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The Marxist, Totalitarian Left Just Got Sideswiped By Swain....
@carolmswain
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Sorry, That Does Not Align With The Corporate Subsidized BLM Marxist Movement.
The real reason why Bill Gates is now the US’ biggest farmland owner
Late last year, Eric O’Keefe was researching a mysterious recent purchase of 14,500 acres of prime Washington state farmland. His magazine, The Land Report, tracks major land transactions and produces an annual list of the 100 biggest US landowners.
Sales of more than a thousand acres are “blue-moon events,” O’Keefe noted, so this one stood out. And Eastern Washington has some of the richest, most expensive farmland in the country. But the purchaser of record was a small, obscure company in Louisiana.
“That immediately set off alarm bells,” O’Keefe says.
He assigned his research team to dig a little deeper. Soon they came back with the answer: The Louisiana company was acting on behalf of Cascade Investment LLC, the secretive investment firm that manages most of the huge fortune belonging to Bill Gates.
O’Keefe knew Gates had been acquiring farmland for years, mostly through various Cascade subsidiaries. The mogul’s holdings include large tracts in Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, California, and about a dozen other states. With the Washington state acreage and other recent additions to his portfolio, O’Keefe calculated, Gates now owns at least 242,000 acres of American farmland.
“Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, has an alter ego,” O’Keefe wrote: “Farmer Bill, the guy who owns more farmland than anyone else in America.”
The Land Report scoop made headlines. Many stories focused on Gates’ longstanding interest in climate change and sustainability and suggested those concerns might be driving the land purchases. Newsweek called him a “sustainable agriculture champion.”
Those stories dovetailed with earlier reports about Gates’ large land acquisitions in Arizona. Most notably, in 2017, the Gates-affiliated Mt. Lemmon Holdings invested in some 40 square miles of “transitional” land on the western fringe of the Phoenix sprawl. (According to The Land Report, Gates owns about 27,000 acres of non-agricultural land, in addition to his farm holdings.)
Some partners in the Arizona project issued a press release touting plans to build “a forward-thinking community … that embraces cutting-edge technology.” There was talk of “high-speed digital networks” and “autonomous logistics hubs.” That was all it took for many in the media to conclude that Gates was personally engineering the city of the future.
“Bill Gates has started laying out his plans for creating a ‘smart city’ in Phoenix, Arizona,” science-news outlet Futurism wrote. This high-tech metropolis “could be both a breeding and testing ground for futuristic technologies.”
In reality, the idea that Bill Gates was single-handedly reinventing farming — or designing cities of tomorrow — was almost entirely speculation.
“There’s a tendency in the media to personalize this,” O’Keefe says. “People want to know, ’Why does Bill Gates want all this land?’ ”
But hyper-wealthy people like Gates don’t make every decision personally, O’Keefe notes. “He has very competent investment managers.”
Given that Gates is the third-richest person in the world — with an estimated net worth of $132 billion, he falls in behind Tesla founder Elon Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos — those money managers have their hands full.
Investment guru Michael Larson, who has worked with Gates since 1994, runs the Washington-based Cascade Investment, as well as supervising the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s nearly $50 billion endowment.![]()
Bill Gates (with Terra Power board member Nathan Myhrvold) is well known for supporting environmental innovation, but his farming plans were more secretive — until now.Bloomberg via Getty Images
“The arrangement is simple,” The Wall Street Journal wrote in a 2014 profile. “Mr. Larson makes money, and Mr. Gates gives it away.”
Larson and his team are famously tight-lipped. Cascade employees almost never speak to the press. According to the Journal, they are even discouraged from using Facebook and other social-media platforms. (Through a spokesperson, the company declined to comment for this article.)
Larson sees to it that Gates’ wealth is sensibly, even conservatively, invested. According to public records, the billionaire’s portfolio includes shares in Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate, a Coca-Cola bottling company, and the tractor manufacturer Deere & Co., among other non-flashy investments.
People want to know, “Why does Bill Gates want all this land?”Eric O’Keefe, of The Land Report magazine
Larson also makes sure Gates keeps his eggs in a wide variety of baskets. His portfolio is diversified, in other words. And that’s where the land purchases come in.
Most of us imagine farmers tilling the soil that has been in their families for generations. But many farmers lease at least some of the land they cultivate. According to Bruce Sherrick, a professor of agricultural economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, about 60 percent of row-crop farmland in the Midwest is leased. The landowners can include investors like Gates.
For investors who know what they’re doing, agricultural land offers financial stability in uncertain times.
“Farmland has had a remarkably consistent ability to hedge against inflation,” Sherrick says.
And it tends to be “negatively correlated” against other investments, he adds: If the stock market is going down, the return on farmland is likely to be going up.
But farmland isn’t easy to buy:
Some partners in the Arizona project issued a press release touting plans to build “a forward-thinking community … that embraces cutting-edge technology.” There was talk of “high-speed digital networks” and “autonomous logistics hubs.” That was all it took for many in the media to conclude that Gates was personally engineering the city of the future.
“Bill Gates has started laying out his plans for creating a ‘smart city’ in Phoenix, Arizona,” science-news outlet Futurism wrote. This high-tech metropolis “could be both a breeding and testing ground for futuristic technologies.”
In reality, the idea that Bill Gates was single-handedly reinventing farming — or designing cities of tomorrow — was almost entirely speculation.
“There’s a tendency in the media to personalize this,” O’Keefe says. “People want to know, ’Why does Bill Gates want all this land?’ ”
But hyper-wealthy people like Gates don’t make every decision personally, O’Keefe notes. “He has very competent investment managers.”
Given that Gates is the third-richest person in the world — with an estimated net worth of $132 billion, he falls in behind Tesla founder Elon Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos — those money managers have their hands full.
Investment guru Michael Larson, who has worked with Gates since 1994, runs the Washington-based Cascade Investment, as well as supervising the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s nearly $50 billion endowment.
“The arrangement is simple,” The Wall Street Journal wrote in a 2014 profile. “Mr. Larson makes money, and Mr. Gates gives it away.”
Larson and his team are famously tight-lipped. Cascade employees almost never speak to the press. According to the Journal, they are even discouraged from using Facebook and other social-media platforms. (Through a spokesperson, the company declined to comment for this article.)
Larson sees to it that Gates’ wealth is sensibly, even conservatively, invested. According to public records, the billionaire’s portfolio includes shares in Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate, a Coca-Cola bottling company, and the tractor manufacturer Deere & Co., among other non-flashy investments.
People want to know, “Why does Bill Gates want all this land?”Eric O’Keefe, of The Land Report magazine
Larson also makes sure Gates keeps his eggs in a wide variety of baskets. His portfolio is diversified, in other words. And that’s where the land purchases come in.
Most of us imagine farmers tilling the soil that has been in their families for generations. But many farmers lease at least some of the land they cultivate. According to Bruce Sherrick, a professor of agricultural economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, about 60 percent of row-crop farmland in the Midwest is leased. The landowners can include investors like Gates.
For investors who know what they’re doing, agricultural land offers financial stability in uncertain times.
“Farmland has had a remarkably consistent ability to hedge against inflation,” Sherrick says.
And it tends to be “negatively correlated” against other investments, he adds: If the stock market is going down, the return on farmland is likely to be going up.
But farmland isn’t easy to buy:
The Presidency Changes People In Strange Ways...
So I turned myself to face me
But I've never caught a glimpse
Of how the others must see the faker
I'm much too fast to take that test
Leftists Cook Up Crazed Fever Dream to See Nazi Symbolism at CPAC
Leftists are convinced that the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is a nefarious conclave of secret Nazis plotting an insurrection. Many activists on Twitter have seized on the shape of the CPAC stage at the Hyatt Regency in Orlando, Fla., claiming it is shaped like a secret rune to cater to Neo-Nazis. Partially for this reason, activists have demanded that Hyatt Hotels stop hosting this “hateful” confab. Hyatt rightly stood up to this absurd cancel push.
Leftists have mocked CPAC as “QPAC,” slamming Republicans as supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory, even though the worst offender in the GOP, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), has disavowed QAnon. This secret Nazi conspiracy theory makes QAnon seem sane.
“Dear [Hyatt], Are you okay with Nazi symbols being used on your properties?” history teacher and PBS Zoom video podcast host Sari Beth Rosenberg asked on Twitter. “Because if you fail to speak out & do something about this immediately, I’ll be sure to no longer patronize any of your properties ever again.”
Rosenberg shared an image that has gone viral on Twitter, comparing the design of the CPAC stage to an oral rune, which the Nazi Waffen SS units used during World War II. While Neo-Nazi groups do use this symbol, it is far less known than the swastika. Even the document that Rosenberg posted to explain the symbol included other symbols like the schutzstaffel (SS) bolts and the Celtic cross, which the Nazis used but which is far more associated with Ireland and Christianity than with the Nazis.
Matt Schlapp, chair of the American Conservative Union (ACU), which organizes CPAC, definitively debunked this absurd conspiracy theory.
“Stage design conspiracies are outrageous and slanderous,” Schlapp tweeted. “We have a long standing commitment to the Jewish community. Cancel culture extremists must address antisemitism within their own ranks. CPAC proudly stands with our Jewish allies, including those speaking from this stage.”
Indeed, CPAC hosts many Jewish speakers, supports the Jewish State of Israel, and celebrates Judeo-Christian values. The official CPAC program included two Jewish prayer services, a Purim luncheon, and a Shabbat dinner on Friday.
Rabbi Yaakov Menken, managing director of the Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV) had the perfect response. “The left is desperate to draw attention from their elevation of antisemites in Congress… so they claim a stage design is antisemitic,” he said on Twitter.
“The Left traffics in ‘dog whistles’ so incredibly sensitive that only leftists can hear them, as compared to the supposed targets, who only see a stage,” Menken added in a statement to PJ Media.
“I wish that all those who for politics pretend to care about hate, real or imagined, would speak up when...
“The Left traffics in ‘dog whistles’ so incredibly sensitive that only leftists can hear them, as compared to the supposed targets, who only see a stage,” Menken added in a statement to PJ Media.
“I wish that all those who for politics pretend to care about hate, real or imagined, would speak up when...
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