Right on! It sounds really syrupy, but he is a hero! He feeds us (McLane’s, Dairy Queen, See’s candies), clothes us (Fruit of the Loom, H.H. Brown, Justin Brands, Garan), houses us (Acme Brick, Clayton Homes, HomeServices of America) and powers us (MidAmerican Energy). He insures us, provides us with jewelry, paint, carpet, machine tools, furniture, flight school, boats, RVs, many sources of news, and heaven knows what else.

He’s got to run a tight ship to keep all that going.

That said, I sure would enjoy it if he would put the smackdown on Goldman, mainly because I consider them to be so smart and talented and it’s a waste when so much of their efforts go to win-lose activities (high frequency trading, arbitraging cheap government financing against other government-backstopped assets) when they could be involved more in the win-win activities of building and growing businesses.

Willy Week also did a piece critical of Buffett for curtailing Pacificorp’s program that let employees volunteer at Loaves and Fishes serving meals to housebound senior citizens on company time. Can’t find the article now (I think it was a Rogue of the Week?) but I’d like to see a follow-up on it — the impression the article gave was that the staffers provided by Pacificorp were the bulk of the volunteers the charity had.

The program never mentioned that Kirby is a Buffett company.

Unlike most CEOs Buffett actually owns a significant share in his company and thus benefits every time a Kirby is sold to some sucker by one of his salesmen.

In the case of those 3,000 Salvadorian textile workers, that is a situation where Fruit-of-the-Loom is just not getting as many orders as Americans wear shabbier underpants in accordance with the New Normal. Should they have a jobs bank, GM style? We see how that worked out.

I do have gripes with Buffett but not regarding layoffs in a recession. Ever since Buffett aquired a large stake in Goldman Sachs, he has been eerily silent on Goldman’s errors of integrity during the last few years as well as their continuing over-reliance on short term trading and derivatives (this after spending a lifetime teaching his accolytes to be long-term investors and railing against ‘financial weapons of mass destruction’). Worse still, his reputation provides cover for them and helps shield them from proper scrutiny.

http://feed43.com/aliceschroeder_passage s.xml

http://aliceschroeder.com/rss.xml

That’s for her entire blog, including the passages section. (There’s not a separate one for each section that I can find).