Bill Gates on capitalism: 'Male baldness gets more funding than malaria'

Young_Chitlin
Young_Chitlin Members Posts: 23,852 ✭✭✭✭✭
By DAILY MAIL REPORTER

Billionaire Bill Gates criticized capitalism saying that it causes fundraising efforts to go to trivial issues that bother rich people a opposed to global health epidemics that are devastating the poor. The Microsoft founder was speaking at a conference about his latest philanthropic push to end malaria, saying that it gets slighted in terms of funding because the ones with the checkbooks are typically men in wealthy countries.

'The malaria vaccine in humanist terms is the biggest need. But it gets virtually no funding. But if you are working on male baldness or other things you get an order of magnitude more research funding because of the voice in the marketplace than something like malaria,' he said. Wired Magazine reported the comment from the Royal Academy of Engineering's Global Grand Challenges Summit.

'Our priorities are tilted by marketplace imperatives,' Gates explained. He said that the way to fix the disparity is to address this 'flaw in the pure capitalistic approach.'

The hypocrisy comes as Gates- who has long earned his title of the richest man in America- chose to take aim at the financial system that lead to his success. To date, Gates is worth $67billion, and has dedicated the majority of his time since handing over day-to-day Microsoft operations in 2008 to the philanthropic foundation he runs with his wife Melinda.

His isn't the first billionaire to bash the ladder that they climbed up either. The Huffington Post points out that ? magnate Richard Branson, filmmaker George Lucas and financial planners Warren Buffett and George Soros have all faulted the capitalist system for inequality.

Comments

  • rantanamo
    rantanamo Members Posts: 79 ✭✭
    We studied this very phenomena in grad school with lots of specific numbers. I think most people don't think about stuff like this daily because we are brain washed and distracted by material goods and our jobs as well as having been brainwashed to believe that the hyper capitalist is justified in nonsense like this because it makes money and provides jobs to a few.
  • MzKB
    MzKB Members Posts: 3,366 ✭✭✭✭✭
    People invest in what directly affects them. If malaria is not something that is not near and dear to their heart then it gets no attention. Most people are about self and their immediate circle of people. Unless they have been exposed to new things or have the willingness to explore outside of their box contributions towards malaria and other diseases will be little to none.
  • cobbland
    cobbland Members Posts: 3,768 ✭✭✭✭✭
    A billionaire who benefited from the very practices he decries now?

    I'm supposed to believe a person who's father was in charge of Planned Parenthood (Bill's own admission), now has good intentions when it comes to Africa as a whole, when history has repeatedly shown everyone (who's eyes are open) otherwise? All of them ? are evil.
    MOYERS: But did you come to reproductive issues as an intellectual, philosophical pursuit? Or was there something that happened? Did come up on… was there a revelation?

    GATES: When I was growing up, my parents were almost involved in various volunteer things. My dad was head of Planned Parenthood. And it was very controversial to be involved with that. And so it's fascinating. At the dinner table my parents are very good at sharing the things that they were doing. And almost treating us like adults, talking about that.

    My mom was on the United Way group that decides how to allocate the money and looks at all the different charities and makes the very hard decisions about where that pool of funds is going to go. So I always knew there was something about really educating people and giving them choices in terms of family size.

    http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_gates.html

    Bill Gates: Killing Africans For Profit & Mr. Bush's Bogus Aids Offer

    By Greg Palast

    Monday July 14, 2003: Bring back Jayson Blair! The New York Times has eliminated the scourge of plagiarized journalism by eliminating journalism altogether from its front page.
    Check this Sunday's edition: "Bill Gates is no ordinary philanthropist," gushes a Times reporter named Stephanie Strom, re-writing one of the digital diva's self-loving press releases. Gates has saved 100,000 lives by providing vaccines to Africans, gushes Stephanie, according to someone on the payroll of . Bill Gates. And he's making drugs for Africans, especially for AIDS victims, "cheaper and easier." Stephanie knows because she asked Bill Gates himself!

    Then we get to the real point of this journalistic Lewinsky: "Those who think of Mr. Gates as a ruthless billionaire monopolist . may find it hard to reconcile that image with one of a humorously self-deprecating philanthropist."

    Actually, that's not hard at all.

    Stephanie, let me let you in on a little secret about Bill and Melinda Gates so-called "Foundation." Gate's demi-trillionaire status is based on a nasty little monopoly-protecting trade treaty called "TRIPS" - the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights rules of the World Trade Organization. TRIPS gives Gates a hammerlock on computer operating systems worldwide, legally granting him a monopoly that the Robber Barons of yore could only dream of. But TRIPS, the rule which helps Gates rule, also bars African governments from buying AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis medicine at cheap market prices.

    Example: in June 2000, at the urging of Big Pharma, Bill Clinton threatened trade sanctions against Argentina for that nation's daring to offer low-cost drugs to Southern Africa.

    Gates knows ? well that the "intellectual property rights" laws such as TRIPS - which keep him and Melinda richer than Saddam and the Mafia combined -- are under attack by Nelson Mandela and front-line doctors trying to get cheap drugs to the 23 million Africans sick with the AIDS virus. Gate's brilliant and self-serving solution: he's spending an itsy-bitsy part of his monopoly profits (the $6 billion spent by Gates' foundation is less than 2% of his net worth) to buy some drugs for a fraction of the dying. The bully billionaire's "philanthropic" organization is currently working paw-in-claw with the big pharmaceutical companies in support of the blockade on cheap drug shipments.

    Gates' game is given away by the fact that his Foundation has invested $200 million in the very drug companies stopping the shipment of low-cost AIDS drugs to Africa.

    Gates says his plan is to reach one million people with medicine by the end of the decade. Another way to read it: he's locking in a trade system that will block the delivery of cheap medicine to over 20 million.

    The computer magnate's scheme has a powerful ally. "The president could have been reading from a script prepared by Mr. Gates," enthuses the Times' cub reporter, referring to Mr. Bush's AIDS plan offered up this week to skeptical Africans. The US press does not understand why Africans don't jump for Bush's generous offer. None note that the money held out to the continent's desperate nations has strings attached or, more accurately, chains and manacles. The billions offered are mostly loans at full interest which may be used only to buy patent drugs at a price several times that available from other nations. What Africans want, an end to the devastating tyranny of TRIPS and other trade rules, is dismissed by the Liberator of Baghdad.

    We are all serfs on Microsoft's and Big Pharma's 'intellectual property.' If Gates' fake philanthropy eviscerates the movement to free Africans from the tyranny of TRIPS, then Bill and Melinda's donations could have the effect of killing more Africans than then even their PR agents claim they have saved. And for our own Republic, we can only hope that when the bully-boy billionaire injects his next wad of loot into the Bush political campaign, he uses a condom.

    Greg Palast is author of the New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Subscribe to his writings for Britain's Observer and Guardian newspapers, and view his investigative reports for BBC Television's Newsnight, at www.GregPalast.com.

    http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4103.htm

    "Although Bill Gates might try to say that the Foundation is not linked to his business, all it proves is the opposite: most of their donations end up favoring the commercial investments of the tycoon, not really "donating" anything, but instead of paying taxes to state coffers, he invests his profits in where it is favorable to him economically, including propaganda from their supposed good intentions," wrote Silvia Ribeiro in the Mexican news source La Jornada back in 2010.

    "On the contrary, their 'donations' finance projects as destructive as geoengineering or replacement of natural community medicines for high-tech patented medicines in the poorest areas of the world ... Gates is also engaged in trying to destroy rural farming worldwide, mainly through the 'Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa' (AGRA). It works as a Trojan horse to deprive poor African farmers of their traditional seeds, replacing them with the seeds of their companies first, finally by genetically modified (GM)."

    Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/035105_Bill_Gates_Monsanto_eugenics.html#ixzz2NjlWToB7

    Drugs firm blocks cheap blindness cure

    Company will only seek licence for medicine that costs 100 times more


    Sarah Boseley, health editor
    The Guardian, Friday 16 June 2006

    A major drug company is blocking access to a medicine that is cheaply and effectively saving thousands of people from going blind because it wants to launch a more expensive product on the market.

    Ophthalmologists around the world, on their own initiative, are injecting tiny quantities of a colon cancer drug called Avastin into the eyes of patients with wet macular degeneration, a common condition of older age that can lead to severely impaired eyesight and blindness. They report remarkable success at very low cost because one phial can be split and used for dozens of patients.

    But Genentech, the company that invented Avastin, does not want it used in this way. Instead it is applying to license a fragment of Avastin, called Lucentis, which is packaged in the tiny quantities suitable for eyes at a higher cost.
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2006/jun/17/health.medicineandhealth