Summary: A connection is suggested between the artificial scarcity of patents and one's ambition to make poor populations more scarce

WE HAVE written extensively about the Gates Foundation's investment in patents, especially those that offer leverage over the developing nations. Keith Robertson-Turner posted a thought-provoking message some days ago and it seems reasonable to make a copy here.

Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy Subject: Re: Evil Bill Gates secures billions for Monsanto's agri-patents and eugenics Date: Thu, 05 Aug 2010 05:16:47 +0100



[Subject corrected]

Verily I say unto thee, that Tattoo Vampire spake thusly: > Hadron wrote: > >> "Thirty-eight US billionaires have pledged at least 50% of their >> wealth to charity through a campaign started by investor Warren >> Buffett and Microsoft founder Bill Gates." >> >> What an evil bastard.

Yes, he is.

>> I bet Gates saved, ooo, hundreds of dollars by giving these >> billions and millions away.

[quote] From 1994 to 2006, Bill and Melinda gave the foundation more than $26 billion. Those donations resulted in a tax savings of less than 8.3 percent of the contributions they made over that time. [/quote]

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/Pages/frequently-asked-questions-foundation.aspx

Assuming "less than 8.3" means 8.25xxx, I'll be generous and round the figure down to 8.2%.

( 8.2 / 100 ) * 26,000,000,000 = 2,132,000,000 or ~2.1 Billion USD.

That was up to 2006.

Also note the wording carefully: "Those donations resulted in a tax savings". IOW there's no explicit correlation between the true source of these "donations" and the accounts benefiting from the tax break. "We donated" can mean anything from "our private bank accounts" to "shell accounts" or even "money laundered though business accounts". The Gates Foundation is well known for it's unethical investments.

[quote] Just How British Is BP? By JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF

In a story in The Times on Sunday, our colleague Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote of growing displeasure in Britain over the use of the name “British Petroleum†by top federal officials in the United States in referring to the party responsible for the gulf spill. The company officially changed its name to BP several years ago, and to some on the other side of the pond, invoking the old name is a backhanded slap at Britain and even a threat to the “special relationship†our two nations share.

With tens of thousands of barrels of oil still gushing into the gulf every day, quibbling over a name might seem petty. Nevertheless, it does seem fair to note that BP is not exactly a foreign corporation running roughshod over American soil. As Fraser Nelson, a columnist for The Spectator, pointed out late last week, 39 percent of the company is owned by American shareholders and six Americans – half the total – sit on its board of directors.

...

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is another a major investor, with nearly 43 million shares. [/quote]

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/just-how-british-is-bp/

>> It'll be interesting to see how nutcases like Roy, Homo and their >> shill Creepy present this to the COLA minions.

I hope you're sufficiently "interested" now.

> Hadron, it's possible for someone to be a humanitarian but still > engage in questionable business practices.

Or even be a "humanitarian" *in order to* engage in questionable business practices. Like this, for example:

[quote] Ending Africa's Hunger? Gates Foundation & Monsanto

These are valuable efforts, but one might pause to ask why the need for such philanthropic intervention arose in the first place. The faltering quality of African agricultural research institutions, and the decline in government spending on agriculture, is a result of the budget austerity imposed by international financial institutions, such as the World Bank, in the 1980s and '90s. As Filipino scholar-activist Walden Bello has noted, Africa exported 1.3 million tons of food a year in the 1960s, but after being subject to international development loans and free-market fundamentalism, today it imports nearly 25 percent of its food. In a 2008 report, the Bank's internal evaluations group lambasted the policies that led to this situation. What the Gates Foundation is doing is using its private money to fund activities that once were in the public domain and were, albeit imperfectly, under democratic control.

The preference for private sector contributions to agriculture shapes the Gates Foundation's funding priorities. In a number of grants, for instance, one corporation appears repeatedly--Monsanto. To some extent, this simply reflects Monsanto's domination of industrial agricultural research. There are, however, notable synergies between Gates and Monsanto: both are corporate titans that have made millions through technology, in particular through the aggressive defense of proprietary intellectual property. Both organizations are suffused by a culture of expertise, and there's some overlap between them. Robert Horsch, a former senior vice president at Monsanto, is, for instance, now interim director of Gates's agricultural development program and head of the science and technology team. Travis English and Paige Miller, researchers with the Seattle-based Community Alliance for Global Justice, have uncovered some striking trends in Gates Foundation funding. By following the money, English told us that "AGRA used funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to write twenty-three grants for projects in Kenya. Twelve of those recipients are involved in research in genetically modified agriculture, development or advocacy. About 79 percent of funding in Kenya involves biotech in one way or another." And, English says, "so far, we have found over $100 million in grants to organizations connected to Monsanto."

This isn't surprising in light of the fact that Monsanto and Gates both embrace a model of agriculture that sees farmers suffering a deficit of knowledge--in which seeds, like little tiny beads of software, can be programmed to transmit that knowledge for commercial purposes. This assumes that Green Revolution technologies--including those that substitute for farmers' knowledge--are not only desirable but neutral. Knowledge is never neutral, however: it inevitably carries and influences relations of power. [/quote]

http://current.com/news/91070994_ending-africas-hunger-gates-foundation-monsanto.htm

Here's a more detailed analysis:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7529

Bill Gates advocating eugenics (elitism through genocide):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WQtRI7A064

AFAICT the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is nothing but a corporatist front for Big Pharma, agri-patents, eugenics, and unethical businesses' tax breaks and money laundering.

-- K. http://slated.org

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