Blogindlæg af Lars Muhl fra d. 31. marts 2021
Uddrag fra bogen ‘Oneness vs The 1% – Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom’ af menneskerettighedsforkæmperen og videnskabskvinden Vandana Shiva fra Indien. Bogen udkom i 2019 og fik superanmeldelser, blandt andet af The Guardian.
Alt, hvad der fremlægges i bogen, er understøttet af et omfattende kilderegister.
”Bill Gates is considered exceptional because of his Foundation, which, according to Forbes, is
the richest funder in the world, with assets worth $43.5 billion and disproportionate influence
on economic, agriculture and health policies, worldwide.
Through his model of philanthro-capitalism, Gates is, in fact, using his unaccountable money
power to bypass democratic structures of society, detail the diversity of alternatives available
and impose his totalitarian ideas based on One Science, One Agriculture, One History, to shape
the future according to his vision. Yet it is precisely through this so-called philanthropy that
Gates is carving out new colonies. The Financial Times writes: ’through the stroke of his pen
on his cheque book, Gates probably now has the power to affect the lives and wellbeing of a
larger number of his fellow humans than any other private individual in history.’ Gates is the
Pope, king, queen and merchant adventurer, all in one. His decrees are shaping every field _
health, education, agriculture, economy and finance. The fundamentalist faith he is imposing
is the worship of the tools he owns through patents.
”On a planet with 300 million species and seven billion humans, one man determining the
future of the earth and humanity is a dangerous idea. It is dangerous for the earth because the
anthropocentric, reductionist, and mechanistic assumptions by which Gates is guided are at
the root of the ecological crisis that has brought us to the brink. It is dangerous for society
because it discounts the contributions of women, indigenous people and small farmers to
knowledge systems and food systems. It is dangerous for the economy because it is blind to
the diversity of economies that sustains people’s lives, and allows them to take care of the
earth and of each other. It defines the economy of the 1% as the only economy, thus implying
the economic exclusion of the 99%. It is dangerous for democracy because people should be
involved in making the decisions that shape their lives and their futures. One rich man
deciding what we will learn, and what we will think is a dictatorship, not a democracy.
The Global Justice Now report cited earlier argues that what the BMGF (Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation) is doing could end up exacerbating global inequality and entrenching corporate
power. Not only is the Gates Foundation profiting from numerous investments in a series of
cotroversial companies which contribute to economic and social injustice, it is also actively
supporting many of those companies, including Dupont and Bayer, through a varity of procorporate initiatives around the world.
”The BMGF funds projects in which agriculture and pharmaceutical corporations are among
the leading beneficiaries, and often invests in the very same companies it is funding. As per
report in the Guardian, the BMGF has investments in coal giants, Anglo American, BHP Biliton, Glencore Xstrata and Peabody Energy, and in oil majors Shell, Conoco Phillips, Chevron, Total Petrobras, BP and Anadarko Petroleum. In June 2015, Gates had announced that the world invest $2 billion in renewable-energy projects. However, in October 2015 he said that the fossil-fuel divestment is a ’false solution’, and, at the same time, accused enviromentalists of making misleading claims about the price of solar power.
The Foundation invests in agri-business companies Archer Daniels Midland, Kraft, Mondelez
International, Monsanto, Nestlé and Unilever. Chemical and pharmaceutical corporations with
Gates investments include BASF, Dow Chemicals, Glaxo-SmithKline, Novartis and Pfizer, and
beverage companies Coca-Cola, Diageo, Pepsico and SABMiller also receive investments from
the BMGF. In 2014, Gates had $538 million worth of shares in Coca-Cola. In addition, the
BMGF uses its grants to encourage local comunites to partner with Coca-Cola as business
affiliates.
As of the end of 2014, the Foundation had investments worth $852 million in the construction
company Caterpillar, which has long been accused of complicity in human rights abuses in the
Palestinian Occupied Territories. BAE Systems, the UK’s largest arms exporter, is another
investee. The Foundation had shares in McDonald’s until December 2014, and still hold shares
in Arcos Dorados – Latin America’s largest quick service chain and the largest McDonald’s
franchisee in the world, which operates the latter’s 2,602 restaurants.
”Philanthro-capitalism
The Gates model of philantrho-capitalism has little to do with charity and giving and more to
do with profits, control and grabbing. It is in fact, an economic model of investment and a
political model of control, silencing and erasing diversity, democracy and alternatives. New
markets and new monopolies are carved out through dominance via aid.
At the 64th World Health Assembly in Genova on 16 May 2011, Gates admitted that the
Foundation funds research in vaccines and subsequently takes out patents on them. He said,
’In terms of IP (Intellectual Property), what we do is actually quite simple. We fund research
and we actually, ourselves or our partners, create intellectual property so that anything that is
invented with our Foundation money that goes to richer countries, we’ve actually getting a
return on that money.’
”The Global Justice Now report warns:
’Gated Developments demonstrates that the trend to involve business in addressing poverty and inequality is central to the priorities and funding of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. We argue that this a far from neutral charitable strategy but instead an ideological commitment to promote neoliberal economic policies and corporate globalisation. Big business is directly benefiting, in particular in the fields og agriculture and health, as a result of the Foundation’s activities, despite evidence to show that business solutions are not the most effective.
Perhaps what is most striking about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is that, despite the aggressive
corporate strategy and extraordinary influence across governments, academics and the media, there is an
absence of critical voices. Global Justice Now is concerned that the Foundation’s influence is so pervasive
that many actors in international development, which would otherwise critique the policy and practice of the Foundation, are unale to speak out independently as a result of its funding and patronage.”
”Gated Developments further reports:
”A major problem with the focus on technology is that the BMGF, along with other philantropic foundations, is reshaping aid policy further away from prioritising rights and justice towards a tecnocratic ’authoritarian development’. For example, Bill Gates, in his 2015 annual letter, stated that the next 15 years will see major breakthroughs in poor countries which ’will be driven by innovation in technology ranging from new vaccines and hardier crops to much cheaper smartphones and tablets – and by innovations that help deliver those things to more people.’”
”Bill Gates specially set up the Cornell Alliance for Science to promote failed biotechnology by
erasing the scientific evidence on the ground of failure of GMO’s, and substituting it with
propaganda pieces to attack local farmers, jounalists and scientists as ’anti-science’.
To prevent real science and the reality of GMO failures from reaching the world, he finances a
PR institute that masquerades as a scientific institution. Originally endowed with $5.6 million
by the Gates Foundation in August 2014, the cornell Alliance for Science received ’a renewed
contribution’ of $6.4 million in 2017. The new grant takes the total Gates contribution to $12
million.
Cornell uses Mark Lynas, a one-time vociferous opposer of GMO’s, to fly into different
countries to falsify the GMO story. Journalist and author Lynas is new at the Cornell Alliance
for Science and is sent to the deficient parts of the world to marginalise people’s voices and
put out the biotech industry’s propaganda. When the Bt brinjal failed in Bangladesh, he was
sent to drown the local news of failure through a planted story in the New York Times. When
peasants disrupted the GMO Golden Rice trials in the Phillipines, he was sent to muzzle the
farmers’ perspective and voices on GMOs.
”While talking ’innovation’ Gates has engaged in piracy, from software to seeds. The
Foundation is making more money than it spends.
”The manipulation of productivity and output data to suit the false narrative of ’feeding the
world with chemicals and GMOs’ has led to violence against the planet, with 75% of water
systems destroyed, 75% of soil desertified and degraded, 93% of plant biodiversity lost, the
biodiversity of pollinators threatened, and 40% of contributions to climate change. And this
industrial system only provides 30% of the food we eat. If the proportion of industrial
agriculture in our food system were to increase, we would soon have a dead planet. And no
food.
”While presenting himself as a philanthropist who gives away his money, Gates has a personal
investment company, Cascade Investment LLC, funded solely by himself and run by Michael
Larson, one of the most powerful men in US wealth management. Gates now has vast holdings
in real-estate and non-tech companies, like the Canadian National Railway Co; AutoNation Inc,
an American automotiver etailer; and Republic Services Inc, a waste-management company.
While he has been central to the establishment of the new civilising mission of technology as a
religion, Gates did not himself invent anything. Microsofts initial programming language was
based on BASIC (an acronym for Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), designed
in 1964 by John G. Kemeney and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire to
make it easy for non-science, non-math students to use computers. Gates made billions
through patent monopolies, by enclosing the commons of software.
Gates is now using his economic power to expand his patent to the living world, to enclose the
biological and knowledge commons through patenting and biopiracy.
”Information technology are integrating in a new ’green’ gold rush, with Bill Gates and
Monsanto in the lead. IT is being used to ’mine’ genetic data and claim patents on plants that
neither Gates nor Monsanto created, and about which they have no knowledge – they only
have ’data’.
”Through Monsantos internal papers it was revealed that Monsanto runs an international
programme, Let Nothing Go, which employs an army of internet trolls besides scientists and
journalists. It has now been revealed how the company mounted a smear campaign against
Gilles-Eric Séralini, the French scientist who published a goundbreaking study showing an
increase in tumours among rats fed genetically modified corn and Monsantos herbicide weed
killer.
In a courtcase against Monsanto, the lawyer Brent Wisner, who represented the cancer
victims, said of the Monsanto Papers:
”This is a look behind the curtain. These show hat Monsanto has deliberately been stopping studies that look bad for them, ghostwriting literature and engaging in a whole host of corporate malfeasance. Monsanto have been telling everybody that these products are safe because that Monsanto has been in bed with US regulators while misleading European regulators.”
”Monsanto’s influence on scientists and regulators has become a global problem. Independent
scientists and journalists have been systematically attacked to maintain the false propaganda
that GMO are the miracle panacea to feed the world and that GMO, as an invention, justify
patent monopolies.”