TheReal_ND wrote:This smells like complete bullshit but if true I am going to disavow him.
The US doesn't use infrastructure pipe from anywhere east of Zelzalouraine. Or something like that. WWII hangover. That's a Polish company btw.
I have never ever seen Chinese pipe sold in any of the mills I work at. Some customers explicitly state no Chinese steel. Moot point anyway, we never stock it. Korean steel is a problem because they sell it ten cents on the dollar. Luckily USS imposes heavy tariffs on them. Again, moot point. Serious businesses, not counting BP here, want quality pipe. ASME or API standards. Those come from Lourain or USS. Lourain is another WWII holdover.
Been sitting on this for a while waiting for the climate to change....pop goes the bubble
https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/02/13/a ... e-xl-steel
Story comes with added bonus of links to Russia
Plus a little cronyism thrown in for good measure.Believe it or not, there's a key connection to Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, in the fight over North America's controversial Keystone XL pipeline.
One of President Donald Trump’s first actions in office was to sign an executive order on January 24 expediting the approval of the Keystone XL. Owned by TransCanada, this tar sands oil pipeline was halted by former President Barack Obama in November 2015. Trump signed another order on January 24, calling for steel for U.S. pipelines to be made in the U.S. to the “maximum extent possible,” and two days later TransCanada filed a new presidential permit application for Keystone XL with the U.S. Department of State.
Critics, such as John Kemp of Reuters, pounced on the caveat language in Trump’s steel order and noted that it appears “designed to preserve lots of wiggle-room.” In fact, a DeSmog investigation reveals that much of the steel for Keystone XL has already been manufactured and is sitting in a field in rural North Dakota.
DeSmog has uncovered that 40 percent of the steel created so far was manufactured in Canada by a subsidiary of Evraz, a company 31-percent owned by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, who is a close ally of Putin and a Trump family friend. Evraz has also actively lobbied against provisions which would mandate that Keystone XL's steel be made in the U.S.
Abramovich is described in the 2004 book Abramovich: The Billionaire from Nowhere by British journalists Dominic Midgley and Chris Hutchins as “one of the prime movers behind the establishment of the only political party that was prepared to offer its undiluted support to Putin when he fought his first presidential election in late 1999. When Putin needed a shadowy force to act against his enemies behind the scenes, it was Abramovich whom he could rely on to prove a willing co-conspirator.”
Evraz describes itself as “among the top steel producers in the world based on crude steel production of 14.3 million tonnes in 2015.”
DeSmog's findings comes as Trump is under scrutiny from Congress, U.S. intelligence agencies, and others for his personal and presidential campaign team's ties to Russia. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded in January that Russian state-sponsored actors had hacked into the email databases of both the Democratic National Committee and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's campaign in order to influence the election in favor of Trump.
Ivanka Trump, the daughter of President Donald Trump, maintains her own ties to Abramovich. Ivanka’s circle of friends includes Dasha Zhukova, the wife of Abramovich.
Jake Sherman, a reporter for Politico, tweeted that Zhukova attended Trump’s presidential inauguration at the invitation of Ivanka. The two have appeared in public on several occasions, most recently during the U.S. Open tennis tournament, which Ivanka attended with her husband and top Trump aide, Jared Kushner.
Also sitting with them in the stands at the U.S. Open was Zhukova’s friend, model Karlie Kloss, who is dating Jared Kushner’s brother, Joshua Kushner. Zhukova, as it turns out, was a donor to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, giving $2,700 to the campaign and another $33,400 to the Democratic National Committee for its 2016 electoral efforts.
Zhukova's father is Alexander Zhukov, a Russian oil magnate.
