Know Your Rulers: John R. Stafford

[TygrBright]

About this series: A few thousand people live and “work” at the most rarefied levels of our economy. The decisions they make affect our lives in ways we cannot even begin to imagine. These few thousand people are the Oligarchs, the string-pullers, the law-buyers, the elected official-owners who rule our world in the most practical sense. We should know more about our rulers, shouldn’t we?

So now and then when I have the time, I'll select an Oligarch from one of the helpful websites that track their interrelationships (see “References” below,) and follow the information trail on the first twenty pages returned by the Google search engine. I select bits and pieces of this publicly-available information and create a helpful profile.

Know Your Rulers: Oligarch John R. Stafford

John R. Stafford

Oligarch Stafford is currently, or has recently served, on the boards of directors of Verizon Communications, Honeywell International, NYNEX Corporation, and JP Morgan Chase. His past board of directors service includes John Deere International (possibly as a favor to his fellow-Oligarch, Hans W. Becherer, also on the boards of Chase and Honeywell,) Allied Signal, Inc., and possibly the Rothschild Bank, Manufacturers Hanover.

Mr. Stafford rose through the power structure after graduating with a law degree from George Washington University in Washington, DC. (He did his undergraduate work at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA.) His early career was associated with the Washington DC law firm, Steptoe & Johnson, and he served on the legal staff of healthcare giant Hoffman-LaRoche.

It can be inferred that the young Oligarch-to-be did a fine job for Hoffman-LaRoche, because we next meet him in a variety of increasingly powerful and responsible positions at American Home Products—owners of Wyeth, another pharma giant. In 1980 he was elected to AHP’s board of directors, and in 1986 he became the corporation’s CEO and Chairman of the Board.

His tenure at AHP/Wyeth was notable for a number of distinctions, including:

Divestiture of less-profitable “non-core” businesses, including household products, foods, and candy, the merger with pharma corp Ayerst, and the acquisitions of Dalkon Shield manufacturer AH Robins, and animal health businesses from Bristol-Myers and Parke-Davis.

Under Oligarch Stafford’s leadership, Wyeth identified women’s health concerns as a major unexploited profit area for the pharmaceutical industry, and invested in marketing its flagship product Premarin to become the #1 prescribed drug in the United States in 1993. Flush with cash, they created the Women’s Health Research Institute, dedicated to conducting trials for drugs connected with menopause, endometriosis, contraception, etc. Wyeth’s me-too long term contraceptive Norplant was a big hit for them, justifying the investment.

Oligarch Stafford was listed as one of the pharmaceutical industry’s five highest-paid executives in 2000, with $27,008,927 in salary and $81,847,569 in stock options. It might have been a terrible loss to him when he stepped down from the CEO position in 2001—but fortunately American Home Products took their ex-CEO on as a “consultant.” As a consultant, his compensation need not be disclosed, but it can be inferred from the $1.6 million in above-market interest alone reported by Wyeth on his compensation package in 2003 that he wasn’t missing any meals. Thank heavens. We were worried.

Although it may seem, when you add the 1990s “downsizing” of 4,000 AHP workers (for which he received a 132% salary increase) to all the wheelie-dealing, mergers, and acquisitions, that Oligarch Stafford was merely a soulless corporate bastard, it must be noted that when one of Wyeth’s key researchers, Robert I. Levy (whose work in lipid metabolism doubtless added much to the company’s bottom line) died in 2000 after a short illness, Mr. Stafford not only tolled a bell at his memorial service, but said some nice things about him.

And there is a human side to Oligarch Stafford: His golf handicap, in 2000, was a respectable 10.9, so he couldn’t have been spending ALL his time burning the midnight oil at AHP. He’s had a bypass operation. He has a daughter, Carolyn (Brown, ’82; Harvard Law, ’85) who shares with President Obama the distinction of having edited the Harvard Law Review. She married a nice doctor in 1988, did a short stint as an assistant US Attorney in Massachussetts, and is now a lecturer at Harvard Law School. And a press release from John Deere when he joined their board of directors in 1997 noted that he was then “active in numerous civic and charitable organizations in the New York/New Jersey area.”

So, what kind of things does Oligarch Stafford interest himself that might affect you or me?

Well, perhaps this 1992 quote from a Philadelphia Inquirer story on “Making Medicine, Making Money: How Drug Companies Minimize R&D Risks” will provide a hint:

“The Food and Drug Administration's system” was misunderstood, misrepresented and misused for years, and to put it into well-deserved oblivion was a PMA (Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association) priority for a very long time," John R. Stafford, chairman and chief executive officer of American Home Products, told executives at the manufacturers group convention in May. “Now it is accomplished.”

Oligarch Stafford was a Bush Pioneer who raised $100,000 for Bush in 2000. Wyeth Pharmaceuticals reported $3.8 million in lobbying expenditures in 2001 and $4.13 million in 2002. Whether there is any correlation between these facts and the subsequent decision by the Bush Administration and Congress to make it illegal for the U.S. Government to negotiate lower drug prices for Medicare beneficiaries is, of course, speculative. And in any case, other Big Pharma players were in the game as well. It’s not Oligarch Stafford’s fault, in other words. At least, not entirely.

Among the affiliations listed for Mr. Stafford with regards to political donations, the bulk are, astoundingly, Republican. But he hedges his bets, with contributions to the DNCC, the Clinton primary campaign in 2007, and a few other “D”s here and there.

Who is Oligarch Stafford connected with? Here is a map to the strings Oligarch Stafford can pull. (You'll have to click through the Flash intro.)

References:

They Rule
Muckety
NNDB
Open Secrets
Wyeth Pharmaceuticals on Wikipedia
Tracked.com
Forbes.com
Buying A Law: Big Pharma's Big Money and the Bush Medicare Plan