A quick note on corporate profiteering

Speaking Security Newsletter | Congressional Candidate Advisory Note 12 | 26 May 2020

The point of this note is to provide another way to carry over your values from domestic to foreign policy. Most/all of you are already aware of this method, but there’s some data in here that you might find useful.

Situation

Sen. Sanders published this sometime last week on social media:

Three things I like about dad’s post:

1. Data: Sanders lists names and numbers. A nice public service gesture (which is the type of thing I’d like to see elected officials do more often), but this information also helps with the broader mission of corporate accountability.

2. Argument: We are investing public funds to ameliorate a threat to public health, so at no point in this scenario should parochial interests (of the corporate elite) come into play.

3. Relevance: The argument speaks to what has happened in the past and what will probably continue to happen in the future if serious changes aren’t made. Just look at how much the CEOs of these corporations were compensated* (*= base pay + bonus/incentives + stock awards/options + ‘other’ compensation) in 2018:

AstraZeneca: $14.93 million

Moderna: $58.6 million

Johnson & Johnson: $20.1 million

Sanofi: $8.2 million

Expanding the scope of the argument

Corporate executives shouldn’t reap private benefits if they’re tasked with fixing a public security problem, especially if public (taxpayer) funds are issued to them for that purpose. This argument has to be said because it speaks to something that happens all the time.

And this (structural) problem isn’t exclusive to Big Pharma, which is a major reason why I won’t shut up about defense spending: public funds invested (purportedly) for public security resulting in (massive) private payouts to the one percent describes what happens every year with the national security budget.

Here’s an intermingling of the CEO compensation figures above with those of the top 5 defense contractors (all refer to 2018 levels):

Moderna: $58.6 million

Boeing: $23.4 million

Lockheed Martin: $21.5 million

General Dynamics: $20.7 million

Johnson & Johnson: $20.1 million

Raytheon: $17.1 million

AstraZeneca: $14.93 million

Northrop Grumman: $13.3 million

Sanofi: $8.2 million

Conclusion

So a lot of ideas to limit or halt this sort of corporate profiteering can be applied to both public health and defense. Maybe this could help with constructing policy ideas or expressing to voters another way your opponent has been irresponsible.

Thanks for your time,

Stephen (stephen@securityreform.org; @stephensemler)