How Bill Gates gives away other people's money
Bill Gates Has Perfected Managerial Philanthropy
This is quite a spectacular article documenting how Bill Gates directs the traffic of global Western do-gooding. You wonder if any do-badding ever gets tangled up in all that power projection!
From 2014 through 2019, the Gates Foundation earned around $28.5 billion in investment income while giving away $23.5 billion in grants —a net profit. Despite giving away over $50 billion since his foundation’s inception, Gates’s personal fortune has grown from $39 billion in 1997 to around $107 billion today.
But the Gates Foundation remains in a class of its own. Today, it has more than double the endowment of the Big Three combined. … A primary emphasis of the Gates Foundation has become to organize and direct the spending of political elites both in the United States and abroad. Instead of merely giving away his own money as philanthropists in the past have done, Gates has uncovered a way to give away other people’s money. …
An example of this organizing approach is Gavi, a non-profit Bill Gates founded in 2000 that provides vaccines to poor countries. The Gates Foundation provided $4 billion in total to Gavi, including $750 million to get the group off the ground. Gates used this funding commitment to attract the involvement of many of the international institutions that were fostered by the Big Three, such as the World Bank and the WHO. With this backing in tow, Gavi was able to secure $16 billion in funding for the group from governments, including $2.2 billion from the U.S. Over the first 13 years of Gavi’s existence, it provided 440 million immunizations to the poor, which the WHO estimates prevented as many as six million deaths. The priority to provide global health and vaccination interventions was already well-established, but the Gates Foundation provided the crucial organization to achieve results.
The Gates Foundation took a similar approach when it helped start the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. The Fund raised $49 billion from governments, including $18 billion from the U.S., with the Gates Foundation pitching in less than $3 billion.
Gates can play this role as an organizing force in the global health system partly because he is the second-largest donor to the WHO, providing over 10 percent of the organization’s annual budget. This largesse has provided him with unprecedented influence over the WHO. Gates’s funding is tied to his Foundation’s agenda, allowing it to direct global health priorities. For example, polio eradication is by far the WHO’s best-funded program because Gates’s funding was earmarked for the cause.
When people think of buying influence, they generally think of wealthy people paying for lobbyists and giving money to politicians. Gates himself has been an avid political donor, giving millions of dollars to Democratic candidates for Congress. In 2019, he launched the Gates Policy Initiative, headed by a former senior Obama White House official.
But Gates’s largest political donations do not go to candidates themselves. For example, the Gates Foundation donated $456 million to Arabella Advisors, founded by Eric Kessler, a former Clinton White House official. Arabella is a “dark money” group—it spends money to influence elections, but the source of its money is not disclosed to the public. The group raised $1.6 billion in 2021 and spends its money on groups aligned with Democratic Party leadership.
The goal of these kinds of donations is not just to influence elections, but also the appointments of cabinet heads and officials—those who ultimately determine policy. The U.S. political system has seen more power delegated to the executive branch each year, with the legislative branch increasingly becoming a junior partner. As a result, executive branch agencies can draft “model” regulations that federal agencies then implement—essentially, writing laws without formal legislation. Gates has placed himself in a valuable position: not only do his donations get people elected, but his foundation can even supply the officials on whom they rely to get policy through. Members of the Gates Foundation have become key members of the Department of Education. The head of the Department of Energy met with Gates within 24 hours of being confirmed by the Senate.
The fab new way to solve social problems: Pay people to yell at each other
Watch it in action here!
My Mum would have liked this painting
Mainly for the cows! She liked cows. Like Mum, they were calm, accepting and ostentatiously sane. Not like horses. Horses are beautiful, but they’re temperamental, both mentally — they’re jumpy — and physically. Like a yacht, if you don’t spend a lot of time looking after them, they founder. Mum preferred cows.
I miss my Mum.
I came upon this painting and, on investigating discovered its creator Kristin Headlam, a Melbourne painter of fearless range. Here is “Handover” the Hopperesque painting she did on seeing a photograph of the Howards passing the keys of the Lodge to the Rudds. And you can see oodles of fascinating paintings on the webpage of a gallery that represents her or on Google Images. (I’ve recently been using Bing, but Google images is better on this search.)
How identity politics ate labour politics
Freddie de Boer is a hold-out socialist and identity sceptical. But he’s part of a dwindling breed.
Current Affairs … was once a dissident, identity politics-skeptical publication. … They saw the price of doing business with identity-skepticism and got religion fast. So of course they fired employees over labor unrest; identity politics have no particular injunction to support people trying to organize in their workplace. Traditional socialist values do.
Of course, tension between identity politics and labor politics is centuries old, and the fight has been central in recent left history. But since left-of-Democrat politics has collapsed into a social culture rather than a political movement, the insistence that everyone must be on board with the identity-fixated program has gotten louder and louder. When you treat your political tendency like a cool party where people hang out, rather than as a vehicle to prompt change, you can’t tolerate anyone harshing the vibe. I have been an activist for my entire adult life and all of my political opinions are an expression of my peculiar form of Marxism, but since I’m identity-skeptical I must be called a conservative. There’s a kind of terror in the face of the idea of a within-coalition divide, these days. But the fundamental weaknesses of identity politics persist and cannot be dissolved by calling people bigots. My upcoming book is a record of the social movements of the past half-decade that is sympathetic to their goals but honest about their outcomes: they have all failed. And someday, the failures will pile up enough that people will be ready to try a new approach once again.
The locust plague: a report from the front
Dr. Samuel Johnson: Hustler, Savage, Grifter, Great
Justin Murphy:
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) is one of the greatest figures in the history of English letters.
I bet you didn't know he wrote a paid Substack.
For the most part, Johnson studied and wrote through a lifetime of poverty. He was a hypochondriac with nervous tics, who never enjoyed the support of a patron. …
While his family's financial situation grew dire, a wealthy neighbor helped him enroll at Oxford. There, Johnson's ragged appearance and financial struggles marked him out; he was reckless and uncontrollable, although his wit and knowledge earned him some leniency.
After leaving Oxford without a degree, Johnson struggled with poverty for about thirty years. He became an incurable hypochondriac, with odd behaviors and sudden outbursts. He attempted to publish poems, but the plan failed due to a lack of interest. Johnson's marriage forced him to work harder, but only three pupils enrolled in his academy over eighteen months. His nervous tics cost him job opportunities, and David Garrick later imitated him, amusing London's high society.
Approximately a year after Irene, Johnson began publishing essays on morals, manners, and literature, inspired by the success of the Tatler and Spectator. In March 1750, he launched The Rambler, which was initially praised by some eminent men. Prince Frederick's adviser arranged for copies to be sent to Leicester House, but Johnson did not seek further patronage from the elite. The Rambler was released every Tuesday and Saturday from March 1750 to March 1752.
Many people today think The Rambler was a "magazine," but that's somewhat misleading. It was much more like what we today would call a paid newsletter. First of all, magazines typically compile writing from many contributors; The Rambler was written almost exclusively by Johnson. It published a total of 208 essays covering moral, social, and philosophical issues. The Rambler had a circulation of about 500 copies per issue and earned Johnson about £2 per essay or about $400 in today's dollars. So that's about $800 per week or $3,200 a month. Including some extra sales from collecting the best essays into volumes, it seems he made about £420 total for the two-year project, or somewhere around $90k in today's dollars. In short, The Rambler was a moderately successful Substack.
Chess
Naturally, I try to keep chess to a minimum in these newsletters. But this is the most spectacular game I’ve seen in a while. And it’s by Simon Williams who is a very funny man. If you go to this video, you’ll see him being very funny in a cockney kind of way about French chess player Maxime Vachier-Lagrave.
