Warren Buffet Taking Advantage Of Poor People.....

Warren Buffet taking advantage of poor people and minorities to make himself ever richer.  

It is the best kind of wealth redistribution.  Take the money from the poor people and hand it over to Warren.  

Of course Warren doesn't want to talk about it.  

If you want to talk about how amazing Warren Buffet is than he is more then ready to do that.  

If you want to talk about what a dirt bag Warren is well suddenly Warren has nothing to say.  He is funny like that.

http://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/minorities-exploited-by-warren-buffetts-mobile-home-empire-clayton-homes/


Clayton Homes has used a pattern of deceptions to help extract billions from poor customers around the country — particularly people of color, who make up a substantial and growing portion of its business. The company is controlled by Warren Buffett, one of world’s richest men.

its methods hardly match Buffett’s honest, folksy image: Clayton systematically pursues unwitting minority homebuyers and baits them into costly subprime loans, many of which are doomed to fail, an investigation by The Seattle Times and BuzzFeed News has found.

Clayton’s predatory practices have damaged minority communities — from rural black enclaves in the Louisiana Delta, across Spanish-speaking swaths of Texas, to Native American reservations in the Southwest. Many customers end up losing their homes, thousands of dollars in down payments, or even land they’d owned outright.

Over the 12 years since Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway bought Clayton Homes Inc., the company has grown to dominate virtually every aspect of America’s mobile-home industry. It builds nearly half the new manufactured homes sold in this country every year, making it the most prolific U.S. homebuilder of any type. It sells them through a network of more than 1,600 dealerships. And it finances more mobile-home loans than any other lender by a factor of more than seven.

In minority communities, Clayton’s grip on the lending market verges on monopolistic: Last year, according to federal data, Clayton made 72 percent of the loans to black people who financed mobile homes.The company’s in-house lender, Vanderbilt Mortgage, charges minority borrowers substantially higher rates, on average, than their white counterparts. In fact, federal data shows that Vanderbilt typically charges black people who make over $75,000 a year slightly more than white people who make only $35,000.

Through a spokeswoman earlier this month, Buffett declined to discuss racial issues at Clayton Homes, and a reporter who attempted to contact him at his home was turned away by security.

Clayton and Berkshire Hathaway did not respond to numerous requests for interviews with executives, delivered by phone and email, as well as in person at Berkshire Hathaway’s headquarters in Omaha. The companies did not answer any of 34 detailed questions about Clayton and its practices. Nor did they respond to an extensive summary of this article’s findings, provided along with an invitation to comment. On its website, Clayton says that it seeks to “treat people right” and “preserve our integrity above all else.”

Clayton’s practices are part of a corporate culture that has condoned racism, including black employees fired while white workers used discriminatory slurs and kept their jobs, and phone collectors casually insulting borrowers with racist stereotypes.

For an earlier story in this series that detailed Clayton’s widespread abuse of borrowers, a Clayton spokeswoman said in a statement that the company helps customers find homes within their budgets and has a “purpose of opening doors to a better life, one home at a time.” Buffett later defended the company, telling Berkshire Hathaway shareholders he “makes no apologieswhatsoever about Clayton’s lending terms.”

For this story, The Seattle Times and BuzzFeed News analyzed hundreds of internal company documents, thousands of legal and regulatory filings, more than 40 hours of internal company audio recordings and federal data on hundreds of thousands of mobile-home loans over a decade. Reporters conducted interviews with more than 280 customers, employees and experts, including some Clayton insiders who said they were appalled by the company’s practices.

Meanwhile, in the first nine months of this year, Clayton generated more than half a billion dollars in profit, up 28 percent from the same period last year.

“It’s a perpetual system of people who are never able to get themselves out of the hole,” said Gwen Schablik, who worked as a collector and handled borrowers’ bankruptcies at Clayton’s Maryville, Tenn., headquarters from 2011 until she quit in 2014.

“I felt, ethically, I couldn’t continue working there,” she said.

In at least six states, Clayton managers have permitted open racial hostility toward people of color, according to interviews and legal filings by more than 15 former workers with direct knowledge of the incidents. In at least seven cases documented in court records, sales reps — both black and white — were fired after complaining about racism on the job. Four cases were dropped or dismissed, and Clayton settled three.