The `Buffettgate' Scandal and U.S. Left `Movement': Part 7

The son of Nebraska’s former right-wing U.S. Congressman Howard Homan Buffett and father of the co-president of the NoVo Foundation which funds many U.S. left “movement” NGOS—Warren Buffett— became the largest owner of American Express and Berkshire Hathaway stock, while transforming Berkshire Hathaway from a textile manufacturer into his stock speculation holding company, during the Vietnam War Era of the 1960s. And before dissolving his Buffett Partnership Limited stock speculation firm in 1970, Warren Buffett also purchased the stock and/or gained control of additional U.S. corporations or set-up other stock speculation holding companies in the late 1960s.

For example, in 1966 the NoVo Foundation co-president’s father set up a stock speculation holding company, in which he owned 80 percent of the stock, called the Diversified Retailing Company; and, soon afterwards, Warren Buffett was given a multi-million dollar “loan”” by the Maryland National Bank’s corporate board for his Diversified Retailing Company to purchase Maryland National Bank board member and then-Hotschild-Kohn department store CEO Martin Kohn’s own Hotschild-Kohn store in Baltimore. Buffett’s Diversified Retailing then also purchased the Associated Cotton Shops dress shop chain in 1967; and Diversified Retailing later sold its Hotschild-Kohn store in Baltimore to Supermarket General.

And during the late 1960s, the NoVo Foundation co-president’s father also speculated in the stock of insurance companies like National Indemnity, Cornhusker Casualty, National Fire and Marine, Employers Reinsurance, and Travelers Insurance; and in companies like First Lincoln Financial, ALCOA, Montgomery Ward, Caterpillar Tractor, AT&T, B.F. Goodrich, Jones & Laughlin Steel, United Brands, Blue Chip Stamps, Illinois National Bank & Trust, Rockford Bank, See’s Candies and the Walt Disney Corporation.

While “the war in Vietnam was pumping up the stock market to record heights,” the Omaha, Nebraska-based son of former Rep. Buffett and father of NoVo Foundation co-president Peter Buffett was also apparently telling “his brokers” that “under no circumstances were they to speak of Buffett’s stock picks, even to people in their offices,” according to Roger Lowenstein’s Buffett book. And during the 1960s, according to the same book:

"The fact is that Buffett was in no way detached from Wall Street. He was on the line to stockbrokers and to traders virtually every day, and on many days numerous times. Art Rousell, the chief trader at Cantor Fitzgerald…must have spoken `100 million words’ to Buffett over the years…”

NoVo Foundation Co-President Buffett’s father had begun using the Berkshire Hathaway holding company (in which the Brooklyn and Kingston, NY-based NoVo Foundation has owned a big chunk of stock since 2006) as a device to eventually purchase large amounts of stock in many purportedly competing U.S. corporate media firms during the following five decades; when Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway became owner of the Omaha Sun group of 8 weekly newspapers and Warren Buffett became Omaha Sun board chairman in 1969—not long before he “joined the board of Omaha National Corporation, the biggest bank in town” in 1970, at the same time Berkshire Hathaway also owned stock in both the National Indemnity and the GEICO insurance companies, according to Alice Schroeder’s The Snowball book.

By the early 1970s, as The Snowball also recalled, former GOP Rep. Buffett’s son “paid careful attention to the…influence of media in politics” and “wanted some of that.” In addition, “as the profitability of television became apparent,” the NoVo Foundation co-president's father “wanted a piece of that business too;” and as Roger Lowenstein’s Buffett book observed “Berkshire had…money” and “was buying…media stock at every turn” in the 1970s.

So, not surprisingly, by 1974 the Buffett family’s Berkshire Hathaway holding company became the largest shareholder of Boston Globe/Affiliated Publications stock and owned big chunks of stock of purportedly competing corporate media firms like the Booth Newspapers chain of newspapers, the Scripps-Howard chain of newspapers, the Harte-Hanks Communications chain of newspapers and the Multi-Media corporate media firm; as well as between 10 and 12 percent of the stock of the purportedly competing Washington Post corporate media conglomerate, which also then owned Newsweek magazine, four television stations and newsprint mills.

Yet as the Buffett book also noted, although Berkshire Hathaway was by October 1973 “the largest outside investor in the Washington Post,” this fact was generally “unknown to the public” during the 1973-1974 Nixon-Watergate Scandal Era of U.S. history.

And what was also not generally known during the mid-1970s was that, at the same time the NoVo Foundation co-president father’s Berkshire Hathaway was gobbling up the stock of corporate media firms like the Washington Post Company, “Berkshire was also buying major chunks of two big” advertising “agencies, Interpublic Group and Ogilvy & Mather International” (which both profited from producing some of the advertising that filled the newspaper pages, the magazine pages or airwaves of some of the same corporate media firms that Berkshire Hathaway also now owned), according to the same book.

In 1974, for example, Berkshire Hathaway owned both 17 percent of Interpublic/McCann-Erickson ad agency corporate stock and 10 to 12 percent of the Washington Post Company/Newsweek corporate stock. But the NoVo Foundation co-president’s father was then “still as secretive as possible,” according to the Buffett book.

And, also not surprisingly, as The Nation magazine noted in a Feb. 13, 2018 article, titled “Special Investigation: The Dirty Secret Behind Warren Buffett’s Billions,” by David Dayen, “despite the Internet,” in 2018 the NoVo Foundation co-president’s father still owned “31 daily newspapers, most of them local monopolies.” (end of part 7)