I realize this sort of thing is almost not even worth noting in the current environment. The corruption is so extreme that donors getting government handouts and regulatory favors is rather quaint.
Still, you almost have to admire the sheer chutzpah of Trump donors who run lung destroying businesses getting Coronavirus money because their killer industries are in trouble:
A year ago, Kelly Craft was serving as Washington’s frequently absent ambassador to Canada, soon to be en route to the United Nations. Her spouse, the coal baron Joseph Craft III, was knee-deep in a Trump administration assault on federal rules aimed at safeguarding the environment, slowing climate change and protecting miners and other breathing Americans from the illnesses, injuries and deaths linked to the burning of coal.
What a difference a pandemic can make.
The Crafts were reaping the rewards after showering Trump and numerous other Republican political candidates with millions in campaign contributions during the 2016 election cycle. The good times were rolling because Joseph Craft’s work eliminating those regulations was driving up coal sales and the value of the coal under his control as the chairman, president and chief executive officer of mining giant Alliance Resource Partners.
Alliance, a publicly-traded diversified energy firm, is the second-largest coal producer in the eastern United States, with about 1.7 billion tons of reserves in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.
On May 14, 2019, Alliance Resource Partners stock was trading at $18.53 a share. The Crafts’ estimated net worth at the time, amounting to more than a billion dollars, mostly in energy stocks, was so vast that Kelly Craft was barred by a federal ethics agreement from participating in climate change matters when she became U.N. ambassador last September.
Fast forward to May 13, 2020, just months after the pandemic struck, and a share was selling at $2.89—about 84 percent of its value having evaporated.
Joseph Craft is the beneficial owner of more than 19 million shares of Alliance Resource, or 15 percent of the total outstanding, according to the company’s annual report for 2019. That means the value of his holdings fell by more than $300 million over the past year.
Wall Street, while uncertain about the future of the coal business, seems to favor a rosier future for Alliance. Analysts are playing down the danger of the company going belly up, saying it appears to be holding on to its customers and existing contracts even as other coal producers find themselves in worse shape.
But behind the scenes, Alliance also appears to be looking to its friends in the Trump administration for a helping hand.
In other words, having spent a lifetime fighting government interference in the marketplace, Craft thinks that when it comes to the money in his company’s pocket, it’s time for the government to pony up.
Soon after the crisis hit, the mining industry, in which Joseph Craft is a leading figure in Washington, won a valuable ruling from the federal Department of Homeland Security, which concluded in late March that coal was an essential industry, “critical to ensuring the reliability of the electrical system” and thus “critical to public health and safety, as well as economic and national security.”
The decision enabled the entire coal-supply chain to continue to fully function during the coronavirus outbreak—while most of America’s economy was shut down, sending millions into unemployment lines.
Alliance has also joined a National Mining Association drive to reduce mandatory industry payments to federal programs aiding coal workers sick with black lung disease and cleaning up the polluted sites of abandoned coal mines. The government has yet to act on this request.
Alliance has also won support from 11 Republican senators—two of whom it has given campaign contributions—for a proposal to help Alliance raise precious capital more easily by weakening Federal Reserve Board requirements on bond ratings.
There more to this story at the link. The amount of sheer corruption at every level continues to be astonishing.
And yet this criminal administration won, with the help of the media, by calling Hillary Clinton corrupt. It’s enough to make you feel like you’re losing your mind.