Peter Buffett, NoVo and the Hudson Valley

Ed. note: This piece was updated Aug. 3 to add in another interview.

Welcome to the Hudson Valley Vindicator’s interviews with Peter Buffett, a philanthropist who lives in the Hudson Valley and is the son of famed investor Warren Buffett. This first version contains abrupt transitions as well as comments that may be unclear to some listeners. During the coming weeks I’ll splice in explanations in the right spots, but if I were to do that now I’d be here til Labor Day, and some people are sending messages that they want to hear the podcast.

These conversations took place on July 19 and July 22, in a pavilion in the middle of picture perfect farmland in Hurley, NY. Rather than combine the conversations, I have left them as two separate files. The first one has explanatory voiceovers, but the second is in raw form, with abrupt transitions and local references that may be unclear to some listeners. During the coming weeks I’ll splice in explanations in the right spots, but if I were to do that now I’d be here til Labor Day.

If you’re not steeped in local politics, you might as well not bother with the July 22 version until I’ve spliced in the voiceovers, and you’ll know when that happens because this page will be updated.

Below are a few points that will be added in.

With folks jumping on the anti-Buffett bandwagon, someone took the opportunity to circulate an email questioning whether NoVo, and not Peter himself, owned his house. A quick check of property records showed that indeed, he does own his own house, so the author then floated a trial balloon wondering whether NoVo paid his property taxes. No, Peter pays his own taxes.

Imokalee is a town in Florida.

Space Commune is a project by Alex Panagiatopoulos and Fox Green. Here is their recent video, which delves into the concepts of economic degrowth and depopulation. This may be happening anyway. Shanna Swan is a scientist who recently wrote a book called Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race. She notes that it’s becoming harder for couples to conceive, and she places the blame on environmental pollutants. If anything, NoVo’s focus on healthy food would be a counterbalance to depopulation.

Bread Alone is a local bakery chain with the best pain au chocolat in the neighborhood.

To be spliced in, whether you like it or not: a brief discussion on Big Ag monopolies, monopsonies, and the recent anti-monopolistic executive order out of White House.

Tech City is an abandoned IBM facility that could see investments of tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars. BluePRINT is a consortium of artists who are hoping to secure some of the space at Tech City.

And my apologies to Oriana Mayorga, whose name I mispronounced. This interview was conducted before I thought to inquire. When I do the overdubs, I’ll pronounce it correctly and identify her as she requested.

Peter says he’s very much out in, and engaged with, the community. But this has been a time of Covid, and no matter how many Zoom meetings we’ve attended, we’ve been in isolation. It’s possible that contrary to his perception, in fact he’s become more tightly surrounded by his inner circle. Jennifer, his wife, declined to be interviewed. How influential is she in the decision making process?

Peter implied that when he realized he couldn’t fix the world, he downsized his dreams because what he could fix, maybe, is a small town. But there’s inconsistency in his steadfast refusal to fix some of the problems he’s created, in particular the very inflammatory Rise Up Kingston.

When I broached the complaints spelled out in print articles and on social media, Peter pivoted into lengthy discourses about multi-century systemic ills, and the end result was that the generalized hand-wringing redirected the conversation away from the complaints. I got the sense that Peter was well-practiced in the art of avoidance.

Perhaps this is a modus operandi he inherited from his father, who bought companies and was famously hands off when it came to influencing management. But Warren Buffett invested in those companies precisely because they were working well, whereas Peter is “investing,” if you can use that word, into physical areas like Kingston, or sectors such as agriculture, education or housing, precisely because they are NOT doing well. Warren Buffett said his timeline was distant and determined by compounding interest. Peter’s agriculture projects look to unfold well, but in Kingston, what’s compounding is ill will.

Some of Peter’s critics have suggested closer government involvement in the selection of NoVo’s grants on grounds that it’s a more democratic way to choose how that money is spent. But that bird won’t fly in the United States. While nobody’s asking for Chinese style intervention, let’s not forget that Alibaba founder Jack Ma disappeared for three months, presumably so that Xi Jinping could better advise Ma on his spending. Foundations in the United States are barely regulated, and the idea of government involvement raises many questions. Would regulation be better on the state level, or the federal level? And how would that interfere with the two advantages that philanthropy actually does confer? Rob Reich is a political scientist at Stanford and the author of Just Giving. Like most students of philanthropy, he is appalled at the huge fortunes that will be sending a tsunami of money into society over the next century, but he says the silver lining consists of two possibilities: pluralism and discovery, which allow philanthropists to engage in helpful experiments that government doesn’t have the stomach to try.

The true problem with today’s “giving” is the tax structure that allows for the creation of billionaires. If you want to fix philanthropy, start with the tax structure, and start right here by fighting welfare for millionaires. Let township, city and county legislators and executives know that we won’t tolerate the theft of our tax dollars, whether it’s bogus construction projects on 9W that add to the bottom line of Jamie Dimon and the other shareholders at JP Morgan Chase, or high end housing and condo boondoggles in Uptown Kingston. Let state legislators and Governor Cuomo know that we won’t tolerate the way he siphons New York’s tax dollars from the people and into the wallets of his real estate and gaming mega-donors. Let Congress and the White House know we will no longer tolerate absurdly low corporate tax rates and other loopholes that bought half our representatives their seats in Washington. Raise your voice for campaign finance reform. Demand that we get rid of Citizens United.

Now, for the Tablet article. It’s not easy to criticize a journalist, but this was a slanted agenda piece if one ever existed. In hopes of stirring the pot, author Sean Cooper had something to fire up everyone across the political spectrum. In an earlier piece from the fall of 2020 he implied that Peter’s funding was intended to fatten his father’s investment in a South American telecom company, which is guaranteed to rouse the Left’s ire. And to rouse the Right’s, in the same piece he linked Buffett to donations to aging boomer revolutionaries who once tried to bring down America.

Clicking on Tablet links led down a rabbit hole of conspiracy thinking ranging from Peter’s presumed desire to subvert Judaism to Warren’s involvement in a Chinese Communist Party front. Next thing you know, père et fils will be dressed in Mao jackets trying to hack Marjorie Taylor Green’s Jewish Space Lasers.

In the current piece, Cooper dissed the alternative currency that Novo has funded. But he failed to mention that another alternative currency, the Sardex, kept many households afloat by underpinning one-ninth of Sardinia’s economic activity during the financial crisis. Who is to say that when the next crisis hits, the Hudson Valley Current won’t play a helpful role? Cooper clearly gave a cursory look to the 990s and singled out Peter’s giving to donor-advised funds. He may be right, but he didn’t do the homework needed to substantiate his assumptions. I started inputting one of the 990s into an Excel spreadsheet, but it was a Herculean task, and I gave up. I’m asking Peter for five years of the 990s in csv or Excel format, and if anyone wants to join me in a data analysis project we can create a true picture of NoVo’s local spending.

Probably deliberately and in hopes that no one would notice, the author confused correlation with causation by blaming Kingston’s opioid addiction and poverty rates on the IBM pull out in the 1990s. But opioid addiction and poverty have devastated communities across America and have been far worse elsewhere. The purpose of the cheap trick was to allow for speculation that a potential withdrawal by Peter Buffett could wreak an analogous wave of havoc.

Does the bipartisan anti-Buffett bandwagon play into the hands of business and real estate interests? Would they like to sideline NoVo when it comes to Tech City and the dying malls across the street? Google former CEO Eric Schmidt just bought our tiny airport, and his presence signals that other heavy hitters might also be circling overhead.

As Peter said toward the end of the July 22 interview, maybe nobody’s gonna like me after this, maybe not even Peter himself, given that I think he is shirking his responsibilities by taking cover under “old white guy” disclaimers. So if you don’t like me and if you don’t like what I’ve said, well, it’s my podcast and I’ll say what I want. I close with an old English expression that’s always helped me steer toward my North Star: Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.

And yes, I made you read all that before you could click on the links below.

Here’s the first one, recorded July 19, with explanatory voiceovers, and here’s the one dated July 22.

At some point, transcripts will be posted with time stamps and subject headers for easy navigation to desired topics. 

Thank you for listening.