Barrick Gold
Barrick Gold
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https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/gold-mine-boss-digs-in-with-bannon-9z82qfq0m
John Thornton, chairman of the London-listed Canadian miner Barrick Gold, used to be something of a leftie.
Back in 2000, when he was at Goldman Sachs, Thornton helped to raise money for the former New York Knicks basketball player Bill Bradley, who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination against Al Gore (unsuccessfully, as it turned out).
The banker, who left Goldman after missing out on the top job, still sits on the board of the Brookings Institution, the left-leaning think tank in Washington. So friends were astonished to open this newspaper last weekend and see a picture of him having lunch with Nigel Farage and the Pied Piper of the alt-right, Steve Bannon.
Thornton, 64, was among a group pictured at Brown’s in Mayfair, where…
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The Threat of Political Climate Change
Countering the Bannon Archipelago
By John Feffer
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MODERN GOLD RUSH?: An ounce of gold is now worth $1,675; gold mines long abandoned in the U.S. have creaked back to life. And on Capitol Hill, the nation's mining companies have been parting with some of their riches as they navigate around environmental, trade and other issues that affect their profitability.
Freeport-McMoRan is a strong Republican supporter, contributing more than $500,000 to federal candidates in the last election. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) saw the best of the spoils, with $61,000 in contributions from Phoenix-based Freeport employees and its PAC. Texas Republican David Dewhurst, who lost in the primary to freshman Sen. Ted Cruz, got $45,000, and Sen. Dean Heller(R-Nev.) and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) each received $20,000. Freeport gave GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney $14,100.
Heller was also one of Newmont Mining's favorite candidates, receiving $20,250 from Newmont employees and its PAC, of a total $337,354 in combined contributions to candidates in the last election. Rep. Mark Amodei (R-Nev.) followed closely behind with $19,000, then Sen. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.) with $15,500, and Nevada Reps. Joe Heck (R) with $16,000 and Dina Titus(D) with $15,000.
According to Newmont's website, Nevada presents a huge opportunity for growth for the company.The company already owns 2 million acres of land in the state and operates 11 mines and nine process facilities there. In 2010, Newmont produced 1.7 million ounces of gold from Nevada mines, which accounted for almost a third of its annual gold production. At today's prices, that would be worth $2.85 trillion.
Nevada-based Barrick Gold and its PAC favored the same Nevada lawmakers last year as Freeport and Newmont did, contributing $279,700 to federal campaigns -- including $20,000 each to Heller, Titus, and Sen. Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.), as well as $25,500 to Amodei and $20,250 to Heller.
But the Nevada lawmakers themselves aren't invested in gold. The direct dividends of a potential gold rush would go to a bipartisan group of lawmakers from around the country, according to disclosure statements covering the year 2011: Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.) and Sen. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.) own shares worth between $1,000 and $15,000 in both Freeport-McMoRan and Newmont Mining. Boehner and Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) own shares in Freeport-McMoRan valued at between $15,000 to $50,000. Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) and Reps. John Campbell (R-Calif.) and Fred Upton (R-Mich.) own shares worth between $1,000 and $15,000. Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) owns up to $2,000 in Freeport stock.
Others own shares in Newmont Mining. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Reps. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) own shares valued at between $15,000 and $50,000. Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.) has stock worth between $16,000 and $65,000, and Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.) owns shares that are worth $1,000 to $15,000.
Of America's top mining companies, only Freeport-McMoRan increased its lobbying budget last year -- to $360,000 from $190,000 in 2011. That's still nothing compared to its $1.5 million lobbying spending in 2008, but these days Freeport is worried about tax reform, water settlement legislation related to Native American affairs, and trade tariffs. Last year it lobbied on Brazilian import tariffs on molybdenum and Russian export tariffs.
Newmont Mining spent $920,000 lobbying on hard rock mining, the Mercury Export Ban Act and the taxation of mercury storage in 2012. Barrick Gold spent $275,000 to lobby mining issues and reimbursement for reclaiming uranium mills.
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demo undergd
Counted among Barrick directors is Brian Mulroney, former Prime Minister of Canada. Another is Edward Neys, former US Ambassador to Canada and chairman of Burson-Marsteller one of the world's largest and most secretive public relations firms.
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Some of America's biggest welfare ranchers:
David and Charles Koch (Koch Industries)
The brothers hold a half-dozen grazing permits on public land in Montana to go with its 300,000-acre Matador Ranch there. The brothers are tied for fourth place on Forbes 2014 400 Richest People in America list (net worth: $ 42 billion each). The Koch family ($ 89 billion) is #2 on Forbes Richest Families list; Koch Industries is #2 on Forbes America's Largest Private Companies list, ($ 115 billion in sales).
J.R. Simplot Corp.
The largest U.S. public lands ranching entity (with an estimated 2 to 3 million acres of allotments in CA, ID, NV, OR and UT) is #63 on Forbes 2014 list of America's Largest Private Companies ($ 5.8 billion in sales). In 2014, the family was #29 on Forbes list of America’s Richest Families (net worth: $ 8 billion).
Bruce McCaw (McCaw Cellular)
McCaw was #382 on Forbes 400 list of America’s Richest People in 2005 (net worth: $ 925 million). Through his 9 sprawling ranches, he controls a significant number of public grazing leases in ID and possibly NV. One of them (Camas Creek ranch) includes 272,000 acres of Federal grazing allotments in Idaho's Camas Prairie. Grazing permitted to his other ranches could easily double or triple that to a million acres or more.
Barrick Gold
The Canadian mining company is one of the two largest public lands ranchers in NV,ranking 771st on Forbes Global 2000 list of the World’s Biggest Public Companies in 2014, (sales: $ 12.56 billion). Like many other large public lands ranchers, Barrick buys ranches to secure water rights.
Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA)
The supplier of drinking water to Las Vegas is a large NV public lands rancher with an estimated 1 million acres of public grazing allotments. Like Barrick Gold, it, buys up private ranches to gain their water rights.
W. Barron Hilton (Hilton Hotels)
The hotel heir dropped off Forbes Billionaires list (ranked #459 in 2011) as well as its list of the 400 Richest Americans (#144 in 2010), with a net worth of $ 2.5 billion. He died in 2013.
Though records are hard to pin down, Hilton's heirs inherited a ranching operation in the CA-NV border area, which has been known to have vast public lands grazing allotments permitted to it.
Mary Hewlett-Jaffe (Hewlett-Packard)
Jaffe holds the largest BLM public lands grazing permit in central ID and is among the top 15 public lands ranchers in the state (estimated at under 200,000 acres that are said to be in extremely degraded condition, according to sources).
James Barta (Sav-Rx.com)
Barta is not on any Forbes rich lists, but owns one of the largest cattle ranching operations in the U.S., according to his attorneys. Barta holds grazing permits to nearly 900,000 acres of public grazing allotments in connection with two properties: White Horse Ranch (in OR) and Soldier Meadows (in NV). Barta may have additional NV grazing leases through two other ranches in NV, according to Jon Marvel, founder of Western Watersheds Project.
T. Wright Dickinson
Though not on any Forbes list, the Dickinson family is a large public lands rancher, with grazing permits estimated at more than a half million acres of CO, UT and WY public lands under its LLC, Vermillion Ranches. Dickinson is a former County commissioner and proponent of county efforts to gain control of federal lands, according to the Denver Post.
Stan Kroenke (Kroenke Group) & Ann Walton Kroenke (Walmart)
With just two of his ranches (in MT and WY) totaling 664,000 acres (not including public grazing allotments), Kroenke is one of the ten top land owners in the U.S. In 2014, he ranked #89 on Forbes list of the 400 Richest Americans, #247 on its Billionaires list, and #5 on its list of Richest American Sports Team Owners (net worth: $ 5.8 billion). His wife, Ann Walton Kroenke (net worth: $ 5.6 billion), was #261 on Forbes Billionaires list and #11 on its list of America’s Richest Women.
Family of Robert Earl Holding (Sinclair Oil and hotels)
Forbes ranks the family #87 on its 2014 list of America’s Richest Families (net worth: $ 2.7 billion). With 400,000 acres of land, the family is the 19th largest private land owner in the US, according to the 2014 Land Report 100. This includes land that Forbes reported “may be the largest ranching operation in the Rocky Mountains.” Public grazing leases are associated with some of the family’s WY and possibly MT holdings, according to Jon Marvel, founder of Western Watersheds.
Ted Turner
He's the second largest U.S. land owner (2 million acres in 6 states), is estimated to hold grazing leases in MT and NM (estimated at as much as 300,000 acres), and owns the world's largest bison herd. Forbes ranked him #296 on its 2014 list of the 400 Richest Americans and #818 on its global Billionaires list (net worth: $ 2.2 billion).
Barrick Gold Corporation Mines Fined For The Release Of Toxic Chemicals In Nevada
AP | By By SCOTT SONNER Posted: 02/07/2013 10:44 am EST
RENO, Nev. (AP) — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has ordered three northern Nevada gold mines to pay a total of $618,000 for failing to report the release of toxic chemicals, including cyanide, lead and mercury from 2005-08.
All three mines are subsidiaries of the Toronto-based Barrick Gold Corp. — Barrick Cortez Inc.'s Cortez Gold Mine near Crescent Valley, Barrick Gold US Inc.'s Ruby Hill Gold Mine near Eureka and Homestake Mining Co.'s Bald Mountain Gold Mine near the Ruby Lake National Wildlife Refuge.
The three agreed to pay a total of $278,000 in fines and spend an additional $340,000 on an environmentally beneficial project as part of a settlement for allegedly under estimating reports of their toxic release inventory required under the federal Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act, EPA officials said.
"Cyanide, lead and mercury used at these mines have the potential to pose a health threat," said Jared Blumenfeld, EPA's regional administrator for the Pacific Southwest Region based in San Francisco.
"We insist on accurate reporting of chemical releases so that citizens have a clear idea of the risk from the facilities near their communities," he said. He added there is no evidence to suggest that the violations posed any immediate danger to workers at the facilities or neighboring communities.
The supplemental project will be conducted at the Cortez mine to identify the metal compounds formed in its oxide mill process and test methods to verify the quantities of new chemical compounds manufactured during the process.
The companies also agreed to perform audits at all other U.S. mining operations Barrick owns in Nevada and Montana, determine if any reporting violations occurred and if so pay a $10,000 penalty per violation up to a total of $250,000
Barrick officials said EPA disputed fewer than 40 of the 330 related reports the companies filed during the time period.
"Barrick disagrees with EPA's position and the company's operations have complied in good faith with all requirements of annual TRI reporting since (first established in) 1998," said Louis Schack, director of communications for Barrick Gold of North America based in Salt Lake City, Utah.
"Nonetheless, to achieve regulatory certainty regarding its TRI obligations, Barrick has agreed to enter into a settlement agreement with EPA," he said Wednesday.
Poppy Strikes Gold
George W. could not have amassed this pile if his surname were Jones or Smith. While
other candidates begged, pleaded and wheedled for donations, the Bushes added a
creative, lucrative new twist to the money chase that contenders couldn't imitate:
"Poppy" Bush's post-White House work. It laid the foundation for Dubya's campaign
kitty corpulence and, not incidentally, raised the family's net worth by several hundred
percent.
In 1998, for example, the former president and famed Desert Stormtrooper-in-Chief
wrote to the oil minister of Kuwait on behalf of Chevron Oil Corporation. Bush says,
honestly, that he "had no stake in the Chevron operation." True, but following this
selfless use of his influence, the oil company put $657,000 into the Republican Party
coffers.
That year Bush pere created a storm in Argentina when he lobbied his close political ally,
President Carlos Menem, to grant a gambling license to Mirage Casino Corporation.
Once again, the senior Bush wrote that he had no personal interest in the deal. However,
Bush fils made out quite nicely: After the casino flap, Mirage dropped $449,000 into the
Republican Party war chest.
Much of Bush's loot, reports the Center for Responsive Politics, came in the form of
"bundled" and "soft" money. That's the squishy stuff corporations use to ooze around
U.S. law, which prohibits any direct donations from corporations.
Not all of the elder Bush's work is voluntary. His single talk to the board of Global
Crossing, the telecom start-up, earned him stock worth $13 million when the company
went public. Global Crossing's employees also kicked in another million for the younger
Bush's run. (We'll meet Global Crossing again in Chapter 3.)
And while the Bush family steadfastly believes that ex-felons should not have the right to
vote for president, they have no objection to ex-cons putting presidents on their payroll.
In 1996, despite pleas by u.s. church leaders, Poppy Bush gave several speeches (he
charges $100,000 per talk) sponsored by organizations run by Rev. Sun Myung Moon,
cult leader, tax cheat-and formerly the guest of the U.S. federal prison system.
Some of the loot for the Republican effort in the 1997-2000 election cycles came from an
outfit called Barrick Corporation. The sum, while over $100,000, is comparatively small
change for the GOP, yet it seemed quite a gesture for a corporation based in Canada.
Technically, the funds came from those associated with the Canadian's U.S. unit, Barrick
Gold Strike.
They could well afford it. In the final days of the Bush (Senior) administration, the
Interior Department made an extraordinary but little noticed change in procedures under
the 1872 Mining Law, the gold rush-era act that permitted those whiskered small-time
prospectors with their tin pans and mules to stake claims on their tiny plots. The
department initiated an expedited procedure for mining companies that allowed Barrick
to swiftly lay claim to the largest gold find in America. In the terminology of the law,
Barrick could "perfect its patent" on the estimated $10 billion in ore-for which Barrick
paid the U.S. Treasury a little under $10,000. Eureka!
Barrick, of course, had to put up cash for the initial property rights and the cost of
digging out the booty (and the cost of donations, in smaller amounts, to support Nevada's
Democratic senator, Harry Reid). Still, the shift in rules paid off big time: According to
experts at the Mineral Policy Center of Washington, DC, Barrick saved-and the u.s.
taxpayer lost-a cool billion or so.
Upon taking office, Bill Clinton's new interior secretary, Bruce Babbitt, called Barrick's
claim the "biggest gold heist since the days of Butch Cassidy." Nevertheless, because the
company followed the fast-track process laid out for them under Bush, this corporate
Goldfinger had Babbitt by the legal nuggets. Clinton had no choice but to give them the
gold mine while the public got the shaft.
Barrick says it had no contact whatsoever with the president at the time of the rules
change.1 There was always a place in Barrick's heart for the older Bush-and a place on its
payroll. In 1995, Barrick hired the former president as Honorary Senior Advisor to the
Toronto company's International Advisory Board.
1 Barrick has responded to every allegation reported in my first report on the company in a
manner certain to get my attention: The company and its chairman sued my papers, Guardian and
the Observer. While I have a distaste for retort by tort, I have incorporated their legitimate
concerns to ensure their views are acknowledged. More on the suit in Chapter 8.
Bush joined at the suggestion of former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, who,
like Bush, had been ignominiously booted from office. I was a bi~ surprised that the
president had signed on.
When Bush was voted out of the White House, he vowed never to lobby or join a
corporate board. The chairman of Barrick openly boasts that granting the title "Senior
Advisor" was a sly maneuver to help Bush tiptoe around this promise.
I was curious: What does one do with a used president? Barrick vehemently denies that it
appointed Bush "in order to procure him to make contact with other world leaders whom
he knows, or who could be of considerable assistance" to the company. Yet, in September
1996, Bush wrote a letter to help convince Indonesian dictator Suharto to give Barrick a
new, hot gold-mining concession.
Bush's letter seemed to do the trick. Suharto took away 68 percent of the world's largest
goldfield from the finder of the ore and handed it to Barrick. However, Bush's lobbying
magic isn't invincible. Jim Bob Moffett, a tough old Louisiana swamp dog who heads
Freeport-McMoRan, Barrick's American rival, met privately with Suharto. When Suharto
emerged from their meeting, the kleptocrat announced that Freeport would replace Bush's
Canadians. (Barrick lucked out: The huge ore deposit turned out to be a hoax. When the
con was uncovered, Jim Bob's associates invited geologist Mike de Guzman, who
"discovered" the gold, to talk about the error of his ways. Unfortunately, on the way to
the meeting, de Guzman fell out of a helicopter.)
Who is this "Barrick" to whom our former president would lease out the reflected
prestige of the Oval Office? I could not find a Joe Barrick in the Canadian phone book.
Rather, the company as it operates today was founded by one Peter Munk. The
entrepreneur first came to public notice in Canada in the 1960s as a central figure in an
insider trading scandal. Munk had dumped his stock in a stereo-making factory he
controlled just before it went belly up, leaving other investors and government holding
the bag. He was never charged, but, notes Canada's Maclean's magazine, the venture and
stock sale "cost Munk his business and his reputation." Yet today, Munk's net worth is
estimated at $350 million, including homes on two continents and his own island.
How did he go from busted stereo maker to demi-billionaire goldbug? The answer:
Adnan Khashoggi, the Saudi arms dealer, the "bag man" in the Iran-Contra arms-forhostage
scandals. The man who sent guns to the ayatolla teamed up with Munk on hotel
ventures and, ultimately, put up the cash to buy Barrick in 1983, then a tiny company
with an "unperfected" claim on the Nevada mine. You may recall that Bush pardoned the
coconspirators who helped Khashoggi arm the Axis of Evil, making charges against the
sheik all but impossible. (Bush pardoned the conspirators not as a favor to Khashoggi, but
to himself.)
Khashoggi got out of Barrick just after the Iran-Contra scandal broke, long before 1995,
when Bush was invited in. By that time, Munk's reputation was restored, at least in his
own mind, in part by massive donations to the University of Toronto. Following this act
of philanthropy, the university awarded Munk-adviser Bush an honorary degree. Several
students were arrested protesting what appeared to them as a cash-for-honors deal.
Mr. Munk's president-for-hire did not pay the cost of his rental in Indonesia. The return
on Barrick's investment in politicians would have to come from Africa.
Mobutu Sese Seko, the late dictator of the Congo (Zaire), was one of the undisputed
master criminals of the last: century having looted hundreds of millions of dollars from
his national treasuryand a golfing buddy of the senior Bush. That old link from the links
probably did not hurt Barrick in successfully seeking an eighty-thousand-acre goldmining
concession from the Congolese cutthroat. Bush himself did not lobby the deal for
Barrick. It wasn't that the former president was squeamish about using the authority of his
former posts to cut deals with a despot. Rather, at the time Bush was reportedly helping
Adolf Lundin, Barrick's sometime industry rival. Africa specialist Patrick Smith of
London disclosed that Bush called Mobutu in 1996 to help cinch a deal for Lundin for a
mine distant from Barrick's.
Rebellion against Mobutu made the mine site unusable, though not for the company's
lack of trying. In testimony in hearings convened by the minority leader of the House
Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Human Rights, expert Wayne Madsen alleged that
Barrick, to curry favor with both sides, indirectly funded both and thereby inadvertently
helped continue the bloody conflict. The allegation, by respected journalist Wayne
Madsen, has not been substantiated: The truth is lost somewhere in the jungle, where
congressional investigators will never tread.
Though Barrick struck out in Indonesia and the Congo, the big payoff came from the
other side of the continent. The company's president bragged to shareholders that the
prestige of the Mulroney-Bush advisory board was instrumental in obtaining one of the
biggest goldfields in East Africa at Bulyanhulu, Tanzania. Barrick, according to its
president, had hungered for that concession-holding an estimated $3 billion in bullionsince
the mid-1990s, when it first developed its contacts with managers at Sutton
Resources, another Canadian company, which held digging rights from the government.
(See footnote 1.) Enriched by the Nevada venture, Barrick could, and eventually would,
buy up Sutton. But in 1996, there was a problem with any takeover of Sutton: Tens of
thousands of small-time prospectors, "jewelry miners," so called because of their
minuscule finds, already lived and worked on the land. These poor African diggers held
legal claim stakes to their tiny mine shafts on the property. If they stayed, the concession
was worthless.
In August 1996, Sutton's bulldozers, backed by military police firing weapons, rolled
across the goldfield, smashing down worker housing, crushing their mining equipment
and filling in their pits. Several thousand miners and their families were chased off the
property. But not all of them. About fifty miners were still in their mine shafts, buried
alive.
Buried alive. It's not on Bush's resume, nor on Barrick's Web site. You wouldn't expect it
to be. But then, you haven't found it in America's newspapers either.
There are two plausible explanations for this silence. First, it never happened; the tale of
the live burials is a complete fabrication of a bunch of greedy, lying Black Africans
trying to shake down Sutton Resources (since 1999, a Barrick subsidiary). That's what
Barrick says after conducting its own diligence investigation and relying on local and
national investigations by the Tanzanian government. And the company's view is backed
by the World Bank. See Chapter 8 for more on this.2
2 A bit of confusion here: Barrick swore to my paper that the alleged killings "related to a time
years before [Barrick] had any connection whatsoever with the company to which the report
referred." Yet Barrick's president and CEO, Randall Oliphant, told Barrick's shareholders that
prior to their acquisition of Sutton, "we followed the progress at Bully (i.e., Bulyanhulu) for five
years, remaining in close contact with the senior management team." That would connect them to
the mine in 1994. The mining company wants me to report their version of events. Okay, here's
both of them.
There's another explanation: Barrick threatens and sues newspapers and human rights
organizations that dare to breathe a word of the allegations-even if Barrick's denials are
expressed. I know: They sued my papers, the Observer and Guardian (for more on that,
see Chapter 8). Barrick even sent a letter to the internationally respected human rights
lawyer Tundu Lissu, a fellow at the World Resources Institute in Washington, DC,
outlining its suit against the Observer and warning that it would take "all necessary steps"
to protect its reputation should the Institute repeat any of the allegations. Barrick's threats
are the least of Lissu's problems. For supplying me with evidence-photos of a corpse of a
man allegedly killed by police during the clearance of the mine site, notarized witness
statements, even a police video of workers seeking bodies from the mine pits-and for
Lissu's demanding investigation of the killings, his law partners in Oar es Salaam have
been arrested and Lissu charged by the Tanzanian government with sedition.
In 1997, while Bush was on the board (he quit in 1999), Mother Jones magazine named
Barrick's chairman Munk one of America's "10 Little Piggies"--quite an honor for a
Canadian-for allegedly poisoning the West's water supply with the tons of cyanide
Barrick uses to melt mountains of ore.
Notably, one of the first acts of the junior Bush's Interior Department in 2001 was to
indicate it would reverse Clinton administration rules requiring gold extractors to limit
the size of waste dumps and to permit new mines even if they were likely to cause
"substantial, irreparable harm." The New York Times ran a long, front-page story on this
rule-relaxing windfall for Nevada goldmining companies, but nowhere did the Times
mention the name of the owner of the largest gold mine in Nevada, Barrick, nor its recent
payroller, the president's father.
The book launch for Noir Canada: Pillage, corruption et criminalité en Afrique, edited by Alain Denault and the Collectif Ressources d'Afrique out of Montréal, was a cancelled yesterday when the authors and publishers (Édition Écosociété) received letters from a law firm representing Barrick Gold.
The letters alledgedly refer to apparent inaccuracies in the book, more particularly around the representation of Barrick's role at Bulyanhulu, in Tanzania, where more than 50 small scale miners were buried alive in 1996.
Barrick has also sued The Guardian and The Observer over articles that they published about the Bulyanhulu massacre.
Noir Canada is about the role of Canadian companies in Africa, which operate with the "unfailing help of the Canadian government."
The list of corporate abuses is long: advantageous mining contracts in the DRC, partnerships with arms dealers and mercenaries in the Great Lakes region, miners buried alive in Tanzania, an "involuntary genocide" by poisoning in Mali, brutal expropriations in Ghana, using people from the Ivory Coast for pharmaceutical testing, devastating hydroelectric projects in Senegal, the savage privatization of the railway system in West Africa...