Ethics Experts Suddenly Care About 'Pay-For-Play'
The Axios piece highlights Google, Amazon, Palantir, and Lockheed Martin reps attending Trump’s gold-tinted dinner, pledging millions for a White House ballroom. Former U.S. Office of Government Ethics acting director Don Fox expressed concern about a "potential coercive effect." One might wonder where this rigorous ethical scrutiny was when these same corporate titans, many with deep ties to
defense industries, were lobbying Congress to greenlight endless wars and massive Pentagon budgets from which they profit handsomely, year after year. Lockheed Martin, for example, which receives billions in taxpayer dollars for weapons, finds itself at a White House dinner and suddenly, ethics are in vogue. It appears that only when the 'pay-for-play' involves decorating the White House—not, say,
funneling billions to weapons manufacturers or allowing tech giants to skirt antitrust laws—do the 'ethics experts' finally sit up and take notice. These are the same corporations that fund political campaigns and think tanks, influencing policy with little public outcry. Does the 'coercive effect' only apply when it’s about a gilded toilet, rather than global conflicts or economic policy? It begs
the question: if this level of scrutiny applied to all corporate-political relationships, would we have any functioning government left?