The `Buffettgate' Scandal and U.S. Left `Movement': Part 2

Besides being the son of Billionaire Warren Buffett, the billionaire co-president of the Brooklyn-based NoVo Foundation that helps fund journalist Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! Productions media firm and some other “non-profit” U.S. left `Movement’ NGOs—Peter Buffett—is also, coincidentally, the grandson of a now-deceased anti-labor union, anti-rent control and right-wing GOP congressional representative from Nebraska named Howard Homan Buffett.

So when Wall Street Speculator Warren Buffett was a teenager and in his early 20’s, his father occupied a seat in the U.S. Congress for 4 terms—between 1943 and 1949 and between 1951 and 1953.

Prior to first being elected to Congress at the age of 39 in November 1942, NoVo Foundation Co-President Buffett’s grandfather had “earned a fortune as a grocery store owner and, after that, as a stockbroker,” in Omaha, Nebraska, according to Neil A. Hamilton’s American Business Leaders book. But the Buffett & Son grocery store owners in the 1920s—Peter Buffett’s great-grandfather Ernest Buffett and GOP Congressman-to-be Howard Buffett—apparently “used the code name `Eskimos’ to make offensive remarks about Jews when they were out in public” in Omaha prior to World War II, according to Alice Schroeder’s 2008 book, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life.

During the 1930s, most people on the Upper West Side suffered economically as a result of the Great Depression. But after Warren Buffett’s father established his stock brokerage firm in Nebraska, which was later renamed Buffett & Co. and then Buffett-Falk, in September 1931, the Buffett family’s wealth increased during the Great Depression.

And in the 1940s, most people on the Upper West Side supported the establishment of the Office of Price Administration [OPA] in Washington, D.C. to protect U.S. consumers from being exploited by owners of grocery stores and others who overcharged for food and other consumer goods. In addition, most Upper West Side tenants supported the enactment of federal rent control legislation in the 1940s to protect them from being exploited by landlords and real estate speculators who wished to overcharge them for renting the apartments in which they lived.

Yet after entering Congress in 1943 and being appointed to sit on the House Banking and Currency Committee, NoVo Foundation Co-President Buffett’s grandfather demanded that hearings be held to promote the elimination of the OPA, elimination of price controls on food and other goods and the elimination of federal rent control legislation—which had limited degree to which tenants in U.S. cities like NYC were being exploited by their landlords prior to the 1950s. And by the end of the 1940s the OPA had been abolished.

In addition, GOP Rep. Buffett voted in 1947 to enact the Taft-Hartley Act that GOP Senator Robert Taft of Ohio pushed through Congress—which allowed states to outlaw union shops, prohibited solidarity strikes and solidarity boycotts by unionized workers and undermined the power of the U.S. labor movement to represent U.S. workers’ class interests effectively.

And, when the Taft-Hartley Act sponsor unsuccessfully competed with then-Columbia University President Eisenhower for the GOP’s 1952 presidential nomination, “Taft made his friend Howard Buffett head of his Nebraska presidential campaign and also head of his speakers’ bureau” in 1952, according to The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life book.

So in 1948, not surprisingly, newspaper columnist Drew Pearson had placed Howard Buffett on his “Don’t Re-elect” list and called Howard Buffett “a jack-of-all issues, a run-at-the-mouth politician and bedrock reactionary,” prior to Buffett’s failure, after he supported the Taft-Hartley Act, to be re-elected to Congress in 1948. But before being elected again in 1950 to sit in Congress for a final term between 1951 and 1953, GOP Rep. Buffett did oppose, from a right-wing extremist isolationist political perspective, U.S. military intervention in the Korean Civil War between 1950 and 1953.

Besides earning money from his Congressional salary between 1943 and 1948, Rep. Buffett also earned money while sitting in Congress from his ownership of the South Omaha Feed Company; and in 1949 and 1950, Rep. Buffett returned to being an Omaha stockbroker at his Buffett-Falk firm, before serving his last term in Congress.

And, not surprisingly, according to The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, in 1953, Warren Buffett who “had been tending his” father’s “old accounts while he” sat in Congress then “set up a partnership, Buffett & Buffett,” in which the now former right-wing Congressman “contributed some capital,” upon returning to Omaha.

By the early 1960s, Warren Buffett’s father and business partner had also joined the then newly-formed right-wing extremist John Birch Society, “helped bring the Christmas Anti-Communist Crusade to Omaha” and “went to the local press to defend his Birch membership,” before his death at the age of 61 in 1964, according to the same book.

Ironically, the NoVo Foundation of the grandson of the right-wing extremist 1950s/early 1960s business partner and son of Warren Buffett now utilizes the Buffett family’s Berkshire Hathaway stock speculation wealth and dividends to fund many 21st-century U.S. left `Movement’ NGOs. For example, according to its Form 990 financial filing for2019, Peter Buffett’s NoVo Foundation authorized the following “charitable grants” to U.S. left `Movement’ NGOs (or to “non-profit” U.S. universities that, like the Tides Foundation, apparently act as conduits for shifting Buffett foundation money into the hands of U.S. left `Movement” NGO executive directors):

1. A $500,000 “charitable grant” to the Upper West Side’s “non-profit” Union Theological Seminary “to support Poor People’s Campaign;”
2. A $2 million “charitable grant” to the New York Women’s Foundation;
3. A $3 million “charitable grant” to the Movement Strategy Center;
4. A $1.5 million “charitable grant” to Equality Now;
5. A $600,000 “charitable grant” to the Chinese Progressive Association of San Francisco;
6. A $200,000 “charitable grant” to the Boston Women’s Foundation;
7. A $1.1 million “charitable grant” to the Peace Development Fund of Amherst, MA;
8. A $175,000 “charitable grant" to the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice;
9. A $1 million “charitable grant” to “non-profit” Bard College for “general support;”
10. A $200,000 “charitable grant” to the Upper West Side’s “non-profit” Columbia University;
11. A $1.2 million “charitable grant” to the Ms. Foundation for Women;
12. A $1 million “charitable grant” to MADRE;
13. A $750,000 “charitable grant” to the Jobs With Justice Education Fund;
14. A $200,000 “charitable grant” to the Institute for Policy Studies;
15. A $300,000 “charitable grant” to the Highlander Research & Education Center;
16. A $150,000 “charitable grant" to the “Center for Economic Democracy” in Boston; and
17. A $200,000 “charitable grant” to Political Research Associates.

These 21st-century U.S. left `Movement’ NGOs purport to be fighting politically against the exploitation of consumers, tenants and workers and against the economic inequality in the USA that has intensified in the seven decades since the OPA was abolished and the Taft-Hartley Act was enacted. But during these same seven decades the Buffett family that funds these `Movement’ NGOS has been undemocratically accumulating billions of dollars worth of for-profit corporate stock on Wall Street.

So, coincidentally, in 2019 the Berkshire Hathaway-connected NoVo Foundation of Warren Buffett’s family also awarded the Rockefeller Family Fund over $5.2 million in “charitable grants” and also gave 14 “charitable grants,” totaling $20 million—to the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors organization.