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The Love Letter

Keywords

war-on-disease, 1-percent-treaty, medical-research, public-health, peace-dividend, decentralized-trials, dfda, dih, victory-bonds, health-economics, cost-benefit-analysis, clinical-trials, drug-development, regulatory-reform, military-spending, peace-economics, decentralized-governance, wishocracy, blockchain-governance, impact-investing

Every board that keeps the world’s money in missiles is run by humans who will also die of the diseases the missiles are not curing. The love letter reminds them. It is the friendly front door of the Loving Takeover: you send it to the board of any company on the target list that pays lobbyists to keep the 604-to-one machine running. Anyone may send it. Owning a single share turns it from a love letter into a formal demand under the board’s duty of oversight: sixty days of silence opens the courthouse door.

The letter

Dear Board of Directors of [COMPANY],

I love you very much and I do not want you and everyone you have ever loved to be slowly tortured and brutally murdered by horrible diseases.

Your company pays lobbyists to keep my government spending on weapons instead of on the trials that would cure what is actually going to kill us. Governments worldwide already spend 604 dollars on the military for every one dollar spent on testing which medicines work. They own enough weapons to end the world 122 times, and we have only the one world. Meanwhile the treatment that would save your family sits untested on a shelf, because the money that would have tested it is in a missile.

It does not have to stay this way, and the fix is almost insultingly cheap: move one percent of military spending to clinical trials. After the last world war the United States cut military spending 87.6% in two years and walked into the largest rise in living standards in its history. It has since crept back up to 30.6x what it spent before that war, and nobody is noticeably safer. One percent is far less than that. The wait for the 6,650 diseases with no treatment falls from 443 years to 36.

I know the lobbying is supposed to maximize your net worth. But your net worth is going to be zero if you are dead, unless you are buried with your money, which your kids are unlikely to do.

This mistake has a precedent. The board of the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation kept lead in gasoline for 73 years, lobbying away every attempt to stop them, giving themselves, their children, and everyone else brain damage. Even those shareholders would have ended up roughly 23.2% (95% CI: 5.65%-78.1%) richer if the board had switched to ethanol on day one, because the brain damage shrank the economy their fortunes lived in.

So I am asking you to do one thing: point your lobbyists at that one percent. Same lobbyists, same budget, same lunches, a different sentence. It costs your company nothing. And if your analysts can find a public policy that does more for your shareholders’ long-term wealth than this one, lobby for that instead and I will support you. Right now, nothing else comes close.

And it makes you richer. You do not have to make your money from bombs: you can buy the biotech that eradicates disease and lobby for the trials that multiply it, which pays better than adding another apocalypse to the 122 we already own. A company like yours is worth far more in the economy this creates than in the one you are lobbying to keep, and the sourced math, including the part where your own shareholders are personally poorer and shorter-lived because of the lobbying you authorize today, is at warondisease.org. You would be voting yourself more money and more years of life. So would I. So would everyone we both love.

With love,

[Your name]

[Shareholder of [COMPANY], holding [N] share(s) since [date]. Include this line if you own one.]

How to send it

  1. Fill in the brackets. Pick your company from the target list, which carries the corporate-secretary address for each.
  2. Email or mail it to that corporate secretary. That is the whole love letter.
  3. Optional, for teeth: own a single share of the company first. A shareholder’s letter is one the board ignores at its peril; a stranger’s is one they can drop in the bin. Buy one, or have a friend gift you one. The share is optional. The letter is not.
  4. Then send the letter to someone you love, and tell them it is their turn.

Love letter, demand letter, same letter

The warm version above is the love letter: anyone can send it, it asks rather than threatens, and it works because every director is also a human who would rather not die. Add a share and the legal machinery, and the same letter becomes a formal shareholder demand under the board’s duty of oversight; sixty days of silence switches it on. One is love. The other is love with standing. Send whichever one you can.