Free Republic

One of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway holdings, NetJets (a private aircraft company), is being countersued by the U.S. government for at least $302 million in taxes and penalties, Bloomberg reports. This story is bound to attract some attention, since Warren Buffett has been so outspoken about every American paying their fair share of taxes. And it's a really hot headline to be sure — but there's a little more to the story. Notice, the U.S. government is counter suing. Back in November, Bloomberg also reported that NetJets was suing the U.S. government for excise taxes and penalties levied against the...

Imagine a Republican president regularly invoking the wisdom of a multibillionaire businessman who had profited off companies with questionable business practices, and who law-enforcement officials had recently asked to provide information about his own company’s questionable practices. No question about it: Democrats and the media would be having a field day. So why do we hear so little about the dark side of Warren Buffett? True, the double standard involving Buffett’s business record is longstanding. But now Obama is using him as a central prop in his class-warfare strategy for winning a second term. Yes, Buffett is a great investor;...

Gasparino actually said in plain English: 1. The 2008 Real Estate Bubble was caused in large part by the three ratings agencies 2. That Warren Buffet had ownership of Moody's and made millions at the time. 3. That the Lubrizol purchase was a continuation of a trend that Buffet has shown toward these sorts of ethical lapses in very large, economy moving transactions. So far, this is the very first time that anyone in the MSM has uttered such things, and the last place I thought I'd see it was on a Fox channel. Kudos to Gasparino for actually reporting...

Hypocrisy: As the great investor's secretary sat with the first lady at the State of the Union, the president spoke of economic "fairness." Is it fair to make a supporter wealthier at the expense of the American people? During the 2008 campaign, candidate Barack Obama cited billionaire Warren Buffett as one of his economic muses. In the 2012 State of the Union address Tuesday night, the president returned to his advocacy of the "Buffett rule," a proposed minimum tax on millionaires and billionaires. To highlight his theme of "fairness," there in the first lady's box sat Buffett's secretary, Debbie Bosanek,...

Warren Buffet’s secretary, Debbie Bosanek, served as a stage prop for President Obama’s State of the Union speech. She was the President’s chief display of the alleged unfairness of our tax system – a little person paying a higher tax rate than her billionaire boss. Bosanek’s prominent role in Obama’s “fairness” campaign piqued my curiosity, and I imagine the curiosity of others. How much does her boss pay this downtrodden woman? So far, no one has volunteered this information. The IRS publishes detailed tax tables by income level. The latest results are for 2009. They show that taxpayers earning an...

Whenever Barack Obama makes a key decision, it always seems to benefit special supporters. 80% of the money Obama threw away on "green energy" programs went to his big donors. It's become painfully evident that crony capitalism has its fingerprints all over other Barack Obama decisions. Last year Barack Obama softened up Warren Buffett by awarding Buffett the Medal of Freedom, which Obama felt was appropriate for Buffett having accumulated more than $40 billion in personal wealth. In return, Buffett has become a cheerleader for Obama, voicing his support of Obama's Buffett rule. WASHINGTON — President Obama on Monday will...

It’s already been widely reported that Warren Buffett, a major shareholder in Obama, Inc. will be one of the primary beneficiaries of the decision from the White House to kill the Keystone pipeline and the jobs it would create. The administration now makes no attempt at all to disguise the fact that most decisions he makes are made in the best interest of Obama, Inc. shareholders. Buffett’s railroad, the BNSF Railway- now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Obama, Inc.- in a remarkable coincidence, will instead, apparently and patriotically, transport Canadian oil to the US at only a slight premium to the...

Rail shipments of North Dakota crude to increase with decision to block Keystone XL pipeline ### North Dakota oil drillers increasingly will rely on trains to move barrels of crude to market after the Obama administration's decision to reject plans for a pipeline that would run from Canada to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico, state and industry officials say. "Pipelines are by far the safest and most economically efficient way to transport oil, but we are left with a limited number of options if pipelines are off the table," said Tony Clark, chairman of the North Dakota Public Service...

linked to verbotten source:Buffett’s Railroad Among Winners From Keystone Denial

Warren Buffett has written his first check to the U.S. Treasury since announcing his pledge to match Republican donations to pay down the national debt a week ago. Carol Loomis, Fortune's senior editor-at-large and long-time friend of Buffett's, reports that the Omaha investor received a letter from Congressman Scott Rigell of Virginia (pictured below). In it, Rigell details the $49,000 he had donated to Treasury in total in 2011 and 2012 and asks Buffett to match both (full letter is below). Buffett agreed (full letter below). Lest we raise your hopes that the national debt is over as an issue,...

Warren Buffett said he is buying The Omaha World-Herald Co. in a $200 million transaction because well-run newspapers have a future and because Omaha is a “vibrant” community. He said his hometown paper has been true to its role as a primary source of information for the community. “I wouldn’t do this if I thought this was doomed to some sort of extinction,” said Warren Buffett, chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, whose surprise appearance at a meeting of the company’s employee-shareholders at the Holland Performing Arts Center drew a standing ovation. The World-Herald is the last major employee-owned newspaper...

I miss the days when the 1% were the 1%. You know, when everyone was wearing monocles to operas and people encrusted everything with diamonds and people wore furs with the heads still attached. People enjoyed being rich. Not all this bs about not paying enough taxes and telling people you want to pay more and then having your real source of wealth, your company, secretly sue the Internal Revenue Service over your way-too-high tax bill.

Listening to an interview of Peter Schwiezer talking to Steve Bannon (Director of Palin's Undefeated movie)...There's a whole chapter in Peter's new book exposing Warren Buffet. Supposedly he is involved in insider trading. This chapter of Schweizer's book shows how his company got the sweetheart deal to invest in Goldman Sachs in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis. One member of Congress even bought Berkshire stock the day before the deal was even announced....It was a racket!

Being endorsed by scary, hateful, self-marginalizing extremists isn’t necessarily the kiss of death in American politics. After presidential candidate Ronald Reagan was endorsed by a Louisiana chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in 1980 –an endorsement he quite correctly and forcefully rejected— he prospered and went on to evict Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter from the White House. But it’s different when the endorsee shares the core tenets of the fringe-dwelling endorsers. It really shouldn’t be altogether surprising that Occupy Wall Street is now endorsed by both the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and the American Nazi Party. After all, the rhetoric...

Warren Buffett, President Obama's pet billionaire, spends a great deal of time calling for tax increases on wealthy people. Funny thing is, it turns out Buffett was being… shall we say ... disingenuous when he claimed his "leaders" never got around to asking for his "shared sacrifice." His company, Berkshire Hathaway, has been fighting the IRS tooth and nail to avoid paying its federal tax bill for nearly a decade.

Signing an executive order to create a presidential emergency board to help resolve the dispute, Obama cited the vital economic importance of rail freight amid faltering economic growth. "It's in our national interest to make sure our freight rail system runs smoothly, since a disruption could affect businesses across the country and cause unnecessary damage to our already-fragile economy," he said in a statement. Talks between 11 unions representing more than 80,000 workers and a group overseeing negotiations for CSX Corp, Norfolk Southern, Union Pacific and Burlington Northern Santa Fe -- owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc -- faltered...

Full title: Buffett Discloses $62,855,038 In 2010 Gross Income, $39,814,784 In Taxable Income, And $6,923,494 In Federal Taxes Excerpt: "Following a back and forth between Kansas Congressman Tim Huelskamp, we have now discovered what, according to Buffett, were the precise amounts of the Octogenarian Crony Capitalist of Omaha's 2010 gross income, taxable income and Federal tax respectively. These are as follows: $62,855,038, $39,814,784 and 6,923,494. This, apparently, was not enough for Huelskamp. The debate continues below."

RUSH: Speaking of the Republican primaries, Larry Flynt I see is offering up to $1 million for details of sex with Rick Perry. Have you heard that? (interruption) What, if you had details -- you wouldn't pass them on? No. No, no, no. If you're a woman, if you've had sex with Perry he's willing to pay you, but if you've got details of somebody else having sex with Perry you could follow up. I want to make a counteroffer, ladies and gentlemen. I today would like to offer up to $1 million for any details of sex with Warren...

A decades-long crusade by the environmental left to convince us that oil is evil, unsustainable, and destroying our planet has yet to accomplish its goal of eliminating oil as a fuel, but it has succeeded in making oil damned expensive. However, new technologies for the extraction and transport of previously unrecoverable oil promise to reverse that trend. One such project is the TransCanada Keystone XL pipeline, which will transport bitumen from the oil sands of Alberta to the refineries and ports along the Gulf coast. It will also feature a spur that will pick up oil from the vast Bakken...

"Twenty-six years ago, another President said that some of these tax loopholes, and I quote, 'made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary, and that’s crazy. It’s time we stopped it.' That was 26 years ago. You know the name of that President? Ronald Reagan."