“The Los Angeles Times has revealed the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has made millions of dollars each year from companies blamed for many of the same social and health problems the Foundation seeks to address. We speak with the lead reporter on the LA Times investigative team that broke the story,” Democracy Now! reports.
Democracy Now! reports, “The Gates Foundation has an endowment of more than $31 billion. The investment mogul Warren Buffet has pledged an additional $30 billion delivered in incremental sums. Since its inception six years ago, the Foundation has committed more than $11 billion to programs around the world. This includes major grants for vaccine and immunization programs, HIV and AIDS research, and public education here in the United States.”
“But the LA Times investigation reveals the Gates Foundation’s humanitarian concerns are not reflected in how it invests its money. In the Niger Delta — where the Foundation funds programs to fight polio and measles – the Foundation has also invested more than $400 million dollars in companies including Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil Corp, and Chevron. These oil firms have been responsible for much of the pollution many blame for respiratory problems and other afflictions among the local population,” Democracy Now! reports.
“The Gates Foundation also has investments in sixty-nine of the worst polluting companies in the US and Canada, including Dow Chemical. It holds stakes in pharmaceutical companies whose drugs cost far beyond what most AIDS patients around the world can afford. Other companies in the Foundation’s portfolio have been accused of transgressions including forcing thousands of people to lose their homes; supporting child labor; and defrauding and neglecting patients in need of medical care,” Democracy Now! reports.
Democracy Now! reports, “Overall, the LA Times says nearly $9 billion in Gates Foundation money is tied up in companies whose practices run counter to the foundation’s charitable goals and social mission. And that number may be understated – the Gates Foundation has not provided details on more than four billion dollars in investments it says are loans.”
Full article here.
Apparently, even Bill Gates can’t buy off that bitch Karma.
No matter how hard he tries, and how much he spends, he just can’t make himself look any less evil.
yeeeeeick. There’s that picture again. >.<
Actually, this is a problem many philanthropists have– who to give the money to without giving some to poorly run places? The only way to avoid this is to sit on your pile of money like Scrooge McDuck.
Overheard at the G.F. Endangered Species Fundraising dinner:
“Oh my, this is delicious Giant Panda. It goes perfectly with the California condor casserole.”
You can’t save it if you can’t eat it.
True, but investing in Exxon is hardly ‘giving’ it to anyone.
“Oops! I bought a controlling interesting in your otter-clubbing operations! Fiddlesticks!”
I think people inherently make Bill Gates out to be the devil. As some omniscient being that has a strategy of balancing intrensically good tasks with amazingly bad ones.
Hold Bono up to the same scrutiny and you’d probably find some capitalistic endeavours in his portfolio too.
Bill Gates is no more evil intentioned than Bono or the Pope. You want to find real hate and venom – look at Rush Limbaugh who is promoting a lightly veiled political caste system.
Gates is really harmless by comparison.
cb
“R” said what I meant in a much simpler manner.
Good Job!
He’s consistant.
He ran MS just like his latest project.
Cause harm and then offer to fix it.
whadda nice guy.
Bill Gates is a liar, thief, cheat, and swindler. His ill-gotten gains remain ill-gotten gains whether they’re used to fund drilling for oil or Malaria vaccinations. What goes around, comes around.
Yes, lets look at Rush Limbaugh. Of all the charges thrown at the man, “a lightly-veiled cast system” is probably the most outlandish, given that he spends day-in and day-out railing against the “plantation mentality” and the self-ghettoization practiced by people that guarentee the closest thing to castes that we have in America. Limbaugh promotes individual freedom and economic freedom, which are destructive to any sort of caste system. So your charges are both wholly ignorant as well as being just plain venomous. Go spread lies about someone obscure. At least that way you’ll have fewer people exposing your idiocy.
The Gates Foundation is just a cover for Bill’s Skynet plans. He’ll be hunting humans in 2099 with his head in a jar atop superfast robot legs and spambot arms. Humanity’s only chance for survival will be his occasional freeze ups.
MW: soon
I’m happy the MDN pubblished what I mention in a yesterday’s post. Great! Thank you guys!
Make as much as possible publicity of it, Gates need it after Job’s triumph…let’s give him the last kick!
Have you ever wondered why in the RED AIDS Project neither Bono, nor Shriver contacted Gates and MS? Now you know!!
Only ideas make money and give work and make our life better!!
Money and power you just make more for yourself and make our life and work WORST!
Bye, bye, Mr. Bill Worst!!!
Gates’ philanthropic work is one thing and is to be commended, however the LA Times article (long read) was searing in the way it exposed the hypocritical manner in which his foundation makes a conscious effort to make money in order to continue its charitable work.
I recall they invest something like 280 million for immunizations and vaccines while investing 450 million in oil properties adjacent to the very communities they are trying to save. The oil companies in these foreign countries have far fewer operating restrictions than those in the US, hence they are an extremely attractive investment.
Though the people of these hell-holes are immunized from disease they’re over-saturated by the chemicals in the drinking water and in the air they breathe. Either way they’re fuçked.
Gates’ and his new found money maker even attracted the attention of Buffet!
Gates has no conscience!
</political rant>
So what!!! Investments are supposed to make money – and that investment income will help sustain the charity fund indefinitely. The companies named are some of the worlds largest, most well known, most responsible, and most profitible – and they employ millions of people around the globe. No matter how much is spent on reducing and cleaning waste, industrial production causes pollution – period.
“Only ideas make money and give work and make our life better!!
Money and power you just make more for yourself and make our life and work WORST!”
This is just plain dumb. Unfortunately, all people have are ideas. At least Gates put his money where his mouth is. Yes, ideas are important, but money is also needed to get those ideas implemented.
Also, I wish people wouldn’t treat these issues so simply, Gates and his foundation are still noobs at this, I doubt any of us can do any better with what is given.
And have you ever thought that by investing in those companies, that as stockholders they would have more sway to INFLUENCE them to cut back on some of the things they are doing to make conditions worse?
Stop being so damn short sighted and giving useless rants!
“Stop being so damn short sighted and giving useless rants!”
Um, but that would spoil the fun that is MacDailyNews.
And White House press conferences, C-SPAN, Glenn Beck and so much more.
I’m sorry, but this just isn’t news. I hate Microsoft as much as anyone, but c’mon now. The libbie wackos at the LA Times really need to find a better use of their time.
Gates is nothing if not very CONSISTENT:
The Foundation gives the world lung disease and the medicine to help you.
Microsoft gives the world Windows malware and the antivirus software to help you.
Investing money in profitable ventures in order to benefit a foundation != Giving grants to and funding research for the companies that the foundation invests in.
What the foundation invests in is a completely separate issue than what the foundation gives grants to.
Chomper is right for the most part. I would like to add two things though:
1) If Bill. and more appropriately his wife. are devoting so much time to this project, I am a little surprised at the level of the problem. Sure difficulties are inherent in such an undertaking, however, the magnitude seems a tad higher than I would expect given their time committment.
2) The measure of the man (or women) is how they follow up on these shortcomings. If they are indeed oversights, will they be altered/changed/dropped etc? If not, then I am major league dissappointed.
Let’s give them a chance. Charity is good even if it is given by the world’s biggest dork.
Not defending Gates but isn’t anyone who buys gas for their car supporting oil production in third world countries? You don’t have to buy stock in Royal Dutch Shell to be part of the problem.
Environmental regulations are pretty lax, even in the USA. Oil companies only obey the local laws, no more, no less.
If those Nigerian Princes would spend some of the oil money they have hoarded in their Swiss Bank Accounts, perhaps the people in the Niger delta would not need the Gates Foundation. The money is there. The people who need it never see it’s benefits.
The one positive aspect of such a practice (I am not discounting the negatives here) is that they are taking some of the value from those companies and using it to fund a foundation that offsets the negatives of the companies in question.
Don’t get me wrong, oversight is important, but let’s not try to have knee jerk reactions.
I mean this isn’t Slashdot…=P
Think about it for a second. The foundation has $31 billion to invest – that’s a lot of money find a home for. They have to buy a lot of stocks of large corporations who obviously do pollute in the course of their activities. We can blame Bill Gates for awful software, but the Foundation is one positive that will have lasting effects for generations to come.
See busting…
Your attack is typical and sad as usual. I’m an idiot simply because I call Rush the Pied Piper. If you could think for yourself, youd see that.
Don’t get me wrong, I can listen to the guy – because if you filter out the misinformation – you can learn about Washington.
Didn’t mean to expose your soft underbelly and get your legs kicking in the air.
chump.
As much as I despise Microsoft, I got a kick out of this, because it doesn’t tell much of the real story:
“In the Niger Delta — where the Foundation funds programs to fight polio and measles – the Foundation has also invested more than $400 million dollars in companies including Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil Corp, and Chevron. These oil firms have been responsible for much of the pollution many blame for respiratory problems and other afflictions among the local population,” Democracy Now! reports.”
This is Democracy Now! FUD, MDN. They are using a health epidemic to further their political aims against the oil companies, but they don’t tell the whole story.
“Many blame [The Oil Companies] for respiratory problems and other afflictions among the local population,” sure, but from talking to a few missionary doctors just recently who have worked in the region and just returned last year, they had a different take.
The Niger Delta does have an epidemic. But the epidemic is something we in Western countries are all too familiar with: Smoking.
The smoking of tobacco and marijuana cigarettes is a real epidemic over there. The volunteers I’ve talked to report whole families, including children as young as 10 and 11 with serious, chain-smoking cigarette habits.
Basically, as one of my mission doctor friends said “Everybody smokes…constantly. It’s like being in a 1920’s movie over there.”
The culture is rather heavily biased to smoking Marijuana as well.
The problem with the heavy marijuana smoking is compounded by the fact that the Marijuana smoked is often cultivated by the people at the sites where oil is produced, because of the readily available water supply around those sites. So, waste water from these oil production carries heavy metals into the leaves of the marijuana plants, which these people smoke directly into their lungs.
Here’s the paper on this specific subject:
http://www.pjbs.org/pjnonline/fin356.pdf
So, just like everything else in life, it’s not as easy to cast blame. Are the oil companies polluting? Sure. But are they directly pumping these toxins in disease-causing levels into the lungs of these people? The answer is not so cut-and-dry.
The people themselves have a responsibility to curb their behaviors which contribute to the problem, but it’s hard to get the message across not to smoke tobacco as they do and not to cultivate the marijuana they smoke on oil production sites, in an area where the education of the population to the dangers of smoking has not fully been realized.
Food for thought.
This is total BS! I am no fan of Gates or his foundation. I don’t like the way they use money to fund promoting voting issues, but that’s another story.
This Democracy Now is no better than Green Peace attacking Apple. Gates is a big target and these guys simply want the press and potential buy-off money they can obtain from this sensationalized report.
Let me tell Democracy Now a couple of things that they might not be aware of:
1. Aides, Measles and Polio are not caused by environmental pollution. This is what their vaccine programs and fighting and somehow relating this to respiratory afflictions that may or may not be pollution related is pretzel logic.
2. Endowment money HAS to be invested. The foundation board has a fidiciuary responsibility to spin income off the endowment for grant purposes.
I don’t like Gates much, but I despise these blood-sucking idiots like Democracy Now. We’ve eradicated polio and measles from the US, so most of us don’t know devastating these diseases are. Relieving these populations of the scourge of these diseases far outweigh protecting them from fumes from a refinery.
“…the Foundation has also invested more than $400 million dollars in companies including Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil Corp, and Chevron.”
OK, who here hasn’t used oil pumped out of the ground by one of these companies?
Spark
Do you really think DN reads this blog? You crack me up…
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Same as the computer. Full of holes, sell hole plugs.
MDN word: “wrong” as in that’s what it all is.
So, where is Greenpeace on this story?
he needs to leave his beleagured sinking ship of a company sooner to correct this and make up for all his lifelong wrong doing by doing good in the world where its needed most
Spark, Greenpeace isn’t criticizing Apple only – it criticizes any company whose chemical and recycling policies are not up to par. This includes HP and Dell and other manufacturers.
Democracy Now is making the point that the Gates Foundation’s money isn’t being invested in a socially conscious manner. This leads to the contradictions of funding vaccine development while investing in polluting industries such as oil companies.
Yes, the Gates Foundation is a visible target, but they’re not the only ones out there. You can bet your britches that if the Ford Foundation, or the John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation, or any of the other major philanthropies were engaging in similar contradictory behavior that they would be called on it.
Socially conscious investing criteria are easy to come by in this day and age, and they are easy for investment fund managers to employ in their day-to-day investment decisions. So it sounds like somebody at the Gates Foundation was asleep at the switch. I wouldn’t be surprised if they started incorporating ethical screens in the near future, especially after this bout of negative publicity.
Spark: “Relieving these populations of the scourge of these diseases far outweigh protecting them from fumes from a refinery.”
You’ve presented a false dichotomy. Why should this tradeoff be made at all? Why can’t we encourage countries to do both at the same time?
More to the point, if the land, water, and air are polluted with sulphur, dioxin, and other noxious pollution, that will affect human health (and animals and plants and fish) as seriously as polio, influenza, and other diseases.
Lastly, who are we to tell another sovereign country what priorities or tradeoffs they should or shouldn’t make? All we can do is advise, guide, make resources and assistance available, and lead by example by getting our own house in order.
Imagine that, an organization criticizing a high profile public group in an effort to bring publicity to itself. Sound familiar? Amazing how we are all for it now.
When I read the article last week, my impression is that isn’t wasn’t meant to specifically trash the Gates Foundation. Their point was to point out the negatives of all the foundations by doing an expose on the currently most well known one. Their goal is to bring awareness of the problem and to try to get Gates to change the way things are done. If he makes the change, the others are sure to follow.
Similarly, if Greenpeace can get Apple to be the leader in the environment, the others will have to follow as well. But then, Greenpeace is going about this in a different way.