Nick Mottern, a local Vietnam War veteran and peace activist, has strong words to describe the CEO of America’s biggest weapons manufacturer: “conscience-dead.”
On Jan. 15, Mottern served as a juror with the “Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal” — an anti-war group calling for corporate accountability for war profiteering. The group found Lockheed Martin CEO James Taiclet and his peers in the arms trade guilty of the “commission of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.”
So when Mottern began asking who leads Mass General Brigham, which owns Northampton’s Cooley Dickinson Hospital and local urgent care centers, he said he was “quite astounded” to discover that Taiclet sat on their board of directors.
With the help of Mottern, River Valley for Gaza Healthcare, a local activist group focused on health care needs in Gaza, published a petition on Jan. 23 demanding that Mass General Brigham remove Taiclet from its board of directors.
“There is a profound conflict of interest involved in the world’s largest weapons manufacturer sitting on the board of one of the world’s largest and most prestigious healthcare systems,” the petition reads.
The petition was drafted in collaboration with Doctors Against Genocide, a global coalition of health care workers advocating for institutional solidarity with Gaza’s medical professionals amid the Israel-Hamas war.
To Jen Scarlott, an organizer with River Valley for Gaza Healthcare, the links between an arms titan and a local hospital system show “the reach of the military-industrial complex into civil institutions like education, like health care,” where she said they don’t belong.
Mass General Brigham did not respond to a request for comment. Mass General’s board is separate from the Cooley Dickinson board, on which Taiclet does not sit. Taiclet could not be reached for comment through Lockheed Martin’s communications office.
River Valley for Gaza Healthcare has previously protested outside Cooley Dickinson and Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, demanding each institution make statements in solidarity with Gaza’s health care workers. Mottern’s research into Cooley Dickinson led him to discover Taiclet’s position with Mass General Brigham.
According to the United Nations, as of Jan. 3, only 16 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals remain partially operational, with a collective capacity of just above 1,800 beds. That’s “entirely insufficient for the overwhelming medical needs” following Israel’s 14-month invasion and bombardment of Gaza, the U.N. concluded.
While a tenuous ceasefire agreement has allowed for a significant increase in the humanitarian aid entering Gaza, doctors on the ground say the enclave’s health care system won’t recover overnight.
Scarlott said the ceasefire won’t slow down her organization’s pressure campaign. “People are dying every day because of the conditions in Gaza,” she said.
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Taiclet, who flew Lockheed C-141s for the U.S. Air Force during the Gulf War, would come to head the company after previous stints in the arms industry. He previously held executive positions with Pratt and Whitney and Honeywell Aerospace Technologies before joining Lockheed Martin as a board member in early 2018, ascending to CEO in 2020, according to the company’s website.
During Taiclet’s tenure, Lockheed Martin has held contracts with the U.S. government worth more than $500 billion, providing advanced aircraft, hellfire missiles, and rocket-launch systems to the United States and its allies, including Israel.
Israel has used some next-generation fighter jets like Lockheed Martin’s F-35 — advertised as the world’s “most lethal” aircraft — to drop 2,000-pound bombs on densely populated areas in Gaza. This has resulted in legal battles worldwide to prevent the delivery of crucial F-35 parts to Israel. Other Lockheed technologies, like AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, have been linked to civilian deaths in Gaza.
Lockheed Martin also has contracts with U.S. Customs and Border Patrol worth almost $56 million since 2020 for “surveillance and communication technologies, aircraft maintenance and logistics support, training, and other technologies and services,” according to the American Friends Service Committee, an anti-war group.
Since Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, an increase in lucrative contracts following military aid packages to Israel has led defense sector stocks to significantly outperform the S&P 500.
Defense giants like Lockheed Martin don’t just profit from protracted wars; they actively lobby the government to help them do so, activists told The Shoestring.
According to data from watchdog group Open Secrets, in 2024 Lockheed Martin spent almost $10 million on lobbying efforts, with much of that cash allocated toward swaying lawmakers to support arms appropriations for Israel and Ukraine. Those include local campaign contributions, too. In the last election cycle, for example, Lockheed employees’ political action committee gave $7,500 to U.S. Rep. Richard Neal, D-Springfield.
In years past, lobbying pushes from other defense firms like Massachusetts-based Raytheon, a subsidiary of RTX Corporation, have helped shape U.S. policy towards Saudi Arabia during their war on Houthi rebels that resulted in severe famine conditions in Yemen.
Mottern argues that there is a “massive contradiction where you have somebody who’s enabling widespread slaughter in one part of the world holding up a position of responsibility for health care in another part of the world.”
He also expressed concern with other members of Mass General Brigham’s leadership like board chairman Scott Sperling, co-CEO of private equity giant THL partners. Sperling has donated over $30,000 to pro-Israel lobbying groups since October 2023, according to the money-in-politics watchdog group OpenSecrets.
To Nidal Jboor, a cofounder of Doctors Against Genocide, Mass General Brigham’s ties to the defense industry are “contradictory to health,” and evidence of corporate America’s capture of the healthcare industry.
Mass General Brigham is the United States’ largest hospital-based research enterprise and Massachusetts’ largest private employer with over 80,000 people on their payroll, according to U.S. Department of Labor data. The system’s hospitals have earned spots on lists of the world’s best. Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital are teaching affiliates of one of the world’s most prestigious medical schools at Harvard University.
Mass General Brigham’s hospitals and other facilities received over $1 billion in National Institute of Health funding in 2024, with Massachusetts General Hospital alone receiving over $650 million.
Despite raking in over $20 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2023, with executives earning millions, the hospital system enjoys tax-exempt status as a 501(c)(3) private non-profit corporation.
Over half of the $2.5 trillion in tax-exempt revenue earned by non-profits in 2019 went to “business-like” non-profit healthcare providers and hospital systems like Mass General Brigham, according to a June 2024 report by the Tax Foundation.
Mass General Brigham’s board of directors is filled with venture capitalists, corporate CEOs, and bankers, whose presence outnumbers medical professionals when deciding on yearly budgets, endowment holdings, and research priorities.
Recently, Mass General Brigham announced the largest layoffs in the system’s history amid concerns about its growing network of hospitals, urgent care centers, and other facilities.
“Unfortunately, these boards are set up to attract people who are extremely wealthy and who have a set of priorities that are very different from most of the people treated at the hospital,” Mottern said.
Echoing members of River Valley for Gaza Healthcare, Jboor cited Mass General Brigham’s footprint on global health, arguing that the institution’s prestige be used to express solidarity with healthcare workers in crisis and act as a “compass for other institutions and smaller organizations.”
Dan McGlynn is an investigative reporter covering social movements and institutional power in western Massachusetts. He can be reached at danmcglynn@protonmail.com. Follow him on Instagram @danmcglynn_ or on X @danmcglynn_.
