The money behind school reform

Proposed TEPCO plant on Texas Gulf coast.

Disaster capitalists Gates, Buffett...

Whenever there's an environmental disaster in the world, I always look to see how deeply Bill Gates, his partners, and his foundation are involved. The Gates Foundation's investments in Nigeria have helped turn much of that country into an unlivable, oil-polluted wasteland.

Gates got off scott free after the massive BP oil spill in the Gulf, even though his foundation owns millions of shares of BP and his hedge-fund school reform partners Warren Buffett and Whitney Tilson own NALCO the company that makes COREXIT, the dispersant that is even more harmful to the environment than the oil.

Now comes the horrific nuclear disaster at Fukushima which has even greater world-wide implications. Gates has been among the loudest champions of building more nukes in this country. He and his foundation have billions of dollars invested in nuclear development, here and around the world.

The reactors at Fukushima were built by Gates partner, G.E. and operated by TEPCO. TEPCO, which is being bashed by the Japanese government for spreading lies and misinformation in order to protect themselves and their investors from liability, is currently building more nukes down in South Texas. Partners in the South Texas project include--yes, you guessed it-- Gates and Buffett.

Gates is also the largest single owner and board chairman of TerraPower, Washington state's nuclear energy company. Other TerraPower investors include, Microsoft, Apple and Intel to Sony and Nokia to Google and eBay — that have poured about $5 billion into Gates' nuke projects.

His partner in the nuclear power industry is the Japanese company, Toshiba and Toshiba along with NRG Energy and G.E. are the direct partners with TEPCO in the U.S.and Japanese nuke business.

Warren Buffett, owns Constellation Energy--67% of which is nukes.

Gates recently put $35 million into Charles River Ventures and Khosla Ventures to build nukes.

It it any wonder then that U.S. politicians, including Pres.Obama are still singing, "NUKE BABY, NUKE" and "DRILL BABY, DRILL"? There's lots of reasons for Gates and his nuke partners to exert influence over pols in both parties. Among them, huge corporate tax breaks. G.E., the nation's largest corporation, pays only about 12% of its earnings in taxes. Don't you wish you were taxed at that rate? Gates does them one better. By investing so heavily through his $36 billion foundation, he is taxed at about a 1% rate on profits from corporate investments. Bad news for Gates--the rate may soon go up to 1.9%.

Finally, it's worth thinking about how much public school reform and public schooling itself, have become dependent of these non-taxable profits gained from these dirty and destructive Gates Foundation investments.