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Trump Commerce Sec. Says Keystone XL Pipeline Will Use Foreign Steel

Trump Commerce Sec. Says Keystone XL Pipeline Will Use Foreign Steel

The Donald Trump administration’s Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, has been in office for less than a week and is already proving that Trump’s “buy America” slogan is all talk. Work on the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline has resumed and Ross confirmed today that the pipeline will be made out of primarily foreign steel.

Ross is no stranger to foreign steel himself. He invested in and sat on the board of international steel giant ArcelorMittal for a decade. During Obama’s second term in office, ArcelorMittal under Ross obsessively lobbied for completion of the Keystone XL. The company had already sold dozens of kilotons of steel to an Arkansas firm which welded the steel into pieces of the pipeline.

Under Trump’s ‘Made in America’ definition, this is not American pipeline. However, despite his criticisms of the Obama administration, the President appears perfectly happy to continue the project with foreign steel.

This is hardly unsurprising. Not only is a former steel magnate running the Department of Commerce, Trump has time and again proven that his talk of standing up for the little guy is just for show. Instead of “draining the swamp” in Washington D.C., Trump filled his cabinet with billionaires and bankers, people who he himself claimed are exploiting the system at the expense of everyday Americans.

An unnamed White House spokesperson gave this lame excuse to Politico: “The Keystone XL Pipeline is currently in the process of being constructed, so it does not count as a new, retrofitted, repaired or expanded pipeline.”

In other words, conman Trump was forced to exploit the fine print in his own rules. We will start respecting Trump when he starts actually putting America first, not selling out blue collar workers to the interests of his billionaire buddies.

Marisa Manfredo
Marisa completed her undergraduate degree in 2013 at the University of Wisconsin with a double major in creative writing and media studies. She is an advocate of progressive policies and focuses her interests on gender equality and preventing sexual and domestic violence.

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