主题： Politics and Current Events

We may be sitting here because two Jewish immigrants signed a Letter to Roosevelt after fleeing Europe and coming to the United States. Einstein and Leo Szilard wrote the president and warned him that Nazi Germany was developing nuclear weapons.… The quality of immigrants, the motivation of immigrants, this is what has contributed to the greatness of the country.

Local and state financial problems are accelerating, in large part because public entities promised pensions they couldn’t afford. Citizens and public officials typically under-appreciated the gigantic financial tapeworm that was born when promises were made that conflicted with a willingness to fund them.

We are still a democracy, but we have moved in my lifetime toward a plutocracy. We do not have a plutocracy, I want to emphasize that, but the distribution of wealth and the influence of wealth have moved in that direction.

The moment I emerged from my mother’s womb … my possibilities dwarfed those of my siblings, for I was a boy! And my brainy, personable, and good-looking siblings were not. My parents would love us equally, and our teachers would give us similar grades. But at every turn my sisters would be told—more through signals than words—that success for them would be “marrying well.” I was meanwhile hearing that the world’s opportunities were there for me to seize. So my floor became my sisters’ ceiling—and nobody thought much about ripping up that pattern until a few decades ago. Now, thank heavens, the structural barriers for women are falling.

I’m happy to say that funhouse mirrors are becoming less common among the women I meet. Try putting one in front of my daughter. She’ll just laugh and smash it. Women should never forget that it is common for powerful and seemingly self-assured males to have more than a bit of the Wizard of Oz in them. Pull the curtain aside, and you’ll often discover they are not supermen after all.

A mass murderer of almost incomprehensible dimensions has been eliminated, just as was the case with Hitler. But there are lots of people in the world that are going to have evil intent toward this country … as well as other people, and they’re not going to go away. And they’re going to continue to seek ways to hurt us, disrupt us, and I think our government has done really quite an amazing job.

If [Bank of America CEO] Ken Lewis hadn’t have bought Merrill on Sunday, I think the system would have stopped, you know. He is the guy that turned out to have saved the system. I don’t like to sound, you know, like a mortician during an epidemic or anything, but last fall [of 2008] was really quite exciting for me. I don’t wish it on anybody, but there were things being offered. There are opportunities for us to do things that didn’t exist a year or two earlier.

There was fraud on the parts of the borrowers and there were frauds on part of the intermediaries in some cases. But you better not have a system that is dependent on the absence of fraud. It will be with us.

Credit is like oxygen. When either is abundant, its presence goes unnoticed. When either is missing, that’s all that is noticed. Even a short absence of credit can bring a company to its knees. We were in the bar drinking. I’m not sure that we want to go all the way back in, but we ought to get over the hangover. Well, there’ll be [another financial crisis] sometime, but no, I don’t worry about it in the least … because I conduct myself so that if there’s another crisis I’ll still be around, Berkshire will be in good shape. We will not be spending 25 percent of GDP and raising 15 percent of GDP 10 years from now. We’ll get there somehow. But … everybody in the country is trying to figure out how to have somebody else pay for it. But some of them are better equipped to fight that fight than others and they’re the people with money that care and that hire lobbyists.

We raised the debt ceiling seven times during the Bush administration and now in this administration, they’re using it as a hostage. You really don’t have any business playing Russian roulette to get your way in some other matter. We should be more grown up than that.