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Bill Gates Investments
How the Gates Foundation’s Investments Are Undermining Its Own Good Works
Its vast holdings in the fossil fuel and arms industries subvert the foundation’s battle against disease and poverty.
By Charles Piller
https://www.thenation.com/article/how-gates-foundations-investments-are-undermining-its-own-good-works/
For all its generosity and thoughtfulness, the Gates Foundation’s management of its $40 billion endowment has been a puzzling ethical blind spot.
In 2007, with colleagues at the Los Angeles Times, I examined whether those investments tended generally to support the foundation’s philanthropic goals. Instead, we found that it reaped vast profits by placing billions of dollars in firms whose activities and products subverted the foundation’s good works.
For example, Gates donated $218 million to prevent polio and measles in places like the Niger Delta, yet invested $423 million in the oil companies whose delta pollution literally kills the children the foundation tries to help.
It had vast holdings in Big Pharma firms that priced AIDS drugs out of reach for desperate victims the foundation wanted to save. It benefited greatly from predatory lenders whose practices sparked the Great Recession and chocolate makers said by the US government to have supported child slavery in Ivory Coast.
After our investigations were published, the foundation briefly considered changing its policy of blind-eye investing, but ultimately pulled funds only from firms that provided the financial basis for genocide in Darfur.
Even in that case, when the glare of adverse publicity faded, the foundation hopped back into such companies, including the Chinese construction giant NORINCO International.
The Gates Foundation boasts about its grants to help poor farmers adapt to droughts and floods caused by global warming. Yet according to the foundation’s most recent tax filing and recent SEC filings, it holds more than $1.2 billion in a rogues’ gallery of corporate actors, including BP, Royal Dutch Shell and Exxon Mobil, whose environmental despoliation promotes the climate change that is destroying those farmers’ livelihoods.
Gates also has placed big bets on mining firms whose operations have proved environmentally disastrous for foundation beneficiaries in the developing world. This includes stakes in Brazil’s Vale S.A. and Rio Tinto—often cited for egregious pollution. Both companies, among others in the Gates portfolio, are jumping into the burgeoning market for rare earth elements essential to electronics, hybrid cars and windmills, yet they are notorious for laying to waste wide areas around mines and processing plants.
Desmond-Hellmann understands the Hippocratic imperative, “First, do no harm.” She could begin to push Bill and Melinda Gates to restructure the endowment by starting close to home. After the tobacco investment episode, she and her husband pledged to “monitor our portfolio to ensure that it reflect our values,” and barred investments in alcohol and firearms from their holdings.
Bill and Melinda Gates oppose tobacco use and the foundation has no such investments. But its stake in manufacturers of military equipment—including Caterpillar—weapons and alcoholic beverages exceeds $1.2 billion.
Bill Gates’ Portfolio
https://www.simplysafedividends.com/bill-gates-portfolio-dividend-stocks/
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