🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <bb0ait4kiu3g9fp74d0qgb4d7j17dnelb1@4ax.com>, Eric Salmassy
<eric3105@yahoo.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 11 Jun 2001 17:03:41 GMT, SMITH29 <smith29@home.com> wrote:
> 
> >Euell wrote:
> >> 
> >> Thanks for bringing this up again. We tend to forget. If Gates was anything
> >> more than a butt kisser re: the lawsuit, he could find a good use for money
> >> in depressed rural areas.
> >> 
> >> Boelke
> >xxx
> >The donations from the Gates family are none of your business what so
> >ever.
> >29;-)
> 
> Oh my God, I agree with you on something :-)
> 
> Seriously, the guy is giving billions of $ to charity and people have
> the nerve to criticize his choice of what charities he gives to?
> Amazing.

The charity list IS pretty geeky & mostly self-serving for Microsoft. The
arts are off his list; the poor are off his list; the environment is off
his list. Healthcare is off his list but he is heavily invested in the
health industry, which is very computer reliant. But is it our business if
he gives away only that which serves Microsoft rather than any theoretical
recipient of his false good will? Sure it's our business!  Gates WANTS it
to be our business, he just doesn't want us to see what a fraud he is
about it. 

When he was being dragged into court & the press started portraying him
like the power-mad Napoleon midget-geek he is, regarding himself above all
laws, his hired P-R people encouraged him to promote himself as a big
charity guy in order to temper his bad image. Fact is until then his
giving had been restricted to whatever his bean-counters said was
necessary for tax purposes. But after his P-R guys (& encouragement from
his wife) got him started giving money away, he gave away an awful lot
indeed. At the same time more & more press-releases were about his good
deeds. If the public hadn't had any interest in it he would've done it.
Remember, he used to just hide out in his computerized mansion holding a
remote control in his hand living the life of the Jetsons, except a
hermit. Then he got married & wanted to appear in public more, at
big-cheeze events, & getting sucked-up to as a charity guy was more fun
than getting spit on as a greedy power hungry dufus.

But alas for him people started realizing that putting more computers in
school rooms that needed books and roofs and better teacher salaries and
magnet programs rather than a bunch of computers -- that giving 'em what
HE decided they needed instead of what they actually needed was NEVER
charity. It was an attempt to squeeze Macintosh out of the only area they
were successfully dominating; Apple COrp had been rewiring schools &
providing them with computers from the beginning, without tooting their
own horn about it. It wasn't one-billion dollars for charity, it was
one-billion dollars to fight Apple Macintosh on its own territory. For
Gates it was two birds with one stone: change your public image while
doing nothing more than broadening Microsoft's monopoly. 

Further Gates has redefined what "charity" means. He has called it
"charity" to fund six billion dollars worth of technicalogical research.
In the past these were called "grants." And grants are good, especially
for the big & little companies that get them. But it's not charity like
Gates pretends.

When called to the mat on this, he turned to his PR people again. "You've
got to help the poor and sick" they told him. "Grants to big businesses
and replacing Macintoshes with PCs isn't cutting it." So he gave a
shitload of money to Botswana to fight the AIDS epidemic.  But always look
closely at what Gates does -- even the token selfless act isn't selfless.
This was actually a deal with Merck Corporation. Actual good WILL be done
for a change & if this was Gates' pattern instead of his exception, he'd
be a lot less creepy. But the fact is he's helping another gigantic
industry out of THEIR image problem (Merck remains in deep shit attempting
to monopolize medications poor countries can't afford). The money all goes
to Merck, not Botswana, though it is targetted for use in Africa. Nor is
it in reality "tens of millions" of dollars as so unspecifically reported,
though that would be the retail value of the drugs Africa will receive, &
that IS something, just not as much as the PR people make of it. And note
that the original annoucement for this Gates/Merck "good deed" was made in
Durban, during court cases in South Africa where Merck was trying to put
the kabosh on a Durban pharmaceutical company making affordable generic
brands of stuff Merck wanted to make illegal except if they make it & sell
it dear. Gates essentially was assisting in preserving yet another
monopoly.

But why exactly would Gates scratch the back of another monopolizing
techno-industry not his own? Especially since otherwise he has never cared
one whit about public health issues. Turns out Gates is heavily invested
in the Merck corporation. Giving them ten million & calling it a hundred
million is giving money to himself. If he can help Merck shut down generic
drug manufacturers, he spreads his own power base of monopoly. Just last
month Microsoft selected Merck CEO Ray Gilmartin to the Microsoft board of
directors. The Seattle newspapers invariably soft-shoe these anti-trust
issues because Gates is locally too powerful to buck. Gilmartin was
hand-selected by Gates, whose press-release on Gilmartin quotes Gates
admitting Gilmartin was chosen because of his successful business
strategies at Merck (as an afterthought, Gates added "and Merck helps
peoples' health world wide"). When Gilmartin came onto the Board of
Directors, Microsoft shares leapt in value by 68 cents a share, whereas
Merck shares dropped 46 cents. Gates in essence BOUGHT one of the world's
leading monopolists by shifting a few million dollars from his left pocket
to his right pocket & calling it health care for Botswana. In exchange,
Merck is assisting Microsoft in setting up Microsoft computer systems in
those third world countries Merck already sucks money out of for their
AIDs drugs. Botswana will get a little bit of help out of these
shinanigans, but not a tenth what they would've gotten if the drugs had
been made available freely through a non-profit health organization
instead of through a Merck/Microsoft beuracracy whose transparent agenda
is to preserve Merck's monopoly & establish Microsoft's monopoly in
Africa.

As for the rest of Gates' "charities" one doesn't even have to look
closely to see what frauds it all is -- unless one buys into the idea that
filling schools up with soon-to-be-outdated technological toys is the same
as helping to improve our weakening school systems. David Korten has
written about corporate systems of evading social responsibility while
seeming to be charitable, & used Gates as a primary example.
Unfortunately, when he was last lecturing in Seattle, the WTO riots
displaced any interest in Korten.

I think from the above it is clear I'm no Gates fan. His PR flacks place
his charitable giving in the billions of dollars range; independent
sources place actual charities (when technolgoical grants are discounted)
report the authentic amount would be anywhere from well under $300 million
to as high as $800 million. Other sources would have less than $3 million
out-of-pocket from Gates to charities in a typical year -- this is loose
change for a billionaire -- but that  counts only the actual cash. The
higher amounts suggested include the retail cash value of all the
computers & software Gates gives to schools to shut down Macintosh --
anyone who thinks a billion dollars worth of software is the same as a
billion dollars needs some quick lessons how how much it really costs to
copy some software without paying anything at all for it. Sidney Schumann
at Reporter-News.com compared Gate's charitible giving, as percentage of
income, to the average American's charitible giving, & the majority of
Americans are way ahead of him. He found Gates' offerings equivalent to "a
few wadded up dollars dropped on a church plate." But the majority don't
have a big PR office making every dime look like millions. 

But the racist "not for poor WHITE kids" in the header is mistaken. Among
the Gateses' charitable programs is one that is provides college grants to
gifted poor students pursuing electronic, computer, business, &
pharmaceutical degrees (no arts degree students need apply). The measure
is need & techno-obsession, not race, & in all likelihood most of this
grant money will go to white students. Gates is a greedy pig pretending to
help the world, but not noticeably racist, let alone "reverse-racist" as
actual racists would have it.

-paghat the ratgirl