If you’re looking for an in-depth informative read this morning you could do little better than not to bother with the Sundays and read yesterday’s LA Times investigative article on Bill Gates’ essentially sham philanthropy.
It lays out in devastatingly thorough terms the way the Gates’ Foundation charitable giving is funded by billions invested in the very drug companies and energy industries whose effects in Africa his much-publicised charity spends so much on visibly treating.
The reporters give chapter and verse on Gates Foundation investments in companies like BP and Royal Dutch Shell, happily polluting away virtually unrestricted in Nigeria, and drug manufacturer Abbott, whose lobbying of industry-friendly intellectual property rights law has priced many AIDS drugs out of the reach of the very sufferers the Foundation aspires to help.
Dark cloud over good works of Gates Foundation
By Charles Piller, Edmund Sanders and Robyn Dixon, Times Staff Writers
January 7, 2007
Ebocha, Nigeria ? JUSTICE Eta, 14 months old, held out his tiny thumb..
An ink spot certified that he had been immunized against polio and measles, thanks to a vaccination drive supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
But polio is not the only threat Justice faces. Almost since birth, he has had respiratory trouble. His neighbors call it “the cough.” People blame fumes and soot spewing from flames that tower 300 feet into the air over a nearby oil plant. It is owned by the Italian petroleum giant Eni, whose investors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Justice squirmed in his mother’s arms. His face was beaded with sweat caused either by illness or by heat from the flames that illuminate Ebocha day and night. Ebocha means “city of lights.”
The makeshift clinic at a church where Justice Eta was vaccinated and the flares spewing over Ebocha represent a head-on conflict for the Gates Foundation. In a contradiction between its grants and its endowment holdings, a Times investigation has found, the foundation reaps vast financial gains every year from investments that contravene its good works.
In Ebocha, where Justice lives, Dr. Elekwachi Okey, a local physician, says hundreds of flares at oil plants in the Niger Delta have caused an epidemic of bronchitis in adults, and asthma and blurred vision in children. No definitive studies have documented the health effects, but many of the 250 toxic chemicals in the fumes and soot have long been linked to respiratory disease and cancer.
“We’re all smokers here,” Okey said, “but not with cigarettes.”
The oil plants in the region surrounding Ebocha find it cheaper to burn nearly 1 billion cubic feet of gas each day and contribute to global warming than to sell it. They deny the flaring causes sickness. Under pressure from activists, however, Nigeria’s high court set a deadline to end flaring by May 2007. The gases would be injected back underground, or trucked and piped out for sale. But authorities expect the flares to burn for years beyond the deadline.
The Gates Foundation has poured $218 million into polio and measles immunization and research worldwide, including in the Niger Delta. At the same time that the foundation is funding inoculations to protect health, The Times found, it has invested $423 million in Eni, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and Total of France ? the companies responsible for most of the flares blanketing the delta with pollution, beyond anything permitted in the United States or Europe.
Gates’ charitable vehicles own so much stock in these companies that by socially responsible proxy voting in shareholders meetings the Foundation could have a significant effect on companies’ policies – if they chose to – which would tackle some of the health issues they champion at source. But they don’t choose to, because that would not be good for the markets or for Microsoft.
It’s fashionable these days, (and I’m as guilty as the next blogger) to decry the major papers as festering backwaters of old media, but every now and then there are still twitches of life and good reporting gets a prominent position.
That despite its own troubles balancing the conflicting demands of capital and news reporting, the LA Times is willing to take on Gates and Microsoft, the oil industry giants and the pharmaceuticals to show the public exactly what their respected household names are doing to the world has to be a good thing.
Read more: Media, Politics, Development, Charities, Investment Social Responsibility, Bill Gates, Microsoft