The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act conclusively answered whether it’s okay for a company to participate in corruption when a government official expects them to. The answer was no.
President Trump displays renderings for his ballroom in front of the destroyed east wing of the White House. Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian
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If you believe the polls, Republican midterm hopes are in shambles. While gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts once looked like it could be enough to hold Democrats to a slim majority in the House, the President’s disastrous policies at home and abroad have brought their hopes crashing down. Democrats seem poised to take a substantial majority in the House and, despite a hostile map, quite possibly the Senate.
With the political winds shifting, savvy operators are already getting a head start on making their case for what Democrats ought to do once they retake one or two chambers. For some, this means preemptively leaping to the defense of the corporations who have participated in the Trump administration’s corruption.
The basic argument being made by these defenders of Trump’s corporate enablers is simple. The poor corporations had no choice but to comply. To resist the Trump administration in any way, including by refusing to engage in his outright corruption would harm their business, and that’s not something we can ask of any company. As such, we must forgive their sins and move on.
Chamber of Progress, a big tech advocacy group has been vocally making this case for months. Given their current and former funders (along with many companies whose support I’m sure they hope to attract) are among the firms who have been most closely linked to the Trump administration’s rampant corruption, this should be unsurprising. Even so, a big tech lobbying group claiming that they’re just looking after the Democratic Party’s best interest is a little too shameless.
But the Chamber of Progress is not alone. Other appendages of Big Tech are attempting to convince Democrats that conducting oversight on the companies that enabled Trump’s corruption is the wrong path to go down. Doubtless, there’s even more work going on behind the scenes to keep these companies out of future committee leadership’s crosshairs.
While this may be what anyone would expect from industry groups, it’s seemingly breaking through, at least to some Congressional Democrats. Congressman Bill Foster made the case for restrained oversight of corporate villains to Politico earlier this month. In his opinion, the companies had no choice but to engage in this corruption, saying “A lot of the companies did things because Trump had a gun on their head.”
Foster may be just one member of the Democratic caucus, but he’s reportedly considering a run for chair of the powerful House Financial Services Committee, which holds jurisdiction over Trump’s most lucrative form of corruption, the crypto industry. If Foster thinks he has the support needed to run for the committee’s top spot, it may indicate there’s other Democrats who’ve voiced their support for his position behind the scenes.
Our senior fellow, Max Moran had a great piece on this very topic that was published in The Nation yesterday. In the piece Max discusses Hannah Arendt’s writings on Nazi Germany and the ethical obligations individuals have to resist fascism. Max’s piece covers a really important moral issue at the heart of Trump 2.0 and makes a compelling case. I encourage everyone to read the piece and really grapple with the questions it raises.
But I want to discuss the matter of the corporate world’s enabling of Trump’s corruption from a different angle. While Trump’s corruption is unprecedented in American history, the arguments being made in defense of the firms that felt cowed by Trump’s behavior are not. In fact, we had this whole debate before. Can we allow companies to engage in corruption if they are being coerced into doing so by government officials was a real matter of political debate in the mid 1970s. It appeared to be conclusively settled until recently.
The post-Watergate era spurred a national push for increased transparency. Efforts to uncover corruption tied to the Nixon administration eventually led to broader efforts to uncover and root out corruption wherever it may exist. Among the many things uncovered by this push for accountability were numerous cases of US-based companies bribing foreign officials. These included Lockheed Martin bribing a Dutch prince and a Japanese Prime Minister, Northrop bribing Saudi generals, oil companies bribing Italian and Korean politicians, and United Brands (formerly United Fruit) bribing the dictator of Honduras.
The bribes looked bad. The national press was scandalized, the international press even more so. But the companies argued this is just how business was always done. When legislation was introduced to crack down on US firms bribing foreign officials, the business community and its defenders leapt into action.
Some argued that a US law banning bribery abroad could be seen as culturally insensitive, or as an overreach by American authorities. Others claimed that existing laws already prevented such behavior so there was no need to pass news legislation on the subject (“If it was already illegal, what’s the harm in making it doubly illegal?,” some might ask.) But much of the debate surrounding the bill that would become the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) was focused on the same defense that is now brought up by the corporations that enabled Trump’s corruption: If corruption is how business is conducted, how can we hold corporations accountable for participating in the game? As Congressman Foster would put it, they had “a gun on their head.”
But Congress did not buy the excuse, the bill was passed anyway. Then-Secretary of the Treasury W. Michael Blumenthal summed up the position of those supporting the FCPA concisely, “Paying bribes – apart from being morally repugnant and illegal in most countries – is simply not necessary for the successful conduct of business here or overseas.” Sadly, it seems as though, for some legislators, this basic stance is not one they agree with.
Proponents of the FCPA argued that by making corruption illegal in the US, companies would have an easier time refusing to pay bribes. This same principle applies to cracking down on the firms that participated in Trump’s corruption. Without reasserting a deterrent to corruption, firms can more easily be pressured into engaging in corruption going forward. If there were no consequences last time, how can they refuse on the basis of future consequences?
It’s little wonder that just a month into office, Trump issued an executive order ordering a pause to the enforcement of the FCPA. The law remains a threat to his project of entrenching corruption and graft wherever possible.
While too few in number, some firms have stood up to Trump’s corrupt schemes. Though extremely prominent on the RDP “do not make a high ranking government official” list, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said he refused to allow the company to fund Trump’s ballroom because, “we’re quite conscious of risks we bear by doing anything that looks like buying favors or anything like that.” Another company, which remains anonymous, refused a request to sponsor Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy’s glaringly corrupt road trip tv series, saying “You’re paying for access […] This is a little too cute.”
There must be some incentive for these companies who refused Trump’s demands to continue to do so. If their refusal to donate earned them enmity from the Trump administration and those companies who complied are able to escape scot-free, what incentive is there for them to refuse to participate in future corruption? Refusal to punish corrupt corporate actors would functionally punish those who risked Trump’s fury to uphold the law and their civic responsibility.
While the landscape of American politics has changed, and the Supreme Court has weakened the definition of corruption to the point that it’s almost unrecognizable, we settled whether de facto bribery was something to stamp out or ignore long ago. We must consider whether our standards have fallen so low that we can no longer hold companies conducting business in the United States to the same standards we hold firms conducting business in Honduras or Saudi Arabia to. If we can’t even stand firm in conviction that corruption ought to be punished, what chance do we have of ridding ourselves of such corruption and restoring a trustworthy government?
Want more? Check out some of the pieces that we have published or contributed research or thoughts to in the last week:
Making America Accountable Again
The Sudden Return of Effective Altruism
How Trump Undermined Our Hurricane Readiness and Response Capacity
Elites Influencing Democrats on AI Policy: Ron Conway
Why Did DOGE Exist? Now We Know.
They came to Washington to dismantle government. Now, they’re profiting from it.
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