“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.
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.