A Critical Examination of Bill Gates' Philanthropic Record 370
sam_handelman writes "The common perception among Slashdotters is that while Bill Gates may cause us some professional difficulties, he makes up for it with an exemplary philanthropic record. His philanthropic efforts may turn out to be not as altruistic as one may think. Edweek, not ordinarily an unfriendly venue for Gates, is running a series of blog post/investigative journalism pieces into what the Gates' foundation is doing, and how it is not always well received by stakeholders."
Foundations are tax shields (Score:4, Informative)
See subject: Anyone that's worked with foundations knows it. I had some dealings with companies that set things like that up for the extremely wealthy whilst I lived in NY City in 2003.
I.E.-> It's better to spend monies on foundations than face tax penalties that would otherwise ensue. You're probably not that much different, considering you probably have monies in IRA's, property, or business investments!
* So - Does this make "King Billy" (I call him that out of respect, NOT ridicule & I have for years) some 'evil guy'? No.
(He's just doing what he has to with HIS monies, and in the most sensible manner possible. Were you in his shoes, would YOU do anything differently with YOUR money? I doubt it.)
APK
P.S.=> Conversely, does it make him a 'saint'? No, of course not - he's just a guy managing his money, and he does a good job of that... I like his educational investments the most! apk
Re:So basically... (Score:5, Informative)
In fact, no, that is not it either. Plenty of money is going to corrupt African dictatorships.
But money is being directed AWAY from public health infrastructure, and the people who are complaining about it (I know: too much to ask for you to read the article) are doctors and public health workers in the African countries.
Re:Shareholders don't like it? (Score:5, Informative)
A fair amount of Microsoft's money is going to wipe out malaria and polio and shitloads of other diseases, on people from nations who will grow up to use pirated software.
A lot of the Gates Foundation's spending on medicine has served a secondary purpose of bolstering drug patents - they won't spend money on drugs from local generic manufacturers in countries that do not heel to US drug patent laws.
No wonder the scumbag stakeholders are pissed.
You seem confused as to the meaning of "stakeholder" - it is not shareholder. It is a term that refers to everyone with an interest in an outcome, not just those with money at risk, but the people who's lives are at risk too - nominally the ones being "helped."
Re:Shareholders don't like it? (Score:5, Informative)
*Stake*holders. As in people with an interest in donations having the best possible impact.
From TFA: “Donor nations were shocked last month, when UNICEF disclosed that it has been forced to pay artificially elevated prices for vaccines under an arrangement called the Advance Market Commitment, which was brokered by Gates Foundation-dominated GAVI alliance, to greatly increase drug company profits. Stakeholders also worry that industry reports of particular vaccine's effectiveness might be skewed by marketing goals.”
Re:All charity ends (Score:1, Informative)
one person's resources are not limited
- I hope I don't have to explain where the typo is in that.
You don't have to but it would help.
Re:Not Me (Score:4, Informative)
But on the flip side, if it's purely a tax dodge, why does Gates invest so much of his personal time visiting poor parts of the world, and speaking publicly about the issues his foundation is attempting to deal with?
He'd have no reason to do this if it was a tax dodge, he could just keep to himself and let it do it's thing, but he doesn't, he gets actively involved.
Maybe they buy research facilities in the US and not Africa because their key focus is on solving the problems they've set as their priorities - like dealing with Malaria. Giving Africa the resources to deal with the problem isn't just a case of building a research centre there - you need a strong talent pool to go with it, which means also building up an education system in the region of the research centre that is on par with Western areas, and then further waiting until the required staff pass through that education system with the skills needed.
His foundation does fund educational initiatives also, but how does that help them deal with the problems in Africa right now? Funding better education and research centres on the continent is a long term investment - you can't just stick a research centre there and assume it to magically fill up with MIT and Cambridge quality grads - it takes time.
So what do you suggest as an alternative? set the groundwork and just wait 20 years until that groundwork has flourished to the point it can deal with the problem? or do both- which is precisely what they are doing. Using American talent now, to deal with immediate problems, whilst sowing the seeds for an Africa that can better help itself with these problems through it's funding and investment in education.
The fact is there are far better tax dodges around, ones that require far less personal effort and involvement if that was the only aim. It may well be that Gates uses his foundation to further the financial fortunes of friends and so forth as a side thing, I'm not denying that, but he clearly has a lot of actual personal interest in solving problems too, and that's far better than merely being a tax dodge, or simply hoarding fortunes for the sake of hoarding which just about every other billionaire does.
Re:Not a strong case (Score:5, Informative)
That part of the article, just one point in it, says that Gates is enriching himself at the expense of the people his charity serves. There are many other points about how his charity's work is counterproductive.
You're an anonymous coward. I say you work for the Gates Foundation.
Re:All charity ends (Score:4, Informative)
Did you read the articles (duh, Slashdot, I know...) - the problem is the Foundation is campaigning on behalf of it's business partners to get the governments who they claim to be helping to establish policies that benefit Monsanto rather than their population. The end result is, Foundation spends x, corporate partners gain x*y. Bill Gats (personally) and Foundation then also gain from investment in corporate partner. This is not about charity at all, it is about disguising dodgy business practises as charity.
Re:What's the big deal? (Score:5, Informative)
From what I read, instead of handing out money directly.. which just leads to corruption, he is leveraging it in a way that prevents the money from being abused. Free money never works when it comes to aid son.
Never say never, son.
A few years ago, Xanana Gusmao, the Prime Minister of Timor Leste was facing a crisis [imagicity.com]. As a result of the violence leading up to Timor's first free elections, almost 10% of the country (over 100,000 people) ended up in refugee camps. He asked the UN and other aid agencies for advice, and they came up with an 8 year plan at the end of which, the first houses would be built.
The PM immediately ordered cash payments to all internally displaced people to help them rebuild their homes. It was a partial answer, one that the government admitted would require significant further effort, but the move helped 60,000 people to begin rebuilding within a year.
The aid agencies went apeshit. They told him that the money would be wasted, stolen, spent on the wrong things, that there would be no way to measure the success, that they wouldn't be able to avoid fraud.... But Xanana insisted. Within two years, the camps were empty.
In retrospect, it's easy to see why: Nobody wants to live in a camp. The money each person received wasn't enough to build a house, but it was enough to get started. And that's all the encouragement people need.
William Easterly's Aid Watch [aidwatchers.com] blog also documents studies tracking how direct cash donations to displaced persons in sub-Saharan Africa were used. They found that less than 10% of the money was wasted or somehow misused. That's better than just about every other form of aid in terms of efficiency.
The moral of the story, therefore, is not that giving money is bad. The moral is that you need to give it to people with the reason and motivation to use it for the right things. I hate to break it to you, but the majority of multi-national corporations lack that motivation.
Re:What's the point of this article? (Score:4, Informative)
It is not the world's most popular OS it is the one you "have" to use because of monopoly building tactics.
The Office suit might be the most popular, but even this is tainted by abusing the power on the OS market to illegally favor the application.
And that money would be better of being totally destroyed rather than in the hand of a guy who pretend to believe that monsanto is a friend of hungry people in emerging countries.
(just in case you are under the delusion that GMO are a misunderstood champion of the poor, learn from the fate of the 1000s of Indian farmers who commit suicide due to their working with monsanto, and think about how usefull "industrial agriculture" can be when it is imposed on a population where at least 40% of the population cannot do something more sophisticated than small traditional agriculture, it took the "emerged world" 60 years to move from around 50% to 2 or 3% of the population in the "fields", if you want to do the same i one generation you can just as "humanely" shoot the poor b***ds directly.)
And gates is not a roge philantropist but a 100% corporate america white collar criminal pushing a conservative agenda with some "democrat" colloring.
(well democrats are just somewhat less obviously right wing radicals than republicans...)
Re:All charity ends (Score:5, Informative)
Mr.Gates resources are actually pretty close to not limited. He could easily set enough aside for the foundation that only the interest would ever have to be spent.
Actually, one of the characteristics of Mr. Gates's charity is that this will not happen.
Gates's position is that while this sounds good, what you end up with is a charity that exists to function like a business. And then, like a business (let's take Microsoft for example), you end up with an organization that's weighed down with layers of middle managers, most of whose chief priority is to keep the business (charity) running -- not to achieve its goals, but to protect their own jobs.
Gates rejected that model. Instead his charity has a mandate that it must spend ALL of its money by XYZ date. After that date, the Gates Foundation will be broke, and it will disappear. Personally I admire this decision.
Re:Excuse me for defying the Monsanto-bashing (Score:5, Informative)
Hmm....
Let's let Monsanto go for a bit - I would just point out that few things are purely good or evil, the world is much more complicated.
However, the vaccine business is clearly not a win for the 'free market'. The early vaccines were not developed by drug companies, they were developed by universities. Even the measles vaccine [wikipedia.org] which was in part developed by the person who started Merck was employed in a government funded lab.
Vaccines make so little money and are so hard to produce that the US government had to write special legislation to entice Big Pharma into making them. That legislation shows just what a mess things are in the US at present. But I think it is quite reasonable to rage at Big Pharma while simultaneously trying to get them to behave in a socially responsible manner.
And the Gates Foundation is an example of this. They certainly do some good, but their structure is really set up to benefit large Western organizations, some governmental, some non governmental. Read up on the machinations of the International Monetary Fund some time. Take some generic anti nausea medication first.