KelleyKramer
KelleyKramer's JournalHow a Trump SoHo Partner Ended Up With Toxic Mining Riches From Kazakhstan
This is a long read, there are a lot of dots to connect. Amazing how many of Trumps crooked connections lead back to Russian dirty money............
How a Trump SoHo Partner Ended Up With Toxic Mining Riches From Kazakhstan
The long road from the old Soviet republic to the offshore financial centers of the Caribbean to London—and all the way to a partner in Midtown Manhattan's Trump SoHo.
(From left) Eric Trump, Tevfik Arif, Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump attend the Trump SoHo press conference at the construction site on Sept. 19, 2007.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-01-11/how-a-trump-soho-partner-ended-up-with-toxic-mining-riches-from-kazakhstan
All of this starts at the Aktyubinsk Chromium Chemicals Plant (AZXS), a Nikita Khrushchev-era complex. It shares an industrial zone with a vast smelting plant; together, they have yielded lavish private wealth since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In one sense, it’s a familiar snapshot of post-Soviet capitalism: state assets bought for a song, workers saying they were cheated out of shares and connected businessmen getting wildly rich.
This story, however, carves a path from near Kazakhstan’s northern border with Russia to the offshore financial centers of the Caribbean, to London and all the way to Trump property in Midtown Manhattan. How and why funds from former Soviet states flowed into Trump-branded real estate has been the focus of speculation since the start of the 2016 presidential campaign. One theory, propounded by opponents of President Donald Trump is that his admiration for Russia’s Vladimir Putin comes down to money, a suggestion Trump has forcefully denied.
Still, Special Counsel Robert Mueller is digging into Trump’s business dealings, and the scramble for Kazakhstan’s chromium riches may fill in a piece of that puzzle. Company records, court filings and interviews in Kazakhstan and London suggest millions of dollars from the Aktobe plant wound their way to the U.S. and a development company with which Trump partnered to build a controversial Trump SoHo hotel-condominium complex in Manhattan.
It was on the 24th floor of Trump Tower that Kazakh businessman Tevfik Arif, a key figure in Aktobe chromium, established Bayrock Group LLC. The plant passed millions of dollars to Bayrock, which organized financing for the Trump SoHo high-rise that Trump once hailed as a “work of art.” Earlier last month, Trump Soho’s new owner bought the Trump Organization out of its management contract for the project.
MUCH more on the link-
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-01-11/how-a-trump-soho-partner-ended-up-with-toxic-mining-riches-from-kazakhstan
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A neighborhood book store responds to Trumps shithole remarks .......
I thought this was well played ...............
https://twitter.com/CelticWombat/status/952748129840869376
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Broken staircases and spoiled food: Florida health inspectors failed Trumps Mar-a-Lago
Trump said he would run the US government the way he runs his businesses ...........
Broken staircases and spoiled food: Florida health inspectors failed Trump’s Mar-a-Lago
http://www.rawstory.com/2018/01/broken-staircases-and-spoiled-food-florida-health-inspectors-failed-trumpa-mar-a-lago/
Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump’s exclusive club in Palm Beach, required emergency repairs in order to pass a November inspection by Florida health inspectors, the Miami Herald reports.
On November 8th, the so-called “Winter White House” was cited for “the lack of smoke detectors capable of alerting the hearing impaired through flashing bright lights; and slabs of concrete missing from a staircase, exposing steel rebar that could cause someone to fall.”
There were also food-safety violations discovered.
“The November inspections of the club’s two main kitchens, meanwhile, yielded a total 15 violations,” the Miami Herald reported. “Among the no-nos was the staff’s failure to track the freshness of potentially hazardous foods, including curry sauce dated Oct. 21 pulled from a freezer and improperly marked, milk stored at 49 degrees instead of the safe temperature of 41 degrees, and cases of hot dogs stored on the ground of the walk-in freezer.”
This was the second time Trump’s club has been cited during his presidency.
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Alaska crushes record for hottest December as Arctic sea ice hits record low
Alaska crushes record for hottest December as Arctic sea ice hits record low"We are the U.S.'s canary in that coal mine."
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https://thinkprogress.org/alaska-hottest-december-1e4effce0ad1/?utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_content=5a59925c19694a000817f60c&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter
In its hottest December ever recorded, Alaska was a stunning 15.7°F above the 20th century average. And the year ended with Arctic sea ice hitting an all-time record low.
While the East Coast had a cool December and New Year’s week, Alaska baked. Last Tuesday, Anchorage hit 48°F, warmer than southern cities from Atlanta and Jacksonville to Houston and New Orleans.
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The Arctic as a whole was so warm in December that Arctic sea ice set a new end-of-year record low, as both the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) reported.
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Unfortunately for the rest of the globe, what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic. Arctic amplification drives more extreme weather in North America, while accelerating the defrosting of the carbon-rich permafrost, releasing carbon dioxide and methane that each cause faster warming — a dangerous amplifying feedback.
More on the link
https://thinkprogress.org/alaska-hottest-december-1e4effce0ad1/?utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_content=5a59925c19694a000817f60c&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter
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Best cable news chyron of the year so far .....
https://twitter.com/nycjayjay/status/952041403168821248
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Trumps 2,000 Lies A Documentary ... Happy Lie 2k Everybody!
There is a 1:30 min. monologue and then the docu starts .......
Trump’s 2,000 Lies – A Documentary
Donald Trump reached a major milestone according to the Washington Post by telling his two-thousandth lie since taking office. Telling two thousand lies is an unprecedented achievement in Presidential history, so tonight we look back at his many prevarications with a new mini-documentary that shows us how we got to this remarkable moment in misrepresentation.
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Darrell Issa Is Retiring, Just Like Everyone Else. Record number of House GOPers have already quit
Darrell Issa Is Retiring, Just Like Everyone ElseA record number of House Republicans have already thrown in the towel.
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http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/01/darrell-issa-is-retiring-just-like-everyone-else/
Democrats’ path to retaking the House just got a little bit easier. Again. On Wednesday, longtime California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa announced that he would retire from Congress rather than seek re-election this fall. Issa’s departure brings the number of GOP retirements from the House to 30—a record for the party—and comes just two days after another embattled Southern Californian, Rep. Ed Royce, announced his own departure. It is a gift to Democrats who had already put Issa’s district near the top of their list of 2018 targets, and who came within 1,621 votes of toppling the former car-alarm magnate in 2016.
After Trump’s election, progressive activists had made a special target of Issa. They did so both because of his newfound vulnerability—Issa’s affluent suburban district, like others in Orange County and the Atlanta and Houston areas, was one of those places where long-suffering Democrats made substantial gains in 2016—and because his notoriety. Issa cultivated a reputation as a partisan attack dog as chairman of the House oversight committee and took the lead in publicizing Obama-era scandals, such as Fast and Furious. His 49th district has become a hub for “Resistance” groups; just one day before Issa announced he would not seek re-election, a San Diego Indivisible chapter held a retirement party for the congressman outside one of his district offices.
With the retirements of Issa and Royce, two of the so-called “California Seven”—Republican members of Congress from Golden State districts won by Hillary Clinton—have now thrown up a white flag. It’s your move, Dana Rohrabacher.
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Report: As Overture To Putin, Trump NSC Official Proposed Withdrawing US Troops
Report: As Overture To Putin, Trump NSC Official Proposed Withdrawing US Troops
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/white-house-official-proposed-withdrawal-us-troops-baltics
A top official on the National Security Council last year proposed withdrawing some U.S. forces from the Baltics in an effort to please Vladimir Putin, the Daily Beast reported Tuesday.
Two former administration officials told the publication that Kevin Harrington, a deputy assistant to President Donald Trump for strategic planning, pitched the plan to remove or reposition some U.S. forces stationed in Eastern Europe in February 2017.
Though Harrington’s proposal never came to fruition, it represented a remarkable pivot from decades of U.S. foreign policy. One former NSC colleague, speaking to the Beast, called it a “gesture to the Kremlin that would enable the nascent Trump administration to see if its desire for a friendly relationship with Russia would be reciprocated.”
U.S. forces have been stationed throughout Europe since the Cold War as a counter-weight to Russia, and were detailed to the Baltics after the 2014 annexation of Crimea.
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This is how coal dies- super cheap renewables plus battery storage
This is how coal dies — super cheap renewables plus battery storageNew Colorado wind farms with batteries are now cheaper than running old coal plants
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https://thinkprogress.org/colorado-wind-batteries-cheap-12e82b91a543/?utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_content=5a570ef704d301081a68e358&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter
Solar, wind, and battery prices are dropping so fast that, in Colorado, building new renewable power plus battery storage is now cheaper than running old coal plants. This increasingly renders existing coal plants obsolete.
Two weeks ago, Xcel Energy quietly reported dozens of shockingly low bids it had received for building new solar and wind farms, many with battery storage (see table below). The median bid price in 2017 for wind plus battery storage was $21 per megawatt-hour, which is 2.1 cents per kilowatt-hour. As Carbon Tracker noted, this “appears to be lower than the operating cost of all coal plants currently in Colorado.”
The median bid price for solar plus battery storage was $36/MWh (3.6 cents/kwh), which may be lower than about three-fourths of operating coal capacity. For context, the average U.S. residential price for electricity is 12 cents/kWh.
Note that by definition, half of the bids are below the median price — and there were 87 bids for solar plus storage, meaning many bids were quite low (see table above). There were 96 bids for wind power alone — at a median price of 1.8 cents/kwh — which means some were very low-priced indeed. The tremendous number of bids in Colorado reveal the power of competition in driving prices down.
More on the link..
https://thinkprogress.org/colorado-wind-batteries-cheap-12e82b91a543/?utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_content=5a570ef704d301081a68e358&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter
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MSNBC The Last Word - this is the best Wolff interview I have seen, Wow ....
Sounds like there is a lot more in this book that we haven't heard about ....
Wolff: President Trump Has Probably Spent His Whole Day Watching Me On TV | The Last Word | MSNBC
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