In the late 1980s, the banker Charles Keating had a problem. Federal regulators were circling his savings-and-loan, and they did not like what they found.
His answer was not to clean up the business. It was to buy the referees. Keating had given five U.S. senators large sums in campaign contributions, and he called on them to lean on the regulators. They obliged, and the regulators backed off.
Lincoln Savings failed anyway. The collapse cost more than $3 billion, the wider savings-and-loan crisis cost taxpayers about $124 billion, and Keating was so sure the money would pay off that he boasted to reporters about his “bribes.”
National Legal and Policy Center was founded in 1991, in the rubble of that scandal. It was not chiefly a story about banking; it was a story about what happens when private money can rent public power. The lesson has shaped the work since: a company that corrupts the government and a government that submits to corruption are two halves of one problem.
Why does the pattern keep repeating? Because the prize keeps growing. The more the state spends, taxes, and regulates, the more a favor from Washington is worth — and the harder firms will work to secure one.
The shapes it takes are familiar. Subsidies and tax carve-outs. Bailouts for sour bets. Tariffs to kneecap a competitor. And rules the largest players help write, because the compliance burden they can absorb will crush smaller rivals who cannot.
Defenders have a stock reply: a corporation exists to make money for its owners, so if a subsidy pays, where is the harm? Milton Friedman, whose name is shorthand for that exact principle, would have waved the dodge away.
Friedman held that profit must be won through open and honest competition, within the rules — not by twisting the rules in your favor. Money taken from taxpayers by mandate is not earned. It is extracted, and it corrodes the free market that makes a share of stock worth owning.
The clearest current example is not hard to find. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act set out nearly $400 billion in green-energy spending, and more than 2,000 organizations — General Motors among them — lobbied on the bill.
GM then built close to $17 billion in domestic plants around the law’s battery-production credits, and tells its own investors that the federal incentives shape where it puts its money. When Congress moved to pare those credits back, the industry lobbied to protect them.
This is the same automaker taxpayers rescued in 2009. A company that builds its plans around a subsidy and then fights to keep it has stopped competing for customers and started competing for appropriations.
That is one firm and one law. The same script runs wherever public money meets private appetite — the ground the Corporate Integrity Project was built to patrol.
Influence tends to outlast any single favor, too. Regulators depart to lobby the agencies they ran; executives take government posts and circle back to the industries they policed. Every turn of the revolving door makes the next favor easier.
For the ordinary owner, the arrangement is a double charge. As a shareholder, you watch your company chase political rewards rather than build a better business. As a taxpayer, you help fund the rewards it collects.
So corporate integrity and government integrity prove to be the same fight from opposite ends. The official who trades favors and the executive who buys them are working one deal between them.
Watching the corporate side of that deal — with shareholder proposals, investigation, and disclosure pried loose — is watchdog work in the fullest sense. It is what NLPC set out to do at its founding.
The pull will not weaken. Government is too vast, and the payoff for seizing a piece of it too sweet, for that to change.
The cure is not one more rule atop the pile. It is light — a public reckoning of who is feeding at the public trough, and an owner with the standing to demand one. No law has ever repealed self-interest. An owner paying attention, and a watchdog willing to do the tedious digging, come closer than any statute.
