Report on B-H Shareholder Meeting
by Tom Strobhar
May 2004

Warren Buffett, the Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, has been called the “world’s greatest investor” and is often referred to as “the Oracle of Omaha.” When Mr. Buffett talks, people listen.

On May, 1, Mr. Buffett announced to the sixteen thousand shareholders assembled for the annual meeting of Berkshire Hathaway that Human Life International would be presenting a shareholder resolution. The resolution ostensively dealt with the political contributions of the company. What Mr. Buffett didn’t plan on was the speech delivered before the reading of the resolution by this writer, representing Human Life International.

Father Eutenneuer was scheduled to be in South America at the time of the resolution and asked if I could stand in for him. Having written the original resolution and never attended “the world’s largest shareholder meeting,” I was most excited by the opportunity. Father Tom had earlier confronted the management of Merck at their shareholders’ meeting over their use of fetal tissue derived from abortions in the manufacture of vaccines. This meeting would have a different atmosphere. The sixteen thousand who assembled in Omaha were all shareholders but they might be better described as worshippers of Warren Buffett. The annual meeting is really a three day love affair with the highlight being the Saturday meeting and the five hours Mr. Buffet and his long time associate, Charlie Munger, spend answering questions from the faithful.

The meeting opens with a professionally done, hour-long film complete with animated cartoons of Mr. Buffett and Mr. Munger. The two are notorious cheapskates and they comically play up this angle in reinforcing their cult of personality. What is less well known is their interest in abortion and population control. These two billionaires (Mr. Buffett is the second wealthiest man in the world) were promoting abortion before abortion was cool. They helped finance the legalization of California abortion laws in the sixties and the introduction of RU-486 into this country a few years ago. Mr. Munger once toasted an abortionist “for all the babies he didn’t deliver.”

Upon the death of Mr. Buffett and his legal wife, Susan, (Mr. Buffett has openly lived with another woman for years), his entire fortune, currently valued at over $40 billion, will go to the Buffett Foundation, whose only interest is in promoting anti-life policies and population control. Assuming a modest return of 5%, the Buffett Foundation will be in a position to distribute over two billion dollars a year forever! This is over forty times the combined budget of the largest pro-life groups in the country. What harm this will do is impossible to overestimate.

After the film and the election of directors, Mr. Buffett called for the reading of “the resolution from Human Life International.” What he received, in addition to the reading of the resolution, was a speech that reminded all that Mr. Buffett’s vision of humanity seems to emanate from a premise that some people are born superior and others don’t deserve to be born. As noted to the crowd, in 1983, in one of Mr.Buffett’s famous Chairman’s letters, he spoke approvingly of something he described as “shareholder eugenics.” Eugenics is the long discredited movement which suggested a stronger race of people could be formed through selective breeding. “More from the fit, less from the unfit” as the masthead of the predecessor of Planned Parenthood, the Birth Control League once succinctly proclaimed. Unfortunately the eugenics movement had its logical conclusion in the death camps of the Third Reich. This history of eugeincs didn’t seem to deter Mr. Buffett. Not since the thirties has any one spoken so approvingly of any form of eugenics.

For the extremely wealthy, the elimination of people in general has often been the ultimate charity. Mr. Buffett is not known to have given meaningful amounts to any school, hospital, cure for disease, or anything else that deals with the real problems people face every day. His singular interest is in eliminating people as if they are the source of every problem. Even his sympathetic biographer, Roger Lowenstein, remarked Mr. Buffett’s philanthropic interests have a strange, other worldly quality to them.

At Berkshire Hathaway the shareholders are divided in to two classes. The A shares sell for approximately $90,000 each while the B shares, which Buffett tried to prevent from coming in to existence, sell for a more modest $3,000 each. The B shareholders have greatly diluted voting rights. This was done by Mr. Buffett to further denigrate the influence of the less affluent on the operations of the company. Mr. Buffett believed by maintaining a high share price, only the wealthy few could become shareholders. A high share price would be a self selecting mechanism. In his 1983 Chairman’s letter, he wrote how he wanted a shareholder “club” screened for its “intellectual capacity, emotional stability, moral sensibility or acceptable dress.” As pointed out to the shareholders, Mr. Buffett believed splitting the shares of stock would attract, in his words, “an entering class of buyers inferior to the existing class” and “downgrade the quality of our present shareholder group.” Basically, this applied to most of the people in attendance, who became shareholders after Berkshire Hathaway was forced to offer a lower price share. Presumably these people didn’t consider themselves an “inferior class.” Mr. Buffett’s insulting comments from twenty years ago had to hit a nerve or two of those in attendance.

Pointing out Mr. Buffett’s elitist tendencies and curious obsession with abortion and population control embarrassed Mr. Buffett. The annual meeting lost its festive edge. His well orchestrated party had one naysayer as represented by Human Life International. This tiny, yet mighty organization was confronting one of the world’s most powerful, most wealthy and most respected persons. We did not carry the vote that day, in part because of Mr. Buffett’s most undemocratic plan to disenfranchise the majority of his shareholders, but the voice of truth was heard.

He later angrily referred to pro-life organizations as “these violent groups.” But a most important point was made, Mr. Buffett’s disdain for the average person, as represented by the common shareholder, and his fondness for an elitist view that has produced some of the worst abuses in human history.

His ability to promote his unusual beliefs should serve as a wake up call to all pro-lifers. His billions have an almost unlimited capacity to produce the most evil of results. We must pray for his conversion and work to show this most human of characters is wrong, dead wrong. Human Life International stood up that day when no one else would. For this, we should all be most grateful.