Jeanne D'Arc has a short post [1] linking to an article on Salon about Bill Gates' philanthropy [2]. "My Microsoft-hating son will never forgive me for saying this," she writes, "but I love Bill Gates." The Salon article discusses Gates' commitment to dispose of 95% of his massive $43 billion dollar personal wealth through charities involved in such issues as reproductive health and the treatment and prevention of infectious diseases in the Third World. According to Salon, whose story is based on an interview Gates recently gave Bill Moyers' "Now", Gates is a stand-up guy: "Gates may be a ruthless businessman, but he is giving away billions of his dollars in a dedicated effort to fight AIDS, develop vaccines for scores of deadly diseases, and improve educational and healthcare opportunities for millions of impoverished women and children. On the most important issue, Gates passes the test with flying colors."
It's not often I disagree with Jeanne d'Arc in any fundamental way, but in this case I definitely do. Like the robber barons of yore, Gates' philanthropy is a gesture--a huge gesture, of course, given how much money is involved, but a gesture nonetheless. Gates refuses to even address, let alone challenge, the political conditions in which poverty, disease, and poor pre- and neo-natal care are rooted--for instance, "He blandly ducks a pointed question from Moyers asking him to comment on the Bush administration's opposition to funding for reproductive health and family planning services worldwide." A commitment to change without considering the means by which real empowerment of the people affected by the status quo can be achieved isn't a great leap forward, it's a band-aid. Yes, Bill Gates' aid may help ease the suffering of thousands, even millions of impoverished people, but it does nothing to prevent or stem further suffering.
But that's not my real issue with Gates. The big problem is that Gates--through the "ruthless" business practices Salon notes but claims are "nothing compared to the right of a child in India or Uganda to live free of crippling disease" (and who could argue with the right of children to live free of disease?)--has amassed enough wealth (and the power that goes with it) to make these decisions for people all over the world. This is the philanthropic problem, that individuals--through the exploitation of workers (prison labor and temp workers, in Gates case), tax codes, consumers, the environment, etc.--become the conduit for basic necessities. History has shown that capitalists are very selective in their philanthropic programs, generally investing only in those areas that mesh most closely with the interests of capital. Around the turn of the 20th c., Rockefeller, Mellon, and Carnegie invested in universities and libraries, for instance, to help meet the emerging need for a well-educated, literate management class; a half-century later, the Rockefellers invested heavily in the promotion of Area Studies around the world, to supply the new American demand for accurate and organized knowledge for the attainment of Cold War objectives. Public health and hygiene, whether in the Third World or in the slums and ghettoes at home, have long been favored by capitalists--of course it looks great to donate to such causes, but it also helps to sustain an exploitable pool of labor. It probably doesn't hurt that the diseases of the poor have often managed to find their way into the homes of the rich--a risk that has only become greater with the rise of rapid cargo transportation that has made many of today's fortunes possible.
Of course, keeping people healthy and safe is a Good Thing, one which I can hardly object to. What I object to is allowing a limited number of people to decide what problems are important and how those problems should be addressed. Are Gates' personal concerns necessarily those of the world as a whole? What if he's incorrect, or if something goes wrong? What if the solutions he favors work fine in ex-Soviet Georgia but fail miserably in rural India?
This is not a question of expertise--I assume that Gates is smart enough to work through organizations that know what they're doing--but of selectivity and, ultimately, accountability. Gates is not funding a program to relieve suffering through state- and region-level political and economic reforms, he is funding a handful of issues that interest him. And, ultimately, if a program he has funded fails, he can say he gave it his best shot and it just didn't work. He's already consigned himself to the financial loss by deciding to give the money away. Nobody selected him as their representative, on health or any other issue. And nobody can "unselect" him--Gates has no reason to listen to even listen to the complaints of those people who feel his intervention in their lives is unwarranted (and it does happen, all the time--medicines are rejected, medical advice refused and even resented--notably by those who question, with good reason, the motivations of the foreigners dispensing their wares).
But from the viewpoint of those whose suffering he wishes to alleviate, it's not just a matter of resources ill-spent, it's a matter of resources that no longer exist to address their needs. Gates gets a clear conscience and a slightly more manageable bank statement, but the poor have to continue to suffer.
Ultimately, it is the practices of capitalists like Gates that need to change if the problems of poverty are going to be addressed in any meaningful way. Although in the Salon article Gates comes off as part of the solution to these problems, he and his ilk are part of the problem. Maybe the biggest part of the problem.
Jeanne d'Arc has written intelligently and even bravely on the Mother Theresa Redemption Racket, showing how Mother Theresa sold redemption to the worst sort of exploitive scum, over the long term underwriting and sustaining their actions. Gates' actions, while involving wealth an order of magnitude (maybe several orders of magnitude) greater, is more of the same--an investment of money earned through the exploitation of the poor in the handful of causes that matter most to him. I actually respect Gates a lot more than most of his colleagues at Augusta, for recognizing that all that money had better uses than lining his own pockets, but that doesn't change wrongness of a system in which (mostly) men who screw people over the most are rewarded by being able to make decisions that a) effect millions of people, and b) ultimately maintain the status quo.
(A bit of a disclaimer: I've worked for non-profits funded, in whole or in part, from the endowments of the very very rich, including Andrew Carnegie. While that may seem to contradict what I've written above, I don't think it does. There's nothing wrong in choosing to apply one's labour to whatever causes one feels drawn to, for whatever reason. I love that Jimmy Carter [3] works with Habitat for Humanity [4], and have no complaints that the time he gives to this organization is time he doesn't give to, say, the Red Cross or Greenpeace. What Gates' does is different--Gates takes the surplus wealth generated by other people's labour and applies it in the way he sees fit. The organizations I worked for were doing important things, I believe, and I was happy to be able to contribute to that--but I would not feel so happy if I had worked for an organization that, say, included one workday a week at the charity of my bosses' choice.)
LinktoComments('94074444')
Old Comments [5]