President Trump signed an executive order requiring all new pipelines in the United States to use US-produced steel products. This was part of his campaign pledge to bring jobs back to America. However, the White House has now announced that the disastrous Keystone XL Pipeline will be exempt from this order, so they can purchase cheaper, lower-quality steel from overseas. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.
Transcript of the above video:
Donald Trump campaigned on the promise to bring back American jobs. He said both on the campaign trail and since becoming President that any new oil pipeline in this country or any pipeline being repaired or retrofitted was going to be made with US steel, so that those jobs, those steel manufacturing jobs in America were secured. Here we are, beginning of March, and he has already backtracked on that promise. The White House announced this week that the Keystone XL Pipeline is going to be exempt from Donald Trump’s executive order mandating that any pipeline in this country be built with US steel. The Keystone XL Pipeline does not have to buy their steel from the United States. They’re allowed to go buy cheaper, lower quality steel from elsewhere in the world, steel that most likely won’t hold up to par when this pipeline is finally finished.
Here’s the thing, The White House is telling us that the reason the Keystone XL Pipeline is exempt from this executive order is because the executive order only talks about new, or retrofitted, or repaired or additions. Since the Keystone XL Pipeline was already under construction, they don’t have to obey by those rules. When you campaign on a promise to use American steel, to use American labor and then immediately after a month and a half backtrack on that promise for one of the largest projects in construction in the United States today, you’re basically a con man. I hope that all of those steelworkers, all of the manufacturing workers in this country that voted for Donald Trump understand that. You were conned by Donald Trump like so many others in the past have been.
Donald Trump doesn’t care about American jobs. He doesn’t care about keeping money in the United States economy. He just wants to do basically whatever the hell it is he wants to do. That’s what he’s doing with this disgusting, destructive Keystone XL Pipeline. Forget for a minute that they’re not even going to use US steel. Let’s talk about the fact that we don’t even need this stupid pipeline. It’s going to go from Canada down to the Gulf Coast, so that TransCanada can sell oil and natural gas on the overseas market. This is not American energy. This is not anything that’s going to benefit American citizens. It’s a Canadian company trying to make more money by poisoning the environment here in the United States.
There is no reason why we should allow this to happen, yet Donald Trump has signed off on it. It’s going to be constructed. It’s going to be constructed with low quality, foreign materials, so that we can pretty much ensure that we’re going to have some leaks in this pipeline. As anybody who has followed the pipeline since it’s early days understands, there will not be inspections of this pipeline. A keyhole leak that is able to leak hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil would not be detected or could flow undetected for at least three weeks. Their maximum oversight of this is that once a month or so, they’re going to have flyovers to make sure they don’t see any visible oil on the surface of the land. Forget about the oil that’s seeping into the water, the aquifers, things like that. We’re just going to make sure it’s not coming up to the top where people can see it.
The pipeline is a bad idea. Telling them that they don’t have to use US production to make it is a bad idea. There is nothing about this pipeline that is going to benefit the United States. Donald Trump knows that. Every Republican knows that. TransCanada knows that, and they’re still going forward with it any way. They sold you a barrel of lies along the way to get the American public to go along with it.
