19. Bill Gates and Big Food 2

BIG FOOD WATCH
Access April 2011 PLoS Medicine David Stuckler et al on global philanthropy here
Access October December 2013 Big Food Watch Words for our sponsors here
Access January 2014 Claudio Schuftan on the Gates Foundation here

Bill Gates addressing the United Nations (left). Bill Gates and Warren Buffett enjoying a joke (right). Together they could place up to $US 100 billion any time, anywhere, any place they liked

Big Food Watch network member Claudio Schuftan writes:
I have come across three criticisms of my Feedback contribution on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in the December issue of WN (1). One is that comment on philanthropists has no place in a journal on public health nutrition. Two is that it is not fair to pick on Bill Gates. Three is that the world needs philanthropists, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is doing good work in the world.

The first criticism is perhaps one for the editor of WN. My answer is brief. In all matters of public policy and action, we need to know the sources of financial, other material and human support that shape eventual decisions. If the arms industry was funding candidates for the US presidency, this would be a cause for condemnation. In our field, the fact that the sugar industry is funding scientific research into sugar and health is a scandal that is now rightly being exposed (2). It is necessary, though insufficient, that writers and presenters are required to declare competing or conflicting interests. It is part of our job to know who pays the piper. More specifically, any feeling that it might be improper to enquire about ‘philanthropic’ funding I suggest stems from the idea that people who ‘give away’ their money are above and beyond scrutiny (3). [Ed; We agree with these points].

Who Bill Gates is

Bill Gates on Time, as a magnate in 1995, 1997 and 1999, and as a philanthropist in 2008. Far more powerful now, he has the same personality, mind-set and world-view now as he did then

Now for the second criticism. It is right to single out Bill Gates, because in our world – indeed, in the whole world – he is the pre-eminent philanthrocapitalist. Time magazine has celebrated the ‘American way’ ever since its foundation in the 1920s, and has glorified Bill Gates for 30 years. The caption of the 2008 cover of Time on the right says: ‘A new creative capitalism can make the world better for all’.

He also has his own beliefs and style. He is not enigmatic or secretive. He can be surprisingly revealing. For example, the Time interview with him in 1997 (second from the left) has him responding to: ‘Isn’t there something special, perhaps even divine, about the human soul?’ And: ‘His face suddenly becomes expressionless, his… voice turns toneless, and he folds his arms across his belly and vigorously rocks back and forth in a mannerism that has become so mimicked at Microsoft that a meeting there can resemble a round table of ecstatic rabbis.’ And: ‘I don’t have any evidence on that’, he answers. ‘I don’t have any evidence of that’. And then ‘Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.’ He is a material person. This is the kind of answer that could be expected from a software engineer, which is how Bill Gates started out.

The other two Time cover features, from 1995 and 1999 (left and next to right), profile him as a relentless and ruthless businessman. ‘Master of the universe’ , the headline on the earlier cover, was prescient. It is on record that in business Bill Gates consistently tended to react with contempt and derision when anybody expressed views that were different from his, intimidating his colleagues at Microsoft, and bamboozling US judicial investigations into Microsoft’s monopoly on software operating systems. This is of course a common trait of entrepreneurs who climb over technical and human obstacles on their way to the top of the money and power tree.

With Steve Jobs, and very many other electronics people much less rich or famous, Bill Gates has transformed the way we are in the world. For those with access to electronic communication, Marshall McLuhan’s vision of the global village has come into being. But does this make Bill Gates a fit person to control the world’s leading foundation whose mission is to protect and improve world health?

Bill calls the shots

Four more Bill Gates covers, three with Melinda Gates, and two with Warren Buffett, published (left to right) in 2002, 2007, and 2010; and Bill by himself up there with heads of state in 2011

Bill Gates has personal direct command of more money than anybody else in the world. For 30 years he has also been exceedingly powerful and famous, first featuring on the cover of Time magazine in 1984 (pictured below) and at least 10 times in all. The covers of other magazines shown above, seek to explain the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (2002); explain his plans to transform Africa and China (2007 and 2010); and position his place in the world as estimated by a leading US money and power journal (2011). Foreign Policy magazine has made him with Warren Buffett the number 1 ‘global thinker’ for ‘preaching a breathtaking new gospel of how capitalist riches can solve the world’s problems… as the world’s states falter’ (4).

Foundations named after tycoons like Ford and Rockefeller are directed by executives who are usually not family members, as is the recently founded Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. By contrast, its website states that the Gates Foundation is ‘driven by the interests and passions of the Gates family’. This first means Bill Gates. He is aged 55, with a personal wealth estimated by the Bloomberg Rich List in 2013 at $US 72.7 billion. In 2013 Forbes magazine made him the world’s number 6 most powerful person, below the presidents of Russia and the US, the leader of China, Pope Francis I, and the prime minister of Germany; way above fellow US philanthropist Michael Bloomberg (29), UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon (32), Bill Clinton (43), and WHO director-general Margaret Chan (59). His wife Melinda is aged 49. She previously worked as a Microsoft general manager. In 2013 she was identified as the world’s number 3 most powerful woman; below the presidents of Germany and Brazil, and above Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Bill’s father William, who is 88, is co-chair with Bill and Melinda of the Foundation.
The Foundation trustees are Bill and Melinda. Its 15 directors include 12 non-family members including fellow multi-billionaire and Bill Gates friend Warren Buffett, of whom 9 are from the US, 2 are South African and 1 is an Irish national. There is nobody from a ‘recipient country’. With all due respect to Bill Gates’s father, friends, fellow-directors and advisors, there are two people who are fully hands-on in charge of Gates Foundation principles, policies, strategies and actions. This is well-known to all who experience how the Foundation is directed. These are Bill and Melinda Gates.

Gates does not give money away

Four more Times covers, the first one 30 years ago in 1984; next are 1996, 1998 and 2010. In 2014 Bill Gates is still the chairman of Microsoft as well as masterminding the Gates Foundation
The Gates Foundation has done good work. I do not believe it was set up as a tax dodge, though it is surprising that the US authorities permit such a huge initiative to be controlled by the benefactor who is also the beneficiary from shareholdings, with his wife and father. Also Bill Gates is no doubt sincere, and there is nothing wrong in enjoying oneself while undertaking good works.

But the Gates Foundation does not, as most people think, ‘give away money’, in any normal sense of this term. It holds tightly on to control of its funds, in ways that in reality make many of those who receive Gates grants, its employees and servants. It specifies its areas of interest, as charities normally do. But also, Gates fairly rigidly operates a ‘we will fix it’, money-driven policy, which can work well with projects such as vaccination against viral diseases and nutrient supplementation. Those in need may well take the money whether or not they agree with the policies, which can bewilder, stupefy and demoralise locally-based professionals with permanent primary health care responsibilities. Such silver-bullet top-down policies and programmes also distract attention and drain resources from necessarily complex public health programmes, or else simplify them so that they lose most meaning and purpose.

Most public health and nutrition concerns are necessarily complex. Examples include alleviation of food insecurity and the sustained protection and improvement of nutritional status especially of populations in Asia, Africa and other less-resourced parts of the world rendered vulnerable and impoverished by old and new forms of colonialism and odious political and economic policies. Gates is surely impeding public health nutrition, certainly in all ways that empower the people most affected and that are genuinely sustainable.

Gates Foundation dictation of policy and practice increasingly distorts programmes worked out within UN and other agencies and organisations and may even overturn them. To a man whose career and success has told him that he is always right, that anybody with differing views is always wrong, and that anybody with opposing views must be trampled, this would not matter. The rest of us see Bill and Melinda Gates attempting, with considerable success, to dictate world health policy and practice.
This is done using the style that Bill Gates used to dominate the software business, in any area that interests them or that makes them feel passionate, at the invitation and with the connivance of elected politicians and of accountable public servants.

The more money that Gates puts into UN projects and programmes influenced or controlled by Foundation executives, the greater the number of public servants who become disillusioned, disgusted or demoralised, and who in effect work for Gates while remaining in their posts, or else who leave the UN. Also, the greater is the tendency for UN member states to reduce their contributions to the affected UN agencies and dilute their interest in the UN process, on the grounds that ‘we can leave it to Gates’. This suits the US and supportive UN member states, because the interests and passions of the Gates family are much the same as those of the US government as evident for examples in the policies and programmes of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The main difference is that in its approaches and actions, the Gates Foundation is less careful and more aggressive than any accountable organisation could be. The charge against the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is that it has become a monstrous creation in our midst.

Transnational charity

Bill Gates giving his deposition and testifying in 1998 at the US judicial hearing on Microsoft monopolistic practices, at left. At right, he is in full flow at a meeting held to plan saving the world
As I said in the previous issue of WN, the Gates Foundation’s very large holdings of shares in Coca-Cola and McDonalds (1,3) identify it as a multinational corporation, albeit run not for profit, which to me aptly puts it in the category of Big Food. Most people agree, some with regret, that the world needs philanthropy and charity. But are justice, equity, human rights and world health served by philanthrocapitalism as practiced by the Gates Foundation? This is a whole different question.
There are also concerns about Big Bill himself, as any Gates watcher may tell you. On the left above, he is seen during the judicial hearings on Microsoft’s alleged determination to monopolise software and even the internet itself. His demeanour as he looks away while declaring his testimony, drinking from a can (hard to tell but it looks like Coke™), and generally acting the boor, says a lot about his character. He is older and wiser now, but when he gets going in addresses to the World Health Organisation, the World Economic Forum and other venues, he has, as seen, right, a tendency to make strange arm gestures. Perhaps he should go easy on the Coke™ .
References
1Schuftan C. The Gates Foundation. Big Bill and Big Food. [Feedback]. World Nutrition January 2014, 5, 1, 87-91. Access pdf here
2Bes-Rastrollo M, Schulze M, Ruiz-Canela M, Martinez-Gonzalez M. Financial conflicts of interest and reporting bias regarding the association between sugar-sweetened beverages and weight gain. a systematic review of systematic reviews. PLoS Medicine 31 December 2013, 10(12). Access pdf here
3Stuckler D. Basu S, McKee M. Global health philanthropy and institutional
relationships. PLoS Medicine, April 2011. PLoS Med 8(4). Access pdf here.
4 Swift A. The leading global thinkers of 2011. Foreign Policy, 28 November 2011.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/11/28/the_fp_top_100_global_thinkers

Claudio Schuftan
Los Angeles, US
Email: cschuftan@phmovement.org

Schuftan C. The Gates Foundation. Big Bill and Big Food. More. [Feedback]. World Nutrition February 2014, 5, 2, xxx-xxx