No, you have it wrong about Warren Buffet, he’s as tight with Obama as Jeffrey Imelt.
The Obama administration has taken an interest in coal mining in the west, due to the influence of Richard Trumka, who was the head of the United Mine workers before he became head of the AFL-CIO. The coal that they are pushing is Powder River Basin, sub-bituminous coal from Montana and Wyoming. The coal has been going to China for years, and the plan is/was to expand that market and build a new rail lines with a huge transfer station in Idaho (Sand Point) to carry it and grain to Whatcom County, WA, where it would be shipped to China by CARRIX, which is 49% owned by Goldman Sachs.
The whole project is dependent on government subsidies and backroom deals. The coal has little value, in itself, and all the profit is in the shipping and teminalling, which will be handled by companies that are big Democrat donors. Patty Murray has proposed a sort of third stimulus bill in the Senate to fund the rail portion of the project S-942. It’s another huge money laundering scheme by the Democrat party, money from the federal budget->to favored Dem companies->back to the Democrat coffers.
One problem with the coal is that the Chinese market for the coal is extremely time limited. It’s dependent on two things, the fact that China has been developing their own source of coal from a new field in Mongolia and the cheap US dollar. As long as China could pay for the coal with cheap US dollars, it was just about free, but if the dollar strengthens even slightly the deal goes south.
What the Chinese really want is grain and soy beans and the Democrats at Goldman Sachs have suggested that they could get the restrictions on farming lifted if the farmers would agree to ship their grain and soy beans to China, through Whatcom County, but the lead time to such a project is about five years, after they get the restrictions lifted, so in the mean time, they want to ship coal and turn my county into a hazardous waste dump.
Oh, and there are plenty of grain terminals in WA. We don’t need a new one. The only reason for a new terminal would be to funnel the profit into Goldman Sachs and BNSF, and to make sure that the grain goes to China, not ethanol.
Well put.