Ignores Rust Belt
America’s Rust Belt is a region made up of Northeastern states, the Great Lakes and Midwest sates; it’s an industrial manufacturing area suffering due to a lack of projects and the unemployment rate is high. Trump often speaks of the area and the battleground states it holds, telling workers in the Rust Belt that only he can fight the exportation of jobs to overseas companies, in particular Chinese companies.
Turns out Trump companies are among those that are ignoring the Rust Belt and exporting jobs by purchasing in China. Newsweek reports that 2 of 3 recent major Trump building projects spent millions and millions of dollars overseas buying steel and aluminum from Chinese companies.
The Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, opening in 2008, was built using Chinese steel. It took Newsweek reporter Kurt Eichenwald a considerable amount of digging to find out all the facts because they are “hidden within a chain of various corporate entities, including holding companies registered in the British Virgin Islands.”
Eichenwald learned Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas turned to the Chinese holding company Ossen Innovation Co., which has had various other names, to get cheaper steel from China. Millions went to China and the communist government there takes some of that money to “provide financing to companies that are competitors to American manufacturers in other industries.”
A similar thing occurred during the building of the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago, opening in 2009. Newsweek found that Trump got financing from the Deutsche Bank and hedge funds financed in part by the controversial George Soros, generally regarded as an enemy to Trump’s Republican Party.
U.S. Aluminum industry woes
Trump’s Chicago hotel project “required tons of aluminum” but instead of working out a deal in his own country, Trump “elected not to purchase the metal from Alcoa or any other similar American producer, but instead turned to a subsidiary of a Chinese aluminum manufacturer.”
American businesses turning overseas to buy aluminum for their U.S. projects has put the aluminum industry in their country on life-support and it is in danger of collapsing. “Aluminum smelters in states like Ohio, West Virginia and Texas have closed as a result of being undercut on price by competition from overseas,” Eichenwald wrote.
The story notes that on Trump’s Chicago project alone, U.S. companies lost out on $350 million in business that instead went to China. It is unclear how many other Trump manufacturing projects went overseas for material and how often he uses foreign labor for his projects but that number is high. Even his line of clothing is made overseas.
To date, Trump’s campaign has declined to comment on the story.
