01.13.11
Bill Gates: “We Were Naïve When We Began.”
Summary: Admission of problems inside the Gates Foundation, from none other than the lavish Bill himself
THE POWER games of the Gates Foundation are not amusing. They are hurtful to a lot of US teachers for example. People’s expertise and reputation are being ignored as a plutocrat takes over fields that he simply does not grasp and cannot understand. Economics would be one example because Obama takes advice from Gates rather than from Economics professors.
To Gates’ credit, he recently admitted that his misguided PR+investment scheme was “naïve”. To quote The New York Times:
In an interview, Mr. Gates sounded somewhat chastened, saying several times, “We were naïve when we began.”
Not much has changed. As pointed out by GatesKeepers, which later adds this, the Gates Foundation only pretends things have changed. Melinda, for example, still “ducks a good question on the Gates Foundation and conflict”:
Here is an informercial interview with Melinda, one of the cochairs of the Gates Foundation. One ‘reader’ asked about the Gates Foundation view of countries in conflict and Melinda just didn’t answer the question! She is extremely practiced, or well briefed, on not answering difficult questions during interviews.
Interestingly enough, Tom Paulson has really decided to explore the Gates Foundation. Being the experienced journalist which he is (but not yet bribed by Gates), his recent output is worth following:
Bill & Melinda Gates: The world is, in fact, getting better
Bill and Melinda Gates want people to stop being such gripes and start paying attention to success.
Yeah, yeah, it’s easy to poke fun at that kind of talk – especially from the super-rich.
But some things, in fact, are getting better. And unlike most of the world’s super-rich, the Gateses are actually “investing” in making the world a better place. They also want to convince skeptics why this is actually a good investment for all of us.
That was the point of their “Living Proof” event, webcast live today from London.
The event was done in collaboration with the ONE campaign, an organization co-founded by Bono which advocates on matters of global health and poverty — and which, apparently, doesn’t like to answer questions from the media regarding its finances, but that’s another story.
(Oops, there I go again being a typical journalist and focusing on the negative.)
That is a bit of sarcasm of course. As for Bono’s scandalous organisation, we wrote about it at the time.
GatesKeepers expands on the above by writing:
One of the best analysts of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on the blogging scene is Tom Paulson on his Humanosphere. In this article he appears to be happy about the good news, which turns out not to be new at all, that Bill and Melinda are giving out on air. The world is getting better we all agree. But Bill and Melinda have set out to show that ‘aid’ is contributing to it. This they have failed to do.
Child mortality rates are not necessarily dropping because of aid. Bill offers no graphs to show greater declines in countries with more aid. Or any proof that aid had anything to do with declines in child mortality.
Melinda is particularly insistent that smaller families are caused by lower child mortality. She keeps repeating this simplistic argument. Smaller families in countries undergoing demographic transitions are not simply caused by declines in child mortality. Aid has not been very successful in bringing down child mortality but has been enormously successful in bringing family planning methods to poorer countries.
The decline in polio is partly caused by aid. Its continued persistence may also be caused by aid that funds ineffective campaigns or facilitates movement of people.
Keep up the good work, Tom. And please don’t be fooled when Bill and Melinda feed you a bunch of well-packaged crap.
In a later post we will show that Paulson too is concerned about the Gates Foundation’s hijack of the media which covers topic of interest to it. █
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