Bill Gates Claimed to Have Said He Would
Spend Half His Money on PR (Propaganda)
Matthew Bishop and Michael Green have published a book titled "Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World". The concepts they introduce help us analyse today's news items which are focused on the activities of Bill Gates.
Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Link TV recently launched ViewChange.org -- a digital media hub that highlights progress in reducing hunger, poverty, and disease in developing nations. It combines powerful video stories with the latest Web technology to make videos, articles, blogs, and actions readily available to key audiences working in global development. The Gates Foundation has also spearheaded the use of storytelling to shift industry and public attitude towards global health via the Living Proof Project, a multimedia initiative intended to highlight successes of U.S.-funded global health initiatives. By reporting success stories back to the people who funded them - American taxpayers and their representatives - the Project hopes to reframe the current global health conversation.
--Bill Gates, Microsoft
The tweetosphere is buzzing with this "quote" from Bill Gates. Did he really say this or is it apocryphal?
"If I had two dollars left, I would spend one on PR"
The Hechinger Report is funded by four philanthropies: the Lumina Foundation for Education, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Foundation for Child Development, and the Joyce Foundation. The Gates and Joyce foundations have also provided grant support for Education Week. At this point, news organizations that publish content from The Hechinger Report do not pay for it, Mr. Colvin said.
The arrogance is astounding ... and the power of money is not surprising.
The northern on-ramp to Seattle’s planned downtown tunnel could lead traffic right under the Gates Foundation’s new $500 million campus.
And the world’s largest foundation doesn’t like that one bit.
“It’s a serious concern for us,” said Martha Choe, chief administrative officer of the foundation, which is pushing for the road to curve around its campus, instead.
Philanthrocapitalism: dawn of a new era?
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When Bill Gates and Warren Buffett stood on stage together at the New York Public Library and the elder billionaire announced the he was going to give away most of his fortune through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to help the poor, a new ideology was born.
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“It’s still in its early days, but if you go back 20 years, companies like Nike, Nestle, Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart regarded it as a badge of honour to be seen as not soft and sentimental, and socially progressive. They preferred to be seen as really focused on efficiency, and maximising profits and shareholder value.”
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That said, he concedes that philanthrocapitalism is still “not a very well defined field” and that “there’s an awful lot of experimentation”, such as learning from others and trying things to see what works and what doesn’t.
Although it was set up by UN member states in 2002, the fund largely got of the ground thanks to the involvement of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Most universities are non-profits, too, and many academic researchers share the altruistic motives of charitable organizations like the Gates Foundation. But when it comes to intellectual property rights, relations between universities and foundations can get tricky. Since 1980, when the Bayh-Dole Act was passed, research institutions that receive federal funding are required to seek ownership of any patentable technologies produced on school grounds. Some institutions also have licensing agreements with companies.
Tony Blair’s Mystery Thieves in Sierra Leone - A Rejoinder to Blair/State House!
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The said approximately ten billion leones cash was collected by Mr. Blair from the American Billionaire’s charity, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and paid into an entity operated by Mr. Tony Blair known as WINDRUSH VENTURES NO. 3 LIMITED PARTNERSHIP. The money was paid out to Mr. Blair in June 2008 under the award of a Grant numbered "Grant OPP50878".
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Mr. Blair regularly jets into Sierra Leone ostensibly to help Sierra Leoneans because he loves Sierra Leoneans but it is only now that Sierra Leoneans are learning that the "love" and the "help" has been propelled with some infusion of billions of leones from American Billionaire Bill Gates into the deep pockets of Blair’s private vehicle.
Research to improve sorghum’s nutritional levels through genetic engineering is under way.
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The research is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Scientists have for years been using biotechnology to genetically modify crops in the United States. They say that changing the DNA of food with genetic engineering makes farming more efficient.
The United States is the main producer of such crops, along with Argentina, Brazil, Canada, India, and China.
But farmers and activists in many countries worry that genetic changes to crops are risky. They are concerned about health and environmental implications. They also say the new methods are expensive and tied to intellectual property laws, putting smaller farmers at a disadvantage.
There is a growing debate within aid groups over whether biotechnology is good for agriculture in Africa.
South Africa already grows biotech cotton, corn and soybeans, and Burkina Faso has started experimenting with BT cotton. Aid groups like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are looking into helping with biotech experiments in many other African countries.
But it appears to be the way forward for AGRA, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. Four years ago, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation partnered with the Rockefeller Foundation to launch AGRA. Their strategy was explained in the report, “Africa’s Turn: The New Green Revolution for the 21st Century.” The report emphasized hybrid and genetically engineered seeds [a.k.a. GMOs or GE seeds], chemical fertilizers, training agricultural scientists for crop improvements and agricultural reforms.
Jos Ngonyo, recipient of the Eastern Africa Environmental Leadership Award, wasn’t scheduled to meet with the Gates Foundation during his visit. He says he would have welcomed the opportunity to explain why he thinks AGRA is a bad idea.
Ngonyo: “AGRA didn’t involve the people in Africa. This was an idea pushed to Africa and that does not work. It’s not about us without us.”
Ngonyo says people are so aware in the world that “you can’t just bring an ideology from outside and push. They’ll only take it for sometime and then rebel against it.”
In early April, protestors, lead by Kenya’s Biodiversity Coalition, rejected 40,000 tons of genetically modified maize grown in South Africa. The maize remains blocked at the port city of Mombassa. Protesters say the maize is a springboard to contaminate non-GMO crops.
While at TED, Bill took time out (twice) to bask in the genius award glow of Esther Duflo. She says: "I had two dinners with Bill Gates in two days. It was efficient." "Gates later pressed MIT to make Duflo's undergraduate course on poverty available online and told her, "We need to fund you."" Too bad, Bill. She's already taken by MacArthur.
Is Bill Gates really, like, crass, or does he just put his foot in it too often? Will he now abandon his beloved microfinance program?
In the view of DuPont and other alarmed observers, this situation makes Monsanto an industry gatekeeper, capable of deciding which new genetically modified traits can be introduced and which cannot. Put another way, Roundup Ready has become a monopoly platform product, much like what the Microsoft Windows operating system became in the market for personal computer software in the late 1990s.
The parallels are not lost on DuPont's longtime outside counsel Boies, chairman of Boies Schiller & Flexner, who was the Justice Department's lead trial counsel in its antitrust case against Microsoft. He argues that Monsanto's stacking restrictions are actually more objectionable than the conduct that got Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) into trouble 15 years ago. "Microsoft's actions were designed to inhibit the stacking of the Netscape browser on the Microsoft Windows operating system," says Boies. "Here, you have outright prohibition of stacking genetic traits on top of Monsanto's Roundup Ready trait."
Now I know all this is a long way from Bill Gates trying to nuke us, but I’m getting there.
A spin-off company from Intellectual Ventures is TerraPower, a group developing new-age, next-generation nuclear power that is truly clean, cheap, safe and does not require the enriched uranium fuel that also makes bombs and leaves stockpiles of radioactive waste collecting around the world.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is fascinating. So is the 19-page annual letter that describes the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest philanthropy. But for someone as smart as Gates, who can afford to hire experts on any subject under the sun, some of his foundation’s strategies are baffling.
Consider his foundation’s approach to malaria, which focuses on bed nets, a low-tech, only modestly effective intervention, and on the development of a vaccine, a high-tech solution that has eluded intensive efforts for decades. This approach dismisses an old, cheap, and safe way to control the vector – the Anopheles mosquito – that spreads the disease: the chemical DDT.
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Moreover, even if mosquitoes become resistant to the killing effects of DDT, they are still repelled by it. An occasional dusting of window frames and doorframes is extremely effective. Bill Gates’s experts seem not to know that; the foundation’s annual letter contains the following single mention of DDT: “The world hoped in the 1950s and 1960s that [malaria] could be eliminated by killing mosquitoes with DDT, but that tactic failed when the mosquitoes evolved to be resistant to the chemical.”
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But policies based on science and data have a short half-life at the UN. With a notable absence of fanfare, in May 2009 the WHO, together with the UN Environment Program, reverted to endorsing less effective methods for preventing malaria, announcing that their goal is “to achieve a 30% cut in the application of DDT worldwide by 2014 and its total phase-out by the early 2020s, if not sooner.” In the absence of effective vaccines or new anti-malarial drugs – and the funding and infrastructure to deliver them – this decision is tantamount to mass murder, a triumph of radical environmental politics over public health.
How can we drain the public-policy swamp?
"The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is supportive of the mission of Grand Challenges Canada and pleased to work together on the Grand Challenge of Point-of-Care diagnostics," said Dr. Carol Dahl, Director of Staff for the Global Health Program of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Gates Keepers find the following statement distasteful: "Perhaps because of language or cultural barriers, stories of malaria elimination from Asia—Pacific have been under-recognised and under-appreciated within the region and by the international community."
Bill Gates visited the village to research for a large-scale immunization program, which could potentially save hundreds of lives. By providing vaccines to villages in remote areas like Khangaria, “The idea is very exciting to us, we believe that we can save the lives of hundreds of children,” said Gate.
OU assistant professor Sunil Joshi obtains $100,000 grant for his research on boosting immune systems.
BREAD is a new five-year program jointly funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
“As in many such cases, Gates is among the stakeholders in the respective patents...”We have already written many posts to shed light on the relationship between pharmaceutical manufacturers and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (some of them actually work inside the Gates Foundation). To clarify again, "Big Pharma" is not the monster which many people claim that it is (extreme daemonisation), but there is a lot to be known about it. Those companies are sometimes giving away experimental drugs to see what happens in poor populations (as they would be unable to sue for damages or generate much publicity), but then again, these are amoral entities (sometimes immoral) working for their own interests. They are mostly owned by shareholders, Gates included. It's not as though they produce many billionaires from within. A breakdown of stakeholders is quite revealing.
There is criticism of what Gates is doing in India right now. For example:
This coverage of the head of the Gates Foundation's trip to India is amusing. It gives a whole new meaning to: "You are our father. You are our mother. Please adopt us" Arey bap! Bill appears to be a development tourist and Rahul is leading him by the nose. What does he expect the villagers to say to him except that they love his grants and want him to be their mother and father just like the Congress Party?
Development tourism in Bihar for the head of the Gates Foundation
This development tourist is so naive. He has never heard of breast milk as the first vaccine but mothers in Bihar have been told this for years. And they can parrot it to any important visitor with connections to the ruling elite.
And then he says he knows nothing about the cervical vaccine trial being stopped. He is either lying or ignorant. We are not sure which is worse.
Bill Gates flew in a chartered plane along with Rahul and landed at Fursatganj airstrip in Rae Bareli 15 km from Jais. Jais is 32 km from Rae Bareli district headquaters.
Bill Gates has offered to adopt an entire village in India.
“I did not make any promise in the IT sector in Amethi ... In fact, I have not spoken anything on the IT during the past one week,” says Mr Gates to the journalists in India.