Photos of stillbirths due to Agent Orange by Hiroko Tanaka [Photoevidence]
I take Donald Trump at his word-- the words that issue from the white nationalist podium as well as the words he whispers behind closed doors, in private chambers, across a Mar-A-Lago table, on the golf course. As a self-styled entrepreneur of the image, Trump hires the best to manage his twitter flow, ensuring the right messaging signals are transmitted in the right language, with just the perfect coding.
Trump's mafia ties are old news.
His ties to Russian hustlers in the recent Soho deal were reported in-depth by Forbes.
His murky dealings with New Russians Felix Sager, Tevkif Arif, and Tamir Sapir are duly noted by Mike Lofgren.
The "Trump pipeline boom" is expected to play well with steel manufacturers and industrial donor bases. Made from all-American steel and all-American carnage,
As Steve Horn points out, however, TMK IPSCO, a massive producer of steel for U.S. oil country tubular goods (OCTG) and line pipe, and a subsidiary of TMKGroup, maintains an interesting relationship with Putin. According to DeSmog Blog:
TMK Group was incorporated in 2001, and in 2008, TMK IPSCO opened its doors as a U.S. subsidiary with a heavy focus on making oilfield pipes on behalf of companies performing hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) techniques in the Marcellus Shale basin located in the northeast U.S. TMK IPSCO, which has said it wants to be a direct competitor of U.S. Steel Corporation in the Marcellus, also makes steel for companies doing fracking in the Bakken Shale basin, located primarily in North Dakota.
TMK IPSCO's CEO, Piotr Galitzine has not been shy about his company's recent success in the Pennsylvania pipeline market, boasting of flourishing business with Moscow in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2015. The financial success is obvious. In 2013, TMK signed a deal with Orenburgneft, a Rosneft subsidiary, to provide the pipes needed to tap into that field. But the political implications of the TMK Board composition should raise all-American, populist eyebrows.
The New York Times also reported in 2000 that Chubais recruited Putin to come to Moscow in 1996 to begin working in politics, and soon thereafter Putin began overseeing the presidential decree process for Yeltsin. Chubais served as part of the “brain trust,” as Bloomberg Businessweek put it, for Putin's successful 2000 presidential campaign and Putin has been described by some as “Chubais' man.”
Aleksandr Shokhin, another TMK board member, heads up the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, the country's powerful business lobbying group. Shokhin formerly served on Putin's Public Chamber, an entity “tasked with personifying the public interest in supervising government, the Duma, media, and law enforcement,” as reported by the Christian Science Monitor.
A little more digging reveals that Sokhin has served as a C-SPAN "spokesman" for the Russian Embassy since 1991-- a fairly long career of representing Russian official interests in Washington.
Pass the palinka, please.
