Category Archives: Legislation

Hunter’s Deal with China on Cobalt, Slaves and Human Rights Violations

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It is not just about batteries for electric vehicles, it is really all batteries and the Obama/Biden administration allowed this nefarious deal to happen.

The Biden family began gifting China with anything it wanted and it continues now in the Biden presidency.

Congo and the cobalt mines employ slaves….even child slaves. so, let’s begin here shall we?

Google parent Alphabet, Apple, Dell, Microsoft and Tesla won’t have to face a class action suit claiming the tech giants bear responsibility for the alleged use of child labour in Congo to mine cobalt, a key ingredient of batteries in electric cars and consumer electronics, a federal court in Washington ruled Tuesday.

An NGO called International Rights Advocates launched the suit in December 2019, on behalf of more than a dozen families of children killed or hurt in the artisinal cobalt mines in the Congo, responsible for more than two-thirds of global production of the metal. source

If the whole world wants cobalt, and all the cobalt is in Congo, why are people in the country dying of hunger?

The president’s son was part owner of a venture involved in the $3.8 billion purchase by a Chinese conglomerate of one of the world’s largest cobalt deposits. The metal is a key ingredient in batteries for electric vehicles.

NYT’s: An investment firm where Hunter Biden, the president’s son, was a founding board member helped facilitate a Chinese company’s purchase from an American company of one of the world’s richest cobalt mines, located in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Mr. Biden and two other Americans joined Chinese partners in establishing the firm in 2013, known as BHR and formally named Bohai Harvest RST (Shanghai) Equity Investment Fund Management Company.
The three Americans, all of whom served on the board, controlled 30 percent of BHR, a private equity firm registered in Shanghai that makes investments and then flips them for a profit. The rest of the company is owned or controlled by Chinese investors that include the Bank of China, according to records filed with Chinese regulators.
One of BHR’s early deals was to help finance an Australian coal-mining company controlled by a Chinese state-owned firm. It also assisted a subsidiary of a Chinese defense conglomerate in buying a Michigan auto parts maker.
The firm made one of its most successful investments in 2016, when it bought and later sold a stake in CATL, a fast-growing Chinese company that is now the world’s biggest maker of batteries for electric vehicles.
The mining deal in Congo also came in 2016, when the Chinese mining outfit China Molybdenum announced that it was paying $2.65 billion to buy Tenke Fungurume, a cobalt and copper mine, from the American company Freeport-McMoRan.
Glencore to Reopen One of World's Biggest Cobalt Mines in Congo - Bloomberg
As part of that deal, China Molybdenum sought a partner to buy out a minority stakeholder in the mine, Lundin Mining of Canada. That is when BHR became involved.
Records in Hong Kong show that the $1.14 billion BHR, through subsidiaries, paid to buy out Lundin came entirely from Chinese state-backed companies.
China Molybdenum lined up about $700 million of that total as loans from Chinese state-backed banks, including China Construction Bank. BHR raised the remaining amount from obscure entities with names like Design Time Limited, an offshore company controlled by China Construction’s investment bank, according to the Hong Kong filings.
Before the deal was done, BHR also signed an agreement that allowed China Molybdenum to buy BHR’s share of the mine, which the company did two years later, the filings show. That purchase gave China Molybdenum 80 percent ownership of the mine. (Congo’s state mining enterprise kept a stake for itself.)
By the time BHR sold its share in 2019, Mr. Biden controlled 10 percent of the firm through Skaneateles L.L.C., a company based in Washington. While Chinese corporate records show Skaneateles remains a part owner of BHR, Chris Clark, a lawyer for Mr. Biden, said that he “no longer holds any interest, directly or indirectly, in either BHR or Skaneateles.” The Chinese records show that Mr. Biden was no longer on BHR’s board as of April 2020. Mr. Biden did not respond to requests for comment.
A former BHR board member told The New York Times that Mr. Biden and the other American founders were not involved in the mine deal and that the firm earned only a nominal fee from it. The money, the former board member said, went into the firm’s operating funds and was not distributed to its owners.
It is unclear how the firm was chosen by China Molybdenum. Current executives at BHR did not return emails and phone calls seeking comment. “We don’t know Hunter Biden, nor are we aware of his involvement in BHR,” Vincent Zhou, a spokesman for China Molybdenum, said in an email.
A dozen executives from companies involved in the deal, including Freeport McMoRan and Lundin, said in interviews that they were not given a reason for BHR’s participation. Most of the executives also said they were unaware during the deal of Mr. Biden’s connection to the firm.
Paul Conibear, Lundin’s chief executive at the time, said it was made clear that China Molybdenum was leading the transaction even though the buyer of Lundin’s stake was BHR.
“I never really understood who they were,” Mr. Conibear said of BHR.
When the mine was sold, Mr. Biden’s father was near the end of his term as vice president. In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, Hunter Biden’s business ties in China were widely publicized.
But BHR’s role in the Chinese mine purchase was not a major focus. It has taken on new relevance because the Biden administration warned this year that China might use its growing dominance of cobalt to disrupt America’s retooling of its auto industry to make electric vehicles. The metal is among several key ingredients in electric car batteries.
When asked if the president had been made aware of his son’s connection to the sale, a White House spokesman said, “No.”

103,000 Dead in One Year From Fentanyl, Biden Admin Ignores the Crisis

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Drug Cartels 1 Biden 0

 

The Biden administration is silent on the crisis and this deadly crisis was not a covered topic at all during the summit the White House held with the presidents of Mexico and Canada. The White House tells us to listen as they listen to the CDC…but it is selective listening.

Furthermore, Biden allegedly spent 3.5 hours in a virtual summit meeting with President Xi of China and never bothered to discuss the manufacture of illicit trafficking of fentanyl to Mexico and that deadly partnership.

The DEA published a factual report on this crisis last year.

So here is a CDC report:

More Americans died of drug overdoses between April 2020 and April 2021 than in any previous yearlong period, the Centers for Disease Control reported Wednesday.

The CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics found that more than 100,000 Americans died of overdosing, a nearly 30 percent spike from the year before and more than double the number of deaths in 2015.

“These are numbers we have never seen before,” National Institute on Drug Abuse director Dr. Nora Volkow told the New York Times.

The Times reported that the spike in deaths was largely caused by increased use of fentanyl, a powerful opioid. The Washington Free Beacon reported on Wednesday that Customs and Border Protection in October captured nearly 1,050 pounds of fentanyl, the fifth-highest amount in three years.

A senior Department of Homeland Security official told the Free Beacon that drug cartels are “exploiting the migrant crisis” to smuggle drugs into the United States. Many of the states hardest hit by the overdoses have put the blame on President Joe Biden, who rolled back many of former president Donald Trump’s border policies.

Biden’s policies have contributed to the “devastating deadly flood of fentanyl across the southwest border,” attorneys for West Virginia wrote in the state’s lawsuit against DHS.

*** Fentanyl seizures at border double over past year: report enough to kill us all….read that again…kill us all. Furthermore, it is being secreted in other drugs so you may not even know you’re taking it. This begins in China and ends in the United States through Mexico. How many more will die?

A close friend of mine Derek Maltz has been leading the mission on dealing with the crisis and has given testimony before Congress and still no advancing of any kind of legislation to stop the crisis at our southern border.

But you need to see the faces, the real faces of victims of fentanyl.

WATCH: Moms Stop The Harm respond to opioid crisis – Victoria News

There are a thousand more faces…. Derek Maltz has 25 pages of faces just like the one above….
***
With international travel limited, synthetics that are easier to manufacture and more concentrated were likely more efficient to smuggle across borders, Volkow said.
The US government has seized enough fentanyl this year to give every American a lethal dose, Drug Enforcement Administration Administrator Anne Milgram said Wednesday at a White House press briefing, calling the overdose epidemic in the US “a national crisis” that “knows no geographical boundaries, and it continues to get worse.”
The new federal data shows that overdose deaths from methamphetamine and other psychostimulants also increased significantly, up 48% in the year ending April 2021 compared to the year before. They accounted for more than a quarter of all overdose deaths in the latest 12-month period.
While fentanyl was once more popular on the East Coast and methamphetamine on the West Coast, Volkow says both have now proliferated nationwide.
***

While seemingly dominated by two large criminal groups in Mexico, the fentanyl trade requires vast networks of smaller subcontractors who specialize in importing, producing, and transporting synthetic drugs. Both large and small organizations appear to be taking advantage of the surge in popularity of the drug, which is increasingly laced into other substances such as cocaine, methamphetamine, and marijuana—very often without the end-user knowing it. To be sure, rising seizures of counterfeit oxycodone pills laced with fentanyl illustrate that the market is maturing in other ways as well.

Fentanyl’s potency also opens the door to entrepreneurs who bypass Mexico altogether, obtaining their supplies directly from China and selling them on the dark web. There is little public understanding of the prevalence of this part of the trade and even less of its medium- and long-term implications. The low barrier of entry into this market and its high returns make for a frightening future in which synthetic drugs of all types could proliferate. This full report is found here.

 

Biden’s Bank Controller Nominee is a Communist

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Primer: This site published an item on Saule Omarova last month, Biden’s Nominee for the Treasury Dept is Member of a Facebook Marxist Group

A big question would be just how she could pass and gain security clearance?

One has to ask where do these people come from such that Biden staff personnel know about them in the first place and then nominate that for a cabinet position, which apparently Biden himself approves….

In part consider these additional items:

A 2020 article written by Omarova that suggests the need for a government-controlled “people’s ledger” that would “end banking as we know it” has caused further friction over her nomination, with some reports suggesting that moderate Democrats may oppose her appointment.

A Republican senator has called on Omarova to hand over her university thesis from her time at Moscow State University, which was titled Karl Marx’s Economic Analysis And The Theory Of Revolution In Das Kapital. In the Soviet Union, it was nearly impossible for ambitious academics to avoid extolling the “virtues” of socialism and Marxist theory. More here. 

***

SAULE OMAROVA’S ACADEMIC WORK

Among Omarova’s publications, “The People’s Ledger: How to Democratize Money and Finance the Economy,” written for Vanderbilt Law Review, is of particular interest. Here, she argues all bank accounts should be in – what she terms – “FedAccounts” to be monitored by the Federal Reserve. [source]

From past tweets of hers, we know that she has praised the Soviet Union, with her most popular tweet stating, “Say what you will about old USSR, there was no gender pay gap there. Market doesn’t always ‘know best.’”[source]

Since her nomination to the position within the OCC as the Comptroller of the Currency (an office I don’t believe is helpful in the first place), Senator Pat Toomey asked her to turn over her thesis on Marxism to the Senate. She refused. Moscow University representatives stated the thesis was destroyed, and no copies of Omarova’s work existed within the university. source

***Towards The Mandatory Approval Of Complex Financial ... She authored this item in Social Europe, it is terrifying.

Perhaps the Biden mission to destroy the American oil and gas industry is coming from her.

She wants to regulate the banking system said earlier this year that she wants to “starve” companies of money to invest in the oil and gas industry in order to fight climate change, comments that could further complicate her chances of Senate confirmation. Additionally, she has proposed establishing a National Investment Authority to divert investments away from the oil and gas industry and into “clean and green” infrastructure projects. Speaking at a virtual forum in May, Omarova said “the way we basically get rid of those carbon financiers is we starve them of their sources of capital.”Omarova, a professor at Cornell Law School, says her proposed National Investment Authority would serve as the “fighting muscle” of the progressive-backed Green New Deal. Under Omarova’s proposal, the National Investment Authority would create investment funds and issue bonds in order to lure investors to fund clean energy projects, sapping oil and gas projects of their funding. The agency, which Omarova modeled after the New Deal-era Reconstruction Finance Corporation, would work closely with the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department, which oversees the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. More here. 

Introducing Air-scrubbing Machines of Carbon Dioxide

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NEW YORK (AP) — On a field ringed by rolling green hills in Iceland, fans attached to metal structures that look like an industrial-sized Lego project are spinning. Their mission is to scrub the atmosphere by sucking carbon dioxide from the air and storing it safely underground.

Just a few years ago, this technology, known as “direct air capture,” was seen by many as an unrealistic fantasy. But the technology has evolved to where people consider it a serious tool in fighting climate change.

Orca - World's Biggest Carbon Capturing Machine Has Been ...

The Iceland plant, called Orca, is the largest such facility in the world, capturing about 4,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. But compared to what the planet needs, the amount is tiny. Experts say 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide must be removed annually by mid-century.

“Effectively, in 30 years’ time, we need a worldwide enterprise that is twice as big as the oil and gas industry, and that works in reverse,” said Julio Friedmann, senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University.

RELATED READING: THE BENEFITS OF CARBON DIOXIDE

Leading scientific agencies including the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say that even if the world manages to stop producing harmful emissions, that still won’t be enough to avert a climate catastrophe. They say we need to suck massive amounts of carbon dioxide out of the air and put it back underground — yielding what some call “negative emissions.”

“We have already failed on climate to the extent to which direct air capture is one of the many things we must do,” Friedmann said. “We have already emitted so many greenhouse gases at such an incredible volume and rate that CO2 removal at enormous scales is required, as well as reduction of emissions.”

As dire warnings have accelerated, technology to vacuum carbon dioxide from the air has advanced. Currently, a handful of companies operate such plants on a commercial scale, including Climeworks, which built the Orca plant in Iceland, and Carbon Engineering, which built a different type of direct air capture plant in British Columbia. And now that the technology has been proven, both companies have ambitions for major expansion. source

 

DIRECT AIR CAPTURE AT WORK

At Climeworks’ Orca plant near Reykjavik, fans suck air into big, black collection boxes where the carbon dioxide accumulates on a filter. Then it’s heated with geothermal energy and is combined with water and pumped deep underground into basalt rock formations. Within a few years, Climeworks says, the carbon dioxide turns into stone.

It takes energy to build and run Climeworks’ plants. Throughout the life cycle of the Orca plant, including construction, 10 tons of carbon dioxide are emitted for every 100 tons of carbon dioxide removed from the air. Carbon Engineering’s plants can run on renewable energy or natural gas, and when natural gas is used, the carbon dioxide generated during combustion is captured.

Carbon dioxide can also be injected into geological reservoirs such as depleted oil and gas fields. Carbon Engineering is taking that approach in partnership with Occidental Petroleum to build what’s expected to be the world’s largest direct air capture facility in the Southwest’s Permian Basin — the most productive U.S. oil field.

Direct air capture plants globally are removing about 9,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the air annually, according to the International Energy Agency.

Climeworks built its first direct air capture plant in 2017 in Hinwil, Switzerland, which captured 900 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually that was sold to companies for use in fizzy beverages and fertilizer. The company built another plant, called Artic Fox, in Iceland that same year; it captured up to 50 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually that was injected underground.

“Today we are on a level that we can say it’s on an industrial scale, but it’s not on a level where we need to be to make a difference in stopping climate change,” said Daniel Egger, chief commercial officer at Climeworks.

BIG PLANS, CHALLENGES

Their plans call for scaling up to remove several million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually by 2030. And Eggers said that would mean increasing capacity by a factor of 10 almost every three years.

It’s a lofty, and expensive, goal.

Estimates vary, but it currently costs about $500 to $600 per ton to remove carbon dioxide using direct air capture, said Colin McCormick, chief innovation officer at Carbon Direct, which invests in carbon removal projects and advises businesses on buying such services.

As with any new technology, costs can decrease over time. Within the next decade, experts say, the cost of direct air capture could fall to about $200 per ton or lower.

For years, companies bought carbon offsets by doing things like investing in reforestation projects. But recent studies have shown many offsets don’t deliver the promised environmental benefits. So McCormick said companies are looking for more verifiable carbon removal services and are investing in direct air capture, considered the “gold standard.”

“This is really exploding. We really didn’t see hardly any of this until a couple of years ago,” he said, referring to companies investing in the technology. “Two years ago Microsoft, Stripe and Shopify were really the leaders on this who first went out and said, ‘We want to procure carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere.’”

Companies are setting targets of net zero carbon emissions for their operations but can only reduce emissions so far. That’s where purchasing carbon removal services such as direct air capture comes in.

Individuals can buy atmosphere-scrubbing services too: Climeworks offers subscriptions starting at $8 a month to people who want to offset emissions.

In the U.S., direct air capture facilities can get a tax credit of $50 a ton, but there are efforts in Congress to increase that to up to $180 a ton, which if passed, could stimulate development.

The Department of Energy announced Friday a goal to reduce the cost of carbon removal and storage to $100 per metric ton, saying it would collaborate with communities, industry and academia to spur technological innovation.

Oil companies such as Occidental and Exxon have been practicing a different form of carbon capture for decades. For the most part, they are taking carbon dioxide emissions from production facilities and injecting it underground to shake loose more oil and gas from between rocks.

Some question the environmental benefits of using captured CO2 to produce more fossil fuels that are eventually burned, producing greenhouse gases. But Occidental says part of the goal is to make products such as aviation fuel with a smaller carbon footprint — since while producing the fuel, they’re also removing carbon dioxide from the air and storing it underground.

Capturing carbon dioxide from oil and gas operations or industrial facilities such as steel plants or coal-burning power plants is technically easier and less costly than drawing it from the air, because plant emissions have much more highly concentrated CO2.

Still, most companies are not capturing carbon dioxide that leaves their facilities.

Worldwide, industrial facilities capturing carbon dioxide from their operations had a combined capacity to capture 40 million tons annually, triple the amount in 2010, according to the International Energy Agency.

But that’s less than 1% of the total emissions that could be captured from industrial facilities globally, said Sean McCoy, assistant professor in the department of chemical and petroleum engineering at the University of Calgary.

If governments created policies to penalize carbon dioxide emissions, that would drive more carbon removal projects and push companies to switch to lower-carbon fuels, McCoy said.

“Direct air capture is something you get people to pay for because they want it,” he said. “Nobody who operates a power plant wants (carbon capture and storage). You’re going to have to hit them with sticks.”

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Associated Press reporter Jamey Keaten contributed from Geneva.