Corrente

If you have "no place to go," come here!

How Bill and Melinda Gates use philanthropy to pump corporate profits

DCblogger's picture
Submitted by DCblogger on Sat, 07/07/2012 - 3:48pm
Departments: 
Department of Bust Out Profit Models and Vampiric Capitalism
Thread: 
Tapeworm Economy

Education Week

Philanthropy wonk Lucy Bernholz defines the buzzword leverage as "the idea that you can use a little money to access a lot of money." ...

...And in its U.S. education reform charity work, the Gates Foundation has increasingly shifted its funding to promote market domination by its British corporate education services partner, Pearson Education.

The Gates Foundation, and Gates personally, also own stock and reap profits from many of these same partner corporations. In addition, the Foundation owns a profit-generating portfolio of stocks which would seem to work against the Foundation's declared missions, such as the Latin American Coca-Cola FEMSA distributorship and five multinational oil giants operating in Nigeria. These corporate investments, now moved to a blind trust whose trustees are Bill and Melinda Gates, are collaterally supported by the Foundation's tax-free lobbying and advocacy activities.

Read the whole thing. Bill Gates is a truly bad actor.

0
No votes yet

Comments

Submitted by ubetchaiam on

"Bill Gates is a truly bad actor."; as someone who grew up in the computer industry, MS has ALWAYS been predatory and callous and Gates set the tone long before Ballmer was pushed out front.

And the crap about him not leaving anything to his heirs; roflmao.

lambert's picture
Submitted by lambert on

I don't know how to recapture the public space on this, I truly don't.

Maybe a locally based "home rule" "will teach for food" movement by university adjuncts assuming the goal is actual education instead of feeding them into the maw of the credentialing (flip side debt) system.

NWLuna's picture
Submitted by NWLuna on

Earlier this year, Melinda Gates announced that she intends to put birth control back on the international agenda by making it her signature issue and significantly boosting the foundation's investment. On Wednesday, the Gates Foundation and the British government will convene a summit of world leaders in London with the goal of raising $4 billion to make contraceptives available to an additional 120 million women in the poorest countries.

The move puts the Gates Foundation on a collision course with the Catholic Church and elements of the religious right. A Catholic herself, Melinda Gates is attempting to defuse the controversy by framing her crusade in terms of health and individual choice. In her travels around the world, she has said, reliable supplies of contraceptives are among the things poor women ask for most.

"We're not talking about abortion. We're not talking about population control," Melinda Gates said in the Berlin TEDxChange talk where she kicked off her initiative in April. "What I'm talking about is giving women the power to save their lives, to save their children's lives and to give their families the best possible future."

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/text/20...