Summary: Investment (profit-making) aspects of the Gates Foundation come to the forefront of the news again and the race for GMO in India continues

THE "Gates Foundation Portfolio Gains," states Philanthropy.com, which is actually a site that's used to promote the Gates Foundation. For those who don't know yet, the Gates Foundation is primarily a tax-exempt investment vehicle, not just a charity as it's often described with the help of PR agencies. Some of the investments include those oil giants that pollute everyone's ocean at this moment and poison people in Africa.

The nation's largest grant maker, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, reported holdings of $12.7-billion as of March 31, up $2.3-billion over the previous quarter, according to MarketWatch. The foundation benefited from significantly increasing its stakes in blue-chip stocks, such as Wal-Mart and McDonald's.

As stated by this pro-Gates Foundation Web site, "The foundation benefited from significantly increasing its stakes in blue-chip stocks, such as Wal-Mart and McDonald's."

See? Everybody wins.

Gates becomes richer by helping Wal-Mart and McDonald's, two companies that help society, right? Just like Shell and BP. Gates is investing in McDonald's, Wal-Mart, and other such questionable companies that can help Gates make a profit (assuming the investments are well placed). This disclosure-centered news is also appearing in some Wall Street-oriented Web sites:

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation profited from bets on several blue-chip stocks in the first quarter, nearly doubling its stake in Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) and adding two million shares of McDonald's Corp. (MCD), according to a regulatory filing late Monday.

Another new headline: "Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Buys Expedia Inc., Walmart Stores Inc., The Cocacola Company, Sells Peabody Energy Corp., CocaCola Enterprises Inc., The Home Depot Inc."

That's just so charitable, right? Over $12,000,000,000 invested, not donated. And some of those companies benefit directly from the work the Gates Foundation does as a charity. We gave many examples before. Not being familiar with them is hardly an excuse.

Market Watch says:

Gates Foundation nearly doubles Wal-Mart holdings

[...]

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation profited from bets on several blue-chip stocks in the first quarter, nearly doubling its stake in Wal-Mart Stores Inc., purchasing over three million shares of Coca-Cola Co. and adding two million shares of McDonald's Corp., according to a regulatory filing late Monday.

Richard Stallman calls for boycott of Coca-Cola for crimes that too few people are aware of. Gates not only supports those companies; He is making money along with them. More from the news:

On another front, Bill Gates’ foundation nearly doubled its stake in Walmart stock, while unloading shares of Home Depot and Dick’s Sporting Goods. Perhaps Gates has confidence that Walmart will fare well.

This is also mentioned here. It is very important to remember what the Gates Foundation is, not how it sells itself to the public using the mainstream press. To be fair, there are other foundations that operate similarly. It's sometimes known as philanthrocapitalism.

Here is a famous film about Walmart's impact on people (Flash only):



Gates not only invests in American multinationals. Here in the UK, Walmart owns Asda. Gates also has investments in the UK-based JJB, which is a huge chain of sports shops. What about Monsanto investments or promotion? We wrote about the subject in posts such as:

1. With Microsoft Monopoly in Check, Bill Gates Proceeds to Creating More Monopolies
2. Gates-Backed Company Accused of Monopoly Abuse and Investigated
3. How the Gates Foundation Privatises Africa
4. Reader's Article: The Gates Foundation and Genetically-Modified Foods
5. Monsanto: The Microsoft of Food
6. Seeds of Doubt in Bill Gates Investments
7. Gates Foundation Accused of Faking/Fabricating Data to Advance Political Goals
8. More Dubious Practices from the Gates Foundation
9. Video Transcript of Vandana Shiva on Insane Patents
10. Explanation of What Bill Gates' Patent Investments Do to Developing World
11. Black Friday Film: What the Bill Gates-Backed Monsanto Does to Animals, Farmers, Food, and Patent Systems
12. Gates Foundation Looking to Destroy Kenya with Intellectual Monopolies
13. Young Napoleon Comes to Africa and Told Off
14. Bill Gates Takes His GMO Patent Investments/Experiments to India
15. Gates/Microsoft Tax Dodge and Agriculture Monopoly Revisited
16. Beyond the 'Public Relations'
17. UK Intellectual Monopoly Office (UK-IPO) May be Breaking the Law
18. “Boycott Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in China”
19. The Gates Foundation Extends Control Over Communication with Oxfam Relationship
20. Week of Monsanto

Gates has generated quite a PR blitz in India after his recent visit there. Here are the Indian Express and other publications glorifying him. It is accompanied by a fluff piece playing for Monsanto|Gates and the Indian Express also prints "Gates backs GM crops: tech must help farmers, feed rising population" (it appeared in two places even). It says:

Giving his full support to the use of genetic engineering in agriculture, Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates today said if the world continued to produce food with existing technologies it would not be able to feed its increasing population.

In an interview with Shekhar Gupta, Editor-in-Chief of The Indian Express, for NDTV’s Walk The Talk programme, Gates, who is on a visit to India for work related to his charitable foundation, said the world needed newer crops with increased productivity, better adaptability to changing climatic conditions and the ones that use less of insecticides. And these, he said, could only be made through innovations in agricultural biotechnology sector.

“Technology, properly applied, is the reason, if you like, why nine billion people can live on this planet without destroying it,” said Gates who toured remote villages in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar during his visit.

The comments are all negative because this piece seems like it was ghost-written by those who manage the Monsanto|Gates marketing/agenda. From the comments:

"If memory serves me right this author tried the same GM push earlier without any foresight or vision(As expected :)). Now wait..suddenly by adding Bill Gates into this mix the author is trying to "cook-up" some credibility around GM food. The idea behind organic/sustainable agriculture is for more farmers to embrace it thereby making it affordable to everyone. Just by mischaracterizing "organic" food as neo rich is not a solution but pure %u201Cpropaganda%u201D. It%u2019s the same lies churned out in a new flavor (vanilla with caramel anyone?:)). Again the Gates foundation which our author harps about...who are they? who funds them? what is BIG GM companies like Monsanto. Cargill%u2019s role in these orgs?"

Another one:

"Do people like to eat genetically modified chicken and meat? Do Indian farmers want to grow genetically modified seeds? Why are the opinion of the Indian farmers missing in this debate?"

As we showed earlier this month, these farmers often commit suicide with Monsanto pesticides in order to protest against Monsanto. It is estimated that about 100,000 Indian farmers have died this way. Another comment:

"I concur with Mr Y Srinivas' arguments. Unfortunately our GM science is so poor, we have to follow the West to seek innovations and technology. Hope people are hearing the aftermath of growing Roundup Ready (RR) crops - RR resistant weeds are emerging fast in the USA. If we depend on foreign technology be rest assured that we will blackmailed.The editorial here has been influenced by lobbyists."

Now watch Gates influencing Indian farmers with slush funds (farmers apparently need speakers from the West). He is putting in relatively small amounts of money and urging taxpayers (through their politicians) to pay the vast majority which is the rest that can feed Monsanto. They call it "kickstart" rather than lobby. It's the same in the pharmaceutical industry where the research is quite similar (genetics and immunisation).

The Gates Foundation's allegedly-corrupt official is dressing that up a little, in the context of health:

'Grand Challenges Explorations continues to generate unique and creative ways to tackle global health issues,' said Tachi Yamada, president of the Gates Foundation's Global Health Programme.

As we have shown in many previous posts, Gates has holdings in some of the same pharmaceutical giants that are set to benefit from the Gates Foundation's activities. They are chasing a big bounty with diseases like malaria [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], always relying on more PR (entirely supportive press coverage), which is sometimes covered by African news site (few speak English):

While the Melinda and Gates Foundation should be commended for the grant, it should be born in mind that donors may have their own research priories.

The research priorities are also connected to investments. "Gates Foundation committed to tribes, but unfocused," says the following article's headline.

The Gates Foundation typically defines a goal and approaches it with strategies that vary in scope, cost, complexity and tactics.

Investments in vaccine are commendable, but it is crucial to understand who profits from them. Gates' vaccine investments are further promoted by US politicians who put tax money in the pool, eventually to reach the pockets of particular companies. Last week we showed a conflict between WHO and Gates (staff intersection reported in the French press) and in recent days we found this report [1, 2] with names of beneficiaries.

Britain's GlaxoSmithKline and U.S.-based Pfizer Inc. make pneumonia vaccines.

Gates is an investor in them and they are working inside the Gates Foundation, as we showed before. The Head of Global Health for the Gates Foundation is from GlaxoSmithKline, where he was bullying researchers who expressed doubt about his products. We wrote about the Gates Foundation and Pfizer in [1, 2]. It's a question of patents and who pays for a licence. Profiting from their patents at taxpayers' expense is what the Gates Foundation has the option of doing and the problem is not vaccination, which is important; the problem is the conflict of interests, which routinely characterises profitable philanthrocapitalism. They seldom neglect the opportunity to gain more power.

“The Head of Global Health for the Gates Foundation is from GlaxoSmithKline, where he was bullying researchers who expressed doubt about his products.”Critics might be inclined to suggest that this is a misinformed demonstration against modern medicine, which it's not (I understand the vitality of medicine and I hold a Ph.D. in Medical Biophysics); this is about an entirely separate issue which involves distribution/concentration of wealth, poor ethics, and mass deception. Politicians too have argued for a reform in the way drugs -- including generics -- are made available to those whose life they can save. The state of the US insurance/healthcare system is a wonderful example of what happens when profit comes before morality and huge numbers of unnecessary deaths just get ignored by a lot of the media (Murdoch leads here). The press sometimes prefers to play along with the companies that make obscene amounts of money from imbalance in the unjust system which they themselves propagate. In turn, this puts a lot of journalistic independence in jeopardy. ⬆