Philanthropy and "Corporatized Charity"
Real charity takes place person to person within strong networks of mutual aid and concern. The mutual aid of real community bonds has largely been replaced and undermined by Corporatized Charity. "I gave at the Office" is a common refrain. Philanthropy is a human practice carried out by the "haves" as they deliver a few crumbs to the starving and despairing masses of "have nots". Most often in the USA, such economic activity takes place within the arcane systems of tax law to bring tax relief or outright tax advantage to the wealthy class. Real charity is simply doing the right thing, not calculating a write off. Real charity empowers the recipient and does not approach our fellow human brothers and sisters as poor wretches that have no hope for economic self-sufficiency. A safety net can also serve as a permanent systemic snare that anchors recipients in a low economic status. The largest philanthropy on earth provides insight into current aspects of this sick system:
In order to understand the Gates Foundation, we first need an understanding of the total economic structure of such large financial holdings. An iceberg provides an excellent metaphor; The public at large see just the surface "good works" presented by an expert team of Gates Foundation PR professionals. Below the surface it is very telling to see how the majority of Gates Foundation funds prop up the current industrial/military/pharmaceutical complex. The Foundation preserves their hard assets and attempts to aggressively grow their "principle" or underlying Foundation assets. The Foundation directs only the "interest" into their "philanthropic" activity. At best, 10% of Gates funds would be directed into "humanitarian work". The 90% represented as permanent assets are invested in many industries that actually bring harm or subvert the work carried out by grant recipients of the Gates Foundation.
You cannot just accept the PR dished out about all of the good that the Gates Foundation carries out, -it is imperative to also dig down a layer to understand the social and environmental harm rendered by the massive global power of the 40 billion dollar Gates investment fund. For the most part, Gates investments support the "status quo" of the military/pharmaceutical/industrial/corporate complex. Real change cannot be brought about by directing 10% of a fund into "good works", while 90% of assets actually harm the planet and its' people. Systemic change is necessary to bring about an improved human and ecological future, not just misleading green washing and expert corporate PR programs.
As the global, corporatized economy collapses under its own weight and as a predictable result of its present systemic dysfunction, the human community will return to the time tested response of family care and mutual community aid. The systems that humanity has applied to survive through all ages will re-emerge.
Gates Foundation Facts
Soon after Susan Desmond-Hellmann became chancellor of the University of California San Francisco medical center campus, she faced an acute personal embarrassment. Financial disclosures revealed that she and her husband, both physicians, owned a sizable chunk of stock in Altria Corporation, a top cigarette maker. The chancellor commendably divested those shares and donated the proceeds to tobacco-control research. In May, Desmond-Hellmann became the first physician to head the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest private foundation and one of the most influential forces in global health. Desmond-Hellmann could draw on her own personal experience--both as a doctor and as a once-oblivious investor--to synthesize investment with the Gates' stated social purpose.
For all its generosity and thoughtfulness, the Gates Foundation's management of its $40 billion endowment operates with a puzzling ethical blind spot.
In 2007, a group of colleagues at the Los Angeles Times, examined whether those investments tended generally to support the foundation's philanthropic goals or subvert them. This investigative journalistic inquiry found that The Gates Foundation reaped vast profits by placing billions of dollars in firms whose activities and products subverted the foundation's good works. For example, Gates donated $218 million to prevent polio and measles in places like the Niger Delta, yet invested $423 million in the oil companies whose delta pollution literally kills the children the foundation tries to help.
Gates has vast holdings in Big Pharma firms that priced AIDS drugs out of reach for desperate victims the foundation wanted to save. Gates invests in predatory lenders whose practices sparked the Great Recession and they hold shares in chocolate firms said by the US government to have supported child slavery in Ivory Coast.
After the LA Times investigations were published, the foundation briefly considered changing its policy of blind-eye investing, but ultimately pulled funds only from firms that provided the financial basis for genocide in Darfur. Even in that case, when the glare of adverse publicity faded, the foundation hopped back into such companies, including the Chinese construction giant NORINCO International.
The Gates Foundation boasts about its grants to help poor farmers adapt to droughts and floods caused by global warming. Yet according to the foundation's most recent tax filing and recent SEC filings, it holds more than $1.2 billion in a rogues' gallery of corporate actors, including BP, Royal Dutch Shell and Exxon Mobil, whose environmental despoliation promotes the climate change that is destroying those farmers' livelihoods. You cannot fight global warming by investing in those global firms that help to create it. 10% good works, countered by 90% of funds actually causing damage results in a net ecological and social loss.
By comparison, a group of seventeen other charitable foundations showed philanthropic leadership when they recently decided to divest from companies that do business in fossil fuels. The head of the Wallace Global Fund wrote that the effort "seeks to break the industry's grip on our political process as it helps catalyze the global energytransition that the climate crisis demands." Stanford University, a major beneficiary of Gates largesse, recently announced that it would divest all coal company investments from its endowment. In contrast, as of the most recent publicly available annual report, the Gates foundation held $30 million in coal firms.
Gates also has placed big bets on mining firms whose operations have proved environmentally disastrous for foundation beneficiaries in the developing world. This includes stakes in Brazil's Vale S.A. and Rio Tinto--often cited for egregious pollution. Both companies, among others in the Gates portfolio, are jumping into the burgeoning market for rare earth elements essential to electronics, hybrid cars and windmills, yet they are notorious for laying to waste wide areas around mines and processing plants.
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