Buffett's Liberal Causes
By Cliff Kincaid (07/24/2006)
By Cliff Kincaid (07/24/2006)
Billionaire Warren Buffett has been depicted as a great humanitarian and philanthropist when he has poured tens of millions of dollars into the morally objectionable cause of promoting abortion not only here but throughout the developing world. Billionaire liberals like Buffett, Ted Turner and George Soros apparently believe it's easier to control and reduce the number of people in the world than help Third World countries develop their economies.
But abortion is not Buffett's only liberal cause. He is also a big supporter of public television, the United Nations, and U.S. nuclear disarmament.
The latter was euphemistically dubbed by USA Today to be "prevention" of nuclear war. Can anything be better than that? The paper also referred to one of Buffett's sons, Peter, as running a foundation concerned with education, the environment and human rights. Those causes sound good, too. It turns out that his NoVo foundation is just as far-left as his father's.
The NoVo Foundation provided more than $1 million in one year alone to the New World Foundation in New York, which became famous at one time for including a person then known as Hillary Rodham Clinton as a member of its board. At that time the group provided money to the extreme left, including the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), a group that tried to facilitate a communist takeover of that country. The Reagan policy of fighting communism in the Western hemisphere, which was resisted by a liberal Congress, saved Central America from communism. The Salvadoran terrorists saw the handwriting on the wall when the communist Sandinistas were defeated in an election in neighboring Nicaragua. The Salvadoran terrorists gave up the fight, to pursue their goals politically.
CISPES, which is still agitating for a communist victory in El Salvador, admits, "We channeled direct financial support to projects that advanced the strategic needs of the revolution " But don't look for the media to remind us of Hillary's involvement with funding that Marxist front group.
While many of the NoVo Foundation grant recipients are concerned with promoting abortion, more than $3 million went to the Tides Center in San Francisco, an unusual left-wing group that works with a network of more than 250 "progressive" organizations.
One big recipient of money from Warren Buffett's foundation (The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation) has been the San Francisco-based Ploughshares Fund, a group that has made a name for itself by sponsoring one of Bill Richardson's "peace" trips to North Korea, hosting actor Sean Penn at one of its briefings, and promoting a book praising J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American A-bomb scientist exposed as a communist and Soviet spy. Hollywood actor Michael Douglas serves on the group's board.
The Ploughshares Fund boasts that its "program officer" for North Korea, Paul Carroll, became "one of only a few foundation representatives ever allowed into North Korea," when he visited the country from July 4-8 at the invitation of North Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was not disclosed if Carroll would be registering with the Justice Department as a foreign agent for North Korea.
On another foreign affairs issue, the Buffett Foundation provided $500,000 to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a group founded by Ted Turner whose slant can be seen in its posting of a story accusing the media and U.S. officials in Washington of having "significantly overstated the capabilities of both North Korea's ballistic missiles and U.S. national missile defenses " during the recent crisis. This group believes in dealing with dictators to reduce the threat, rather than building up our own military strength.
Conservatives on Capitol Hill should take note of the fact that Buffett's support for public broadcasting includes $100,000 for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and grants to Nebraskans for Public TV and KQED in San Francisco.
Why not a congressional resolution urging Buffett-and not the taxpayers-to pay for public broadcasting? That would be real charity.
A U.N. booster like Ted Turner, Buffett gave $10,000 to the Federation of United Nations Associations. Perhaps Warren and Ted can take over paying U.S. "dues" to the U.N. and get U.S. taxpayers off the hook for that financial burden. That would be real philanthropy.
Media Monitor: http://www.aim.org/media_monitor/4731_0_2_0_C/