#askU2 -Are you aware @gatesfoundation media control hid their DAPL investment from #boycott #NoDAPL?
This is substantiated by #askwarren Question #6 and trust me, you don't want any new developments. It's already big enough. It relies on three points:
1) "Gates' funding of media and influence over public dialogue" - Humanosphere - Gates Foundation's media partners include The New York Times, The Seattle Times, NPR, NBC and The Guardian, some of these substantially. This is the tip of the iceberg. We don't know who and how many or how much. -More Gates Foundation Media partnerships come up dealing in education including LA Times, CBS and ABC, -in the form of "Education Partnerships". (I'd check the Boston Globe.) -Starting at 16:10... "if I google 'charter school statistics' -and you're welcome to try this at home, twenty nine of the top 30 results will originate from Foundations that are funded by Bill Gates" -"so there's a privatization of not just education, but the way we talk about education" -also Viacom is a Gates Foundation media partner, and became one just before acquiring Gates Foundation funded "Waiting for Superman". This can include direct sponsorship of individual journalists, as was recently the case with NYT's Nick Kristof. Now you know why Assange made that tweet. If you read to the bottom, then you'll really know.
2) To present an example that demonstrates just how effective this "media partners" strategy can prove, I delineate the history of the oil by rail #bombtrains run by Warren Buffett's BNSF and Bill Gates' majority controlled CN (Canadian National Railway, which runs bi-nationally), when it developed through a multitude of spectacular explosions that proved Bakken "crude" was highly volatile, very explosive and extremely dangerous. Yet this failed to obtain any significant or sustained media coverage. When The New York Times finally conceded to run something, their personally curated the public comments field would not permit commenters to associate either name with the bomb trains, despite the fact that they owned or held majority investment in the biggest rail carriers involved. The implication is that the reign of censorship when Gates Foundation (over 55% bankrolled by Buffett) fund The New York Times runs deeply rather than lightly, in that it circumscribed and censored the association being made even by the public for the public, in order to maintain their ignorance of the financial association.
Obviously this is a very big chronology to lay out, besides conveying exclusively why this was far more scandalous and negligent on the part of the carriers than has ever been discovered. The New York Times provided crack investigative reportage simultaneously on the massive corruption engulfing the state of North Dakota in the Bakken shale boom, -yet deliberately avoided naming Buffett's BNSF in ND's most significant rail explosion (while documenting it), as well as avoiding the chain of rail explosions caused by the Bakken shale boom entirely. The omission is so vast and explosive (both literally and figuratively) as to be demonstrably systemic in its avoidance.
Consequently, the substantiation for Question #6 also answers the #askU2 question: Did @U2 have any clue about their @RED /ONE billionaire sponsors' NA #bombtrains?
"Transporting Tar Sands 'As Dangerous' As Shale Oil" - Oil Change International
Furthermore, was there any clue that in fact the secondary source of these bomb trains, next to the Bakken, was actually Canadian tar sands, and that oil by rail out of Canada had boomed 28,000% in four years, with the tar sands producing toxic ponds so large they're visible from space, and that this is poisoning the third largest watershed in the world? -Or that the mining is open pit disturbance destroying a land base as large as Florida, -and that this export was why Bill Gates purchased majority control of CN, formerly Canada's national railway? Oh, didn't know that?
I also have a video clip to add, showing how these bomb train accidents that were deliberately not associated with their owners in the press have truly long term consequences. How's it going in Gogoma, ON?
In addition I got an update on the volume and expansion of the toxic tailings ponds permanently toxifying all that pristine Athabasca River freshwater (3 barrels for every single barrel of oil): it used to stand at having resulted in 176 sq km of toxic tailing ponds. Now it's 220 sq km of toxic tailings ponds, which equal 1.2 trillion litres. Some of these are immediately adjacent to the river and would overspill it in a flash flood. They are seeping into it and the ground and ground water regardless, because there is no separation between them and the soil they are lying on. The seepage is toxic enough there are already exotic cancer clusters killing the indigenous population who are dependent on the fish and the surrounding landscape in order to eat. Oh, check that:
Oilsands ponds full of 340 billion gallons of toxic sludge spur fears of environmental catastrophe - Financial Post
Alberta's tailings ponds cover about 97 square miles and hold enough waste to fill more than half a million Olympic-size swimming pools
3) The question is raised as to whether The Guardian (where the Gates Foundation sponsors the Global Development page not quite exclusively) deliberately ran an attack piece delineating Trump's investment in the Dakota Access Pipeline in a manner that was not only false but designed by its timing to cost Trump the US election, and simultaneously designed to drown search algorithms so none of the public would be able to google and discover either Warren Buffett's or Gates Foundation's investment in Phillips 66, which enlightens you as to why really conveying these two factors (2 and 3) does take an article that is 26 pages long. The question is whether it is a reasonable implication that The Guardian's existence as a sponsored Gates Foundation "media partner" is also indicative of political/ideological (neoliberal) identity to the extent that is not only willing to initiate bogus stories that are then echo-chambered across liberal media, proactively sabotaging searches on the web (which is what was done with The Guardian's "Trump investment" fake expose, right up to the present day, while they simultanously avoid that Buffett's investment Dakota Access Pipeline staked Phillips 66 was over 600 times as much as Trump's). The Guardian's Trump DAPL investor hit piece was also impeccably timed to actively attempt to throw the election in accordance with the ideological position of the funders (Warren Buffett stumped for Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail). This protection was mutual, as it equally avoided the implication of Gates Foundation's stock portfolio being dependent on Buffett to the tune of over $10 billion at the time (which avoided Gates Foundation's mutual investment in the Dakota Access Pipeline eclipsed Trump's by over 160 times).
Furthermore The Guardian ran the toothless #keepitintheground divestment campaign with respects to Gates Foundation's fossil fuel investments, without even casting a glance at over 55% of their porfolio being Berkshire Hathaway stock. Avoiding what was owned or invested in by Warren Buffett's holding company Berkshire Hathaway, when Bill Gates has sat on the director's board for over twelve years and it comprises over half the portfolio is a serious omission. It neatly avoided any reference to Warren Buffett's (and thereby Gates Foundation's mutual investment) in Phillips 66 and the Dakota Access Pipeline, when Gate Foundation's investment proportionately stood at nearly $1.7 billion at the height of the Dakota Access Pipeline protest.
While #keepitintheground and #NoDAPL were not concurrent, actual scrutiny would have indicated their involvement before #NoDAPL exploded and would have made either billionaire culpable in events. This could have avoided events transpiring into total state violence against a peaceful protest, as neither philanthropic billionaire would have wanted themselves associated with those events, -which they would have been had the Guardian possessed an iota of investigative scrutiny in launching their campaign. (Gates Foundation ignored the campaign despite a petition involving over 300,000 signatures.)
Nor did The Guardian make any reference to Bill Gates' personal holding company, Cascade Investments LLC (also invested in CN - Canadian National Railway). This avoided that there were multiple CN investments on the part of Bill Gates, which avoided the scope of his majority control of CN. It is also pretty redundant to campaign for Gates Foundation to divest in fossil fuels and yet avoid the question of Bill Gates' personal investment in such.
In doing so, The Guardian also avoided the oil by rail explosion in shipping entirely (besides its attendant commensurate explosion in actual rail explosions), even though it was the only reason Gates Foundation and Bill Gates invested in CN in the first place - not to mention avoiding entire the bombs on rails unfolding bi-national rail scandal, -this despite the fact that it had inaugerated with the immolation of 47 people. Avoiding the explosion in oil by rail export out of Canada CN was bankrolling on (the source of Bill Gates' 34% increase in share profits for 2013, and his second biggest source of profit after Microsoft that year) also neatly avoided that his biggest profits for that year were contingent in no small part on exporting the most toxic, GHG emitting oil extraction development on the face of the earth (as well as being perilously explosive).
It also avoided the uncomfortable fact that oil development and consumption were not impeded in the least by the presence or lack of pipeline infrastructure, as rail had entirely taken up the slack. From a climatological standpoint, protesting the KeystoneXL pipeline at its (late) developmental stage was redundant, but proved very profitable for both Gates' and Buffett's oil by rail. (In fact Buffett's Foundation funding prompted and funded the Keystone XL protest, as well as successfully attenuating and diverting the #NoDAPL protest.)
The Guardian's entire divestment campaign indicates that being a funded "media partner" totally attenuates any climate action you might take directly towards that partner. It was so useless and toothless it raises the question of whether it was societally damaging as opposed to an improvement. Rather than exposing anything, it hid everything that was really societally and environmentally damaging that Gates Foundation was associated with, allowing for incalculable future damage as #NoDAPL unfolded into an humanitarian crisis of state violence, as well as avoiding the environmental devastation of the tar sands development and US oil consumption rates' integral dependence on it. Fun facts:
"World’s richest 10% produce half of carbon emissions while poorest 3.5 billion account for just a tenth" - Oxfam -From the article:
- Someone in the richest one percent of the world’s population uses 175 times more carbon on average than someone from the bottom 10 percent.
- Someone in the richest 10 percent of citizens in India uses on average just one quarter of the carbon of someone in the poorest half of the population of the United States.
- The emissions of someone in the poorest half of the Indian population are on average just one-twentieth those of someone in the poorest half of the US population.
- The total emissions of the poorest half of the population of China, around 600 million people, are only one-third of the total emissions of the richest 10 percent in the US, some 30 million people.
“Rich, high emitters should be held accountable for their emissions, no matter where they live. But it’s easy to forget that rapidly developing economies are also home to the majority of the world’s very poorest people and while they have to do their fair share, it is rich countries that should still lead the way,” said Gore.
According to the report, the only people who benefit from the status quo and who stand to gain from a weak deal in Paris is a select group of billionaires, who have made many of their fortunes in the fossil fuel industry."
“With less than 5 percent of world population, the U.S. uses one-third of the world’s paper, a quarter of the world’s oil, 23 percent of the coal, 27 percent of the aluminum, and 19 percent of the copper,” Dave Tilford, Sierra Club -not to mention 27% of the world's natural gas.
"Use It and Lose It: The Outsize Effect of U.S. Consumption on the Environment" -Scientific American
The enforcement of this disproportionate inequitable energy and resource usage is the basis for the US being such a heavily militarist state, though it really is a chicken or egg question, as they are in a mutual terminal feedback. Only brutality can enforce this level of energy inequity. Given that these are 2 of the 8 men who possess as much wealth as the latter half of humanity, (-poor guy), -in fact the carbon inequity they impose upon humanity is truly beyond calculation and can only be described as obscene. #NoDAPL is testament to how this inequity is enforced by brutality domestically, as well transforming the planet into a slaughterhouse with US bases encompassing the planet (761). It is not enforced nicely. No amount of philanthropy can mask this reality in Africa.
It is doubtful a personage with the acuity and stature of Bill Gates could even take such a campaign as #keepitintheground seriously, and formal declarations from both the Gates Foundation and his subsequent interviews showed he did not (only months of prolonged protest at his door in Seattle worked). Given he is astute enough to cherry pick his very own North Dakota Governor to protect his and Warren's DAPL investment, and this will not even arise as a topic of any scrutiny in the press, he must be laughing into his shirt cuff.