In the real time world no one sees them at all
They all say Trump's crazy...
Four days after his inauguration, Donald Trump signed a handful of executive memos to advance the Keystone XL pipeline and revive the U.S. steel industry. He invited builder TransCanada Corp. to reapply for a permit denied by Barack Obama and ordered up fast-track rules forcing not only Keystone but also all new U.S. pipelines to be made from American steel. “From now on, we’re going to be making pipeline in the United States,” he said.
Made-in-America Keystone was a stunt. Most of its pipes had already been manufactured, a fact the White House grudgingly admitted when it exempted the project from any new Buy American rules a few months later. While some of Keystone’s pipes were made in the U.S., at least a quarter of them came from a Russian steel company whose biggest shareholder is an oligarch and Trump family friend. The company, Evraz North America, supplied Keystone from its steel plants in Canada and for years has lobbied in Washington against Trump-style protectionism.
Ten months after his Keystone event, Trump has yet to deliver on his pledge to boost the fortunes of American steel. Two self-imposed deadlines for trade action, one in June and one in July, have come and gone. Meanwhile, the prospect of tariffs has led to a surge of cheap foreign steel into the U.S., with imports rising 24 percent in 2017, the fastest increase in years.
As federal and congressional investigators probe Moscow’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election, Evraz North America shows that Russians are also involved in pressing against one of Trump’s main campaign promises. The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Evraz Plc, Russia’s second-largest steelmaker. It has two factories in the U.S., in Colorado and Oregon, and four in western Canada, where it produces steel and large-diameter steel pipe. The company’s top shareholder is Roman Abramovich, a billionaire who owns 31 percent of Evraz’s stock. In 2005 he was the first oligarch allowed to sell his oil company to the state, taking in $13 billion in a deal approved by Vladimir Putin.
Abramovich’s ties to the Trumps stem from a decade-long friendship between Ivanka Trump and Abramovich’s wife, Dasha Zhukova, from whom he announced a separation in August. Jared Kushner and his brother, Joshua, invested in Zhukova’s art collection business. The Russian couple hosted Ivanka and Jared in Russia in 2014, when they shared a table at a fundraiser for Moscow’s Jewish museum. Zhukova went to the 2016 U.S. Open tennis tournament with Ivanka and attended Trump’s inauguration as Ivanka’s guest.
Dear Steel Country:
You voted for Donald Trump because he promised to make your mill towns and factory cities great again. You voted for him because he was going to make it so your kid, fresh out of high school, could make $90k a year busting his ass at a smelting plant and take pride in it, that you'd be proud of him, that you didn't have to spend $100,000 to get him through four years at Penn State or Michigan or Miami of Ohio for him to get a house and a good job that he could support a wife and kids with so she didn't have to work.
You also voted for him because he was going to send all those job-stealing Mexicans home and keep the blacks in line so that you could afford to send your youngest to Catholic school instead of the public high school with all those people in it. And maybe you could afford to move to a new place away from them and work for another 20 years and retire like your grandpa did when he put in his 35 at the GM plant in Hamtramck.
I'm here to tell you Donald Trump flat out lied to you. Not only did he lie to you, he sold you out to the goddamn Russians. He sold you out so that Putin's cronies could make pipelines using imported steel from Asia. That big infrastructure plan Trump has? It's a gift to the guys who really got him elected.
You got played for fools, but you had a choice and you made it.
Now we all have to live with the consequences of 2016.
The good news is you can help make it right in 2018 and 2020.
Think about it.
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