Warren Buffett compares Berkshire-Hathaway's investment strategy to being bisexual

Filthy rich Omaha tycoon Warren Buffett

Buffett, a fan of Mae West, likes to include sexual metaphors in Berkshire-Hathaway's annual letter to shareholders. Here's an excerpt from the Oracle of Omaha's latest missive to stockholders, (in which he admitted that last year Berkshire Hathaway again did not beat the performance of the Standard and Poor's 500.)

     Our flexibility in capital allocation – our willingness to invest large sums passively in non-controlled businesses – gives us a significant advantage over companies that limit themselves to acquisitions they can operate. Woody Allen stated the general idea when he said: “The advantage of being bi-sexual is that it doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night.” Similarly, our appetite for either operating businesses or passive investments doubles our chances of finding sensible uses for our endless gusher of cash.

     Although Buffett is willing to draw parallels between the behavior of his company and bisexuals, he refuses to pose for any joke photos with business students implying teh gay.
     Unrelated: Earlier this year, Buffett tweeted a photo of himself as Breaking Bad's fictional meth manufacturer, Walter White.

Berkshire-Hathaway unit denied gay BNSF employees benefits in Washington State using same argument Jean Stothert did against Omaha cop union

(Via JMG)  Locomotive engineer Michael Hall and conductor Amie Garrand, of respectively, Pierce County and Vancouver have filed suit against against the railroad, owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire-Hathaway, of Omaha (HRC score: 0), for refusing to add their legal same-sex spouses to their health plans. The railroad claims it cannot unilaterally change a collective bargaining agreement.

However, it wasn't clear why such discussions were necessary. An excerpt of health plan at issue, included as an exhibit to the lawsuit, says the husbands and wives of covered employees are dependents eligible for coverage. It makes no reference to whether those husbands and wives must be the opposite sex of the employee, and the company didn't immediately respond to an email asking why same-sex spouses wouldn't be covered under that language.

     Omaha Mayor Jean Stothert is using the same argument to deny spousal coverage to gay cops. Omaha's police union is not persuaded by her logic and will file a grievance.

Piers Morgan's puffball interview with Warren Buffett, the so-called 'people's billionaire'

In between getting Buffett to strum a uke CNN bought for him to play and displaying the contents of his wallet, Piers might have found time to ask a serious question or two about recent nasty revelations about the dozens of lawsuits filed against Berkshire Hathaway subsidiaries National Indemnity and Resolute Management for wrongfully delaying or denying (in order to boost Berkshire's profits) compensation from asbestos and pollution policies to people dying of cancer.
     Scripps recently reported that in multiple cases, courts and arbitrators have ruled that the Berkshire subsidiaries' tactics have been in "bad faith" or intentional. And it's not just sick victims who are mad: large corporations like Ford, Estee Lauder, and other companies whose commercial policies were bought from or sold to Berkshire Hathaway subsidiaries are now suing for reimbursement of fines, legal fees and payments of injury claims.
     Morgan also might have asked why one of the subsidiaries of the 'people's billionaire', Nebraska Furniture Mart, will be, according to the Dallas Morning News, the happy beneficiary of $802,000,000 in financial and tax incentives for building one new store in The Colony, a city of just 20,000, north of Dallas.
     Morgan also might have asked why Berkshire Hathaway recently received an HRC score of zero and whether Warren Buffett is as homophobic as some writers think.

Asbestos-related cancer victims allege compensation stalling by Berkshire Hathaway subsidiaries Resolute and National Indemnity to increase profits; Ford, Estee Lauder are mad too — and they're suing

Scripps investigative reporter Mark Greenblatt reveals that Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc., of Omaha, Neb., is now a foremost global titan in asbestos and pollution litigation.

Scripps interviewed more than 20 sources — some confidential — reviewed dozens of lawsuits and spoke with former insiders, who all allege the Berkshire-owned companies that handle its asbestos and pollution policies — National Indemnity Co. and Resolute Management Inc. — wrongfully delay or deny compensation to cancer victims and others to boost Berkshire's profits. In multiple cases, courts and arbitrators have ruled that the Berkshire subsidiaries' tactics have been in "bad faith" or intentional.

Through 25 known deals, insurers like American Insurance Group, CNA Financial Corp. and Lloyd's of London have paid Berkshire to assume their risk for tens of billions of dollars in future asbestos and pollution claims.

It's not just asbestos cancer victims that are mad: dozens of large corporations are also livid. Ford, Estee Lauder, and other companies whose commercial policies were bought from or sold to Berkshire Hathaway subsidiaries are now suing for reimbursement of fines, legal fees and payments of injury claims.

Buffett on GOP: This particular hole belongs to them; likens healthcare to tapeworm of American economy

Omaha's Croesus, Warren Buffett, was on CNBC's Squawk Box earlier this week. In the video below, he gave some free advice to the GOP: don't screw up two centuries of good credit that the U.S. has built. On other topics (not in the video below) he talked about the recent departures of two of his Benjamin Moore CEOs and the continuing drag that healthcare, American-style, is on the economy.

Healthcare is the tapeworm of the American economy. When u get up to 17-18 percent and other countries have 10%, You've got 7 or 8 cents out of the dollar that we are at a disadvantage – I mean we think we are at a disadvantage and we are because we talked about the $500 billion spent on foreign oil but $500 billion is 3% of GDP. We're talking about a huge cost disadvantage versus rest of world, and we need to address it.

Warren Buffett tweets a photo of himself as Walter White, but no meth dealer ever took $802,000,000 from the tax base of a town of 40,000

Warren Buffett just tweeted a picture of himself in Walter White drag, but not even the most ruthless of meth dealers ever accomplished what his Berkshire Hathaway (HRC score: zero) unit, Nebraska Furniture Mart, did earlier this year when it wrangled economic incentives approaching a billion dollars from a small city near Dallas, The Colony, in exchange for building one new store.
     According to Matthew Watkins of the Dallas Morning News, $802 million in economic incentives is 15 times the city's annual budget; roads, utility upgrades and a parking garage by themselves will run $291 million.
     NFM also will get up to $261 million to offset some of the store's building expenses. This despite the fact that retail jobs are some of the worst paying. Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First, wonders why a city should subsidize retail and "give away your tax base for years," since "retail will take care of itself."
     Which means that stores always follow growing populations, with or without incentives.

     NFM has promised to employ about 2,000 people, but only 850 will be full-time jobs.
     Robert Bland, chairman of the Department of Public Administration at the University of North Texas, wondered about incentives punishing previously existing businesses which have paid their full share of taxes and will now be gaining a major competitor.

For its new Texas store, Nebraska Furniture Mart got $802 million in economic concessions from The Colony, a city of 40,000 — $20,000 per person

According to Matthew Watkins of the Dallas Morning News, that's 15 times the city's annual budget; roads, utility upgrades and a parking garage by themselves will run $291 million.
     NFM, a division of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, also will get up to $261 million to offset some of the store's building expenses. This despite the fact that retail jobs are some of the worst paying. Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First, wonders why a city should subsidize retail and "give away your tax base for years," since "retail will take care of itself."
     Which means that stores always follow growing populations, with or without incentives.
     NFM has promised to employee about 2,000 people, but only 850 will be full-time jobs.
     Robert Bland, chairman of the Department of Public Administration at the University of North Texas, wondered about incentives punishing previously existing businesses which have paid their full share of taxes and will now be gaining a major competitor.

America's billionaire: New York Times columnist Maureen Down goes to Georgetown University to hear the Oracle of Omaha

Well, maybe heterosexual America's billionaire. At any rate, listening to the quote-friendly Warren Buffett talk is always an easy gig for a columnist. Here's some of what Maureen Dowd thought was worth repeating in her latest column:

• He even joked that he had fond thoughts of 1929 because it was when he was conceived: “my dad was a stock salesman and after the crash he didn’t have anything to do.
• But then, about five years ago, Buffett said at Georgetown, he and Gates began plotting about philanthropy and now they have enrolled 115 plutocrats pledging a majority of their net worth. “I’ve been dialing for dollars,” he said, adding that when billionaires resist, he gives them a warning: “If I’m talking to some 70-year-old, I say, ‘Do you really think your decision-making ability is going to be better when you’re 95 with some blonde on your lap, or now?’ ”
• “I always tell people, if they’re going in the investment business and you’ve got a 160 I.Q., sell 30 points to somebody else because you won’t need it.”
  [Dowd]Or sell some to the House Republicans.

Warren Buffett on budget threats: 'Markets only expect politicians to act irrationally for a certain length of time'

Nevertheless, the Oracle of Omaha and most successful large invester of the 20th century thinks prolonged obstructionism on lifting the debt ceiling is "disturbing" and not moving forward would be "pretty damn dumb."

Here's a much better ad for insurance than those ubiquitous, relentless and crummy Berkshire-Hathaway GEICO spots

See John Lewis' ad here.

Via copyranter, who opined:

"...this spot for John Lewis home insurance actually, you know, SELLS INSURANCE.
     Because frankly, this whole “let’s get ha-ha about insurance” ad movement (I’m looking at you, AllState “Mayhem”) that Geico helped jumpstart is just getting so fucking tiresome."

     AKSARBENT thinks copyranter is wrong about Allstate, right about GEICO, the ATM for Omaha billionaire Warren Buffett's gargantuan holding company, Berkshire-Hathaway.
     How pathetic that GEICO, one of the largest insurance companies in the world, was totally outclassed by an ad for the insurance subsidiary of a British department store.

TMZ baits Warren Buffett again: I want Warren Buffett in a little outfit too.

Recent reports indicate that Yahoo! websites actually beat Google's sites in traffic recently, for the first time in years. (Maybe Google Russia could contribute more to the parent company's hits if it weren't allegedly blocking gay news sites from its search engine results.)
     In the wake of the Yahoo! news, TMZ did a segment on whether Vogue's feature on CEO Marissa Meyer "objectified" her.
     Apparently the fashion arbiter didn't sufficiently do so, according to one TMZ staffer, who wanted pictures of Meyer in a bikini. But he didn't stop there:

(@42:25) You know what? I want Warren Buffett in a little outfit too. I want Warren Buffett abs... on the beach... chillin'.

     TMZ must be unaware that "Oracle of Omaha" tycoon Buffett isn't at all copasetic with being objectified by dudes.
      The entertainment-news-program-with-an-attitude last ridiculed Buffett by asking him if he was a "rainmaker," which, evidently, is a gentleman's club patron who showers lap dancers with money.
     It also opined that his wife, Astrid Menks, looks like a "drag queen."
     Steve Horn of DeSmogBlog has been Buffett-baiting recently too: Witness his recent post ripping the Berkshire-Hathaway founder and CEO for his "dirty deeds done dirt cheap" stock play in tar sands oil profiteer Suncor.
     Horn reminded his readers that Buffett was fingered by Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson as one of 17 "Climate Killers"

Omaha tycoon Warren Buffett urges the woman who tried to throw Nebraska farms and ranches under Keystone XL bulldozers to run for president

"#45" evidently means "President #45"

Hillary Clinton has put her thumb on the pro-Keystone XL pipeline decision scale so shamelessly that her State Department received two rare spankings from the EPA about its crudely biased environ­mental impact studies of the Keystone XL pipeline siting.
     Clinton, who has all but called for Bradley Manning's head on a stick, was exposed by State Department cables he wikileaked which showed a sickeningly cozy relationship of the U.S. Department of State with a foreign oil company (TransCanada) that betrayed Nebraska landowners threatened by TransCanada with eminent domain even though the company has not been issued pipeline permits.
    We're sure that if TransCanada had tried to run a pipeline anywhere near the pristine reservoirs of New York State, where Clinton lives, she would have put an immediate stop to it, but evidently an extension to the leakiest new pipeline ever, directly over North America's most valuable underground aquifer (the original route) didn't bother Hillary at all. Nebraska is, after all, a flyover state.
    Recently a former employee compared Hillary's friends at TransCanada to an organized crime syndicate before a Canadian Senate hearing.
     Speaking of which, both Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman and Attorney General Jon Bruning were forced by press exposure to return political contributions from TransCanada because, of course, foreign corporations are legally prohibited from renting U.S. politicians, even brazenly amoral ones.
     Incidentally, Bruning and Heineman just lost another round in a landowner lawsuit against Nebraska involving opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline.
     In respect of corporations, gay AKSARBENT readers should know that only one company of the 1,000 that HRC evaluated rated lower than Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway in its treatment of gay employees and job applicants: ExxonMobil.

October 2011 chart via Friends of the Earth

Omaha's surprising wealth

Downtown Omaha from the north. Photo: Patrick Hawks, via Wikipedia.

Anyone who lives here can tell you that Omaha has an unusual amount of money for a city of its size — although the largesse may not be particularly well distributed.
     The revelation of how much money elicits anything from raised eyebrows to gaping disbelief.
     Unlike Texans, Midwesterners aren't notorious for flaunting their loot (Willy Theisen notwithstanding) and flyover money isn't visible from planes.
     But the dough is here, and in 2005, Del Jones of USA Today confirmed the perception.

Omaha has tremendous wealth, industry and influence for being in the middle of nowhere. It ranks eighth among the nation's 50 largest cities in both per-capita billionaires and Fortune 500 companies.

     The article was accompanied by two charts which reveal that Nebraska's largest city had 9.9 Fortune 500 companies per million people, vs. 5.3 for New York City. It had 7.4 billionaires per million people vs. 4.5 for Los Angeles (!), 3.8 for Chicago, 3 for New York and 2.7 for Miami.
     Omaha is said to have at least 100 families worth in excess of $100,000,000 each, many of them early Berkshire-Hathaway investors who rode the Warren Buffett train to Fat City.
     (In 2009, Berkshire-Hathaway actually bought the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) railroad outright for $34 billion. The only U.S. railroad bigger than BNSF, the Union Pacific, is headquartered in... Omaha.)
     Below: Ralph Nader promoting a book at Borsheim's Fine Jewelry, in Omaha's Regency neighborhood. At 62,000+ sq. ft. with 100,000 items in inventory, Borsheims is said to be the largest single-location jewelry store in the world and is where Bill Gates bought Melinda her engagement ring. During his shopping expedition at Borsheim's (by then a Berkshire property), Gates was squired by pal Buffett who, ever the salesman, gave him the following advice about buying a ring:

"Look, Bill, this is none of your business, but when I got married, I spent 6 percent of my net worth on the ring. I don't know how much you love Melinda."

The 300-year-old Indian "Princie" pink diamond, sold
April 16, 2013 by Christie's in New York City.

     In 1994, when Gates bought his engagement ring from Borsheim's, he had just edged out Buffett as the wealthiest American, reckoned by Forbes to be worth $9.35 billion. A ring worth 6% of that would have cost $561 million, a sum more than ten times the cost of any diamond ever sold, before or since.
 

Warren Buffett's Berkshire-Hathaway ranked worst large Omaha firm for gay employees, job applicants; rating: 0% — most other top Omaha firms also flunked

Related: Why did HRC score Berkshire-Hathaway so low?
 

Left to right: Peter Kiewit Sons and Berkshire-Hathaway (both headquarters are in the same building),
Union Pacific and Mutual of Omaha (decked out for an over-the-top promotion of a 2008
U.S. Olympic swim trial that Mutual sponsored; the 2012 hype was even more outlandish.)

The well-known Omaha corporations whose headquarters are pictured above, all flunked the 2013 Corporate Equality Index ratings released by Human Rights Campaign (HRC),  the country's preeminent gay rights organiza­tion. That study evaluated how America's leading corporations treat their gay employees and job applicants. You can read the whole thing here, with an explanation of HRC's methodology.

ConAgra: almost as good to gay employees as Berkshire is bad

     Notably absent from HRC's rankings was Omaha's huge brokerage firm, TD Ameritrade, whose founder Joe Ricketts, and son, Peter, have a nasty habit of bankrolling antigay GOP politicians like U.S. Senator Deb Fischer and state senator Beau McCoy.
     Here are the rankings for several internationally-renowned companies based in Omaha:

ConAgra: 95
Kutak Rock LLP: 90 (law firm)
Mutual of Omaha: 60
Union Pacific: 55
Peter Kiewit Sons: 15 (construction)
Berkshire-Hathaway: 0

     AKSARBENT is less than surprised at the abysmal rating of gigantic Berkshire Hathaway, whose founder, Warren Buffett, finds the prospect of even joking about being gay offensive.
     GEICO, a Berkshire company, once engaged as a commercial spokesman Charlie Daniels, the only singer we can think of to chart a top 10 record in the United States referring to gay people as "fags" and then to have released a followup which heaped even more of his redneck abuse at the same targets. (Good choice, GEICO, especially when Progressive has run at least one television ad with two males obviously intended to be perceived as a gay couple.)



     The Daniels records in question were his 1973 smash "Uneasy Rider" (skip to 3:17 here) and the sequel, "Uneasy Rider '88," which contained the following lyrics:

But this funny looking feller kept coming on
And he was making me mad with some of the things he said
Then he put his hand on my knee
I said if you don't get your paw off me
I'm gonna locate your nose around
The other side of your head

     AKSARBENT has a hard time picturing, even back in 1988, the scenario of Charlie Daniels being hit on by dudes as anything other than a fantasy of poetic license.
     In April [of 2010], GEICO fired gay gay supportive voice-over actor Lance Baxter, aka D.C. Douglas, best known for his "save up to 15%" tags on GEICO commercials, after a voicemail he left for Dick Armey's astroturf group FreedomWorks was widely circulated in the right-wing blogosphere. (Rule #1: If your voice is on commercials heard by millions of people, use email, not voicemail, when you're pissed off.)
     Baxter was incensed by what he considered to be rampant racism and homophobia among Tea Party members. Baxter's home phone number was subsequently posted on Andrew Breitbart's Big Government website.

Warren Buffett buys Heinz; Omaha now wields terrifying power over nation's catsup suppliers; Hunts also a captive; will Del Monte fall next?

Go Big Red!

If you're keeping this story to yourself, you're just damn selfish! Tell your friends via the Facebook, Google+, Reddit, Twitter, or email buttons at the bottom of this post.

Many naive observers think Warren Buffett's announced acquisition, today, of Heinz, was just the latest in a long line of synergistic corporate plays (Heinz makes catsup, catsup stains couches, Buffett also owns Nebraska Furniture Mart.)
     Few noticed the looming spectre of total Omaha catsup domination — as it happens, the #2 catsup brand, Hunts, is owned by Con Agra, headquartered in... you guessed it... Omaha.
     If you live in San Francisco, home of the #3 catsup, Del Monte, you should be very, very afraid.
============
In other business news, two airlines, American and some other company, merged to create the world's largest future recipient of a government bailout, and Omaha stock broker TD Ameritrade, whose founder, Joseph Ricketts, just made the balloon payment on GOP yes-girl Deb Fischer's successful Nebraska Senate race, um where did this sentence begin? Oh, yeah, TD Ameritrade this month reached half a trillion dollars in total client assets.
     Pssst. Wanna have some fun? Run a Koch Bros.-backed candidate against Ricketts-backed Fischer next primary and watch Karl Rove go completely insane.

Sacramento Bee bitch slaps Rick Perry, Texas over radio ads poaching California businesses

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First, some background:
     When Nebraska Furniture Mart executives went to Texas in 2011 to plan its newest megastore, the state immediately started to grab for the whole enchilada, dangling large tax inducements to persuade the store to move its headquarters from Omaha, the home of current owner, Warren Buffett and his Berkshire Hathaway Corporation, which bought the enterprise from Omaha's Blumkin family.
     NFM said no thanks. Like Buffett, it liked Omaha and would run things from here.

Warren Buffett buys NFM on a handshake from the woman whose motto
was ''Sell cheap, tell the truth, don't cheat nobody.'' (Did you catch that
middle part, Rick Perry?)   Photo from Nebraska Furniture Mart website

     Before engaging in their hamfisted overreaching, Texas economic development officials might have done well to peruse the New York Times' 1998 obituary of NFM's matriarch to familiarize themselves with the local bonds they were trying to sever:

Based on his experience as a customer and as an acquaintance of her [Rose Blumkin's] children, Mr. Buffett made the acquisition on a handshake without bothering to audit her books or inventory.

     Texas bidnessmen can have sharp elbows. Especially in California, where they now are using radio ads to amplify their acquisitive opportunism. Here was the tart response to that in an astringent Sacramento Bee editorial, published Wednesday:    

     Poor Texas. With its high dropout rate, lack of health insurance coverage and economic disparities, the Lone Star State appears to be desperate, or least its governor is. How else to explain Gov. Rick Perry's unseemly radio ads attempting to lure businesses away from California?
     "Building a business is tough, but I hear building a business in California is next to impossible," the Republican governor says in the ad. "This is Texas Gov. Rick Perry, and I have a message for California businesses: Come check out Texas."
     Yes, come check out Texas. Check out a state that ranks dead last in the percent of its population with high school diplomas. Come check out a state that is last in mental health expenditures and workers' compensation coverage. Come check out a state that ranks first in the number of executions, first in the number of uninsured, first in the amount of carbon dioxide emitted and first in the amount of toxic chemicals released into water.

     The dressing down continued for eight more paragraphs, within which the Bee took issue with Jerry Brown's comparison of the importance of Texas' radio ads to a fart. The paper said it was actually less like a fart and more like a cry for help from a governor who can only steal jobs, not create them.
     The editorial ended with a quote from every progressive's heroine, the late, no-BS Texas icon Molly Ivins, about her state: "It's a low-tax, low-service state — so shoot us. The only depressing part is that, unlike Mississippi, we can afford to do better. We just don't."

TMZ ambushes Warren Buffet, but not before calling his wife Astrid Menks a drag queen

In the second teaser to the sorry spectacle below, one member of the TMZ staff name-checked Buffet's wife, Astrid Menks and immediately got a "Drag Queen!" response by one of the resident punks who has obviously been on the streets of Hollywood too long, or perhaps confused Astrid with "Mink Stole," who, although she played Divine's daughter in a John Waters film, isn't a drag queen either.
     If you want to hear the teaser's snarky slur, you'll have to watch today's episode on your DVR or online tomorrow at TMZ's website.
     Trust AKSARBENT, Menks didn't look like a drag queen back in the day when she worked at the French Cafe and she doesn't look like one now.

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Warren Buffett's weird call to Jack Welch on CNBC

Berkshire Hathaway millionaires, billionaires occupy Omaha; 150 private jets alit on Friday alone

Occupy Omaha activists outside Borsheim's jewelry in
Omaha's exclusive Regency neighborhood. Borsheim's, a
Berkshire Hathaway company, is a featured destination for
shareholders in their annual pilgrimage to Omaha, which
Warren Buffet calls "Woodstock for Capitalists." At the
Borsheim venue, "shameless embrace of conspicuous
consumption" might be a more appropriate description.
Photo: KMTV still frame from this report.

30,000 shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, the most expensive stock on the New York Stock Exchange, have descended on Omaha to hear Warren Buffett answer questions about, among other things, his recent cancer diagnosis and why Berkshire is trailing the S&P 500 for the third year in a row.
     150 private jets were expected Friday alone. Berkshire Hathaway has 80 subsidiaries and 270,000 employees, of which just 24 work at Omaha headquarters.
     In his most recent annual report, Buffett, the People's multibillionaire, consoled homeowners recently evicted in foreclosures by noting the following:

Large numbers of people who have “lost” their house through foreclosure have actually realized a profit because they carried out refinancings earlier that gave them cash in excess of their cost. In these cases, the evicted homeowner was the winner, and the victim was the lender.

     To conserve the wealth of his shareholders too poor to afford private jet or co-op NetJets (another Berkshire company) travel, and to enable them to spend more at Borsheim's and the gigantic Nebraska Furniture Mart (another Berkshire company), Warren Buffett thoughtfully encouraged stockholders to fly into Kansas City rather than Eppley Airfield because the airlines jack up fares to Omaha during shareholders' weekend. Even at 81, Buffett is not one to leave money on the table for airlines to scoop up when those bucks should rightfully be his!

'Populist' tycoon Warren Buffett to evicted home­owners: You won!

Photo: Dorothea Lange

Buffett had this sympathetic salve in his breathlessly-awaited 2011 letter to shareholders regarding homeowners left out in the cold during the recent mortgage meltdown:

Large numbers of people who have “lost” their house through foreclosure have actually realized a profit because they carried out refinancings earlier that gave them cash in excess of their cost. In these cases, the evicted homeowner was the winner, and the victim was the lender.