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Dark Cloud Over Good Works of Gates Foundation
theodp writes "Justice Eta, a Nigerian infant, has an ink spot on his tiny thumb to show he was immunized against polio and measles thanks to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But Justice still faces respiratory trouble, which locals call 'the cough' and blame on fumes and soot spewing from 300-foot flames at a nearby oil plant owned by Itallian energy giant Eni, whose investors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Part one of an L.A. Times investigation reports that the world's largest philanthropy pours money into investments that are hurting many of the people its grants aim to help. With the exception of tobacco companies, the foundation's asset managers do not avoid investments in firms whose activities conflict with the mission to do good."
You still see the Gates Foundation doing good things but why is it that so many foundations of insurmountable wealth are somehow ignorant of the economic problems they persist for those they try to help?
My work here is dung.
If you look closely at all of the funds that you can choose from,
you may well find that most of them have big oil, or questionable companies like Microsoft or Walmart.
It is very difficult, on inspection to make good picks that really fit your morals.
But this is the key problem. When you look at stocks or funds you look at the profit to you, and often do not see or ignore the negative things that you may be contributing to.
Once an asshole, always an asshole.
Did you buy any gasoline recently? Had anything delivered by truck? Bought anything in plastic packaging? Used any electricity in the last, oh, 2 minutes?
Get off your high horse.
The fact the the Gates foundation invests into questionable industries is perfect.
ALL multinational industriess are 'questionable. Every single one. It is near impossible to invest on a large scale without bumping against these corps.
Bill Gates could, if he were REALLY concerned with good works, spend 100 million dollars (That's like a $100 to you and me) and feed them all.
Wrong. Cutting a check for $100M will NOT do it. VArious countries have tried that all over Africa. The result? Food left rotting on the dock, because the local chump in charge of the trucks isn't getting his cut.
Simply sending $100M to Somalia/Ethiopia/Chad does nothing except for make a few warlords richer.
How many people are dying because of no health care?
And that is one of the main things the Foundation is trying to address. Fixing some of the less popularized, but still debilitating/deadly illnesses and diseases.
The investment arm and the charitable arm are two distinct entities within the Foundation. The investment arm gathers as much money as possible, and the charitable arm spreads it around where it will (supposedly) do the most good. Neither side has influence over the other.
You think it's easy? Get hired on their board and change the way they do business.
Um, nice piece of completely unfounded conjecture. Also, it doesn't make logical sense even from a circumstantial point of view. The billionaires are investing in their foundations to "make money?" You do realize that they can't get it back out, right? The foundation makes money, true...which is good, as it allows it to spend way, way more money fixing problems. Assuming a fairly normal rate of return, the foundation should be able to spend its entire (current) endowment over the next 7 years and yet still have the same amount of money at the end of that time...meaning it can keep doing it. And this idea that Gates should just be sending us all a $100 check? Are you brain dead? First, since he is clearly more interested in third-world disease and poverty than he is with the home-grown (and comparatively less miserable) variety, we'd be talking about a few billion checks, not a couple hundred million. Which means the foundation's endowment would only be like $20 per recipient. But even if it was a hundred...you think everybody having a small bit of cash (which won't last) would be better than curing HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis, and working on better ways to get clean water and food to the third world? That's dumb as hell; the value of the foundation is having such a big pile of cash in one place where it can be spent in really big chunks on research and large-scale health projects. The benefit of these initiatives to the people they serve are many, many times greater than the per-capita amount spent to pursue them.
You seem to think that the foundation doesn't do anything important. This suggests you simply haven't made any attempt to find out what they are about. Add to this your complete lack of logic and your unfounded conclusions, and it comes off sounding really ignorant.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
For those that are not familiar with Nigeria, this is not a standard case of industry versus activist.
The Niger delta is in serious trouble; the environmental contamination there is beyond anything you would believe. My company had been contracted by one of the large oil companies there to investigate cleanup of some of their contaminated sites. They gave us some project specs.
The sites were huge. Gigantic. The scale of the project was larger than anything we had ever considered, and we work on some pretty large projects. Our existing cleanup efforts include some of the largest contaminated sites in the U.S. and Europe. We went to the delta to do some investigating and preliminary tests, and were shocked with what we found. On average, each contaminated site was 10x larger than the specs we were provided.
The environmental "mess" there is huge, and terribly depressing. It's a beautiful region, but you cannot imagine the scale of the contamination. It would take decades upon decades of pouring billions of dollars into remediation to bring the delta region near the environmental standards of the U.S. or Europe, neither of which are particularly high.
Furthermore, in terms of economics; these giant oil companies are ugly, monopolistic ventures with high levels of foreign and domestic (Nigerian) government involvement. They do things no "sane" company would do.
Don't respond with the usual, "These people wouldn't be better off with no jobs" bullshit. These companies have literally destroyed the region, annihilating the local agriculture and local industry. Not through competition, but through force; the region is so polluted that nothing but a resource extraction company can survive there. As far as I'm concerned, this represents use of force; which should be prohibited under capitalist frameworks.
It's really sad what is going on over there.
These ideas are ones that have been influenced by the book "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy".
Most health professionals working in HIV/AIDS in third world countries regularly state that the only way to really tackle the AIDS epidemic is for drug companies to allow generic drugs to be made and given to people in third world countries, while allowing the expensive, patented, proprietary medications to continue to be sold in first world countries.
Of course, Merck et al haven't been too eager to open that intellectual property floodgate, and they've either said "No" outright, or volunteered to donate a small percentage of drugs (much less than addressing the epidemic would require).
Any other multinational corporation with substantial patents and IP concerns must wonder be aware that reducing the patent protection from big pharma could eventually affect them as well.
So, when Bill Gates donates large amounts of money to buy patented medications, he's equally protecting the sanctity of human life and the sanctity of international IP laws. Convenient way to look great, do good things, all while protect his own interests.
Sometimes "good" is the enemy of "best" and rich & powerful people using their money to buy drugs at ridiculous prices allows them to avoid pressuring our world governments to level the playing field a little for the poorest of the poorest.