by Via International Business Times (via RSN): Trump Administration’s Infrastructure Plan Involves Privatizing America’s Assets and Selling Them to Goldman Sachs>/a> President Donald Trump’s administration this week touted an infrastructure plan that would sell off public assets to private financial firms. Left unsaid in the White House promotional materials was any mention that the Trump aide who is overseeing the initiative comes from a Wall Street firm that says it is seeking to buy up the very same kind of assets the Trump administration plans to sell off. Leading the White House privatization initiative is Gary Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs, who received a 5 million dollar payout upon leaving the bank and taking a job as the director of
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Via International Business Times (via RSN):
President Donald Trump’s administration this week touted an infrastructure plan that would sell off public assets to private financial firms. Left unsaid in the White House promotional materials was any mention that the Trump aide who is overseeing the initiative comes from a Wall Street firm that says it is seeking to buy up the very same kind of assets the Trump administration plans to sell off.
Leading the White House privatization initiative is Gary Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs, who received a $285 million dollar payout upon leaving the bank and taking a job as the director of Trump’s National Economic Council. As Cohn has led the infrastructure privatization initiative from that perch, Goldman Sachs declared that it continues to look at “new business initiatives” that revolve around taking ownership of public assets, according to Securities and Exchange Commission documents reviewed by International Business Times.
Cohn is spearheading the administration’s infrastructure policy despite a White House official telling Bloomberg News in February that he “will recuse himself from participating in any matter directly involving his former employer.” That pledge seemed at the time to show that Cohn was following ethics rules Trump enacted in January. Those rules require federal officials to sign an ethics pledge in which they agree to wait two years before they “participate in any particular matter involving specific parties that is directly and substantially related to my former employer.”
Those rules, however, empower Trump to waive the restrictions whenever he wants. Whether or not Cohn has received such a waiver remains secret: the administration has not released a list of waivers, and has moved to block federal agencies from disclosing such waivers to federal ethics regulators