Pampered Chef Helps End Support of Planned Parenthood by Berkshire Hathaway & Warren Buffett!

This is the text of an email sent out today from Pampered Chef's founder, Doris Christopher.

I have shared with you my pride in being a part of the Berkshire Hathaway family of businesses. I knew that this was the kind of family where The Pampered Chef would thrive and grow for years to come. I have also shared with you my feelings of respect for Warren Buffett.

This week I went to Warren with a heavy heart. I told him that many of our Kitchen Consultants were concerned and troubled with Berkshire Hathaway's donation policies - specifically the contributions to pro-choice organizations and to the Buffett Foundation. I knew that I could speak with Warren frankly and that he would want to hear of the issues impacting your business.

It troubled him deeply that charitable donations from Berkshire Hathaway were causing you difficulty. He listened to me carefully and with great compassion. He understands that as his family of Berkshire companies expands, it becomes more diverse, and there are opinions and concerns that need to be taken into consideration. Warren Buffett made a landmark decision regarding the long-standing corporate giving policies of Berkshire Hathaway. His decision was this:

Effective immediately, Berkshire Hathaway will cease all corporate contributions of any kind to any non-profit organization. This means there will be no donations from Berkshire Hathaway to the Buffett Foundation. Let me be clear, there will be no possibility of any Pampered Chef profits being donated to any cause other than those we initiate, including our three current charitable giving programs: Round-Up from the Heart, Help Whip Cancer and the Family Resiliency Program.

Warren Buffett made his landmark decision after hearing what was in my heart and in yours. I believe that Kitchen Consultants, hosts and customers are a diverse group of individuals with different opinions and beliefs. Our business is built on trust and on personal relationships. Warren understands our business and wants you to be successful in every way, able to do business with people of all backgrounds and beliefs.

I'll take "one chip at a time" but FYI:

Warren Buffett

The Buffett Foundation, Family Planning, and Population Control

http://www.cirtl.org/buffett.htm

Not long ago, I received an introductory offer for four issues of a Dow Jones Business and Financial News weekly called Barron's. The first issue's cover story (December 8) was titled Why, Warren? Warren Buffett is one of America's most wealthy from his successful ventures as an investor. I remember a camping trip where one of my friends told of how investors climb on board paying as much as $30,000 per share for Berkshire Hathaway Inc. voting stock. Berkshire which is controlled by Warren, invests in other companies and outperforms most mutual funds. His annual reports are famous for their "plain English" and easy to understand language...much of which has now been adopted by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Besides being a very successful investor, Warren has a social agenda. He considers overpopulation to be a serious threat to the future of the world. In fact the Buffet Foundation established by he and his wife has spent nearly 10 million dollars this year alone on "family planning causes and other population control efforts". Shocked! So was I and that's not the worst of it. The foundation is currently small; however the foundation is heir to the estimated $20 billion once Warren passes on. The foundation has spent $2 million to fund RU-486 research.

The Buffett foundation is not alone. Established years ago, the Rockefeller foundation continues to expand its worldwide efforts through the Population Council, Planned Parenthood, and other organizations to promote and encourage abortions and birth control/contraceptives. The Ford and Rockefeller foundations used to work through the State Department's Agency for International Development. Today, they work through the United Nations Fund for Population Activities.

You may have heard recently of Ted Turner’s $1 billion donation to the UN. It's expected that $30 million will be annually contributed by Turner to the UN foundation. Turner was recently quoted, "if everybody voluntarily had one child for 100 years we would go back to $2 billion people." Recently Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, has developed ties with Buffett and is spending money for teenage pregnancy studies. In fact Bill Gate's father was involved with Planned Parenthood in the sixties. Hewlett Packard's foundation is expected to contribute more to population control activities than all of the above.

The list goes on like a who's who list of the wealthiest, who are dedicating resources to population planning. Why? Their goal is to reduce the worldwide birth rate to a stable ( or as they call it replacement level) level which for them is estimated at 2.1 children per family.

We have all heard stories of doom and gloom from overpopulation, the gas crisis, global warming etc. I remember in 1977 we had a visitor to our class that claimed we would run out of gas by the year 2000. I remember reading a Wall Street Journal article last month that tackled the myth of global warming stating the mean average temperature over the last 30 years is actually declining and the overriding dominant factor to warming is the sun. Scientists know solar activity dramatically impacts climate and communications and the gradual warming since the ice age is "natural".

What about the myth of overpopulation? Most of Europe and America are already have declining birth rates. China's barbaric one child policy certainly has had an impact to the world's most populous nation. Most of the food shortages in many African countries, India, and North Korea, are do to ineffective governments and/or a loss of social order. UN studies predict fertility rates will drop below replacement level by 2015. In fact UN studies also state 44% of the world's population is already at replacement level. If UN studies suggest we are nearly there why do these powerful people persist? Besides does anyone know how many people the earth can reasonably feed? Is it 6 billion, 12 billion or 20 billion...What about the untapped reaches of the oceans or space or new technologies?

No, it all comes down to FEAR. Fear of a loss of power, loss of resources, fear of the unknown. Fear that if we don't kill our young children today, they will be killed in the future. Ultimately, fear from the lack of faith in God, his teachings and promises!!!!

Have these wealthy men forgotten God's teachings? What is the logic that demands abortion today to abort the unlikely scenario of starving in the future? I used to admire these men, now I pity them, for to be without God must indeed be fearful. Please pray for these influential people that they may become followers of Christ, and in so doing help God's special little people...the children!

Mark Lang

Email Mark At : marklang@dpc.net

Contact At :
CIRTL [Central Illinois Right to Life]
4100 N. War Memorial Drive
Peoria, IL 61614
(309)685-3034
General Email: cirtl@cirtl.org

Dairy Queen loses profits due to population control

http://www.fathersforlife.org/families/DairyQueen.htm

From: Population Research Institute [mailto:pri@pop.org]

Sent: Monday, May 06, 2002 7:48 AM

To: Population Research Institute

Subject: PRI Weekly Briefing: Proposal to Warren Buffett

Dear Colleague:

This past Saturday I met Warren Buffett, Chairman of Berkshire-Hathaway, and the world’s second richest man, and delivered the following resolution to him and 10,000 Berkshire-Hathaway shareholders.

Steve Mosher
President

PRI Weekly Briefing, 6 May 2002, Vol. 4/ No. 10
Chairman Buffett, Shareholders of Berkshire-Hathaway,

My name is Steven Mosher, and I am the President of Population Research Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the case for people as the ultimate resource—the one resource that we as investors cannot do without—and debunking the hype about overpopulation, what the New York Times has called, and I quote, one of the "myths of the twentieth century."

I have written about the coming depopulation—that’s right, I said the coming de-population—in the Wall Street Journal and other publications. I say this to explain why Gloria Patrick, a Berkshire-Hathaway shareholder, has asked me to present for action at this meeting the following proposal.

I will present the proposal and then, with the Chairman’s indulgence, spend a couple of minutes explaining why it is necessary:

Here is the resolution:

Whereas, charitable contributions should serve to enhance shareholder value;

Whereas, the company has given money to groups involved in controversial activities like abortion and population control;

Whereas, our company is dependent on people to buy the products and services of the various companies we own;

Whereas, our company is being boycotted by Life Decisions International and investment-related groups like Pro-Vita Advisors because of our contributions;

Resolved: The shareholders request the company to refrain from making charitable contributions.

To take these point by point:

Shareholder money is entrusted to the Board of Directors to be invested in a prudent manner for the shareholders.

I think you all will agree, as the resolution states, that charitable contributions should serve to enhance shareholder value. Indeed this is already Berkshire-Hathaway’s policy with regard to its operating subsidiaries. As Chairman Buffet explained in his Chairman’s letter of 2001, "We trust our managers to make gifts in a manner that delivers commensurate tangible or intangible benefits to the operations they manage." We did not invest money in this company so it could be given to someone else’s favorite charity.

You will all likewise agree that activities like population control and abortion are controversial. In fact, some of the charitable money has been given to Planned Parenthood, a group that is responsible for almost two hundred thousand abortions a year in the United States alone, and in countless more through its population control programs worldwide. We believe that abortion is the taking of a human life. Even if you disagree on this fundamental point, however, you must concur that these ongoing boycotts of Berkshire-Hathaway company products are not a good thing.

It should be self-evident that Berkshire-Hathaway, like the economy as a whole, is dependent upon people. It is people who produce the products and services of the various companies we own, and it is people who buy them. Now you may think that there is a superabundance of people, and that we will never run short, but this is not true. Half the countries of the world—including countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia—have birthrates below replacement. Europe and Japan are literally dying, filling more coffins than cradles each year.

Dying populations may shrink the economic pie. We already see this happening in Japan and some European countries: How much of Japan’s continuing economic malaise can be directly traced to a lack of young people to power the economy? They may also make economic development nearly impossible: Russia is having trouble finding its feet economically in part because of its demographic collapse.(1) These problems will spread to many more countries in the near future.

Charitable contributions to simple-minded population control programs, in which governments impose restrictions on childbearing, are not in Berkshire-Hathaway’s interest. Such programs are not "investing in humanity’s future," they are compromising humanity’s future, and putting a roadblock in the way of future economic growth. There is no "global share buyback" in store for those who fund population control programs, because such programs will rob the world of future consumers and producers and threaten to shrink the economic pie.

Let me give you a concrete example of what I mean. Berkshire-Hathaway owns Dairy Queen, and there are 103 Dairy Queens in Thailand.(2) But Thailand, due to a massive sterilization and contraception campaign supported by Planned Parenthood and other population control groups, now has a birthrate that is below replacement—and falling. This means that its cohorts of children are shrinking, that there will be fewer and fewer young families in the years to come, and that its population will eventually fall.(3) Now you may think that Thailand has too many children. But is it possible for there to be too many children for Dairy Queen? According to Dairy Queen, "The Dairy Queen concept especially appeals to… young families," but there will be fewer young families in Thailand’s, and Dairy Queens future, because of population control.(4)

So I urge you to vote yes on this resolution. Let it be resolved that this company refrain from making charitable contributions.

Should you, on the other hand, vote to continue the current practice of making charitable contributions based on shareholder designations, I would urge you all to designate 501(c)3s, like the Population Research Institute, which are attempting to help the poor become the agents of their own development, and not simply try to reduce their number through population control.

ENDNOTES

See: "‘Overpopulation’ Turns Out to Be Overhyped," Ben Wattenburg, The Wall Street Journal, 4 March 2002; or "Too Many People? Not by a Long Shot," Steven W. Mosher, The Wall Street Journal, 10 February 1997.
Dairy Queen: International Locations,
World Population Prospects, The 2000 Revision, Thailand, p. 433.
www.dairyqueen.com.
______________________________
Steve Mosher is the president of Population Research Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to debunking the myth that the world is overpopulated.

© 2002 Population Research Institute. Permission to reprint granted.

Redistribute widely. Credit requested.

____________________________
To subscribe to the Weekly Briefing,
send an email to: JOIN-PRI@Pluto.Sparklist.Com.

_____________________________
The Population Research Institute is committed to ending human rights abuses committed in the name of "family planning," and to ending counter-productive social and economic paradigms premised on the myth of "overpopulation."

____________________________
Population Research Institute
1190 Progress Drive, Suite 2D
P.O. Box 1559
Front Royal, VA 22630

USA

http://www.pop.org

Media Contact: Scott Weinberg

540-622-5240, ext. 209

See also:

World Population Control — U.S. Strategy and UN Policy Program
An overview compiled from various sources, based on various opinions relating to the consequences of the U.S.-promoted culture of death resulting from National Security Study Memorandum 200, by Henry A. Kissinger, National Security Council, Washington, D.C. 20506, April 24, 1974.

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