Buffet donates $30 billion to the Gateses’ “Charity”
Like Bill and Melinda really need it.
Billionaire investor Warren Buffett is donating a total of $37 billion -- most of his personal fortune -- to a foundation started by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and to several family foundations, making it the largest-ever individual charitable gift in the United States.Something tells me this has more to do with taxes than charity.
Buffett, 75, is the chief executive of investment firm Berkshire Hathaway (BRKa). He is worth an estimated $44 billion, according to Forbes magazine, making him the second-richest man behind Gates, who is worth about $50 billion.
The $37 billion comprises about 85 percent of Buffett's fortune.
In a letter to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Buffett, 75, said he will set aside 10 million shares of Berkshire class B common stock (BRKb) for the foundation.And what exactly do Bill and Melinda do with the fortune they sucked out of humanity through exorbitant royalties on their monopoly software or with the fortunes they continue to bleed out of borrowers by charging interest on the pristine "principal" that constitutes their "charitable" foundation?
Based on the stock's per-share price of $3071.01 [!!!] as of Friday, the total amount for the Gates foundation comes to about $30 billion.
The amount is the largest commitment to a philanthropic cause ever made by one person in the United States, said Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.
"Even if you look at what (John D.) Rockefeller and (Andrew) Carnegie gave historically -- even if you do it in today's numbers, it doesn't come close to that," she said.
In a letter to the Gateses, Buffett wrote that "You have committed yourselves to a few extraordinarily important but underfunded issues, a policy that I believe offers the highest probability of your achieving goals of great consequence."
"We are awed by our friend Warren Buffett's decision to use his fortune to address the world's most challenging inequities, and we are humbled that he has chosen to direct a large portion of it to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation," the Gateses said in a statement on the foundation's Web site.
They buy up all the intellectual property they can get their grubby little hands on and exploit young unsuspecting brilliant minds to churn out more.
And we're supposed to hail Bill and Warren, the former an extortionist and the latter a speculator, for their pretentious philanthropy?
If Bill and Melinda cared one iota about anyone but themselves they wouldn't be charging the world an arm and a leg for the use of technology that COULD NOT HAVE BEEN DEVELOPED but for the grace of God and the hard work of thousands of people over thousands of years.
The benefits of human progress and technology shouldn't be hoarded by a handful of individuals through the power of courts and police states.
posted by qrswave @ Sunday, June 25, 2006
7 Comments:
Great post qrswave. It is a sick world where idiot america believes that the rich white male corporate terrorists who steal from them and terrorize them into giving away their food and health care money, are some sort of good people if they give away money in order to get a tax write off and give it to charities designed to make black people act white and turn people into their slaves and brainwash them into wanting to work for the sick twisted corporate terrorists.
Very intelligent observation qrswave,
Again i'm AMAZED at your keen eyes!! I've noticed it too! The "charity" of Bill and Melinda Gates is to PROTECT their PC MONOPOLY, so it's not really helping anyone, but HURTING people -- there are better software out there and its free. Free Software is better in that it RESPECTS THE USER'S & DEVELOPER'S FREEDOMS (the 4 freedoms -- freedome to examine, change, and learn from the code, freedom to redistrubute the software (including for money), etc), it GUARANTEES other people with the same freedom, it's STABLE, SECURE, FREE, FAST, and POWERFUL.
Yet, MS and Bill is using their ILLEGAL MONOPOLY to shove shitty code down people's throats -- yes, I know the majority of people use PeeCees, but that's because they haven't been exposed to GPL software yet. The good news is that the mission critical, server functions are handled almost exclusively by GNU/Linux.
And Warren Buffet, as you mention is a CON-ARTIST, he's a SCAMMER, and SPECULATOR, a FRAUD. The Birkshire stock is right now in a "bubble" state ------------------- For those of your keen FINANCIALISTS, who can see beyond the phoney numbers, there's really little substance behind the "company". To spell it out for you: "What did ENRON as a business ACTUALLY make/do???" They didn't do really anything at all!!! The company was really a "shell" company, i.e. a FRONT ORGANIZATION. Now, what does Birkshire Hathaway as a business ACTUALLY make/do???? ---- now selling "insurance" back-and-forth-to-each-other, is not really contributing to society is it?!!! (rhetorical question).
.....think about it.....
The people who criticise Richard Stallman...
by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 26, @01:25AM (#15603615)
I always enjoy it when Richard Stallman gives interviews. He was probably the first person--many, many years ago!--to fundamentally understand that we have a CHOICE of whether we want to preserve freedoms to do whatever we want with our software, or whether we're going to let other parties take those freedoms away from us.
Also, he had the guts to stand up for his freedoms and everyone else's, to be able to do what they want with their software. He's done more than just about any other single person to try and protect those freedoms for regular folks like you and me.
Can you imagine what the software landscape would look like today without the GPL, without the FSF and without all the free software that has been licensed under the GPL (both by the FSF and by many other open-source contributors)? Even if many of us continue to use non-free systems such as Windows XP, it is nice to know we have a choice. And we WOULDN'T have that choice anymore if Richard and many others had not stood up when they did.
Lots of people criticise Richard Stallman, but in my view nearly all of those people are either (1) immature kids who wouldn't pass a real civics class if they were ever put in one, (2) people who don't understand the real issues and how fundamental they are, or (3) shills or trolls or other people with an anti-freedom agenda.
There are a small number of people who understand the issues but aren't particularly concerned about them; extreme pragmatists like Linus probably fall into this category. Still, I don't often hear Linus or others from this category criticising Stallman.
The people who criticise Richard Stallman are those who are afraid of his message.
You guys are conspiracist morons. Berkshire is a holding company. It holds onto stock and companies as a whole and reaps the profits from what it owns in terms of dividends or company earnings of its subsidiaries (such as Geico, Borsheims, Omaha furniture mart, and about 50 others including the newly acquired Russel athletic). Also, speculator is the last word ever used to describe Buffett. Anyone above a third grade education could tell you that. The fact that you guys are trying to degrade his gifts is absolutely horrific, as these three people have set aside $60 billion of their own, earned (which is an adjective none of you guys should ever used when mentioning your income) money to fight for global inequities and health causes of the greatest need. You liberal wannabe clowns should be congratulating someone for giving to the poor like they have, not trying to type angrily when you're only envious of what these people have accomplished. Grow up.
robert, get a life. People who read and write at this blog weren't born yesterday. Buffet is a greedy little speculator and has publicly admitted that he profits from others' misfortunes. And Gates is a person with an inferiority complex which he tries to cover up using extortion on a global scale. Neither of them eliminate inequities, like you claim, but instead exacerbate them.
As I struggle to use Linux on my machine, but i WILL figure it out, someday and there will be NO microsoft product used here.
Robert you should be condoning your fellow corporate terrorists for all the steal they have done from the poor (formerly known as the middle class). It is very convienant that the money they give goes to suppossed "charities" whose purpose is to make black people act white and to create a slave race of brainwashed servants for the corporate terrorists. Some charity.
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