Editor's Commentary:
This is a very long piece. It's much longer than what is usually found on Internet political and social commentary sites. But it is well worth the effort and your time.
It's been said - I've said it myself - that Bill Gates deserves credit for spreading around his wealth. He doesn't have to give away even a nickel of it. He is obscenely wealthy, but his public persona these days is as a generous man trying to return a very large chunk of money to society, especially to those who have the least or are most in need.
In an earlier article published here, I noted that Gates is
"... someone who was
coincidentally in the right place at the right time, with the right insider
influence, and the right lack of moral rectitude that allowed him to screw over
a friend. Gates invented nothing; he created nothing; he only managed to figure
out how to parlay the work and talent of others into a huge pile of money for
himself.
Gates won
what his (almost) equally rich friend Warren Buffet calls “the ovarian
lottery”. Buffet acknowledges that there is nothing special about himself or
any other billionaire that isn’t clearly explained by the luck of birth.
... that’s not to argue that some wealthy people have not contributed enormously to
society. But we have apparently accepted the lie that it is only by giving these
huge rewards that we can get these ‘talented’ people to put out for us."
But not so fast. Is Gates really the benevolent soul he appears to be? The evidence is pretty clear, and very well enunciated in this article, that it is mostly smoke and mirrors. And some of it is downright vicious and harmful.
Once a predatory capitalist, always a predatory capitalist.
- prh, Editor
Axis of Logic
“You're trying to find the places where
the money will have the most leverage, how you can save the most lives for the
dollar, so to speak,” Pelley remarked. “Right. And
transform the societies,” Gates replied.[1]
In 2009 the self-designated “Good Club” – a
gathering of the world’s wealthiest people whose collective net worth then
totaled some $125 billion – met behind closed doors in New York City to discuss
a coordinated response to threats posed by the global financial crisis. Led by
Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and David Rockefeller, the group resolved to find
new ways of addressing sources of discontent in the developing world, in
particular “overpopulation” and infectious diseases.[2] The billionaires in
attendance committed to massive spending in areas of interest to themselves,
heedless of the priorities of national governments and existing aid
organizations.[3]
Details of the secret summit were leaked to the
press and hailed as a turning point for Big Philanthropy. Traditional
bureaucratic foundations like Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie were said to be
giving way to “philanthrocapitalism,” a muscular new approach to charity in
which the presumed entrepreneurial skills of billionaires would be applied
directly to the world’s most pressing challenges:
Today’s philanthrocapitalists see a
world full of big problems that they, and perhaps only they, can and must put
right. … Their philanthropy is “strategic,” “market conscious,” “impact
oriented,” “knowledge based,” often “high engagement,” and always driven by the
goal of maximizing the “leverage” of the donor’s money. …
[P]hilanthrocapitalists are increasingly trying to find ways of harnessing the
profit motive to achieve social good.[4]
Wielding “huge power that could reshape nations
according to their will,”[5]
billionaire donors would now openly embrace not only the market-based theory,
but also the practices and organizational norms, of corporate capitalism. Yet
the overall thrust of their charitable interventions would remain consistent
with longstanding traditions of Big Philanthropy, as discussed below:
I.
The World’s Largest Private Foundation
“A
new form of multilateral organization”
The most prominent of the philanthrocapitalists is
Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft Corp. and as of this writing the richest
man in the world. (Despite the carefully cultivated impression that Gates is
“giving away” his fortune to charity, his estimated net worth has increased
every year since 2009 and now amounts to $72 billion.[6]) Gates owes his fortune
not to making technological contributions but to acquiring and enforcing a
fabulously lucrative monopoly in computer operating systems:
Microsoft’s greatest strength has always been its monopoly
position in the PC chain. Its exclusionary licensing agreement with PC
manufacturers mandated a payment for an MS-DOS license whether or not a
Microsoft operating system was used. … By the time the company settled with the
Justice Department in 1994 over this illegal arrangement, Microsoft had
garnered a dominant market share of all operating systems sold.[7]
Microsoft employs the standard repertoire of
business strategies in defense of its monopoly power – preferential pricing,
lawsuits, acquisitions of competitors, lobbying for patent protection – but
relies ultimately, like other US-based monopolies, on the dominant position of
the US worldwide. As former US Secretary of Defense William Cohen observed in
1999, “the prosperity that companies like Microsoft now enjoy could not occur
without having the strong military that we have.”[8]
Gates remains chairman of Microsoft but now devotes
the bulk of his time to running The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF),
the largest private foundation in the world and easily the most powerful.
With an endowment of $38 billion, BMGF dwarfs once-dominant players such as
Ford ($10 billion), Rockefeller ($3 billion), and Carnegie ($2.7 billion).[9] These elite charitable
funds are attractive to the super-rich not only as alternative channels of
influencing policy, but also as a legal means of tax avoidance. Under US law,
investments in charitable foundations are tax-free; moreover, investors are not
required to sell their stock positions and may continue to vote their shares without
restriction.[10] By
sheltering foundations, the US Treasury effectively co-finances the activities
of BMGF and its investors, supplying a substantial part of the “leverage”
lauded above.
Even in a field dominated by the world’s richest,
the Gates Foundation has acquired a reputation for exceptional high-handedness.
It is “driven by the interests and passions of the Gates family,” evasive about
its financials, and accountable to no one except its founder, who “shapes and
approves foundation strategies, advocates for the foundation’s issues, and sets
the organization’s overall direction.”[11]
Gates’ approach to charity is presumably rooted in
his attitude toward democracy:
The closer you get to [Government] and see how the sausage
is made, the more you go, oh my God! These guys don’t even actually know the
budget. … The idea that all these people are going to vote and have an opinion
about subjects that are increasingly complex – where what seems, you might
think … the easy answer [is] not the real answer. It’s a very interesting
problem. Do democracies faced with these current problems do these things well?[12]
The Gates charitable empire is vast and
growing. Within the US, BMGF focuses primarily on “education reform,” providing
support for efforts to privatize public schools and subordinate teachers’
unions. Its much larger international divisions target the developing world and
are geared toward infectious diseases, agricultural policy, reproductive
health, and population control. In 2009 alone, BMGF spent more than $1.8
billion on global health projects.[13]
The Gates Foundation exercises power not only via
its own spending, but more broadly through an elaborate network of “partner
organizations” including non-profits, government agencies, and private corporations.
As the third largest donor to the UN's World Health Organization (WHO), it is a
dominant player in the formation of global health policy.[14] It orchestrates vast
elaborate public-private partnerships – charitable salmagundis that tend to
blur distinctions between states, which are at least theoretically accountable
to citizens, and profit-seeking businesses that are accountable only to their
shareholders. For example, a 2012 initiative aimed at combatting neglected
tropical diseases listed among its affiliates USAID, the World Bank, the
governments of Brazil, Bangladesh, UAE et al., and a consortium of 13 drug
firms comprising the most notorious powers in Big Pharma, including Merck,
GlaxoSmithKline, and Pfizer.[15]
BMGF is the prime mover behind prominent
“multi-stakeholder initiatives” such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS,
Tuberculosis and Malaria, and the GAVI Alliance (a “public-private partnership”
between the World Health Organization and the vaccine industry). Such
arrangements allow BMGF to leverage its stake in allied enterprises, much as
private businesses enhance power and profits through strategic investment
schemes. The Foundation also intervenes directly in the agendas and activities
of national governments, ranging from its financing of the development of
municipal infrastructure in Uganda,[16] to its
recently announced collaboration with the Indian Ministry of Science to
“Reinvent the Toilet.”[17] At the
same time the Foundation supports NGOs that lobby governments to increase
spending on the initiatives it sponsors.[18]
The Gates operation resembles nothing so much as a
massive, vertically integrated multinational corporation (MNC), controlling
every step in a supply chain that reaches from its Seattle-based boardroom,
through various stages of procurement, production, and distribution, to
millions of nameless, impoverished “end-users” in the villages of Africa and
South Asia. Emulating his own strategies for cornering the software market,
Gates has created a virtual monopoly in the field of public health. In the
words of one NGO official, “[y]ou can’t cough, scratch your head or sneeze in
health without coming to the Gates Foundation.”[19] The Foundation's global influence is now so great
that former CEO Jeff Raikes was obliged to declare: “We are not replacing the
UN. But some people would say we’re a new form of multilateral organization.”[20]
II.
Foundations and Imperialism
When those who have aggressively established and
maintained monopolies in order to accumulate vast capital turn to charitable
activities, we need not assume their motives are humanitarian.[21] Indeed, on occasion
these ‘philanthropists’ define their aims more bluntly as making the world safe
for their kind. In a letter published on the Foundation's website, Bill Gates
invokes “the rich world's enlightened self-interest” and warns that “[i]f
societies can’t provide for people’s basic health, if they can’t feed and
educate people, then their populations and problems will grow and the world
will be a less stable place.”[22]
The pattern of such ‘philanthropic’ activities was
set in the US about a century ago, when industrial barons such as Rockefeller
and Carnegie set up the foundations that bear their names, to be followed in
1936 by Ford. As Joan Roelofs has argued,[23] during
the past century large-scale private philanthropy has played a critical
worldwide role in ensuring the hegemony of neoliberal institutions while
reinforcing the ideology of the Western ruling class. Interlocking networks of
foundations, foundation-sponsored NGOs, and US government institutions like the
National Endowment for Democracy (NED) – notorious as a “pass-through” for CIA
funds – work hand-in-hand with imperialism, subverting people-friendly states
and social movements by co-opting institutions deemed helpful to US global
strategy. In extreme but not infrequent cases, foundations have actively
collaborated in regime change ops managed by US intelligence.[24]
The role of Big Philanthropy, however, is broader.
Even seemingly benign endeavors by foundations, such as the fight against
infectious diseases, can best be understood when located in their specific
historical and social contexts. Recall that schools of tropical medicine were
established in and the US in the late 19th Century with the explicit goal of increasing
the productivity of colonized laborers while insuring the safety of their white
overseers. As a journalist wrote in 1907:
Disease still decimates native populations and sends men
home from the tropics prematurely old and broken down. Until the white man has
the key to the problem, this blot must remain. To bring large tracts of the
globe under the white man's rule has a grandiloquent ring; but unless we have
the means of improving the conditions of the inhabitants, it is scarcely more
than an empty boast.[25]
Precisely this reasoning underlay the formation of
the Rockefeller Foundation, which was incorporated in 1913 with the initial
goal of eradicating hookworm, malaria, and yellow fever.[26] In the colonized world
public health measures encouraged by Rockefeller’s International Health
Commission yielded increases in profit extraction, as each worker could now be
paid less per unit of work, “but with increased strength was able to work
harder and longer and received more money in his pay envelope.”[27] In addition to enhanced
labour efficiency – which was not necessarily a critical challenge to capital
in regions where vast pools of underemployed labour were available for
exploitation – Rockefeller’s research programs promised greater scope for
future US military adventures in the Global South, where occupying armies had
often been hamstrung by tropical diseases.[28]
As Rockefeller expanded its international health
programs in concert with US agencies and other organizations, additional
advantages to the imperial core were realized. Modern medicine advertised
the benefits of capitalism to “backward” people, undermining their resistance
to domination by imperialist powers while creating a native professional class
increasingly receptive to neocolonialism and dependent on foreign largesse.
Rockefeller's president observed in 1916: “[F]or purposes of placating
primitive and suspicious peoples medicines have some advantages over machine
guns.”[29]
In the aftermath of World War II, public health
philanthropy became closely aligned with US foreign policy as neocolonialism
embraced the rhetoric, if not always the substance, of “development.”
Foundations collaborated with the US Agency for International Development
(USAID) in support of interventions aimed at increasing production of raw
materials while creating new markets for Western manufactured goods. A section
of the US ruling class, represented most prominently by Secretary of State
George Marshall, argued that “increases in the productivity of tropical labor
would require investments in social and economic infrastructure including
greater investments in public health.”[30]
Meanwhile, the seminal Gaither Report, commissioned
in 1949 by the Ford Foundation, had charged Big Philanthropy with advancing
“human welfare” in order to resist the “tide of Communism … in Asia and
Europe.”[31] By
1956, a report to the US president by the International Development
Administration Board openly framed public health assistance as a tactic in aid
of Western military aggression in Indochina:
[A]reas rendered inaccessible at night by Viet Minh
activity, during the day welcomed DDT-residual spray teams combating malaria. …
In the Philippines, similar programs make possible colonization of many
previously uninhabited areas, and contribute greatly to the conversion of Huk
terrorists to peaceful landowners.[32]
For a time, therefore, Western philanthropy worked
to shape public health systems in poor countries, sometimes condescending to
relinquish control of infrastructure and trained personnel to national health
ministries.[33]
Although actual investment in Third World healthcare was meager by comparison
with the extravagant promises of Cold War rhetoric, some response to health
crises in poor countries was deemed necessary in the context of the postwar
struggle for “hearts and minds.”
The fall of the Soviet Union ushered in the present
phase of public health philanthropy, characterized by the Western demand for
“global health governance” – purportedly as a response to the spread of
communicable diseases accelerated by globalization. Health has been redefined
as a security concern; the developing world is portrayed as a teeming petri
dish of SARS, AIDS, and tropical infections, spreading “disease and death”
across the globe[34] and
requiring Western powers to establish centralized health systems designed to
“overcome the constraints of state sovereignty.”[35] Imperial interventions in the health field are
justified in the same terms as recent “humanitarian” military interventions:
“[N]ational interests now mandate that countries engage internationally as a responsibility
to protect against imported health threats or to help stabilize conflicts
abroad so that they do not disrupt global security or commerce.”[36]
Providing support for national healthcare operations
is no longer on the agenda; to the contrary – in keeping with structural
adjustment programs that have required ruinous disinvestment in public health
throughout the developing world[37] –
health ministries are routinely bypassed or compromised via “public-private
partnerships” and similar schemes. As national health systems are hollowed out,
health spending by donor countries and private foundations has risen
dramatically.[38]
Indeed, the US-based Council on Foreign Relations envisions a withering away of
state-sponsored healthcare delivery, to be replaced by a supranational regime
of “new legal frameworks, public-private partnerships, national programs,
innovative financing mechanisms, and greater engagement by nongovernmental
organizations, philanthropic foundations, and multinational corporations.”[39]
The exemplar of philanthropy in the era of global
health governance is the Gates Foundation. Vastly endowed, essentially
unaccountable, unencumbered by respect for democracy or national sovereignty,
floating freely between the public and private spheres, it is ideally
positioned to intervene swiftly and decisively on behalf of the interests it
represents. As Bill Gates remarked, “I’m not gonna get voted out of
office.”[40] Close
working relationships with UN, US and EU institutions, as well as powerful
multinational corporations, give BMGF an extraordinary capability to harmonize
complex overlapping agendas, ensuring that corporate and US ambitions are
simultaneously advanced. To better understand how BMGF operates and in whose
interests, it is worth looking closely at the Foundation’s global vaccine
programs, where until recently the bulk of its money and muscle was brought to
bear.
III.
Gates and Big Pharma
“Guinea
pigs for the drugmakers”
Despite annual revenues approaching $1 trillion,
the global pharmaceutical industry has lately experienced a critical decline in
the rate of profit, for which it lays most of the blame on regulatory
requirements. A US think tank has estimated the cost of new drug development at
$5.8 billion per drug, of which 90 per cent is incurred in Phase III clinical
trials mandated by the US Food and Drug Administration and similar agencies in
Europe.[41] (These
are tests administered to large groups of human subjects in order to confirm
the effectiveness and monitor the side effects of new vaccines and other
medicines.) The international business consulting firm McKinsey & Company
called the situation “dramatic” and urged Big Pharma executives to “envision
responses that go well beyond simply tinkering with the cost base” – primarily
the relocation of clinical trials to emerging markets, where drug safety
testing is seen as relatively cheap, speedy, and lax.[42]
It is in this specific context that BMGF’s
intervention in the distribution of certain vaccines and contraceptives must be
seen. Heavily invested in Big Pharma,[43] the Foundation is well positioned to facilitate
pharmaceutical R&D strategies tailored to the realities of the developing
world, where “[t]o speed the translation of scientific discovery into
implementable solutions, we seek better ways to evaluate and refine potential
interventions—such as vaccine candidates—before they enter costly and
time-consuming clinical trials.”[44] In
plain language, BMGF promises to assist Big Pharma in its efforts to circumvent
Western regulatory regimes by sponsoring cut-rate drug trials in the periphery.
The instruments of this assistance are
Gates-controlled institutions like the GAVI Alliance, the Global Health
Innovative Technology Fund, and the Program for Appropriate Technology in
Health (PATH) – public-private partnerships purportedly devoted to saving Third
World lives. Notionally independent but so heavily funded by Gates as to
function as virtual arms of the Foundation, these organizations began to
conduct large-scale clinical trials in Africa and South Asia in the mid-2000s.[45]
Africa soon experienced an “unprecedented increase
in health research involving humans” who were typically “poverty-stricken and
poorly educated”[46]; the
results were predictably lethal. In 2010 the Gates Foundation funded a
Phase III trial of a malaria vaccine developed by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK),
administering the experimental treatment to thousands of infants across seven
African countries. Eager to secure the WHO approval necessary to license the
vaccine for global distribution, GSK and BMGF declared the trials a smashing
success, and the popular press uncritically reproduced the publicity.[47] Few bothered to look
closely at the study's fine print, which revealed that the trials resulted in
151 deaths and caused “serious adverse effects” (e.g., paralysis, seizures,
febrile convulsions) in 1048 of 5949 children aged 5-17 months.[48] Similar stories emerged
in the wake of the Gates-funded MenAfriVac campaign in Chad, where unconfirmed
reports alleged that 50 of 500 children forcibly vaccinated for meningitis
later developed paralysis.[49] Citing
additional abuses, a South African newspaper declared: “We are guinea pigs for
the drugmakers.”[50]
It was in India, however, that the implications of
BMGF’s collaboration with Big Pharma first rose to widespread public
attention. In 2010 seven adolescent tribal girls in Gujarat and Andhra
Pradesh died after receiving injections of HPV (Human Papilloma Virus) vaccines
as part of a large-scale “demonstrational study” funded by the Gates Foundation
and administered by PATH.[51] The
vaccines, developed by GSK and Merck, were given to approximately 23,000 girls
between 10 and 14 years of age, ostensibly to guard against cervical cancers
they might develop in old age.
Extrapolating from trial data, Indian physicians
later estimated that at least 1,200 girls experienced severe side effects or
developed auto-immune disorders as a result of the injections.[52] No follow-up examinations
or medical care were offered to the victims. Further investigations revealed
pervasive violations of ethical norms: vulnerable village girls were virtually
press-ganged into the trials, their parents bullied into signing consent forms
they could not read by PATH representatives who made false claims about the
safety and efficacy of the drugs. In many cases signatures were simply
forged.[53]
An Indian Parliamentary Committee determined that
the Gates-funded vaccine campaign was in fact a large-scale clinical trial
conducted on behalf of the pharmaceutical firms and disguised as an
“observational study” in order to outflank statutory requirements.[54] The Committee found
that PATH had “violated all laws and regulations laid down for clinical trials
by the government” in a “clear-cut violation of human rights and a case of
child abuse.”[55] The
Gates Foundation did not trouble to respond to the findings but issued an
annual letter calling for still more health-related R&D in poor countries
and reaffirming its belief in “the value of every human life.”[56]
Making markets
By thrusting the HPV vaccine on India, The Gates
Foundation was not merely facilitating low-cost clinical trials but was also
assisting in the creation of new markets for a dubious and underperforming
product. Merck’s version of the vaccine, called Gardasil, was introduced in
2006 in conjunction with a high-powered marketing campaign that generated $1.5
billion in annual sales[57]; the
vaccine was named “brand of the year” by Pharmaceutical Executive for
“building a market out of thin air.”[58] Aided
by enthusiastic endorsements from the medical establishment, Merck at first
persuaded Americans that Gardasil could protect their daughters from cervical
cancer. In fact the vaccine was of questionable efficacy:
The relationship between [HPV] infection at a young age and
development of cancer 20 to 40 years later is not known. … The virus does not
appear to be very harmful because almost all HPV infections are cleared by the
immune system. [S]ome women may develop precancerous cervical lesions and
eventually cervical cancer. It is currently impossible to predict in which
women this will occur and why.[59]
The prestigious Journal of the American Medical
Association in 2009 openly questioned whether the vaccine’s risks
outweighed the potential benefits.[60] As
word of Gardasil's defects emerged, American and European women began to
decline the vaccine, and by 2010 Fortune Magazine declared Gardasil a
“marketplace dud” as year-over-year sales fell by 18 percent.[61] GSK's copycat HPV
vaccine, Cervarix, experienced a comparable sales trough.
Billions in profits and capitalization were at
stake. At this stage the Gates Foundation stepped in. Its principal tool
was the GAVI Alliance, launched by BMGF in 2000 with the “explicit goal to
shape vaccine markets.”[62] GAVI
was charged with co-financing vaccine purchases with Third World public health
ministries, meanwhile “finding the type of large-scale funding needed to
sustain long-term immunisation programmes” and “laying the foundations
that will allow governments to continue immunisation programmes long after GAVI
support ends.”[63] In
essence, BMGF would buy up stockpiled drugs that had failed to create
sufficient demand in the West, press them on the periphery at a discount, and
lock in long-term purchase agreements with Third World governments.
In 2011 GAVI held a highly publicized board meeting
in Dhaka where, with the enthusiastic endorsement of UN Secretary General Ban
ki-Moon, it announced a worldwide campaign to introduce HPV vaccines to
developing countries: “If [developing] countries can demonstrate their ability
to deliver the vaccines, up to two million women and girls in nine countries
could be protected from cervical cancer by 2015.”[64] GSK adopted a “Global Vaccine Availability Model”
involving tiered pricing to permit “transition[ing] into poorer countries with
the help of ‘partners’ such as UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and the
Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization.”[65] Meanwhile PATH was rushing to complete a
large-scale, five-year long project “to generate and disseminate evidence for
informed public sector introduction of HPV vaccines” in India, Uganda, Peru and
Vietnam. An Indian Parliamentary report observed: “all these countries have
state-funded national vaccine immunization programs, which if expanded to
include Gardasil, would mean tremendous financial benefit to the …
manufacturer.”[66]
By FYE 2012, Merck was able to report a 35 percent
jump in worldwide Gardasil sales, reflecting inter alia “favorable
performance in Japan and the emerging markets,” where “sales growth is being
driven by vaccines.”[67]
Evidently, a drug rightly deemed suspect by Americans would be good enough for
women in the developing world.
Other dangerous drugs that failed to gain a toehold
in Western markets have received similar attention from the Gates Foundation.
Norplant, a subcutaneous contraceptive implant that effectively sterilizes
women for as long as five years, was pulled from the US market after 36,000
women filed suit over severe side effects undisclosed by the manufacturer,
including excessive menstrual bleeding, headaches, nausea, dizziness and
depression.[68]
Slightly modified and rebranded as Jadelle, the same drug is now being heavily
promoted in Africa by USAID, the Gates Foundation, and its affiliates. A recent
article on the Gates-sponsored website Impatient Optimists elides its
dangers and disingenuously states that the drug “never gained traction” in the
US because inserting and removing the device was “cumbersome.” With Gates
Foundation support, however, Jadelle “has played a pivotal role in bringing
implants to the developing world” and is soon to be complemented by a second
Norplant clone, Merck’s Implanon.[69]
An equally risky contraceptive, Pfizer’s
Depo-Provera, recently received the Gates Foundation imprimatur for
distribution to poor women worldwide. In the US and India feminists fought
against approval of the injectable drug for decades due to its alarming list of
side effects, including “infertility, irregular bleeding, decreased libido,
depression, high blood pressure, excessive weight gain, breast tenderness,
vaginal infections, hair loss, stomach pains, blurred vision, joint pain,
growth of facial hair, acne, cramps, diarrhea, skin rash, tiredness, and
swelling of limbs”[70] as
well as potentially irreversible osteoporosis.[71]
After the US Food and Drug Administration succumbed
to industry pressure and granted approval in 1992, studies found a marked
racial disparity in Depo-Provera prescriptions between white and African
American women, leading to charges that “this form of long-acting
provider-controlled birth control is routinely given to women of color in order
to deny them the ability to control their own reproduction.”[72] White American and
European women, by contrast, receive the drug only rarely and typically as a
treatment for endometriosis, greatly limiting its commercial potential in the
West.
Hence Pfizer stands to benefit enormously from a
Gates-sponsored program, announced with much fanfare at the 2012 London Summit
on Family Planning, to distribute the drug to millions of women in South Asia
and sub-Saharan Africa by 2016:[73]
[Y]ou do the numbers: If 120 million
new women users chose Depo-Provera, at an estimated average cost between
$120-$300 per woman annually, that works out to $15 billion to $36 billion in
new sales annually, a nice payoff from leveraging $4 billion in research money.[74]
Foundation publicity suggests that its aggressive
backing of a discredited drug is merely a response to appeals from poor women.
“Many [African] women want to use injectable contraceptives but simply cannot
get access to them,” claimed PATH President and CEO Steve Davis.[75] Reproductive rights
activist Kwame Fasu disagrees: “No African woman would agree to being injected
if she had full knowledge of the contraceptives’ dangerous side effects.”[76]
IV.
A Broader Agenda
Behind BMGF’s coordinated interventions in
pharmaceuticals, agriculture, population control, and other putatively
philanthropic concerns lies a broader agenda. In a recent interview Bill Gates
briefly strayed off-message to warn of “huge population growth in places
where we don’t want it, like Yemen and Pakistan and parts of Africa.”[77] His use of the majestic
plural here is revealing: in spite of much rhetoric about “empowering poor
people,” the Foundation is fundamentally concerned with reshaping societies
in the context of ruling-class imperatives.
The central thrust of
current imperialist strategy involves increasingly direct intervention in the
developing countries/Third World, ranging from internal destabilization to
regime change to outright military occupation. This is evidenced by recent wars
of conquest in Iraq and Libya, multiple programs of destabilization and proxy
warfare throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and the integration of
African Union military forces into the framework of AFRICOM. Military
aggression undergirds a redoubled effort to seize control of raw materials in
developing countries, in particular oil and strategic mineral resources in the
African continent. Big Philanthropy’s more aggressive interventions in the
public health systems of the Third World reflect and complement this strategy.
Meanwhile, the capitalist core is pursuing an
energetic program of what David Harvey has called “accumulation by
dispossession,” leading to “a rapid and large movement of foreign capital
taking control over huge tracts of land—mainly in Africa, Southeast Asia, and
Latin America—by either outright purchase or by long-term leases and removal of
peasant farmers from the land.”[78] This
process is facilitated in multiple ways by the activities of the Gates
Foundation. What follows is an attempt to summarize the Gates agenda in a few
broad strokes.
“Land
mobility” not land reform
Hunger, claims the Gates Foundation website, is
rooted in “population growth, rising incomes, dwindling natural resources, and
a changing climate,” and is best addressed by enhancing agricultural
productivity.[79]
Unmentioned is the fact that per capita food production has been trending
upward for decades and remains at historic highs,[80] meaning that hunger is an issue of unequal
distribution rather than inadequate productivity. Extensive scholarship shows
also that food insecurity has been greatly exacerbated over recent decades by
massive dispossession of small farmers, depriving millions of their
livelihoods.[81] Contra
Gates, the food crisis is not one of “rising incomes” but of vanishing incomes.
Although Foundation publicity pays lip service to
the idea of sustainable smallholder agriculture, in fact its initiatives are
uniformly directed toward high-tech, high-yield farming methods – much like the
“Green Revolution” technologies that proved ultimately ruinous for rural
peasantries beginning in the 1960s.[82] Gates
works closely with agribusiness giant Monsanto through organizations like the
Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), which steers billions in
grant money primarily to biotech and GMO research.[83] The Foundation has also thrown its weight behind a
revival of Grameen-style microbanking schemes, which transpired during the
2000s to be a debt trap leading to dispossession of rural families.[84]
Far from empowering small farmers, BMGF’s efforts
envision the exit of “inefficient” small farmers from their land – a process
euphemistically termed “land mobility” – as revealed by an internal memo leaked
to the press in 2008:
In order to transition agriculture from the current
situation of low investment, low productivity and low returns to a
market-oriented, highly-productive system, it is essential that supply
(productivity) and demand (market access) expand together… [this] involves
market-oriented farmers operating profitable farms that generate enough income
to sustain their rise out of poverty. Over time, this will require some
degree of land mobility and a lower percentage of total employment involved
in direct agricultural production.[85]
The impact of these policies on small farmers and
their families is disastrous. As Fred Magdoff recently explained, “the world
capitalist economy is [no longer] able to provide productive employment for the
huge numbers of people losing their lands. Thus the fate of those migrating to
cities or other countries is commonly to live in slums and to exist
precariously within the ‘informal’ economy.[86]
Indeed, the Foundation's agricultural policy
strikingly resembles what Samir Amin describes as the logical outcome of
subjecting agriculture to the same market principles as any other branch of
production: 20 million industrial farmers producing the world's food supply in
place of today’s three billion peasants.[87] As
Amin observes:
The conditions for the success of such an alternative would
include: (1) the transfer of important pieces of good land to the new
capitalist farmers (and these lands would have to be taken out of the hands of
present peasant populations); (2) capital (to buy supplies and equipment); and
(3) access to the consumer markets. Such farmers would indeed compete
successfully with the billions of present peasants. But what would happen to
those billions of people?[88]
Amin’s analysis chimes with the Gates Foundation
memo quoted above, and there is reason to believe that BMGF is already
contemplating strategies for coping with the “surplus” population that the
processes of accumulation and dispossession are generating.
Population
control not redistribution
In a 2012 Newsweek profile, Melinda Gates
announced her intention to get “family planning” back on the global agenda and
made the dubious claim that African women were literally clamoring for
Depo-Provera as a way of hiding contraceptive use from “unsupportive husbands.”[89] Boasting that a
decision “likely to change lives all over the world” had been hers alone, she
announced that the Foundation would invest $4 billion in an effort to supply
injectable contraceptives to 120 million women – presumably women of color – by
2020. It was a program so ambitious that some critics warned of a return to the
era of eugenics and coercive sterilization.[90]
Bill Gates, at one time an avowed Malthusian “at
least in the developing countries”[91] is now
careful to repudiate Malthus in public. Yet it is striking that Foundation
publicity justifies not only contraception, but every major initiative
in the language of population control, from vaccination (“When children survive
in greater numbers, parents decide to have smaller families”[92]) to primary education
(“[G]irls who complete seven years of schooling will marry four years later and
have 2.2 fewer children than girls who do not complete primary school.”)[93]
In a 2010 public lecture, Bill Gates attributed
global warming to “overpopulation” and touted zero population growth as a
solution achievable “[i]f we do a really great job on new vaccines, health
care, and reproductive health services.”[94] The
argument is disingenuous: As Gates certainly knows, the poor people who are the
targets of his campaigns are responsible for no more than a tiny percentage of
the environmental damage that underlies climate change. The economist Utsa
Patnaik has demonstrated that when population figures are adjusted to account
for actual per capita demand on resources, e.g., fossil fuels and food, the
greatest “real population pressure” emanates not from India or Africa, but from
the advanced countries.[95] The
Gates Foundation is well aware of this imbalance and works not to redress it
but to preserve it – by blaming poverty not on imperialism but on unrestrained
sexual reproduction “in places where we don’t want it.”
From Malthus to the present day, the myth of
overpopulation has supplied reliable ideological cover for the ruling class as
it appropriates ever greater shares of the people's labor and the planet's
wealth. As argued in Aspects No. 55, “Malthus’s heirs
continue to wish us to believe that people are responsible for
their own misery; that there is simply not enough to go around; and to
ameliorate that state of wretchedness we must not attempt to alter the
ownership of social wealth and redistribute the social product, but instead
focus on reducing the number of people.”[96] In
recent years BMGF's publicity apparatus, exploiting Western alarm about
“climate change,” has helped create a resurgence of the overpopulation hysteria
last experienced during the 1970s in the wake of Paul Erlich’s bestseller The
Population Bomb.[97]
Yet the sheer scale of BMGF's investment in “family
planning”" suggests that its ambitions reach beyond mere propaganda. In
addition to the multibillion dollar contraception distribution program
discussed previously, BMGF provides research support for the development of new
high-tech, long-lasting contraceptives (e.g., an ultrasound sterilization
procedure for men as well as “non-surgical female sterilization”). Meanwhile
the Foundation aggressively lobbies Third World governments to spend more on
birth control and supporting infrastructure.[98] while subsidizing steep cuts in the price of
subcutaneous contraceptives.[99]
These initiatives lie squarely within the
traditions of Big Philanthropy. The Rockefeller Foundation organized the
Population Council in 1953, predicting a “Malthusian crisis” in the developing
world and financing extensive experiments in population control. These
interventions were enthusiastically embraced by US government policymakers, who
agreed that “the demographic problems of the developing countries, especially
in areas of non-Western culture, make these nations more vulnerable to
Communism.”[100]
Foundation research culminated in an era of “unrestrained enthusiasm for
government-sponsored family planning” by the 1970s.[101] Less discussed but amply documented is the
consistent support for eugenics research by US-based foundations, dating from
the 1920s, when Rockefeller helped found the German eugenics program that
undergirded Nazi racial theories,[102]
through the 1970s, when Ford Foundation research helped prepare the intellectual
ground for a brutal forced sterilization campaign in India.[103]
Why have foundations invested so persistently in
actual technologies and campaigns for population reduction? In the
absence of a definitive explanation, two possibilities are worth pondering:
- Gates and his billionaire associates may well share
Dean Acheson's view – famously ridiculed by Mao Zedong – that population growth
engenders revolutions by “creating unbearable pressure on the land.”[104] A more recent
expression of this idea, contained in the report of the US Vice President’s
Task Force on Combatting Terrorism, is that “population pressures create a
volatile mixture of youthful aspirations that when coupled with economic and
political frustrations help form a large pool of potential terrorists.”[105] Thus BMGF likely sees
population control as a security imperative, in keeping with its fear of a
“less stable” world and reflecting the philosophy of global health governance.[106]
- Population control is, in another sense, one of the
instruments of social control. It extends ruling-class jurisdiction more
directly to the personal sphere, aiming at “full-spectrum dominance” of the
developing world. Like laws regulating marriage and sexual behavior, such
interventions in the reproduction of labor power are not essential to
capitalists but remain desirable as a means of exercising ruling class hegemony
over every aspect of the lives of the working people. Whereas the ideology
of population control is intended to turn attention away from the existing
distribution of wealth and income that causes widespread want, population
control as such directly targets the bodies and dignity of poor people,
conditioning them to believe that life’s most intimate decisions are outside of
their competence and control.[107]
The relationship between bourgeois ideology and
imperialist practice is dynamic and mutually supportive. As David Harvey has
observed: “Whenever a theory of overpopulation seizes hold in a society
dominated by an elite, then the non-elite invariably experience some form of
political, economic, and social repression.”[108] Seen in this light, BMGF's promotion of
population control is doubly pernicious because it is cloaked in the language
of environmentalism, popular empowerment, and feminism. Melinda Gates may evoke
“choice” in support of her family planning initiatives, but in reality it is
not poor women, but a handful of the world’s wealthiest people who have
presumed to choose which methods of contraception will be delivered, and to
whom.
Dependency
not democracy
Speaking off the record, public health officials
are scathing about the imperiousness of the Gates Foundation. It is said to be
“domineering” and “controlling,” contemptuous of advice from experts, seeking
to “divide and conquer” the institutions of global health via “stealth-like
monopolisation of communications and advocacy.[109] But the high-handedness of the Foundation
goes far beyond office politics in Geneva. In general it “has not been
interested in health systems strengthening and has rather competed with
existing health services.”[110] It
routinely subverts the health ministries of sovereign nations, either coercing
their cooperation or outmanoeuvring them via NGO-sponsored field operations
that bypass existing infrastructure and personnel.
In particular, the Foundation’s emphasis on
single-issue, vertically organized interventions tends to undermine
community-based primary care, endorsed by the Alma Ata Declaration of 1978 as
the model for Third World public health programs. Based implicitly on the
“barefoot doctor” program that revolutionized public health in the People’s
Republic of China, the philosophy of primary care proposed that the people
“have a right and duty to participate individually and collectively in the
planning and implementation of their health care.”[111] In theory, the goal was not only
improvement of health as such, but also popular empowerment and genuine
democracy at the local level. People would be encouraged to believe that health
care was not a gift from Western benefactors, but belonged to them as of right.
Although the Chinese model could never be properly
implemented in non-socialist countries, Alma Ata inspired various
community-based health initiatives in developing countries, achieving some
success in lowering infant mortality and raising life expectancy.[112] Today, however, primary
care programs worldwide are on the decline due both to the imperatives of
structural adjustment programs and to the meddling of US-based foundations.[113] The Gates Foundation,
for its part, invariably acts to steer resources away from community-based
holistic doctoring and toward single-disease crash programs, controlled by
Western NGOs in collaboration with health-related MNCs. Its approach to
diarrhea, which kills upwards of one million infants annually, is a case in
point.
The procedures necessary to control diarrhea are
not mysterious: clean water and adequate sanitation are essential to
prevention, while treatment consists of administering oral rehydration salts
(ORS) and zinc supplements to afflicted infants. Chinese “barefoot doctors”
achieved steep declines in diarrhea mortality from the 1950s through the 1980s
by distributing ORS supplies at the village level and educating families on
their importance and proper use.[114] Yet while
shepherding governments away from investing in the sanitation infrastructure
and primary care that have been proven to save lives, BMGF funds and promotes
vaccine research, marketing programs administered by NGOs, and “work[ing] with
manufacturers and distributors to make ORS and zinc products more attractive to
consumers—by improving flavors and repackaging products.”[115]
Perhaps Bill Gates, who became rich through the
expert marketing of inferior software, really believes that poor mothers can’t
be relied upon to take an interest in saving their children’s lives unless
medicines are advertised like Coca-Cola. But BMGF’s overall stance toward
diarrhea, as toward public health in general, reminds us that the attenuation
of Third World democracy is far from unwelcome to the rulers. As the
educational theorist Robert Arnove has observed, foundations are at bottom
a corrosive influence on a democratic society; they
represent relatively unregulated and unaccountable concentrations of power and
wealth which buy talent, promote causes, and in effect, establish an agenda of
what merits society’s attention. They serve as ‘cooling-out’ agencies, delaying
and preventing more radical, structural change. They help maintain an economic
and political order, international in scope, which benefits the ruling-class
interests of philanthropists.[116]
Charitable activities that undermine democracy and
state sovereignty are immensely useful to the ruling class. Robust, effective
social programs in developing countries are an impediment to the current
imperial agenda of worldwide expropriation; healthy people, in control of their
own destinies and invested in the social well-being of their communities, are
better equipped to defend their claim to the wealth they possess and produce.
Far better, from the point of view of the Good Club philanthrocapitalists, if
the world’s poorest billions remain wholly dependent on a largesse that may be
granted or withdrawn at pleasure.
A
facelift for the rulers
In the wake of the 2007-08 financial crisis and the
subsequent implementation of "austerity" programs worldwide, the
super-rich experienced popular anger more directly than at any time since the
Great Depression. The masses took to the streets worldwide; the avowedly
anti-capitalist Occupy Wall Street movement received extensive and largely
favorable press coverage; newspaper columnists openly wondered whether reforms
might be needed to save capitalism from itself; Capital and The
Communist Manifesto returned to bestseller lists. Particularly worrisome to
the mega-rich was the extent to which they themselves, rather than vague
complaints about “the system,” became the focus of discontent. Even relatively
well-to-do Americans questioned the power and disproportionate wealth
controlled by elites, now commonly identified as “the 1 per cent” or the “1 per
cent of the 1 per cent.” Confronting widespread hostile scrutiny, the ruling
class was in need of a facelift.
BMGF’s publicity operation was quick to respond.
The Foundation exploited “multiple messaging avenues for influencing the public
narrative” including the creation of “strategic media partners” – ostensibly
independent news organizations whose cooperation was ensured via the
distribution of $25 million in annual grant money.[117] Bill Gates, said to be socially awkward
and formerly shy of media attention, was suddenly ubiquitous in the mainstream
press. In every interview Gates worked from the same talking points: he had
resolved to dedicate “the rest of his life” to assisting the world’s poor; to
that end he intended to give away his entire fortune; his uncompromising
intelligence and business acumen made him uniquely qualified to wring “more
bang for the buck” from philanthropic endeavors; he is nevertheless kindhearted
and deeply moved by personal encounters with sick and impoverished children;
etc. Invariably he told the suspiciously apposite story of his mother’s
deathbed adjuration: “From those to whom much is given, much is expected.”[118] At the same time BMGF
expanded its online operations, using Twitter and Facebook to disseminate
pseudoscientific aperçus and heartwarming images to millions of
“followers” worldwide.[119]
Gates’ willingness to carry the torch for the
world’s billionaires reflected an understanding that his Foundation plays an
important ideological role within the global capitalist system. Apart from the
promotion of specific corporate interests and imperialist strategic aims,
BMGF’s expertly publicized activities have the effect of laundering the
enormous concentration of wealth in the hands of a few supremely powerful
oligarchs. Through stories of Gates’ philanthropy we are assured that our
rulers are benevolent, compassionate, and eager to “give back” to the less
fortunate; moreover, by leveraging their superior intelligence and technocratic
expertise, they are able to transcend the bureaucratic fumblings of state
institutions, finding “strategic, market-based solutions” to problems that
confound mere democracies. This apotheosis of Western wealth and knowhow works
hand-in-hand with an implicit contempt for the sovereignty and competence of
poor nations, justifying ever more aggressive imperialist interventions. [120]
Thus the Gates Foundation, like the MNCs it so
closely resembles, seeks to manufacture consent for its activities through the
manipulation of public opinion. Happily, not everyone is fooled: popular
resistance to the designs of Big Philanthropy is mounting. The struggle is
broad-based, ranging from the women activists who exposed the criminal
activities of PATH in India, to the anti-sterilization activities of
African-American groups like The Rebecca Project, to the anti-vaccine
agitations in Pakistan following the revelation that the CIA had used
immunization programs as cover for DNA collection.[121] Surely a worldwide campaign to eradicate
the toxic philanthropy and infectious propaganda of the Gates Foundation would
be in the best traditions of public health.
Notes:
1. “The Gates Foundation: Giving Away a
Fortune,” CBS 60 Minutes, Sept. 30, 2010
2. Paul Harris, “They’re Called The
Good Club – And They Want to Save the World,” Guardian, May 30, 2009
3. Andrew Clark, “US Billionaires Club
Together,” Guardian, Aug. 4, 2010
4. Matthew Bishop and Michael Green, Philanthrocapitalism:
How Giving Can Save the World (2008), pp. 3, 6.
5. Harris, op cit.
6. “Bill Gates,” Forbes.com,
Sept. 2013
7. Barry Ritholtz, “What's Behind
Microsoft’s Fall from Dominance,” Washington Post, Sept. 26, 2013
8. Quoted in Michael Perelman,
“The Political Economy of Intellectual Property,” Monthly Review, vol.
54, no. 8, January, 2003
9. The Foundation Center, Top
Funders
10. Sheldon Drobny, “The Gates and
Buffett Foundation Shell Game,” CommonDreams.org, April 26, 2006
11. BMGF website
12. Richard Waters, “An exclusive
interview with Bill Gates,” Financial Times, Nov. 1, 2013
13. Noel Salazar, “Top 10 philanthropic
foundations: A primer,” Devex, Aug. 1, 2011
14. Global Health Watch, Global
Health Watch 2: An Alternative World Health Report, 2008, p. 250.
In a 2008 memo leaked to the press, Arata Kochi, chief of the malaria program
at the World Health Organization, charged that “the growing dominance of
malaria research by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation risks stifling a
diversity of views among scientists and wiping out the health agency’s
policy-making function.” Donald G. McNeil Jr., “WHO official complains about
Gates Foundation's dominance in malaria fight,” NY Times, Nov. 7, 2008
15. “Private and Public Partners Unite
to Combat 10 Neglected Tropical Diseases by 2020,” BMGF press release, Jan.
2012
16. Grant to Ministry of Lands, Housing
and Urban Development; Government of Uganda, July, 2012
17. “The Next Grand Challenge in India:
Reinvent the Toilet,” BMGF press release, Oct. 2013.
The Foundation also feels free to “sit down with the Pakistan government” to
demand security measures in support of its operations. See Neil Tweedie,
“Bill Gates Interview: I Have No Use for Money. This is God’s Work,” The
Telegraph, Jan. 18, 2013
18. Global Health Watch, op. cit.,
p. 251.
19. Ibid.
20. Gabrielle Pickard, “Will Gates
Foundation Replace the UN?” UN Post, 2010
21. The Gates Foundation’s
occasional pretensions to selfless charity are belied by the policies of its
Trust, which invests heavily in “companies that contribute to the human
suffering in health, housing and social welfare that the foundation is trying
to alleviate.” Andy Beckett, “Inside the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,” Guardian,
July 12, 2010
22. Bill Gates, Annual Letter 2011
23. Foundations and Public Policy:
The Mask of Pluralism (SUNY Series in Radical Social and Political Theory
2003); see also “New Study on the Role of US Foundations,” Aspects of
India's Economy No. 38, Dec., 2004
24. E.g. “[i]n Indonesia the Ford Foundation-sponsored
knowledge networks worked to undermine the neutralist Sukarno government that
challenged U.S. hegemony. At the same time, Ford trained economists (both at
University of Indonesia and in U.S. universities) for a future regime supportive
of capitalist imperialism.” Roelofs, “Foundations and American Power,”
Counterpunch, April 20-22, 2012
25. Quoted in E. Richard Brown,
“Public Health in Imperialism: Early Rockefeller Programs at Home and Abroad,”
Am J Public Health, 1976 September; 66(9): 897–903, 897.
26. From its earliest days
Rockefeller’s philanthropy hid a domestic agenda as well. The Foundation was
forced to retreat from sponsorship of research into labor relations after the
1916 Walsh Commission Report found it was “corrupt[ing] sources of public
information” in an effort to whitewash predatory business practices and
industrial violence. Jeffrey Brison, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Canada,
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005, p. 35.
27. E. Richard Brown, op. cit.,
p. 900.
28. David Killingray, “Colonial Warfare
in West Africa 1870-1914,” reprinted in J. A. de Moor & H.L. Wesseling,
eds., Imperialism and War, Leiden : E.J. Brill : Universitaire pers
Leiden, 1989, pp. 150-151.
29. E. Richard Brown, op. cit.,
p. 900.
30. Randall Packard, “Visions of
Postwar Health and Development and Their Impact on Public Health Interventions
in the Developing World,” reprinted in Frederick Cooper & Randall
Packard, International Development and the Social Sciences, Berkeley:
Univ. of California Press, 1997, p. 97. In a 1948 address to the Fourth International
Congress of Tropical Diseases and Malaria, Marshall, a leading architect of US
policy during the early years of the Cold War, outlined a grandiose vision of
healthcare under ‘enlightened’ capitalism: “Little imagination is required to
visualize the great increase in the production of food and raw materials, the
stimulus to world trade, and above all the improvement in living conditions,
with consequent cultural and social advantages, that would result from the
conquest of tropical diseases.” Ibid., p. 97.
31. Report of the Study for the Ford
Foundation on Policy and Program, Detroit: Ford Foundation, November, 1949,
p. 26
32. Quoted in Packard, op.
cit., p. 99.
33. Wilbur G. Downs, M.D., “The
Rockefeller Foundation Virus Program 1951-1971 with Update to 1981,”
Ann. Rev. Med. 1982 33:1-29, 8.
34. Andrew F. Cooper and John J.
Kirton, eds., Innovation in Global Health Governance: Critical Cases,
Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2009, ch. 1.
35. Michael A. Stevenson & Andrew
F. Cooper, “Overcoming Constraints of State Sovereignty: Global Health
Governance in Asia,” Third World Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 7, 3009,
pp. 1379-1394.
36. Thomas E Novotny et al., “Global
health diplomacy– a bridge to innovative collaborative action,” Global Forum
Update on Research for Health, vol. 5, 2008, p. 41. (Emphasis added.)
37. See Ann-Louise Colgan, Hazardous
to Health: The World Bank and IMF in Africa, Africa Action position paper,
April 18, 2002
38. Global Health Watch, pp. 210-11.
39. David P. Fidler, The Challenges
of Global Health Governance, CFR Working Paper, May, 2010
40. Interview with Bill Gates, NOW
with Bill Moyers, May 9, 2003, transcript of television interview
41. Avik S.A. Roy, Stifling
New Cures: The True Cost of Lengthy Clinical Drug Trials, Manhattan
Institute, April, 2012
42. Vivan Hunt et al., A Wake-Up
Call for Big Pharma, McKinsey & Co, Dec. 2011;
Michael Edwards, R&D in Emerging Markets: A New Approach for a New Era,
McKinsey & Co., Feb. 2012
43. In 2002 the Gates Foundation
invested $205 million in pharmaceutical companies, including Merck & Co.,
Pfizer Inc., Johnson & Johnson, and GlaxoSmithKline. Ruben Rosenberg
Colorni, “Bill Gates, Big Pharma, Bogus Philanthropy,” News Junkie Post, June
7, 2013
44. Discovery and Translational Sciences
Strategy Overview, BMGF website
45. Gates-funded public-private
consortia typically subcontract with local Contract Research Organizations
(CROs) to conduct trials in the field, allowing the Foundation to maintain
arms-length distance from the realities of recruiting and injecting human subjects,
which frequently involves deception and coercion. The global CRO industry is
projected to reach over $32 billion by 2015. See WEMOS, The
Clinical Trials Industry in South Africa: Ethics, Rules and Realities, July
2012, pp. 11-13
46. A. Nyika et al., “Composition,
training needs and independence of ethics review committees across Africa: are
the gate-keepers rising to the emerging challenges?,” J Med Ethics, 2009
March; 35(3): 189–193.
47. E.g., “Malaria vaccine could
save millions of children's lives,” Guardian, Oct. 18, 2011
48. “First Results of Phase 3 Trial of
RTS,S/AS01 Malaria Vaccine in African Children ,” N Engl J Med 365;20,
November 17, 2011. Though some of the deaths would have been expected due to
high infant mortality rates in Africa, children who received the vaccine died
at more than twice the rate of children in the control group. Ibid.,
p. 1869.
49. “Minimum of 40 Children Paralyzed
after New Meningitis Vaccine,” VacTruth.com, Jan. 6, 2013.
The report relied on the Chadian daily La Voix.
50. Johannesburg Times, July 25,
2013
51. Sandhya Srinivasan, “A Vaccine for
Every Ailment,” Infochange, April, 2010.
PATH maintained that the dead girls had been bitten by snakes or fallen down
wells. Ibid.
52. Kalpana Mehta, Nalini Bhanot &
V. Rukmini Rao, Supreme Court Pulls Up Government Of India Over Licensing And
Trials With “Cervical Cancer” Vaccines, Countercurrents.org, Jan. 7,
2013
53. Aarthi Dhar, “It’s a PATH of
violations, all the way to vaccine trials: House panel,” The Hindu,
Sept. 2, 2013
54. Parliament of India, 72nd Report
on Alleged Irregularities in the Conduct of Studies Using Human Papilloma Virus
(HPV) Vaccine by PATH in India, Aug. 29, 2013, sec. II.
55. Quoted in Aarthi Dhar, op.
cit.
56. Bill and Melinda Gates, 2014
Gates Annual Letter, Jan. 2014
57. Merck, 2007 Annual Report
58. Zosia Chustecka, “HPV Vaccine:
Debate Over Benefits, Marketing, and New Adverse Event Data” Medscape,
Aug. 18, 2009
59. Charlotte Haug M.D., “The Risks and
benefits of HPV Vaccination,” Journal of the American Medical Association,
Aug. 19, 2009
60. Ibid.
61. Shelley DuBois, “What Went Wrong
With Gardasil,” Fortune, Sept. 7, 2012
62. GAVI Alliance, “Vaccine supply and
procurement,”.
As of July 2013, GAVI had received $1.5 billion in support from the Gates
Foundation. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Foundation Fact Sheet,
2013
63. GAVI Alliance, “The Business
Model”
64. “GAVI takes first steps to
introduce vaccines against cervical cancer and rubella,” GAVI press release,
Nov. 17, 2011
65. Renee Twombly, “U.S. Girls To
Receive HPV Vaccine but Picture Unclear on Potential Worldwide Use,
Acceptance,” J Natl Cancer Inst, vol. 98, no. 15, Aug., 2006, pp.
1030-32.
66. Parliament of India, 72nd Report,
sec. 1.11.
67. “Merck Announces Full-Year and Fourth-Quarter
2012 Financial Results,” Business Wire, Feb. 1, 2013
68. Morrow, David J. “Maker of Norplant
offers a settlement in suit over effects,” New York Times, Aug. 27,
1999, p. A1
69. Dorfliner et al., “The
Evolution of Implants,” Impatient Optimists, Feb. 20, 2013
70. Amy Goodman, “The Case Against Depo
Provera: Problems in the U.S.,” Multinational Monitor, Feb./March, 1985.
See also N. B. Sarojini & Laxmi Murthy, “Why women’s groups
oppose injectable contraceptives,” Indian Journal of Medical Ethics,
vol. 2, no. 1, 2005
71. US Food & Drug Administration,
“Black Box Warning Added Concerning Long-Term Use of the Depo-Provera
Contraceptive Injection,” FDA Talk Paper, Nov. 17, 2004
72. Thomas W. Volscho, “Racism and
Disparities in Women's Use of the Depo-Provera Injection in the Contemporary
USA,” Crit Sociol 2011 37: 673, June 3, 2011
73. Innovative Partnership to Deliver
Convenient Contraceptives to up to Three Million Women,” BMGF press release,
July 11, 2012.
It is presumably a coincidence that the London Summit on Family Planning was
timed to take place on the 100th anniversary of the First International
Eugenics Congress.
74. Paul B. Farrell, “Gates’ $4 Billion
Foray in Global Family Planning,” MarketWatch, May 15, 2012
75. Ibid.
76. Quoted in Lisa Correnti and
Rebecca Oas, “Black Leaders, Rights Experts Denounce Gates’ New Contraceptive
that May Increase HIV Risk,” Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute,
Oct. 18, 2013
77. Ezra Klein, “Bill Gates:
‘Capitalism Did Not Eradicate Smallpox’,” Washington Post, Jan. 21,
2014
78. Fred Magdoff, “Twenty-First Century
Land Grabs,” Monthly Review, vol. 65, no. 6, Nov., 2013
79. Agricultural Development Strategy
Overview, BMGF website
80. Keith Fuglie and Alejandro
Nin-Pratt, “A Changing Global Harvest,” 2012 Global Food Policy Report,
International Food Policy Research Institute
81. See. e.g., Raj Patel et al.,
“Ending Africa's Hunger,” The Nation, Sept. 21, 2009;
Utsa Patnaik, The Republic of Hunger and Other Essays, London: Merlin
Press, 2007; Rahul Goswami, “From District to Town: The movement of food
and food providers alike,” Macroscan, Jan. 8, 2013
82. See generally John H.
Perkins, Geopolitics and the Green Revolution: Wheat, Genes, and the Cold
War, Oxford University Press, 1997. See also Deborah Fahy
Bryceson, “Sub-Saharan Africa’s Vanishing Peasantries and the Spectre of a
Global Food Crisis,” Monthly Review, vol. 61, no. 3, July-Aug., 2009
83. Raj Patel et al., op. cit.
84. Aasha Khosa, “Grameen Bank Can’t
Reduce Poverty: Economist,” Business Standard, April 2, 2007;
Financial Services for the Poor Strategy Overview, BMGF website
85. Quoted in Community Alliance for
Global Justice, “Footloose Farmers,” AGRA Watch, Aug. 19, 2011
86. Magdoff, op. cit.
87. Samir Amin, “World Poverty,
Pauperization, and Capital Accumulation,” Monthly Review vol. 55, no. 5,
Oct. 2003
88. Ibid.
89. Michelle Goldberg, “Melinda Gates’
New Crusade: Investing Billions in Women's Health,” Newsweek, May 7,
2012
90. The Rebecca Project for Human
Rights, Depo-Provera: Deadly Reproductive Violence Against Women, June
25, 2013
91. Interview with Bill Gates, NOW
with Bill Moyers, May 9, 2003, transcript of television interview.
In this interview Gates also discloses his admiration for the notorious Club of
Rome report, Limits to Growth, a 1972 polemic that became central to a
postwar revival of Malthusian thought.
92. Bill and Melinda Gates, 2014
Gates Annual Letter.
93. Dr. Denise Dunning, “Girls: The
World’s Return on Greatest Investment,” Impatient Optimists website
94. Hendershott, op. cit.
95. Patnaik, Republic of Hunger,
pp. 10 et seq.
96. Manali Chakrabarti, “Are There Just
Too Many of Us?,” Aspects of India’s Economy no. 55, March, 2014
97. The tone and implications of
Erlich’s influential tract, which has sold more than two million copies, can be
judged from its set-piece opening describing a “stinking hot night in Delhi”
experienced by the author and his companions: “The streets seemed alive with
people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. … People thrusting their
hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. …
People. People, people. … Would we ever get to our hotel?” Paul Erlich, The
Population Bomb, Cutchogue, NY: Buccaneer Books, 1968, p. 1.
98. Anne Hendershott, “The Ambitions of
Bill and Melinda Gates: Controlling Population and Public Education,” Crisis,
March 25, 2013;
Family Planning Strategy Overview, BMGF website
99. “Innovative Partnership Reduces
Cost of Bayer’s Long-Acting Reversible Contraceptive Implant By More Than 50
Percent,” BMGF press release, Feb. 27, 2013
100. Kingsley Davis, quoted in
Donald T. Critchlow, ed., The Politics of Abortion and Birth Control in
Historical Perspective, University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1995, p. 85.
101. Ibid., p. 87.
102. Edwin Black, “Eugenics: the
California connection to Nazi policies,” San Francisco Chronicle, Nov.
10, 2003.
See generally Allan Chase, The Legacy of Malthus, Champaign,
Ill.: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1980.
103. Mark Hemingway, “Ford Ahead: The
Foundation Tightens Its Belt,” Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2009
104. Quoted in Mao Zedong, The
Bankruptcy of the Idealist Conception of History, Sept. 16, 1949
105. Public Report of the Vice
President's Task Force on Combatting Terrorism, Feb. 1986, p. 1
106. Hence BMGF literature lays special
emphasis on population control in urban sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia –
putative hotbeds of “terrorism” and precisely areas to which peasants
dispossessed via Gates-sponsored agricultural policies may be expected to
relocate.
107. Population control is also
potentially a weapon of ruling class terror, as when India used coercive mass
sterilization during the 1975-77 ‘Emergency’. In such a scenario, whether or
not population control measures succeed in substantially reducing the numbers
of people, they are effective in instilling and deepening among the common
people a dread of the State and its power to intervene in their lives. (It is
tempting to speculate that ultrasound and other high-tech sterilization methods
funded by BMGF are appealing because they could facilitate coercive
sterilization campaigns while avoiding the gory surgical botches that might
draw unfavourable publicity.)
108. David Harvey, “Population,
Resources, and the Ideology of Science,” Economic Geography, vol.
50, no. 3, July 1974, p. 273.
109. Global Health Watch, op. cit.,
p. 251.
110. Ibid, p. 253.
111. Declaration of Alma-Ata,
International Conference on Primary Health Care, Alma-Ata, USSR, September
6-12, 1978
112. Mala Rao & Eva Pilot, “The
Missing Link: The Role of Primary Care in Global Health,” Global Health
Action, Jan. 1, 2014, p. 2.
113 .John Walley et al., “Primary Care:
Making Alma-Ata a Reality,” Lancet 2008; 372: 1001-1007.
114. Carl E. Taylor and Xu Zhao Yu,
“Oral Rehydration in China,” Am J Public Health 1986; 76:187-189.
115. BMGF, Enteric and Diarrheal
Diseases Strategy Overview, Gates Foundation website
116. Robert Arnove, ed., Philanthropy and
Cultural Imperialism, Boston: G.K. Hall, 1980, p. 1.
117. Tom Paulson, “Behind the scenes
with the Gates Foundation’s ‘strategic media partners’,” Humanosphere,
Feb. 14, 2013.
For example, NPR’s “Global Health Beat” and The Guardian’s Global
Development page are underwritten by the Gates Foundation. Ibid.
118. See, for example, Caroline
Graham, “This Is Not The Way I’d Imagined Bill Gates,” Daily Mail, June
9, 2011
119. As of this writing Bill Gates’
Twitter account boasts 15.8 million followers. Social media is prized by corporate
marketers as a low-cost, unmediated, seemingly “organic” method of distributing
publicity.
120. At the same time, the ideology
promoted by BMGF fosters the involvement of the corporate sector within
‘philanthropic’ interventions, legitimizing the exploitation of public needs
for private profit. This opens the door for private corporations to annex still
more sectors of state activity, justifying the high cost of their services by
invoking illusory "efficiencies.” BMGF's assistance to the ongoing
privatization of US public education via the “charter schools movement” is a
case in point.
121. “Yes, Vaccinations Are a CIA
Plot,” Economist, July 20, 2011
Jacob Levich,
jlevich@earthlink.net, has written on imperialist military strategy
for
Aspects No. 42. He lives in New York City and
tweets as @cordeliers.
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