SOS Forests

A Goldman Sachs Let It Burn Fire

One thing we do here is track wildfires. W.I.S.E. Fire Tracking [here] provides daily-updated narratives of fires from ignition to containment. We don’t have access to minute-to-minute information but instead rely on daily reports from the National Geographic Area Coordination Centers [here].

Those reports are called 209’s, and they come from the incident management teams (IMT’s) on each fire. Often they are written in a sort of sparse code which requires decoding and interpretation. But we have tracked over 400 wildfires during the last two years and have gained some experience in sussing out the facts from the 209 bureaucratese.

Few things surprise us anymore. We have tracked Let It Burn fires on every type of federal land and parsed out some pretty egregious malfeasance. But today a new wrinkle caught us off guard.

The Bureau of Land Management has assigned management of a Let It Burn fire (the Twin Buttes WFU [here]) in western Colorado to The Nature Conservancy (TNC).

TNC is a quango (quasi-govermental non-governmental organization). They are a multi-billion-dollar quango, the largest in the world, and are intimately tied to the Goldman Sachs investment banking concern.

Before Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson destroyed the U.S. economy, he was Chairman of the Board of Governors of The Nature Conservancy. Before that, Paulson was Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Goldman Sachs — initiating the firm’s initial public offering in 1999.

The current president and CEO of The Nature Conservancy is Mark Tercek, also currently a managing director at Goldman Sachs.

TNC is a big business. They hold nearly $6 billion in assets, primarily real estate, and enjoyed a half billion dollars in income last year, including $130 million in government grants [here].

Evidently, TNC now contracts WFU’s (wildland fire “use”, aka Let It Burn fires) using their own “module”, a quasi-private fire monitoring team (everything TNC does is “quasi-private, quasi-government”). TNC’s WFU Module “is trained to assist federal agencies to allow natural wildland fires to burn…” [here]

The Twin Buttes Fire has thus become a Goldman Sachs Let It Burn While We Rob the U.S. Treasury fire.

TNC (and by extension Goldman Sachs) has their sticky fingers in much of what our federal land management agencies do. TNC is deeply involved in the Great Montana Land Swindel [here]. They are bagmen agents in the Pinon Canyon/Fort Carson fiasco and indeed are involved in real estate deals on every U.S. Military Base [here]. They were instigators of Gail Kimbell’s “Open Space Conservation Strategy,” the largest land grab since the Louisiana Purchase [here].

Scorched earth is part of the TNC’s strategy. They have subverted the Wildland Fire Leadership Council [here], pushing Let It Burn down the throat of America. They want the entire Federal Estate to be incinerated. They burn their own lands, too. For example, last year the TNC incinerated 14,874 acres on and off their Silver Creek Nature Preserve in Blaine County Idaho [here]. At taxpayers’ expense, of course. Everything TNC does (or is) is at taxpayers’ expense.

Goldman Sachs has a sweet deal in TNC. They buy land cheap (usually just purchase an option) and then resell the land to the Feds at inflated prices for enormous windfall profits — and pay no taxes on the deals. Goldman Sachs buys and sells Congresspersons and government officials, too. They have an unlimited backdoor to the U.S. Treasury.

And now they contract Let It Burn fires from the BLM. The amount of money changing hands will never be revealed. Sweet.