The $5.3 Trillion Question Behind America's COVID-19 Failure

[TexasTowelie]

That’s the amount of buybacks U.S. corporations funneled to shareholders during the past decade—rather than invest in technologies for the common good.


The United States has been woefully inept in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. Clearly, the Trump administration’s ignorance, incompetence, and malfeasance have exacerbated the death and destruction.

But putting in place a new administration that heeds the recommendations of science and effectively carries out the necessary containment policies would only remedy part of the nation’s failure to deal with the pandemic. The successful implementation of a national response to the COVID-19 pandemic requires collaborations between federal government agencies and those business enterprises that have accumulated the capabilities for the development, production, and delivery of countermeasures—vaccines, therapies, diagnostics, ventilators, and personal protective equipment (PPE). For such government-business collaborations (GBCs) to successfully confront the COVID-19 pandemic, the prime purpose of the companies themselves must be the development, production, and delivery of safe, effective, and affordable countermeasures.

That’s not their prime purpose now. How can it be, when senior corporate executives have an obsession with doing whatever it takes to boost the company’s stock price?

For a business corporation to be a reliable partner in a GBC, it must reject the ideology of “maximizing shareholder value” (MSV) and shift its purpose to corporate governance for the common good. The belief that corporations should be run according to the dictates of MSV poses a formidable obstacle to the collective action needed to confront not only a pathogen pandemic but also the scourges of income inequity and climate change.

Read more: https://prospect.org/coronavirus/americas-covid-19-failure-corporate-stock-buybacks/
(American Prospect)