Food Chain Capitalism, Millionaires feed Billionaires and are fed to Trillionaires

CHAMPLIN REFINING COMPANY.

"The Champlin Refining Company, which for many years held the distinction of being the nation's largest fully integrated oil company under private ownership, was based at Enid, Oklahoma.

 In 1916 Enid banker and entrepreneur Herbert Hiram Champlin (1868–1944) bought a lapsed oil lease on the Beggs farm in the fledgling Garber Field about fifteen miles east of Enid. Champlin was reluctant to enter the new and highly speculative oil business, but at his wife's urging he agreed to invest twenty-five thousand dollars in the venture.

Champlin's first well came in on Christmas Day 1916 as a 250-barrel producer. The banker-turned-oilman drilled more wells on his 160-acre lease and in July 1917 purchased a small refinery on the outskirts of Enid, enlarged it to provide a market for the oil from his wells, and established the Champlin Refining Company.

In order to provide a secure market for the refinery's growing output, He purchased a series of small oil companies that operated service stations. By the mid-1920s Champlin Refining Company was marketing petroleum products in a six-state area centered on Oklahoma. As the organization grew, it drilled more wells, built a large pipeline network, opened additional refineries, and greatly expanded the retail operation, all under the auspices of Champlin's private ownership.

When Herbert H. Champlin died on April 30, 1944, his company employed more than eight hundred people in Enid, operated service stations and wholesale outlets in twenty midwestern states, had a strong drilling and production presence in Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico, and continued a major refining operation supported by one of the largest pipeline complexes in Oklahoma.

 The company continued under family ownership until its stock went public in 1953.

 In 1954 the Champlin Refining Company was bought by the Chicago Corporation of Chicago, Illinois. This $55 million deal allowed the company to operate as a subsidiary until the Chicago Corporation changed its name to the Champlin Refining Company in 1956.

 In 1964 the Celanese Corporation bought the company, and at the beginning of 1970 Celanese sold Champlin to the Union Pacific Resources Company, a division of the Union Pacific Corporation. 

They operated the Champlin Refining Company in much the same manner as before. In 1984 they sold the entire retail operation to American Petrofina, closed the Enid refinery, and ended the Champlin Refining Company's lengthy and significant presence in Oklahoma."

https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=CH001

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"1211 Avenue of the Americas (also known as the News Corp. Building) is an International style skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Formerly called the Celanese Building, it was completed in 1973 as part of the Rockefeller Center extension, that started in the late 1950s with the Time-Life Building. The Celanese Corporation would later move to Dallas, Texas.

The building was part of the later Rockefeller Center expansion (1960s–1970s) dubbed the "XYZ Buildings". Their plans were first drawn in 1963 by the Rockefeller family's architect, Wallace Harrison, "

"The building served as the global headquarters for the original News Corporation, founded by Australian-born businessman Rupert Murdoch in 1980.

It continues to serve as the headquarters for subsequent spin-offs 21st Century Fox (2013–2019), Fox Corporation (2019–present) and the present-day News Corp (2013–present). 

The building is well-known for housing the main Fox News studios, part of the Fox News Group which is currently owned by Fox Corp. Well-known News Corp divisions housed within the building include Dow Jones & Company, The Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1211_Avenue_of_the_Americas

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"In 1986, its pharmaceutical business was spun off as Celgene, and, in 1987, Celanese Corporation was acquired by Hoechst and merged with its American subsidiary, American Hoechst, to form Hoechst Celanese Corporation.[10]

In 1998, in a $2.7 billion deal, Hoescht Celanese sold its Trevira division to a consortium between Houston-based KoSa, a joint venture of Koch Industries and IMASAB S.A. of Mexico, and Grupo Xtra of Mexico.[11][12][13]

Also in 1998, Hoechst combined most of its industrial chemical operations in a new company, Celanese AG, and, in 1999, Hoechst spun off Celanese AG as a publicly traded, German corporation, traded on both the Frankfurt and New York stock exchanges.

On 16 December 2003, the U.S. private equity firm Blackstone Group announced a takeover offer for Celanese, after two years of wooing management.[14] Shareholders formally approved the offer from Blackstone on 16 June 2004, and Blackstone completed the acquisition of Celanese AG. The company was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange, and Blackstone changed the entity's name to Celanese Corporation. Under Blackstone, a number of streamlining initiatives were undertaken, and several acquisitions were made.

On 21 January 2005, Celanese Corporation conducted an initial public offering and became a publicly traded corporation traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "CE".[15]

When Blackstone sold the last of its shares in 2007, it had made five times what it had invested and it, and its co-investors collected a $2.9 billion profit"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celanese


"As of 2019, the company's total assets under management were approximately US$545 billion dollars. In April 2019, Blackstone disclosed it was converting to a corporation from a publicly traded partnership"

CEO and co-founder Stephen A. Schwarzman has been criticised for his long-time association with now U.S. President Donald Trump. Recently, he served as chair of his Strategic and Policy Forum until its dissolution and has donated around $850,000 to Trump's inauguration and political action committees since his victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, on top of $5.5 million to Republicans in the preceding election cycle.

In separate cases in 2018 and 2019, the hotel chain Motel 6, which is owned by Blackstone, agreed to settle for a total of $19.6 million for giving guest lists to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) without a warrant.

In 2019, The Intercept revealed that two firms owned by Blackstone were partially responsible for the burning of the Amazon rainforest."



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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoechst_AG

 "In 1916, the Hoechst AG was one of the co-founders of IG Farben, an advocacy group of Germany's chemicals industry to gain industrial power during and after World War I.

 In 1925, IG Farben turned from an advocacy group into the well-known conglomerate."

"Various Hoechst facilities were bombed during the Oil Campaign of World War II. 

Its managers in charge were prosecuted along with other IG Farben managers—during the Nuremberg trials—in the IG Farben trial for their role in the exploitation of enslaved laborers and for testing drugs on concentration camp prisoners"
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"1951 - Hoechst AG was re-founded on December 7 in Frankfurt when IG Farben was split into its founder companies. The original capitalization of the company was 100,000 Deutsche Mark. By 1953 Hoechst had acquired parts of Knapsack-Griesheim, Kalle AG, Behring Werke, Wacker Chemie and Ruhr Chemie, among others.[2]

1969 - Hoechst acquired Cassella.[2]

1987 - Hoechst acquired the American chemical company Celanese and formed a new Hoechst subsidiary in the US, Hoechst Celanese.

1995 - Hoechst merges with Marion Merrell Dow of Kansas City, Missouri forming U.S. subsidiary Hoechst Marion Roussel (HMR).

1997 - Hoechst underwent a realignment wherein its various businesses were transferred to independent companies, including Nutrinova and Clariant.[3]

1999 (December 7) - Hoechst and Rhône-Poulenc settle Federal Trade Commission charges that merger would violate U.S. antitrust laws;

1999 - Aventis was formed when Hoechst AG merged with Rhône-Poulenc S.A. The merged company was headquartered in Strasbourg, Eastern France. As part of the merger, the company demerged many of its industrial businesses into Celanese, which became an independent company again (e.g. the engineering polymers business Ticona).


2005 - The company became a wholly owned subsidiary of Sanofi-Aventis (now called Sanofi)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoechst_AG

"Wilhelm Meister (1827–1895) founded the chemical company Teerfarbenfabrik Meister, Lucius & Co. which eventually became Hoechst AG. He was the great-grandfather of William von Meister, one of the founders of Control Video Corporation which later became America Online. 

Pascal Soriot (the now-chief executive of AstraZeneca) held positions with the organisation from 1989 up until 2006 through Aventis."

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"For years, one of the targets for campaigners leading the fossil fuel divestment campaign has been the asset management company BlackRock.

Pressure had been building on BlackRock for some time. And you can see why: the company controls some $7 trillion in assets and therefore is hugely influential in the financial sector.

As the New York Times has noted: if BlackRock shifted its stance on climate, it “could reshape how corporate America does business and put pressure on other large money managers to follow suit.”

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/01/21/blackrock-announcement-beginning-end-fossil-fuel-system

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"BlackRock, the world’s biggest investor, has lost an estimated $90bn over the last decade by ignoring the serious financial risk of investing in fossil fuel companies, according to economists.

A report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) has found that BlackRock has eroded the value of its $6.5tn funds by betting on oil companies that were falling in value and by missing out on growth in clean energy investments.

The report found that BlackRock’s multibillion-dollar investments in the world’s largest oil companies – including ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and BP – were responsible for the bulk of its losses.

The fund manager was also stung by the collapse of big US fossil fuel companies, including General Electric, and the coal mining company Peabody."

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/31/blackrock-lost-90bn-investing-in-fossil-fuel-companies-report-finds

"Its combined funds are larger than the economy of Japan, the third largest economy in the world, making it the single largest investor in the global coal industry and one of the top three investors in most big oil companies."