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Good morning.
I’m not sure there are any Americans left who haven’t decided how they will vote in the election. And I doubt last night’s debate changed many minds. It was a chaotic, uncontrolled, food fight. (“A s—t show,” one TV commentator called it.) But still worth sharing a few of the night’s lines, since one of these two men will end up being President of the United States for the next four years.
Trump on the Supreme Court: “We won the election. Elections have consequences. We have the Senate, we have the White House, and we have a phenomenal nominee. Good in every way.”
Biden on the Supreme Court: “The American people have a right to have a say in who the Supreme Court nominee is…They aren’t going to get that chance now because we are in the middle of an election already.”
Trump on pharmaceuticals: “I’m cutting drug prices… Drug prices will be coming down 80-90%. We are going to allow our governors to go to other countries to buy drugs.”
Biden on the Affordable Care Act: “The president has made clear he wants to get rid of the Affordable Care Act…which will strip 20 million people from having health insurance now.”
Trump on why he ended racial sensitivity training: “I ended it because it was racist. I ended it because people were being asked to do things that were absolutely insane…And literally they were teaching people to hate our country. And I’m not going to allow it.”
Biden on Bernie Sanders: “My party is me. I am the Democratic party right now.”
Trump on the last four years: “There has never been another president that’s done what I’ve done.”
Biden on the last four years: “Under this president we have become weaker, sicker, poorer, more divided, and more violent.”
Trump on COVID: “I’m the one that brought back football. I brought back Big Ten football.”
Biden on COVID: “You can’t fix the economy until you fix the COVID crisis.”
Trump on election results: “As far as the ballots are concerned, it’s a disaster…There is fraud, they’ve found them in creeks, they’ve found them with the name Trump in a waste basket. This is going to be a fraud like you’ve never seen.”
Biden on election results: “This is all about trying to dissuade people from voting, because he is trying to scare people by saying it’s not going to be legitimate.”
More news below.
Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
TOP NEWS
Disney jobs
Disney is laying off around 28,000 people in the U.S., mostly in its parks and resorts business, which employs 100,000 and has been hit hard by the pandemic. Two-thirds of the laid-off employees will be part-time workers. CNN
Shell jobs
Royal Dutch Shell is to cut up to 9,000 jobs as a result of the pandemic-related slump in oil demand. Around 1,500 people are taking voluntary redundancy, and the cuts will be implemented within the next couple years. BBC
South African Airways
South African Airways' operations have been suspended due to the failure of its owner—the government—to raise much-needed funding. The state carrier has no more working capital, business rescue practitioners told creditors today. SAA's operations were also suspended earlier this year, but that was a pandemic-related grounding, not financial. Business Maverick
Boeing production
Bad news for the Seattle area: Boeing is reportedly about to announce the consolidation of its 787 Dreamliner production down in South Carolina. Boeing has to find some way to deal with the slowdown in demand for the aircraft, and has been weighing cuts beyond the 19,000 jobs that it is already shedding. Wall Street Journal
AROUND THE WATER COOLER
Meghan controversy
Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex says her words aren't inflammatory, even when people see them that way. The actor turned duchess turned activist recently raised eyebrows (due to her royal position) for encouraging Americans to vote. "If you listen to what I actually say, it's not controversial," she told Ellen McGirt at Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit. Fortune
Role model
Lebanese wannabe-executives will get to take a new business program at the Université Saint-Esprit de Kaslik near Beirut, and it's being run by Carlos Ghosn, the former Renault and Nissan chief who is currently an international fugitive after fleeing his fraud trial in Japan. "The role model is my experience, what I think are the basic needs of a top executive in a very competitive environment," said Ghosn, who has convinced top execs such as new Jaguar Land Rover CEO (and Ghosn's short-lived successor at Renault) Thierry Bolloré to give pro bono courses. Reuters
Online privacy
Cloudflare, the cybersecurity and content-delivery firm that runs a ton of Internet infrastructure around the world, has launched a free rival to Google Analytics, the (also free) toolkit that most website administrators use to gain insights into on-site activity. Google's version also feeds a lot of profiling data back to the mothership, but Cloudflare's new offering allows organizations to preserve their users' privacy—a useful aspect for companies with European operations. Fortune
Sustainability agenda
Big business may be increasingly taking the stakeholder-capitalism route on the environment, but smaller companies not so much. That's according to the FT's Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, who writes that multinationals won't achieve their sustainability agenda unless they can get their supply chain in line with their goals, too—something that isn't happening much yet. Financial Times
This edition of CEO Daily was edited by David Meyer.