Cement concrete

https://gregolear.substack.com/p/deconstructing-the-epstein-myth-what

...SK

Well, was looking at all of the criminals around Donald, and I had a head start with a piece of information that I had gotten in 2005—before there was even an imagination that this man would run for president. I think to the layman’s understanding, if you knew who Trump was, which people did, that he was political in any way, just maybe he had been and we learned that he had been.

In 2005, Trump had this new reality show with Mark Burnett. And so I had a circle of people that I knew. I’m a writer, screenwriter. So I knew folks in that circle with that man.

GO

Okay. Meaning Burnett.

SK

Yes, Burnett. And I had learned that Donald was in a tremendous amount of debt to some Russians. And it was threatening this new thing—this idea of him as this self-made, you know, billionaire, whatever, whatever the thing was, a successful businessman, because it was all about to crumble. And there’s been a tremendous amount of reporting since I learned that. Verifying all of that. So I had that information at the time, back in the day.

And so when he came down that escalator, I knew, I was like, “Oh no, that’s the guy that’s in debt to a bunch of Russian gangsters!” And so I started trying to figure out who those Russians may be. And then in doing that, I came across Jeffrey Epstein.

GO

Okay, interesting. So Trump to the Russians to Epstein.

## Tinker, Tailor, Mobster, Trump

Greg Olear

March 31, 2020

SK

Yeah, well, organized crime—specifically Russian organized crime. And then trying to understand Donald and Fred, Fred’s empire, his father’s empire, which was built with the Genovese crime family. And then the building of Trump Tower in Manhattan that moved in—they had different territory as Fred would call it, as Donald has said on the record—that Manhattan wasn’t. According to his father, “That’s not our territory,” because it wasn’t, it was Gambino territory. For Donald Trump specifically to be able to build in Manhattan, develop in Manhattan, Fred arranged for, and Roy Cohn arranged for, the two crime families, the Gambinos and the Genovese to form what became known as a concrete cartel—all the five families were in there. And this was the bid-rigging over concrete contacts to develop in Manhattan. And it was called “the Donald Trump deal.” And so that was in the middle of it, for those U.S. crime families and the racket they were running, which is this very racket that Giuliani used to prosecute the five families. So…

GO

Four of the five families.

SK

Four of the five families. Castellanos was a holdout and then was killed, shot dead in the street. So that’s the history.

There’s way more than that. During that time, before the Russian mafia had really taken over New York—which it did; it rolled in in the late 80s, some of it even back to the 70s, but very specifically in the 80s and the 90s and just sort of rolled up a lot of the territories as their own. And they did it by laundering money through Donald’s casinos. There was a lot of ways that they did all of that. There was a very prominent Russian gangster named Ivankov, who had actually an office in Trump Tower in Manhattan, but he was ultimately caught, tipped off and caught by Andy McCabe’s team.

Like when you start learning about these characters, of what they were doing back in the day, both on the law enforcement side pursuing Russian organized crime and from the Russian organized crime side—the bosses and the key figures there were all in business in some fashion with Donald Trump.

Then in the mid early 2000s to like 2005, 2006, right around when I was hearing this stuff about him, what was happening was the Russians were wanting to keep using Trump to go internationally. So the properties: Trump Panama developing and Trump Toronto developing and Trump Georgia developing and all of these foreign developments, which we were watching. If you watch “The Apprentice,” it unfolds on “The Apprentice” as well. This sort of expansion of the Trump thing where he was just licensing his name to be put on these things, because he was really over-leveraged.

Like the one in Georgia, the country Georgia—the Trump Tower there, all they did was just stick a shovel in the ground, and a whole bunch of money was laundered. There’s Trump Baku, which, you know, there was quite a bit of reporting how that was probably a front for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Again, Iran and their corruption very closely tied in with Russian organized crime as well.

GO

Right. Adam Davidson in the New Yorker.

SK

So that’s the background. That’s why the Trump/Russia thing is not a hoax. Donald is the hoax. You know, he did. And there’s so much reporting and Trump, the company, Allen Weisselberg, all those people, they affirm this, they said, “Yeah, yeah, we took that money.” The problem with it is some of it was illegal, but a lot of it’s not illegal, right?

He couldn’t get a casino license in Australia, infamously. They would not give him a casino license because of his ties to organized crime, both U.S. organized crime and Russian organized crime.

GO

So a major Five Eyes power decided that Trump couldn’t have a casino license because of his ties to organized crime—and specifically Russian organized crime. Let’s just underline that because it seems important. Australia is, as they say, a real country, you know—that is one of our strongest allies.

SK

Right. Right.

So how you get to Jeffrey is, there was a time in the 80s where Donald was really having issues, and he was sort of over-leveraging himself. He was building in Atlantic City. He was doing these things and couldn’t get them funded. He always had a problem getting the money because legitimate banks would stop lending to him, which was the crisis he was facing in the early 2000s, mid-2000s. There was Deutsche Bank, but even Deutsche Bank was turning him down, so he had to go for this Russian money. You could get Russian money, you could get Chinese money, and the Chinese money hadn’t quite showed up yet. But the gangsters will invest in you. So the banks were difficult.

Now part of the stuff that made it hard to get finding from U.S. banks is because of what happened with him in the 80s with Bear Stearns. So there’s a guy that ran Bear Stearns.

(This is all the reporting done by Wayne Barrett. And I recommend everybody go read Wayne Barrett’s work on Donald and Fred Trump and that sort of “Trump Inc.” He did extraordinary work on that. He also did great work on Giuliani and showing what sort of a criminal and a fraud Giuliani was. And it still is, I guess.)

So Ace Greenberg ran Bear Stearns. Bear Stearns is the company that infamously went down in 2008 with all the credit-default swaps, all that kind of stuff that just crashed—you know, the Big Shorttype of thing.

But before that, they were a real player—Bear and Lehman and these other entities. Goldman Sachs. And so Donald had a very close relationship with Ace Greenberg. Ace Greenberg is the man whose daughter was Jeffrey Epstein’s student when Jeffrey Epstein was at the Dalton School. And Epstein did whatever he did at the Dalton School to leverage his just being a math teacher and tutor at this private school into working directly for Ace Greenberg.

So he went into the financial industry at Bear Stearns. And he didn’t come in as a low-level person and work his way up. He came in at a very senior level, and it caused a great sort of upset at Bear Stearns. Who is this guy? Where is he coming from? And why is Ace giving him this plum spot?

And he was handling private wealth management. And his big client that he had, that Ace gave him, was Edgar Bronfman, who’s Sam Bronfman’s son. Sam Bronfman, he established Seagrams, and he was Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano’s business partner during the bootlegging days. And Edgar Bronfman has a lot of ties to Russia as well, quite frankly. And it’s his daughters that were part of that NXIVM thing. That’s how people recognize that name, Bronfman.

GO

He’s Canadian though, right? Sam Bronfman?

SK

Yes, he was Canadian. So that was part of the bootlegging thing. Yeah.

But that was Jeffrey’s client, and he got into difficulties and troubles there at Bear Stearns with that particular client managing, you know, and he basically had to be fired. And Ace really resisted firing Jeffrey. And what I uncovered and discovered was that he didn’t fire him. He just moved him into Offshores. Jeffrey went into establishing offshore accounts and offshore money, sort of tax havens for Bear Stearns clients.

sv350 921

senator Nancy Skinner's SB 27, which was signed into law by Newsom this week, will require agencies to design a framework/strategy to support carbon sequestration on natural and working lands, and a registry of projects.

Governor Newsom signed 24 environmental bills this week, including several of our priorities. While we can celebrate a few wins, we must also urge him to finish the job.

Senator Josh Becker's SB 596, signed on Thursday, is the first bill in the nation to directly target greenhouse gas emissions from cement, which is responsible for 7 precent of all global emissions. It's also the first provision in California law requiring any sector to achieve net-zero emissions.

While we were also excited to see SB 47 (Limón) become law so that idle and deserted wells are cleaned up, two complementary bills remain unsigned — AB 896 (Bennett) and SB 84 (Hurtado), critical components to ensure that remediation is paid for by the well owners.

yikes

Congressional Cement Caucus - Legislative Committee Detail Page

www.ciclt.net/sn/pol/poc_detail.aspx?P_ID=&ClientCode=masc&LegComID...

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

2.

:{:{Congressional Cement Caucus:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:. Room 1218 LHOB- Longworth House Office Building 15 Independence Avenue, SE Washington, DC 20515 202.225.4065 FAX: ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:[:{

| Federal Caucus Member | [Yoder, Kevin W.](http://www.ciclt.net/sn/pol/po_detail.aspx?P_ID=&ClientCode=masc&MemID=21910) | R-h03 | Overland Park |}:](https://www.google.com/search?q=related:www.ciclt.net/sn/pol/poc_detail.aspx%3FP_ID%3D%26ClientCode%3Dmasc%26LegComID%3D19983+Congressional+Cement+Caucus&tbo=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjcm5CA0YPdAhUCa60KHdJhANoQHzAAegQICxAF)

Cement Caucus | American Concrete Pavement Association

www.acpa.org/tag/cement-caucus/

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

1.

:{Feb 10, 2017 - The North American Concrete Alliance* met the :{Congressional Cement Caucus:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: in Washington, D.C., on February 5 to present a briefing on the ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

Congress Has a Caucus for Everything - The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/04/congress-caucus-for.../360894/

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

2.

:{Apr 18, 2014 - Reading through lists of caucuses that members of Congress ... niche (the Congressional Gaming Caucus, the :{Congressional Cement Caucus:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

Caucuses of the United States Congress - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucuses_of_the_United_States_Congress

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

2.

:{A :{congressional:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: caucus is a group of members of the United States :{Congress:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: that meets to ...:{Cement Caucus:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:; Climate Solutions Caucus; :{Congressional:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: 21st Century Skills Caucus;:{Congressional:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Access to Civil Legal Service Caucus ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

===

https://www.opensecrets.org/jfc/summary.php?id=C00618371

2019 519

2016

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http://www.ecowatch.com/carbon-capture-india-baking-soda-2177070984.html

good news?

dicaprio

...Carbon Clean Solutions is not the first company to attempt to commercialize a process to convert CO2 emissions into commercially marketable products.

In 2012, a U.S. startup named Skyonicraised $9 million from investors to build a plant to convert carbon emissions from a cement plant in San Antonio, Texas. The investors included ConocoPhilips, BP and PVS Chemicals. The facility opened in October 2014 at the Capitol Aggregates plant and became operational in January 2016. Outputs include baking soda, bleach and hydrochloric acid.

Skyonic has said that, at full capacity, the plant will be able to capture 75,000 tons annually of CO2. The company claims that its process uses 30 percent less energy than more common carbon capture technologies. The plant was financed with the aid of a $28 million award under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

California-based Blue Planet produces concrete and other building materials from sequestered CO2. The company says its concrete can be carbon neutral or carbon negative. Climate activist and actor Leonardo DiCaprio is a member of the firms' government affairs advisory board.

...

The company captures industrial carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and factories and transforms it into concrete materials. Photo credit: Blue Planet

Brent Constantz, Blue Planet’s founder and CEO, said in a statement on the formation of the advisory board: “Bringing these leaders together to advise the company will guide our important initiatives with world governments. We encourage policies that promote carbon mitigation technology on a massive scale. We welcome the expertise, passion and unique platforms that Leo, Daniel and Durwood bring to the company. I look forward to working closely with them.”

DiCaprio—who urges a "transition to a clean energy economy that does not rely on fossil fuels"—is a powerful advocate for environmental action. In September 2015, DiCaprio pledged to divest from fossil fuels as part of the Divest Invest Coalition, which encourages business leaders to divest from fossil fuels and in businesses that contribute to climate change and to invest in environmentally conscious companies instead.

Oscar-nominee and environmental philanthropist Leonardo DiCaprio has joined the newly-formed government and policy advisory board of Blue Planet, a prominent developer of carbon capture technology based in Los Gatos, California....

It's safe to say *The Revenant* star knows a thing or two about carbon capture. According to the announcement, DiCaprio made a personal investment in Blue Planet and produced last year's documentary film Biomimicry, which covered carbon capture technologies, including those developed by the company. Watch here (starts at 7:50):

==

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cemex

mercury pr

Recent history (2006-)

In November 2006, an American embassy cable released via Wikileaks listed Cemex among "Mexico's monopolists", with a market share of 87.6%; its competitorHolcim Apasco was listed with a market share of 12.4%.^[9]

Shortly after the apparent finalization of the Rinker deal on 2007, the United States Department of Justice brought an antitrust lawsuit against CEMEX, blocking the acquisition.^[10] After a lengthy process, CEMEX complied with regulators by divesting (selling) 40+ cement and concrete plants formerly part of itself or Rinker, essentially devaluing the initial deal.^[11]

In April 2008, the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, announced the nationalization of "the whole cement industry" in that country, in response to the belief that the industry was exporting its products in order to receive prices above those it was allowed within the country.^[12] In mid-2008 the Venezuelan government took over the Venezuelan operations of CEMEX, the largest Venezuelan producer with around a 50% market share; a deal on compensation was still to be reached in March 2009,^[13]despite agreements being reached in mid-2008 with the other two major cement producers.^[14] In December 2011, an agreement was reached, with Cemex receiving $600m in compensation, and benefiting from the cancellation of $154m in debt.^[15]

After having problems with the Mexican peso devaluation of 2008, including problems with derivatives,^[16][17] CEMEX had to rethink its international standings to decrease debt and avoid a default. In June 2009, CEMEX sold its Australian operations to Holcim for A$ 2.2 billion (US$1.75 billion) helping refinance its US$14 billion debt, which partly was due to the acquisition, two years earlier, of the Rinker Group.^[18]

In December 2010, DOL Resolves Employee Back Wage Case With CEMEX - The U.S. Department of Labor announced the filing of a consent judgment in a case against CEMEX Inc. and the recovery of $1,514,449 in overtime back wages for 1,705 current and former ready-mix drivers who worked in eight states.