It’s the tenth year in a row that Buffett has contributed to charity foundations, including Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and four other charities headed by his own family.
The donations will all go to charities affiliated with the Buffett family. That includes Buffett’s education-focused charity, which is named for his late wife Susan, the Nebraska-based Sherwood Foundation, which is chaired by their daughter, the Howard G. Buffett foundation chaired by his son, and the NoVo Foundation, headed by Buffett’s youngest son Peter.
Buffett is the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway (BRKA), a $160 billion holding company, and his donations will be in the form of 20.6 million Class B shares that were worth more than $2.8 billion at Thursday’s close.
Although he seems keen on philanthropic deeds, Buffet is by no means the humble, honest super-philanthropist the mainstream media plays him out to be. Here are a few facts you should also know about him:
1)”We’re going to have something in the way of a major nuclear event in this country,” said Buffett, in 2002. “It will happen. Whether it will happen in 10 years or 10 minutes, or 50 years … it’s virtually a certainty.” Fear-mongering of that sort tends to improve the profits of the insurance companies he owns.
2)He often says his kids will get basically nothing from him. He says, nobody should win the “genetic lottery.” This is untrue, as admitted in even mainstream sources, because his children will inherit life-long positions as CEOs of very well-funded “charities”. Doubtless they will be given quite a fair bit of his money from that route. Better, none of it gets taxed, and the positive PR…
3) Champion of the lower class, advocate of higher taxes on the uber rich? Not really, Berkshire Hathaway has been in an ongoing tax dispute with the IRS since 2002. In other words, he doesn’t want to pay taxes (note how he conveniently avoids the estate tax by giving it all to charity upon his death) and his company doesn’t want to pay taxes. He advocates higher taxes on the 1%, who are often still income earners and work for their over-inflated salaries, but wants the 0.01% like himself(who happen to just sit around and depend on passive income) to escape paying taxes altogether.
4) He claims to stay in a small 5-bedroom house. How humble. He also forgot to mention that one does not need a bigger house when one owned at least two beach beach houses worth millions in the past.
6)“I’ll tell you why I like the cigarette business. It costs a penny to make. Sell it for a dollar. It’s addictive. And there’s fantastic brand loyalty.” a quote from him, made in 1989.
7) The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation is worth some 2.7 billion dollars. Of this, it has received 204 million dollars in gifts and spent 458 million dollars in total for 2013. 425 million spent on 289 grants, 25 million for grants to individuals. As a charity focused on education, the tiny 25 million spent on actually giving individual scholarships is telling. Interestingly, the amount spent in total is barely a rounding error when compared with the total value: about 0.17% is spent a year.
Precious little else can be gleaned regarding its individual activities, or the salaries paid to its CEO, as is the case with other Buffet charities. Notably, his own son who runs a charity for him has made a stunning admission “Because of who my father is [Warren Buffett], I’ve been able to occupy some seats I never expected to sit in… Philanthropy has become… what I would call “conscience laundering”—feeling better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity.”
8) Warren’s companies often engage in predatory practices, passing customers from one money-vampire to the next:
Berkshire Hathaway, the investment conglomerate Buffett leads, bought Clayton in 2003 and spent billions building it into the mobile-home industry’s biggest manufacturer and lender. Today, Clayton is a many-headed hydra with companies operating under at least 18 names, constructing nearly half of the industry’s new homes and selling them through its own retailers. It finances more mobile-home purchases than any other lender by a factor of six. It also sells property insurance on them and repossesses them when borrowers fail to pay.
Berkshire extracts value at every stage of the process. Clayton even builds the homes with materials — such as paint and carpeting — supplied by other Berkshire subsidiaries.
More than a dozen Clayton customers described a consistent array of deceptive practices that locked them into ruinous deals: loan terms that changed abruptly after they paid deposits or prepared land for their new homes; surprise fees tacked on to loans; and pressure to take on excessive payments based on false promises that they could later refinance.
Former dealers said the company encouraged them to steer buyers to finance with Clayton’s own high-interest lenders.
The Oracle of Omaha is worth an estimated $70 billion and has made headlines for his philanthropic efforts in the past. In 2006 he announced his intention to gradually give away all of his shares in Berkshire Hathaway, which will probably end up in his own foundations which will act in his family’s interests. Last year, he gave away 21.7 million shares, now worth nearly $3 billion.
In 2010, Buffett launched The Giving Pledge with Bill Gates, and so far more than 130 billionaires have signed on to a commitment to “give” their fortunes away…. To avoid paying inheritance taxes? Buffett is a better person than most wealthy individuals, but this does not necessarily make him a good person or a particularly saintly individual as the media likes to portray him.
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Buffet, and Berkshire Hathaway, through secret private placement memorandums, purchase government backed mortgages, route the mortgage payments to off shore havens in order to avoid paying income taxes. They receive future advances for real property tax payments, and hazard insurance, which they are supposed to repay, but never do. They force homeowners into foreclosure, obtain the homes for cheap, and then sell them through their own realty services. They collect on the government insurance, but proceed to foreclose in the courts, as if they had not already been paid. Buffet is a vicious thief, who has removed hundreds of thousands of Americans from their homes.