I have read a few articles over the years glorifying Bill Gates, and I recently learned that Netlfix has released a new documentary that more or less continues the practice. Hopefully, the over the top adulation will stop, as it is clear, at the very least, that Bill Gates is no hero. In fact, he is a powerful global menace who needs to be held accountable.
I love Dr. Vandana Shiva, and Dr. Shiva has called Bill Gates a billionaire dictator who is the Christopher Columbus of modern times. She adds that Bill Gates continues the destructive work of Monsanto by pushing chemicals, GMOs, and patents globally with a mission to impose genetically modified organisms, and digital dictatorships all over the world.
As per Dr. Vandana Shiva on Twitter, or X, or whatever it’s called:
#Gates became a Billionaire thru #Biopiracy & #PatentMonopolies
#Gates #Microsoft patented software others created. He is patenting seeds our farmers have evolved . He has plans for #forcefeeding patented #FakeFood. Patents being taken on mining our data.
Click here for an interview with Dr. Vandana Shiva.
Bill Gates is not just a lying, sleazy billionaire, he is also a direct threat to the survival of our species. One of the reasons that you will not hear the truth about Bill Gates is because the Gates Foundation has donated over $319 million to media outlets (mostly mainstream), to ensure that only fluff pieces are written about him and his nefarious dealings.
As per Project Censored: “MacLeod examined more than 30,000 individual grants from the the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and found it had donated “more than $319 million to fund news outlets, journalism centers and training programs, press associations, and specific media campaigns, raising questions about conflicts of interest and journalistic independence.”
Click here to learn more from Project Censored.
In addition, and if you are interested:
Tim Schwab of The Nation: “Gates has proved there is a far easier path to political power, one that allows unelected billionaires to shape public policy in ways that almost always generate favorable headlines: charity. The Nation found close to $250 million in charitable grants from the Gates Foundation to companies in which the foundation holds corporate stocks and bonds: Merck, Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline, Vodafone, Sanofi, Ericsson, LG, Medtronic, Teva, and numerous start-ups—with the grants directed at projects like developing new drugs and health monitoring systems and creating mobile banking services.
By Bill and Melinda Gates’s estimations, they have seen an 11 percent tax savings on their $36 billion in charitable donations through 2018, resulting in around $4 billion in avoided taxes. The foundation would not provide any documentation related to this number, and independent estimates from tax scholars like Ray Madoff, a law professor at Boston College, indicate that multibillionaires see tax savings of at least 40 percent—which, for Bill Gates, would amount to $14 billion—when you factor in the tax benefits that charity offers to the superrich: avoidance of capital gains taxes (normally 15 percent) and estate taxes (40 percent on everything over $11.58 million, which in Gates’s case is a lot).Madoff, like many tax experts, stresses that these billions of dollars in tax savings have to be seen as a public subsidy—money that otherwise would have gone to the US Treasury to help build bridges, do medical research, or close the funding gap at the IRS (which has resulted in fewer audits of billionaires). If Bill and Melinda Gates don’t pay their full freight in taxes, the public has to make up the difference or simply live in a world where governments do less and less (educating, and researching) and superrich philanthropists do more and more.
Naturally, Big Philanthropy has special interest groups pushing back on the creation of special rules that determines how a company that receives tax breaks spends its money. The Philanthropy Roundtable defends the wealthiest Americans’ “freedom to give,” describing itself as fighting the “increasing pressures from some public officials and advocacy groups to subject private philanthropies to more uniform standards and stricter government regulation.” The nonprofit group receives funding from influential right-wing billionaires, including hundreds of thousands of dollars from the private foundation of Charles Koch. And it gets substantial funding from the Gates Foundation: nine grants from 2005 to 2017, worth $2.5 million, mostly for general operating expenses. A spokesperson for the foundation says these donations are aimed at “mobilizing voices to advocate for public policies that further enable charitable giving. At a certain point, however, the Philanthropy Roundtable seems to primarily serve the private interests of billionaires like Gates and Koch who use charity to influence public policy, with limited oversight and substantial public subsidies.
It may seem like a radical proposition to challenge the ability or desire of multibillionaires to give away their fortunes, but such scrutiny has a historical precedent in mainstream politics. One hundred years ago, when oil baron John D. Rockefeller asked Congress to provide him with a charter to start a private foundation, his ambitions were soundly rejected as an anti-democratic power grab. As Theodore Roosevelt said at the time, “No amount of charities in spending such fortunes can compensate in any way for the misconduct in acquiring them.”
Click here to learn more about the awfulness of Bill Gates from Tim Schwab.
Click here for Tim Schwab’s book, The Bill Gates Problem, Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire.
Linsey McGoey is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex, and author of the book, No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy: “It’s been a quite unprecedented development, the amount that the Gates Foundation is gifting to corporations…. I find that flabbergasting, frankly. They’ve created one of the most problematic precedents in the history of foundation giving by essentially opening the door for corporations to see themselves as deserving charity claimants at a time when corporate profits are at an all-time high.”
Bill Gates has also called whistleblower Edward Snowden a criminal (like Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department official who released the Pentagon Papers, Snowden brought to light important information that deserved to be in the public domain, while doing no lasting harm to the national security of his country), and has had laws rewritten through the WTO so that MS could pay fewer taxes, while simultaneously being critical of Elizabeth Warren’s 6% tax on billionaires.
Lastly, Bill Gates is also lying to people when he says that refusing to eat meat will not really affect the climate crisis.
Really? As per Oxford University, the “single biggest way” for anyone to fight the climate crisis is to adopt a vegan diet!
