#askwarren -Has @gatesfoundation's funding of media partners succeeded in concealing his & your DAPL investment from the current boycott campaign?
"Gates' funding of media and influence over public dialogue" - Humanosphere
Considering that Warren Buffett's largesse in Berkshire Hathway shares is reponsible for 58% of Gates Foundation's portfolio at $10.74 billion, and $1.69 billion of this is proportionately invested in Berkshire Hathway's 5th largest holding of $6.8 billion in Phillips 66, (who has a 25% stake in the Dakota Accesss Pipeline), -considering there is a international boycott of 17 banks for loaning credit to the maximal of between $500 and $600 million (one of these, Wells Fargo (which it so happens Warren Buffett has majority control of at $28 billion), has been penalized by the City of Seattle $3 billion dollars) -it seems almost astonishing that no one launched anything similar to boycott those profiting directly from the DAPL's development with far higher stakes.
That is, until you realize that Gates Foundation media manages a huge spectrum of our most respectable media outlets in terms of media partnerships, funding many mainstream outlets directly. We do not know how many or how much. We do know they include The Guardian's Global Development section:
Gates Foundation also funds the New York Times, the Seattle Times, NPR's global health beat and NBC.
We have examples of the extent which some of these partners have performed story control (and even comment censorship) to hide Bill Gates' and Buffett's connection to the oil by rail bomb trains that were going off, specifically with the New York Times:
"BNSF and its fracking holding company, Burlington Resources, figure prominently in this New York Times’ expose dated November, 2014. Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway (BNSF) belongs to Berkshire Hathaway. At $44 billion it was the largest acquisition in Berkshire Hathaway’s history, which would be common knowledge to anyone in the NYT readership with a memory, but was a curiously omitted fact in the above expose on state corruption in the Bakken five years later.
The expose delineates pay to play collusion involving the then current North Dakota Governor and state officials (the director of mineral resources) with the oil and gas industry with respects to mineral rights (i.e., fracking rights, helpful hint: mineral rights trump surface rights), which BNSF had originally owned through land it had been historically awarded including those rights. When they sold off surface tracts of land in North Dakota, they were not selling the mineral rights. Those rights “were managed by its energy company, Burlington Resources.” Burlington Resources was sold to Conoco Phillips for $36.5 billion. The NYT article does not provide the crucial purchase date, but this does (Feb. 1, 2006), so it was a Conoco Phillips entity when this corruption scandal transpired (by three years), a date of transaction curiously omitted by the NYT that was pretty essential for clarification. Incidentally Phillips 66 was created and spun off from this parent company in 2012, meaning Conoco Phillips investors received two Phillips 66 shares for every Conoco Phillips share they owned."
"Gates and Buffett both got into oil by rail nigh simultaneously, -after touring the Alberta (Athabasca) tar sands in 2008. The tar sands tour article mentions that in 2006 Buffett was notably invested in Conoco Phillips, which means his hands weren’t entirely clean of what went down in North Dakota with the Burlington Resources subsidiary (owned by Conoco Phillips when BNSF sold it)."
"The NYT expose had a Part 1, depicting how oil and gas resource industry was an old-school regulatory douche-nozzle we normally identify as structured unbridled corruption with ghastly spill rates, (precisely the sort of situation completely ripe for an explosive protest with the level of ineptitude just waiting to blow), accompanied by the above Part 2 pointing out the level of corruption that is legally structured into state governance around oil resources in North Dakota, as well as a history of connective issue informing us that these are more or less the same corporate players. The most salient point is that NYT would make no mention of Warren Buffett’s ownership of BNSF or lend any clarification with regards to its subsidiary, Burlington Resources although this would have indicated it avoided a direct conflict of interest on the part of the companies and himself. The basis for this became clear with the fact that NYT pointedly omitted on its description that the photograph of a charred skeleton of an train engine from a rail explosion outside of Casselton, ND, was a BNSF train. If you avoided the train was BNSF’s, the query of conflict of interest would not even arise at all for those who didn’t already know that. They certainly weren’t bringing up who owned it to those not in the know of their readership, and that was the priority."
"NYT’s photo of the charred shell of an train engine whose company they wouldn’t name makes a picturesque omission that should have been worth a thousand words, or could have easily held the potential for a Part 3; -the trace remnant of a BNSF train that exploded near the governor’s birthplace of Casselton, ND (with such fierceness that the town had to be evacuated). In fact it was BNSF’s first Bakken oil train explosion, and it was truly spectacular. However these were not new. The first explosion of fracked product out of Bakken immolated the town center of Lac-Megantic along with 47 people. Homes were burned from the inside out while “fire erupted from water pipes, drains and sewers'".
"While there was obvious negligence at fault (brakes not set properly on a single engineer run train at the top of a hill) and these problems increased, rather than decreased in Canada afterwards) -this was clearly not simply the problem as evidenced by the barest of timelines offered by Sightline, which marks the BNSF train at Casselton as the third such explosion."
"The third explosion in the rail accident chronology by BNSF outside of Casselton stands apart for one thing, it brought about a report by Truthout that all trains out of Bakken were being permitted to carry highly volatile VOC’s, alleged by non-corporate testing of the Bakken product to easily range between 30% and 40% of the product. (Casselton got the undivided attention of Mark Ruffalo.) Also, those in receivership of BNSF Bakken trains had to obtain “special conditions” permits, requiring them to “flare-off” the dangerous VOCs before barging them down a river, the Mississippi. This wasn’t your usual crude. (The article doesn’t even mention the obvious potential of residual methane, which in fracking operations was being flared off all the time.) The permit process showed that those in receivership knew the volatility as they were required to treat the product, which means so did the shippers. What was AWOL was Federal regulation of the product out of North Dakota, and this was because volatility equated with profitability, especially with respects to jet fuel.
At this threshold the salient point to be derived from the New York Times expose on the prior coexistence of BNSF and their spin-off Burlington Resources becomes very clear. BNSF had a subsidiary dealing in this product that was more than likely offloaded at the right time to prevent any conflict of interest being thrown into relief by a subsequent explosion, a situation that would would have surely made it liable, whereas after Casselton, Buffett was campaigning for the equivalent insurance exceptions as nuclear power plants, despite a record of 721 safety violations in North Dakota alone since 2006. After all, you cannot obtain such exemptions in the face of such a record when you can in no way have claimed ignorance after 47 people got immolated, which you could not when the same company that ships the product has an existing subsidiary fracking the product. By the point of purchase of BNSF, Buffett was in the clear of such a glaring direct conflict of interest. Nonetheless there is no way those responsible for shipping product out of Bakken could have been any more naive than those in receivership who were being regulated to treat the contents for volatility, and even if one could have laid claim to ignorance, after the second conflagration in Alabama, there was really no question anymore. Really there should have been no question after Lac-Megantic, but strike 3, you’re out. The BNSF Casselton explosion resulted in a nigh instantaneous safety classification alert by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA). Canadian pipeline corporations immediately followed suite.
Yet rail companies continued to insist on not even upgrading their tanker cars, as well as one engineer per train after 47 dead, (which has met with consistent resistance). BNSF was spearheading continual lobbying efforts against safety regulation, -including against upgrading the braking system to ECP (electronically controlled pneumatic braking system), right up to the present day.
Buffett himself needed no more hints after Casselton, he diversified into a subsidiary pipeline company of Phillips 66 within 24 hours, whose specialty was "lubricating oil's movement through pipelines, increasingly crucial for the industry to move both tar sands crude and oil obtained via hydraulic fracturing ('fracking') in an efficient manner." At that point he was already invested in Phillips 66 to the tune of 27 million shares. This article cites shipment of Bakken crude by BNSF at 'over 1 million barrels per day'."
"Before Lac-Megantic, the Bakken oil trains had been labeled with the wrong hazard class in Canada, one that gave no warning of their explosiveness. They were classified the same as regular crude."
Practically the biggest rail shipper of Bakken "oil" is BNSF.
Furthermore, the New York Times would not permit anyone to comment on the #bombtrains with respects to either Buffett's ownership of BNSF or Bill Gates' majority control of CN, when they were exploding just as frequently due to the shipment of tar sands cut 30% with "diluent" -called in short form "dilbit" which means it's cut that amount with natural gas combined with the toxilogical cocktail that goes into fracking the product, making it nigh par for the danger.
"Two reports have reached a consensus of 14 such headline accidents by multiple carriers, whereas Sightline lists eleven. In the instance of the Gogoma ON oil train fire mentioned by all three, that was in fact the fifth derailment in Ontario alone for that year (in less than three months) of just CN trains. There were more (of just CN trains for that period) in other provinces, actually seven additional derailments, five in Canadian provinces, and two more in the US. This article on the second oil train accident/fire listed in Sightline’s timeline in Alabama mentions another one in Alberta. By the time of the Timmins ON derailment (and massive fire), that was the third such derailment in less than a month."
"The article that cleared this one up is referring to the fifth oil by rail accident on Sightline’s timeline, the Timmins Ontario CN fire, which was dilbit (as was the ninth listed (CN) rail accident fire at Gogoma ON). In fact the volatility of tar sands with diluent, while not quite as explosive as Bakken product, was certainly as volatile and produced burns that lasted for days, -so volatile that it was just as explosion prone in the newly issued CPC-1232 tank cars brought in to replace the vulnerable DOT-111’s that weren’t designed for oil transport."
"Transporting Tar Sands 'As Dangerous' As Shale Oil" - Oil Change International
Further complicating the issue, while there was always an interest in flaring off the additives that originated in the Bakken "crude" (or they could be subject to pre-treatment if anyone cared), diluent was added to tar sands bitumen to make it in any way viable in the first place, and it was exploding in Ontario at minus 40 degrees Celcius, -not that the shippers had in any way cared about the potential danger, just getting the product to market. The above article showed that the question of how much diluent was required to treat bitumen for rail transport was in fact redundant. It was being shipped by pipeline to rail terminals."
"Obama Approves Major Border-Crossing Fracked Gas Pipeline Used to Dilute Tar Sands" -Truthout - it's a Kinder Morgan pipeline, and it shows fracked gas is shipped directly to the tar sands operation in order to cut the bitumen with "condensate" (or diluent) 30% to move it through pipeline.
"This means the diluent cut was knowingly, irrefutably high and irrefutably dangerous, and no one at CN, BNSF or any of the rail carriers was concerned about the all too obvious danger of it exploding, or the potential of spills into waterways during shipment (a doubly proven potential due to the explosions that had already taken place due to the same level of VOC content out of Bakken). Such rail acccidents, (which are more or less permanent in their ramifications where human timelines are concerned) had to have the danger made irrefutably clear in inflicted consequences. Only when subject to backlash by the general public and binational #bombtrains campaigns was reform even prompted, which has altered the present mode of operations in no manner whatsoever (those changes in the offing are still put off into the interminable future whereas those introduced have not worked). But that didn't prevent their threat from being callously used by our very own neoliberal Prime Minister to pacify the Canadian public into accepting pipelines they did not want, in order to make the tar sands commercially viable and ready for shipment internationally and thereby turn Canada into the greatest per capita GHG emitter on the planet, all for export (Phillips 66 makes mention again as having US refinery terminals in receivership).
In light of this (inevitably explosive) development, not only was Buffett’s acquisition of stock in the Phillips 66 subsidiary, Phillips Specialty Products, pivotal, it already looked like they’d proven incapable of the job. It was either that or it was impossible to do the job safely. While the constraint to oil by rail was making money hand over fist for everyone involved, something had to give, and that give was to transition to pipeline. But that did not mean the abandonment of Buffett’s original strategy, either, which was to divert and attenuate the environmental climate movement and use them to prevent the Keystone XL and maximize the oil by rail profit boom."
"At this point it should be brought into the record that Bill Gates has the majority investment stake in CN (Canadian National Railway), and it is the Gates Foundation Trust portfolio’s third largest investment (it was second in 2015). His total investment is very close to the maximal investment permitted under the rules of CN’s privatization. As a total investment (after the 28,000% increase in oil by rail shipment out of Canada in only four years), it was Bill Gates’ second biggest milk cow after Microsoft in 2013, thanks to a 34% share increase that year."
"The year Bill Gates was raking in his peak oil by rail profits (2013) 'just happened' to be the same year that US records showed that rail related oil spills were more frequent in that one year than had occurred in the four decades prior, (bear in mind CN transports in the US), -and accidents at CN’s newly acquired (and thereby privatized) BC Rail went up 21%. US rail clocked in 88 oil by rail accidents for 2013 while oil by rail in the US “increased by 423 percent between 2011 and 2012 and in 2013 had surpassed 400,000 rail carloads per year.” CN used backed to work legislation on its workers seven times, who were suffering from exhaustion and genuinely worried about safety. Rail on both sides of the border prioritized oil by rail to the point that grain transport was severely constrained. (Ranchers on Vancouver Island were three days away from having no grain for their cattle during a year with a 60% grain surplus, a boom crop that sat in silos.) It was so bad General Mills complained to the Federal Government of factory shutdowns due to lack of grain. And then fortunes began to shift. 2014 was the year Bill Gates’ CN basically graduated to being a gong show on rails (derailments soared 73% that year), but his profits pulled ahead of Buffett’s BNSF."
The Guardian is also an interesting example of perhaps proactively targeting Trump during the final election heat for his marginal DAPL investment, while specifically avoiding Buffett's bankrolling of the Gates Foundation $30 billion in their "keep it in the ground" campaign with respects to what that added to Gates Foundation portfolio (which included the DAPL investment, not to mention Gates' private Cascade Investment LLC portfolio), as well as making a complete avoidance of both Gates and Buffett's entry, consolidation and control of the domestic North American oil by rail boom.
"In fact the Guardian’s hit piece targeting Trump as [a DAPL] investor was timed to target the blame [two days] after the attack dogs had been deployed. Actually it was right on cue with when police and military moved on the Oceti Sakowin camp. 141 arrests followed."
"The Guardian [...] launched the Trump DAPL investment story in the final election heat of 2016, after Trump had already divested. They did this after Washington Post already had gone on record showing this just three days before. The Guardian performed this fake expose that was echo-chambered around the entire leftist media in the last heat of the election (and still is)."
"The Guardian/350.org/tcktcktck consortium of climate “activism” (which doesn’t merit the term resistance), -their #keepitintheground” campaign’s entire focus was the $722 million Gates Foundation had invested in fossil fuel corporations, one tar sands operation included."