Good morning.
Most Americans don’t want CEOs involved in politics. A poll conducted last week by Golin and Ipsos found only 41% favored CEOs weighing in on disputed elections, and only 43% wanted them speaking out on impeachment. On the other hand, 74% say CEOs should call for unity and a peaceful transfer of power, and 57% believe it was appropriate for CEOs to speak out after the January 6 insurgency at the Capitol. That pretty well tracks with the way most CEOs and business groups have behaved since election day. They kept their powder dry until all legitimate avenues for disputing the election were exhausted, then came out strongly endorsing the election results and attacking efforts to undermine them. Relatively few have backed impeachment. (You can see the poll results here.)
But how about political contributions? That’s the question raised last week, as a host of companies—Marriott, AT&T, American Express, Best Buy, Cisco, Comcast, Dow and Amazon among them—suspended campaign contributions to members of Congress who challenged the election results. Another large group—Microsoft, Boeing, Blackrock, Coca-Cola, JP Morgan, Ford, GM, UPS, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup—temporarily halted all political contributions to members of both parties. (Quartz has a more comprehensive list of what companies did here.)
Some business leaders are even contemplating permanently shutting their political action committees and exiting the money game altogether. But absent a broader overhaul of campaign finance—which is unlikely anytime soon—I think that’s a mistake. Most big companies remain balanced players in the money game, dividing their dollars roughly equally between members of each party. Walmart, for instance, has kept its contributions at exactly 50-50. Their strategies have less to do with trying to influence outcomes, and more to do with assuring they have access to whoever wins.
The more important question for 2021 is how big business uses that access. There are a host of issues where business has the potential to help broker positive outcomes for the U.S. economy and society: economic stimulus, infrastructure, worker training, climate change. On each of these, business leaders occupy the center, and can help bring the parties together to solve urgent problems.
But on tax and regulatory issues, in particular, corporations will be playing defense. And they’ll be tempted to use what influence they can muster to seek tax breaks and regulatory exemptions that aren’t in the broader public interest. That’s where the commitment to stakeholder capitalism will be tested. The nation desperately needs business involved in government. But business, now more than ever, needs to use its influence to focus on solving long-term challenges.
News below.
Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
Inside the Battle for Responsible A.I. Discuss best practices and industry guidelines for responsible A.I. with Affectiva, Dropbox, IBM, Accenture, and Cravath, Swaine & Moore. Join us on January 26
COVID failures
The World Health Organization is currently highlighting failures in the handling of the pandemic. Most urgent is what WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warns will be a "catastrophic moral failure" to equitably distribute vaccines to poorer countries. But a WHO report looking back at the past year also recounts many missteps, including by the organization itself. Washington Post
Keystone scramble
With President-elect Joe Biden likely to axe the Keystone XL oil-pipeline project once he's in power, the project's developer is scrambling to ward off that threat. Canada's TC Energy reportedly claims it would use only renewable energy building the fossil-fuel pipeline, eliminate all greenhouse gas emissions from its operations by 2030, and hire a union workforce. Wall Street Journal
Act big
Biden's Treasury pick, former Fed chair Janet Yellen, will call for major funding for vaccine distribution, school reopenings and unemployment insurance at her Senate confirmation hearing today. "Economists don't always agree, but I think there is a consensus now: Without further action, we risk a longer, more painful recession now—and long-term scarring of the economy later," she will say, according to prepared remarks. CBS News
Backing Google
The U.S. has asked the Australian government to hit the brakes on a proposed law that would force Google and Facebook to pay for news articles they show to users. From the U.S. Trade Representative's office: "The U.S. Government is concerned that an attempt, through legislation, to regulate the competitive positions of specific players...to the clear detriment of two U.S. firms, may result in harmful outcomes." Reuters
CFO 2021 Expectations About 75% of CFOs expect the US economy to improve in 2021, with high expectations that a COVID-19 vaccine will bolster it by mid-year. Deloitte’s latest CFO Signals™ survey captures the thinking of CFOs of large North American companies, including their views on US government policy over the next four years. Read more.
Vaccine fears
Norway's health authorities don't see evidence of a direct link between the inoculation of the elderly against COVID-19 and a string of deaths among those over 75 who received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Norwegian Medicines Agency medical director Steinar Madsen: "All of these patients have had serious underlying illnesses. We can’t say that people die from the vaccine. We can say that it may be coincidental." Fortune
EU on U.S.
Most Europeans may like Joe Biden, but they think the U.S.'s global leadership role is over. According to a survey conducted for the influential European Council on Foreign Relations, a majority of respondents think China will be more powerful than the U.S. within a decade, and Washington cannot take it for granted that Europe would be on its (or anyone's) side in case of a Sino-American conflict. ECFR
Welcoming refugees
America needs to unify and heal, and welcoming refugees into the country would be "perhaps the best way to do that," writes World Relief's Jennifer Foy in a piece for Fortune. "This will be a challenge that revives a tired nation, but it will take work and commitment from all of our citizens," she writes. Fortune
Backdoor danger
The tech industry's love for user data has given law enforcement troves of information to sift through, and they "have gotten hooked on this ease of access to data like a drug," writes Chris Howell, co-founder and CTO of encrypted messaging app Wickr—and a law-enforcement veteran—in a piece for Fortune. He warns: "When our national and economic security depend on secure communications, the risk of losing that is too great. Power and people are corruptible. Encryption is not." Fortune
This edition of CEO Daily was edited by David Meyer.
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