01.13.11

Gates Foundation is Not African But Speaks and Decides for Africa

Posted in Africa, Bill Gates at 4:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Africa is debated in Rupert Murdoch’s rags, wherein the African population is kindly asked to kneel for Bill and accept his plans for the continent

A FEW days ago we showed that the Gates Foundation continues to buy the media in Africa (there is also a translation into Spanish). The “rich uncle from America” syndrome means that they “know” what’s best for other people and insist on using money to promote the plan which they consider to be “best”. See the links at the very bottom for additional background.

In order to distance itself — at least somewhat — from the decision-making process, the Gates Foundation creates all sorts of organisations such as AGRA, which we last covered some days ago. To say that some shell called “AGRA” manages African’s agriculture would simply sound better than saying that Bill Gates manages African’s agriculture (for the benefit of Gates-backed companies like Monsanto).

Techrights is troubled not just because this strategy is deceitful but also because Gates bought the media which could potentially expose the blunder and bring it to more people’s attention (instead, it spoon-feeds Gates’ PR). In today’s post we add to our record some of the latest articles on the subject, accumulated gradually since late October.

“It’s an Orwellian sort of language because Gates relates to BREAD in the intellectual monopolies sense.”The Gates Foundation has this programme called BREAD, which we covered here before. It’s an Orwellian sort of language because Gates relates to BREAD in the intellectual monopolies sense. This latest headline is stating this quite explicitly: “NSF, Gates Foundation policies on sharing data and intellectual property in agricultural basic research grant program (BREAD)”

Do intellectual monopolies belong here at all? Non-producing countries that rest on their laurels love to use intellectual monopolies in order to keep Africa in the dark ages and, with very limited success, hinder the Chinese revolution. China has gained a lot of leverage over the West in recent years and we can give some news on the subject by looking at yesterday’s/this week’s papers which say:

• China’s exchange reserves hit record level

  At issue is the imbalance in their financial relationship. China’s central bank said Tuesday that Beijing’s holdings of foreign cash and securities amount to $2.85 trillion – a jump of 20 percent over the year before – despite Chinese promises to try to balance its trade and investment relations with the United States and other countries.

• Chinese bank launches yuan service in New York

  A state-owned Chinese bank says its New York City branch has begun offering accounts denominated in China’s tightly controlled yuan in a new move to expand the currency’s global reach.

China too has begun exploiting Africa, but that’s another subject. We’ll cover this shortly when discussing the purpose of Chinese patents.

If there is a point which is important to get across here, always check what bodies that are called names like BREAD, AGRA, or GAVI actually do, who founded them, and who funds them. Therein lie many answers. Now that Gates is paying millions of dollars to All Africa (major news site), do not look at the corporate press for answers. Cowardice and self-censorship are part of the sponsorship.

Ground Report is known as another leading source and it published interesting commentary about two white people arguing over what’s good for Africa over at Rupert Murdoch’s platform. Yes, they are ignoring Africans and any decent reporter can immediately see this. As Gates Keepers put it, “Where were the Africans when Bill Gates and Matt Ridley were arguing?”

Here is a well thought-out piece from an African wondering where the Africans were in the Gates/Ridley debate and making some important points. Maybe Bill’s intern who wrote his piece was African.

Gates Keepers alleges that an intern must have composed Bill’s article in this Murdoch-hosted debate about Africa [1, 2]. Cherish this beautiful example where Africans get treated like a toddlers and white Westerners patronise the very same people whom they exploit, playing softball in Murdoch’s ‘press’ (one billionaire helping another, as the implicit rule goes). There is also the obligatory CNN propaganda, but it’s not as classic as the one over at Murdoch’s.

Here is more of Murdoch’s ‘press’: Gideon Rachman met Bill Gates and Gates Keepers claims that “Bill Gates tries to pay off Gideon Rachman just like any other journalist” (regarding another puff piece):

Gates Keepers laughed when Bill tried to treat a journalist to lunch. Doesn’t he know any better? Journalist pay for their own lunches. That way they cannot be bought for the price of a burger. Maybe the Gates Foundation funding of journalists is just lunch writ large.

Finally, Gideon Rachman’s trenchant observations on Bill’s style of discourse are brilliant. One gets the impression that the lunch gave Rachman heartburn.

The same person later wrote about the “last hurrah”, which some call “Bill Gates’ second empire” (mirrored in [1, 2]). No empire has managed to spread to so many continents and Rachman calls it internationalism (“globalisation” without the negative connotation). To quote:

Once inside the portals, the Gates Foundation feels like a cross between a United Nations agency and a high-tech start up. In true Silicon Valley style, nobody ever wears a tie and the staff is cheerily multinational. Yet rather than being computer geeks, the foundation’s people are more likely to be medics, or experts on seed technology – and to have last worked in government, or agricultural research, or a teaching hospital, rather than in the corporate world.

The promotional material and PowerPoint presentations shown to visitors have all the bright professionalism of a sales graph for a Microsoft product. But here the graphs will typically illustrate the foundation’s progress in reducing infant mortality around the world rather than success in shifting the latest version of Microsoft Office.

[...]

In that sense, the foundation is behaving like a business, looking for neglected niches in the market. But, perhaps above all, the Gates Foundation reflects the founder’s restless intellectual energy – and his determination to bring the optimistic vision, drive and flair for technology that created Microsoft into entirely new areas.

[...]

At a troubled time for the US and the western world, it is difficult to leave the Gates Foundation’s offices without feeling a little more positive. It exemplifies a very west-coast blend of optimism about the future, internationalism, and belief in technological progress.

Yet I left Seattle wondering whether the foundation also represents a last hurrah for a world that is now passing. In the old world, ideas, money and expertise flowed from the western world into the developing world. Over the next decades, as Bill Gates himself would happily acknowledge, much of the dynamism is likely to come from the other side of the Pacific Ocean.

The “last hurrah for a world that is now passing,” eh? Whose hurrah is it? We’ll close with this rhetorical question and a quote from China. █

“Gates has created a huge blood-buying operation that only cares about money, not about people.”

–AIDS organisation manager, December 2009

Related posts:

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

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