The EPA offered an oil refinery owned by billionaire and former Trump advisor – still close friend – Carl Icahn, “hardship waivers” at an Oklahoma facility that will help Icahn and the facility avoid tens of millions of dollars in costs related to the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) program. How a billionaire qualifies for anything entitled “hardship” waivers is anyone’s guess. “This one is going to be hard for [Scott] Pruitt to explain,” Brooke Coleman, head of the Advanced Biofuels Business Council industry group, said in an email Friday.
Well, no, actually – it is rather easy to explain, as Carl Icahn has been cutting corners to get rich since back in the 80s and 90s when he went to jail for moves that reeked of similar self-interested “insider” dealing. Carl Icahn is a friend of Trump, having served as a special regulatory adviser to Trump until last August when he stepped down only after lawmakers cited potential ethical problems in his dual role as an adviser and an investor. One can safely assume that the ethical problems causing his demise as an advisor included things such as applying for special hardship waivers to save tens of millions, the same waivers which were denied under the Obama administration. But, with Scott Pruitt now head of the agency, things like ethics and neutral application of the law have gone out of style as the type of government engaged in only by “losers.”
It seems there is no bottom to Pruitt’s corruption, similar to his boss. The swamp has been drained, the regulators that used to at least make an attempt to govern the country with a nod toward fair-play are gone, replaced by the “pay to play” winners that Trump long favored. Next time your Facebook uncle starts to talk about Trump caring for the common man, you might want to mention that the “common man” who owned a similar site would have paid 8 figures more to the government to operate it.
Trump is in it for himself and his friends, alone, and the common man got played, no different than the commoners that signed up for Trump University.
