The Real Rulers of America...

[conspiracy analyst]

Profiting from others misery here Buffet pontificates on the so-called credit crunch which is like Germanys 1920's government issuing of Deutschmarks which led to hyperinflation...This is one of the real rulers of America. The 'elected' ones are just mere representatives of these money men, who think that when they are dead they will be able to use their currency in the afterlife.These are the people Blair Brown and Cameron are in awe of and in debt to.


Warren Buffett
The view from Omaha: devotees flock to hear world's richest man



His homespun investment strategy has made him $10bn profit from the credit crunch

* Andrew Clark in Omaha
* The Guardian,
* Monday May 5 2008
* Article history

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This article appeared in the Guardian on Monday May 05 2008 on p21 of the Financial section. It was last updated at 00:15 on May 05 2008.
Warren Buffett

Record-breaking crowds braved midwest storms to attend Berkshire Hathaway's annual meeting. Photograph: Carlos Barria/Reuters

If there is anything more satisfying than being rich, it must be basking in the glow of being proved right. The world's wealthiest man, Warren Buffett, was lauded by 31,000 devotees in his home town this weekend for eclipsing the biggest brains on Wall Street through his homespun approach to business.

The so-called Sage of Omaha has warned for years that financial innovations such as derivatives, credit swaps and repackaged debt were a disaster waiting to happen.

Buffett favours a more straightforward perspective on investment. "If you're going to buy a farm somewhere near Omaha, you wouldn't get a different price set every day," Buffett told the annual meeting of his Berkshire Hathaway empire. "You'd look at the yield, the cost of the assets, the price of fertiliser. You'd decide what it was worth on the basis of what its earnings will be."

When Buffett wants to invest in a business, he has little time for hedging his way in through "long" or "short" options: "If we want to buy something, we'll just buy it. If we want to exit, we'll sell it. We won't get involved in these fancy techniques."

In a year that has proved catastrophic for Wall Street, the Nebraskan billionaire's fortune has increased by $10bn (£5bn) to $62bn. In Forbes's annual rankings, Buffett overtook Microsoft's Bill Gates and held off the Mexican telecoms magnate Carlos Slim to claim top spot as the richest individual on the planet. Shares in his insurance-based empire soared 29% last year as profits rose 20% to $13.2bn.

This has boosted Buffett's kudos as America's favourite capitalist. The number of people at Buffett's annual shareholder weekend was up 15% on last year's record turnout, in spite of storms pounding the midwest and throwing flight schedules into chaos. Some investors hastily rented cars with strangers to drive through the night from far-flung cities.

At Omaha's Qwest conference centre, Buffett posed patiently as an artist "speed-painted" him at six o'clock in the morning. Crowds flocked to stands promoting Buffett's NetJets private planes, Justin Brands cowboy boots and Dairy Queen cafes. On a hastily arranged Wrigley stand, staff handed out chewing gum to mark Buffett's co-purchase of the $22bn firm with Mars last week. Investors queued to buy Buffett watches, playing cards and T-shirts.

As the meeting began, the congregation roared with laughter at a film featuring Jamie Lee Curtis flirting with "all-you-can-eat Buffett". The country singer Jimmy Buffett even adapted his classic hit Margaritaville with a version entitled Berkshire Hathawayville.

Then, for six hours, Buffett, 77, and his right-hand man, Charlie Munger, 83, munched sweets and swigged Cherry Coke as they fielded non-stop questions with a mixture of banter, scholarly lecturing and philosophy. Many queries centred on the credit crunch and the ensuing financial slowdown in the US.

"There are these primeval urges in wanting to get rich and wanting to believe in the tooth fairy," said Buffett. "Some stupid things were done which won't be done again soon and won't be done the same again."

Mass destruction

He was scathing about the management of Wall Street banks after billions were written off investments in derivatives - which he described as "weapons of financial mass destruction".

"You need a guy at the top whose DNA is very, very much programmed against risk," said Buffett. "The big investment banks, a number of them, are almost too big to manage effectively from a risk standpoint."

Mortgage companies' haphazard lending to inappropriate, sub-prime customers came in for particular flack. Munger told the crowd that "bums were swept off skid row and given mortgages", adding: "The idea of turning the financial markets into gambling parlours so that the croupiers can make more money has never been very attractive to us."

Buffett feels that business schools have encouraged overly complicated financial engineering by spending too much time on "nonsense" such as the pricing of options rather than the fundamental attributes of companies.

The crowd lapped it up. Marv Johnson, a vet from Iowa, said: "He's disciplined, conservative and he doesn't believe in trends."

Many had travelled long distances. A Peruvian clothes company executive, Dante Albertini, had flown in from Lima to hear Buffett for the fourth year: "There are so many fakes in the world: he's authentic."

A note of dissent came from a group of native Americans who live on the Klamath river in California and Oregon. They protested that dams controlled by a Buffett-owned firm, PacifiCorp, are polluting waterways and killing wildlife. Buffett rejected their criticism, saying the issue was for regulators to resolve.

The Nebraskan billionaire's priorities for this year include looking at European opportunities. He is shortly to visit four countries in Europe and is particularly interested in Germany's plethora of family-owned companies: "We're more on the radar screen in the US than we are in Europe. We want to correct that."

Buffett has sought to take advantage of the financial turmoil; a new Berkshire Hathaway venture insuring municipal bonds has got off to a swift start, taking $400m in premiums in the first quarter. But Berkshire is not totally immune: the group's earnings fell 64% in the three months to March and its insurance arm wrote down $1.6bn in liabilities.

Addressing concerns about his age, Buffett recently announced that he had identified four people who could succeed him. But he made it clear at the meeting that he was in no hurry to step aside. Gesturing to Munger, Buffett quipped: "With our average age of 80, we're only ageing at a rate of 1.25% per year. That's the lowest rate of ageing in corporate America. Some of these companies have chief executives who are 50: they're ageing at 2% per year."
Buffett-speak: Sayings of the Sage

On what he would do if he were elected president

"Change things so the super-rich pay a little more and the middle class pays a little less"

On the future of the planet

"The great problem for mankind is that the genie is out of the bottle on nuclear knowledge. More and more people are going to know how to do enormous damage to the rest of the world as the years go by"

On risk

"Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing"

On timing

"We attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful"

On his appearance

"I buy expensive suits - they just look cheap on me"

On his disdain for the legal profession

"I've asked my lawyer to ensure my estate survives for quite some time after my death but that's like asking your teenage son to have a normal sex life"

On his pledge to hand much of his wealth to the Gates Foundation

"I've never given up anything in my life that's made a difference in the way I live"

[mr nice]

[conspiracy analyst]

Warren Buffet: No Project Too Controversial


Warren Buffett’s business accomplishments are certainly impressive. Beginning with one antiquated New England textile mill, Buffett built his fortune as a stock market speculator. His primary company, Berkshire-Hathaway, Inc., based in Omaha, Neb., holds stock in Coca-Cola, Dairy Queen, newspapers and candlemakers. Wall Street holds him in awe; his stock trades at about $70,000 a share.

He may own newspapers, but Buffett isn’t a media hound. He’s said very little about his philanthropy. His foundation, meager compared to that of other billionaires at $22 million, must be judged on what it does. And what it does, mostly, is hard-edged, even fanatical, population control.

The Buffett Foundation is known for funding projects that other foundations, even those similarly inclined to limit human numbers, keep well clear of, including the abortion drug known as RU-486. Back in 1994, Buffet provided $2 million to RU-486's chief U.S. promoter, the Population Council, for clinical trials that led the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to approve the drug. 2

Another $2 million went to North Carolina’s Family Health International (FHI) for an equally questionable drug — quinacrine hydrochloride. Originally developed to combat malaria, quinacrine has in recent years been used to perform chemical sterilizations. Inserted into the upper part of a woman's uterus, quinacrine hydrochloride tablets dissolve to form a powerful acid which burns away the lining of the upper uterus and fallopian tubes. The resulting scarring usually renders a woman sterile. Even if her fallopian tubes are not completely blocked, fertilized eggs can no longer implant.

Family Health International (FHI) began testing quinacrine as a sterilization agent as early as 1976. But its 1981 application to the FDA to approve the drug for sterilizations (it had previously been approved to treat malaria) was rejected on the grounds that, as FHI later explained, “rigorous studies are needed to ensure the safety and efficacy of quinacrine.” 3 Buffet’s fresh infusion of cash will apparently jump start this process by enabling the testing to go forward.

In the meantime, quinacrine’s proponents are doing brisk business overseas. The Vietnamese government has sterilized tens of thousands of poor women using the drug, many without their foreknowledge or consent. 4 Recent reports suggest that ethic minorities, such as the Hmong and Montagnard, have been specifically targeted. Although quinacrine sterilizations are officially banned in India, New Delhi newspapers report that more than 30,000 impoverished, illiterate women have been subjected to the painful procedure. Informed consent is often lacking, and follow-up care is nonexistent.

Yet Buffet’s favorite charity, judging by his giving, is an obscure entity with the studiously neutral name of International Projects Assistance Services (IPAS). According to a Business Week report, the Buffett Foundation’s “1999 contribution of $2.5 million is part of a five-year, $20 million commitment, which will enable IPAS to double its capacity.”

Double its capacity for what? Aborting very small babies — up to 12 weeks gestational age — by means of a hand-held suction pump, that’s what. As it turns out, IPAS is the principal manufacturer and distributor of the manual vacuum aspirators, or MVAs, used by the UN Population Fund, among other groups. This deadly device is actually a manually operated suction pump that can be used perform, in IPAS words, ”elective abortion through the first trimester.” When the tip is inserted into the uterus, and the operator pulls the plunger on the 50cc syringe, enough vacuum is created at the tip to suck a tiny baby right out of her mother’s womb. 5

Nor is IPAS’s abortion advocacy an anomaly. 6 A list of Buffet’s charitable contributions reads like a veritable rogue’s gallery of abortion promoters and providers.


Why is Warren Buffet obsessed with ridding the globe of so-called “excess” baby humans?

Such groups as the National Abortion and Reproductiove Rights Action League (NARAL), the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, and Pathfinder International all figure prominently. What's more, Buffett's funding of Planned Parenthood is specifically earmarked for particular abortion clinics around the country. 7

What would possess a man of obvious intelligence and untold wealth to spend tens of millions of dollars to finance aggressive programs of sterilization and abortion? To put it even more bluntly, why is Warren Buffet obsessed with ridding the globe of so-called “excess” baby humans?

Buffett’s biographer, Roger Lowenstein, reports that Buffet has “a Malthusian dread that overpopulation (will) aggravate problems in all other areas — such as food, housing, even human survival.” And, like Turner, Buffet developed a strong antipathy to Christianity.

http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Evils%20in%20Government/billionaire_bom b.htm