Is there real change beyond the rhetoric?

The Business Roundtable’s statement also exposed divisions over how much real change will flow from the rhetorical repositioning. Verisk’s Stephenson is among many of its signatories who describe it as a reflection of how their companies already operate rather than a herald of big changes.

Business has not suddenly gone soft, echoed Tom Quaadman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “I don’t think there’s been any fundamental shift,” he said. “Companies have been doing a lot of these things for a long time.”

The status quo looks unlikely to satisfy critics, however. Warren, who is vying for the Democratic presidential nomination, said the Business Roundtable’s statement would be “meaningless” unless it’s followed by changes such as diverting buyback budgets to raise workers’ wages.

Mirza Baig, head of governance at Aviva Investors, noted that there has been no such resetting of financial priorities. “Do we expect buybacks and dividends to be cut? Absolutely not,” he said.

The enthusiasm for a kinder form of capitalism has also emerged in a period of booming profits, raising questions about whether it will survive a downturn. “When things are difficult, does this mean not cutting the headcount because that hurts morale?” Baig asked pointedly.

Having articulated a change in focus, companies now face calls to spell out what this means in practice.

“Purpose, the new mantra for business, that’s pretty fuzzy,” Harvard’s Ruggie said.

“We need to have a conversation on specifics. The ‘motherhood and apple pie’ conversation is nice, but doesn’t get you there,” said Saker Nusseibeh, CEO of Hermes Investment Management.

Unilever CEO Alan Jope has gone further, warning that brands are in danger of “woke-washing” if they make claims of a social purpose they do not live up to.

And for all the more positive headlines this year, there has been no let-up in allegations of antisocial corporate behavior. Even as Alex Gorsky, Johnson & Johnson’s chief, was writing the Business Roundtable’s statement, he was battling litigation over his company’s role in the opioid crisis.

Some executives see a risk of disillusionment if promises of a new model of capitalism are not followed by clear changes in corporate behavior.

“Citizens’ expectations have risen around the world,” said Daryl Brewster, chief of the business coalition Chief Executives for Corporate Purpose. His question for 2020 is: “How do companies really actualize this?”

Others are willing to take that risk. “If expectations have been raised, I think that’s good,” Stephenson said. “I look forward to living and acting in that world of increased expectations.”

© The Financial Times Ltd. 2019. All rights reserved. FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd. Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.

If you have a plant-related class, garden tour or other event you’d like us to mention, email [email protected] — at least three weeks in advance — and we may include it. Send a high-resolution horizontal photo, if possible, and tell us what we’re seeing and whom to credit.

Through Jan. 5

L.A. Zoo Lights includes animal-themed light displays, 3-D projections, disco-ball forest, “Twinkle Tunnel” and — new this year — the “World’s Largest Illuminated Pop-Up Storybook,” from 6 to 10 p.m., closed Dec. 24-25, at the Los Angeles Zoo and Botanical Gardens at 5333 Zoo Drive in Griffith Park. Tickets $11 for members; nonmembers pay $15-$22 for adults 13 and older, $12-17 for children 2-12. lazoolights.org

Descanso Gardens’ Enchanted Forest of Light is a gentle one-mile walk through the gardens highlighting some of the most popular locations with large-scale light displays. New this year is a “magical ‘stained-glass’” creation at Mulberry Pond by contemporary sculptor Tom Fruin. This year’s exhibit also features updated versions of the popular “Celestial Shadows” display of spinning polyhedrons, the “Lightwave Lake” light show and Jen Lewin’s interactive landscape of meandering pathways called “Aqueous.” Member-only nights Dec. 26-28. General admission tickets start at $30; members pay $5 less. Children 2 and younger, free. Tickets must be purchased in advance. descansogardens.org

Jungle Bells at the San Diego Zoo transforms the zoo with music, lights, animal-shaped light sculptures, special animal experiences and holiday-themed entertainment, including acrobats and Dr. Zoolittle, the zoo’s costumed characters and Santa Claus (through Dec. 25). 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. except Dec. 24, when the zoo closes at 5 p.m., at 2920 Zoo Drive in San Diego. Free with admission to the zoo, $46 ages 3 to 11, $56 12 and older. sandiegozoo.com

Dec. 28

A free home composting and urban gardening workshop by horticulturist Steve List is being hosted by the city of Los Angeles and L.A. Sanitation, at the Lopez Canyon Environmental Education Center, 11950 Lopez Canyon Road, in the Lake View Terrace area of San Fernando Valley, 9 to 11 a.m. City of Los Angeles residents can get free mulch (bring your own shovel and container) and are eligible to purchase composting bins for $20 (checks only). Representatives from the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power will provide conservation tips and rebate information. lacitysan.org

Dec. 28-30

San Diego Botanic Garden’s Holiday Nights in the Garden promises a family-friendly range of activities such as a play area with real snow, visits with Santa (through Dec. 23), holiday crafts, a 10-foot-tall poinsettia tower and a “romantic mistletoe hideaway” (something to keep the parents busy perhaps, while the kids are tossing snowballs?). Admission prices range from $25 for nonmembers on weekends to $17 for children 3-17; prices slightly lower on weeknights. 230 Quail Gardens Drive in Encinitas. SDBGarden.org

Jan. 8
The Claremont Garden Club offers Greywater 101, a talk by Greywater Action instructor Ty Teissere who will explain common and popular systems that use water from sinks, showers and washing machines for outdoor watering. Refreshments at 6:30 p.m., talk begins at 7 p.m. at the Napier Building, 660 Avery Road in the Pilgrim Place area of Claremont. claremontgardenclub.org

Jan. 11-12
Cool Camellia Celebration at Descanso Gardens involves walks, crafts, demonstrations and the annual show of the Pacific Camellia Society, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day. The Southern California Camellia Society offers tours of the gardens’ famous camellias at 2 p.m. each day at 1418 Descanso Drive, La Cañada Flintridge. Admission is $9, $6 seniors/students with ID and $4 children 4-12. descansogardens.org

Jan. 11, 25 & Feb. 8, 22

The L.A. Arboretum sponsors a landscape design course for people who want to use regenerative practices to redo their yards, every other Saturday starting Jan. 11, from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the arboretum. The courses, taught by landscape architect and certified arborist Shawn Maestretti, will cover a range of topics including the basics of design and how to capture rainwater, nurture living soil, use native or climate-appropriate plants and implement permaculture techniques to reduce green waste. Preregistration is required; call (626) 821-4623. The cost is $250 for arboretum members or $300 for nonmembers. Couples pay $310 for arboretum members, $360 for nonmembers. arboretum.org

Jan. 14
“Fire-Safe Native Landscaping,” a talk by Cassy Aoyagi, landscape designer and board member of the L.A. chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council, is the topic of the January meeting of the California Native Plant Society, Los Angeles/Santa Monica Mountains. Aoyagi will discuss 10 ways that native-plant landscaping can protect property from wildfires, flooding and mudslides. 7:30 p.m. at the Sepulveda Garden Center, 16633 Magnolia Blvd., Encino. lacnps.org

MEXICO CITY — 

Mexico says Bolivian security forces in La Paz, the capital, have increased their presence around the Mexican ambassador’s residence, where former Bolivian Cabinet ministers and others loyal to ousted President Evo Morales have sought refuge.

Troops gathered in larger numbers around the residence on Tuesday, the Mexican Foreign Ministry said. Maximiliano Reyes, Mexico’s undersecretary for Latin America, described the Bolivian patrols around the diplomatic property as a “siege.”

Relations between the two countries have been strained since Mexico granted asylum to Morales after he resigned Nov. 10 following national upheaval over his claim of victory in an election marred by vote-rigging. Morales has since relocated to Argentina and says he plans to stay involved in politics in neighboring Bolivia. Some former top aides remain holed up in the Mexican ambassador’s residence.

Wilson Santamaría, Bolivia’s deputy minister of public security, said the Morales loyalists would not be allowed to leave the country.

“We have taken the necessary steps so that the security forces immediately track and detect any help, any complicity in helping the fugitives flee the country,” he said.

Those who sought refuge in the residence include Juan Ramón Quintana, the former chief of staff for Morales, and five other former ministers, according to a Mexican official. The official was not authorized to comment publicly about the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Several are accused by the interim government of President Jeanine Áñez of electoral fraud or other crimes.

Mexico has complained that Bolivian security and intelligence officials have surrounded the ambassador’s residence and the embassy, recording the movement of people in and out of the facilities, and even impeding the “free transit” of the ambassador.

Erick Foronda, Bolivia’s presidential secretary, denied that authorities are interfering with the movements of Mexico’s diplomats. The police presence at the diplomatic facilities was increased for security reasons after reports of planned demonstrations in the area, he said.

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BANDA ACEH, Indonesia — 

Thousands of people knelt in prayer in Indonesia’s Aceh province at ceremonies Thursday marking the 15th anniversary of the Indian Ocean tsunami, one of modern history’s worst natural disasters.

The massive Dec. 26, 2004, tsunami was triggered by a magnitude 9.1 earthquake off Sumatra island. The giant wall of water killed about 230,000 people in a dozen countries as far away as East Africa. Indonesia’s Aceh province, which was closest to the earthquake, was hit first and hardest.

More than 170,000 people died in Indonesia alone, about three-quarters of the overall death toll.

“No words can describe our feelings when we tearfully saw thousands of corpses lying on this ground 15 years ago,” acting Aceh Gov. Nova Iriansyah said at a ceremony in Sigli, a town in Pidie district, “And now, we can see how people in Aceh were able to overcome suffering and rise again, thanks to assistance from all Indonesians and from people all over the world.”

Weeping survivors and others attended religious services and memorial ceremonies. Relatives of the dead and religious and community leaders presented flowers at mass graves of tsunami victims in the provincial capital, Banda Aceh.

Shops and offices were closed, boats were not allowed to sail and flags were being flown at half staff throughout Aceh on Thursday and Friday.

Disaster-prone Indonesia, a vast archipelago of more than 17,000 islands that is home to 260 million people, lies along the “Ring of Fire,” an arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific Basin.

Thursday’s commemoration came four days after the anniversary of last year’s Sunda Strait tsunami, which followed the eruption and partial collapse of the Anak Krakatau volcano. That tsunami struck coastal regions of Banten on Indonesia’s main island of Java and parts of southern Sumatra island, leaving more than 400 people dead and 14,000 injured.

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia — 

People along a swath of southern Asia gazed at the sky in marvel on Thursday at a “ring of fire” solar eclipse.

The so-called annular eclipse, in which a thin outer ring of the sun is still visible, could be seen along a path stretching from India and Pakistan to Thailand and Indonesia.

Authorities in Indonesia provided telescopes and hundreds of special glasses to protect viewers’ eyes. Thousands of people gazed at the sky, cheering and clapping as the sun transformed into a dark orb for more than two minutes, briefly plunging the sky into darkness. Hundreds of others prayed at nearby mosques.

“How amazing to see the ring of fire when the sun disappeared slowly,” said Firman Syahrizal, a resident of Sinabang in Indonesia’s Banda Aceh province who witnessed the eclipse with his family.

The previous annular solar eclipse in February 2017 was also visible over a slice of Indonesia.

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KATHMANDU, Nepal — 

Police in Nepal said Tuesday that they have detained 122 Chinese nationals who are suspected of being involved in financial crimes.

Police official Shailesh Thapa said the suspects were detained Monday in Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital.

Details of the cases were not released because the investigation was still open, but the suspects are likely to be presented before a judge to determine how long they can be held for investigation.

Among them were 116 men and eight women. They were held at different detention centers in Kathmandu.

Police were also investigating if they had violated immigration laws by overstaying their visas.

“As far as I know, these citizens are suspected of engaging in cross-border online fraud activities, and the cases are currently under investigation,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang. “It is an important operation carried out by the police of China and Nepal. China is willing to strengthen cooperation with Nepal in various fields, including law enforcement, to jointly combat cross-border crimes and promote friendly exchanges between the two countries.”