No Such Thing As A Free Gift – The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy (Linsey McGoey)

No Such Thing As A Free Gift

An extremely important & timely exposé. Bill Gates is an absolute fucking monster! Beyond his repulsive corporate aggression, brand-bloat, ‘compulsory’-software imposition/unilateral product bondage & horrible diversity-quelling market monopolizing mania of Micro Soft miasma, a much more sick, sinister & damaging agenda is at foot. Pretty much the original Technogarch, with absurdly odious volumes of wealth that have only just been usurped by the equally repellent Zuckerberg , Gates enjoys ‘tampering’ with the majority world & reeving new business ‘opportunities’ & testing laboratories under the sanitized guise of charity & philanthropy. His corporation/charity (ha!) & movement have become so powerful, PR-perfected & either embedded or directly-controlling of the press, narrative, regulation, administration & coverage of this philanthrocapitalism malpractice that it basically just self-defines & operates with very little scrutiny or documentation beyond its own carefully clipped presentation of events & realities. Gates is actually extraordinarily dangerous & harmful. He has exponential wealth, immense political favouritism & influence, but one of his core beliefs is that technology can solve anything. Any of the increasingly urgent & insane crisis that are resulting from our ineffably virulent globalized abuse-structure are to be ‘off-set’ by a technological panacea…Geo Engineering, Genetic Modification or other frighteningly far-fetched sci-fi measures that have not been fully devised but will be ready (we are told) in time to save humanity from the holocaust the system is hurriedly unfurling (so let’s carry on self-immolating! Step-it-up even). The roots are never addressed, the problem is neglected & an artificial solution or perhaps ‘artificial support system’ is imagined/conjured up in a laboratory/test facility/silicon-valley-corporate-complex to allow the madness to continue & expand. A good example of how badly captured/muzzled the media is of Gates would be the recent furore over major corporate tax avoidance & the pathetically exiguous tax contributions from Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon etc…have you heard Microsoft being mentioned even once? & there’s the point underscored! In fact, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation even fund …. THE GUARDIAN NEWSPAPER!!! This is corporate capture at its most insidious & why Gates so rarely receives any criticism or negative press.

Enter Linsey McGoey to lift-the-lid on this corporate basket-case. First off a few statements about this book – it’s not solely about Gates but about philanthrocapitalism as a phenomenon with other major villains examined. It’s also very dry, but undoubtedly contains some extremely important information & research that really needs further dissemination. McGoey is also clearly very concerned about repercussions & writes the book with huge restraint (not an easy task when you are dealing with something as nasty & extravagant as this). Here’s one such example of the Gates strategy – in 2013 TGF was the single largest donor to the UN health agency (more than the US government even) – “According to its charter, the WHO is meant to be accountable to member governments. The Gates Foundation, on the other hand, is accountable to no one other than its three trustees: Bill, Melinda and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffet. Many civil society organizations fear the WHO’s independence is compromised when a significant portion of its budget comes from a private philanthropic organization with the power to stipulate exactly where and how the UN institution spends its money”. By entering or subsidizing institutions, preferably with as little detection as possible, these bodies can be used, like a mask or disguise to enact or administer the Gates agenda like a perfect proxy. Gates appalling wealth, labyrinthine political networks, embedded agents/interest-enablers & massively misinforming & laboured innocuousness in the media & public psyche, along with decades of gestation & direct habitat-shaping have created an extremely byzantine calamity. The roll is also reversed & the Gates foundation is used as a detergent, disguise & host/trojan horse for conglomerates such as Monsanto to surreptitiously contaminate with GM agriculture under the farce of poverty reduction & self-sufficiency (“Today, with the Gates Foundation support, Monsanto is bringing business to Africa”). Furthermore (& I am really just skimming the surface here) TGF has a $327m stake in British Petroleum, a $5.5m stake in Royal Dutch Shell & has obstinately resisted implorations to divest from such hideous corporate pollution-genocide monoliths despite a multitude of evidence & accounts that uncovers them funding death-squads that abduct, torture, murder & rape on their behalf (just one of the litany of regional horrors concomitant to their global exploitation & extraction).

In one chapter titled “God’s Work” (a direct quote from Gates whilst referencing his efforts to vaccinate against polio in Pakistan “the woman that are doing god’s work”), the extremely disturbing & controversial ‘vaccination’ sector is detailed. It’s a very unpleasant chapter, replete with phrasing such as Adverse Events Following Immunization (AEFI), “mission-related investing”, Universal Immunization Programme (UIP) etc. Populations & communities with the smallest amount of political representation are being targeted & tested on (sometimes without even their consent) in the developing world for American Markets. – “In 1990, only a small proportion of experimental clinical trials testing new drugs with the American market in mind were conducted outside the US. Today, an estimated 40 per cent of clinical trials take place outside of Western Europe and the US. This number is a ‘very conservative’ projection; estimates are hard to verify as US regulators have little knowledge of how many experiments take place before a drug application is submitted.”

Not everything the GF does is bad. But like any good hoax or plausible fraud, it has to be convincing, & so actions or areas of genuine good work are an inevitable feature of the deception & will of course receive the most attention, prominence, fanfare, reference & reiteration in an utterly prostrated media environment.

This sprawling bureaucratic mechanism & it’s interaction with governments is complex, bizarre, frightening & perverse. Much like a disease that has advanced so far that it starts to deform the host/limb or produce visible growths. It’s not simply a colossal corporate pathogen but a long since conquered landscape that has been reshaped, tailored & optimized to smooth & solicit the reigning carcinogens exhaustless expanse, avarice & acquirement. Falsehood, fraud, concealment & the feigning of good intentions is still essential in an increasingly farcical ‘democracy/rule of law’ ruse & illusion-pageant, & McGoeys precious book discloses the major machinations & ethical distortions at the heart of this diabolical curse.

As the author herself writes – “The third major concern is that many philanthropists, both today and in the past, earned their fortunes through business strategies that  greatly exacerbate the same social and economic inequalities that philanthropists purport to remedy. The great industrialists of the nineteenth and early twentieth century were dubbed robber barons due to the widespread condemnation of their predatory business tactics. Today, some of the world’s most celebrated philanthropists, from Gates to George Soros, earned billions through business tactics that have compounded financial instability, eroded labour protections, and entrenched global economic inequalities.”

 A vital & brilliant exposé of white-collar malevolence & technogarch tyranny that’s completely out of control.

Note: expressions in ‘   ‘ are highlighted terms whilst text in “  “ is verbatim extracts from the book itself.

Author: Linsey McGoey

Publisher: Verso Books (2015)

Here is further excellent & extremely damning reportage on the horrific malpractice of The Gates Foundation that were printed in a seismic series of articles published in The Guardian last year under the Keep It In The Ground campaign (it’s well worth reading everything in the series, world-class reporting) –

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/26/dust-tb-hiv-ugly-face-mining-south-africa

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/26/residents-blame-durban-oil-refineries-for-health-problems

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/22/colombian-takes-bp-to-court-in-uk-alleged-complicity-kidnap-and-torture

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/24/colombia-oilo-wars–kidnapped-chained-and-blindfolded-i-cant-go-bac-gilberto-torres