Icahnic corruption
With the simple turn of a single federal regulatory dial, billionaire investor Carl Icahn stood to pocket millions upon millions of dollars. Knowing that full well, then-President-elect Trump welcomed Icahn into the administration last December as special adviser for regulatory reform.
No disclosure required, no divestment, no guidelines, no legal review to speak of. Icahn would, the world knew, have the President’s ear on changing the U.S. government’s rules overseeing key industries. Including many where he was, and is, a major player.
Icahn would take no government paycheck but would retain his vast empire of industrial holdings and his brutally aggressive trading practices.
And he would wield real power, by negotiating with industry leaders on behalf of the President — and vetting candidates for top posts, including some that directly regulate his businesses, from the Securities and Exchange Commission to the Environmental Protection Agency to the Treasury Department.
That nobody thought twice about an arrangement that from the start reeked of fundamental corruption speaks volumes about the ethical rot deep inside the Trump White House, run by a President profiting daily from his hotel and resort holdings.
Icahn resigned from his position Friday, just as the New Yorker magazine published a damning expose confirming that he did the one-thousand percent predictable thing, and profited from his perch by at least half a billion dollars in increased stock value.
Icahn zeroed in on a single federal rule that proved a costly bane to his energy business — in this case, a small refinery he controlled called CVR Energy.
Approved on a bipartisan basis and signed into law by President George W. Bush, the mandate forced that company and its competitors to buy ethanol credits. His competitors had prepared better for the requirement; Icahn’s company hadn’t, so the regulation was a multi-hundredmillion-dollar albatross around earnings.
Which is why, from the second he took the volunteer position and got to call himself special adviser to the President, he set out to kill the rule. A draft executive order to that effect read suspiciously like Icahn’s doing.
The mere whiff of a coming rule change sent the price of the credits plummeting — and what d’ya know, Icahn made a killing betting on that outcome, before other energy interests squashed the new rules.
Did we mention it’s a crime for federal employees (save the President and vice-president) to work on matters in which they have a financial stake?
At behest of the President who vowed to “drain the swamp” slithered in the sharpest-jawed gator of them all, to feast and frolic and profit personally from the sacred trust of American government.
This is precisely the type of corruption that a heartbeat ago this nation’s leaders condemned among petty plutocrats across the globe.