Billions can be a worrisome thing

When in January a Los Angeles Times reporter began researching the investment history of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the first places she consulted was the 990s filed in the databases of Guidestar.com, a website that provides access to these tax returns of the non-profits free of charge. The Gates Foundation’s 2004 990 (the most recent one available, all 94 Mb of it) runs to 2565 pages, so reading it must have been a chore and a half for the reporter. Once you’ve found the pages where the Foundation’s investments are listed (in detail, with monetary investment amounts provided with the name of each investment), there are nearly 100 pages of them (over 4000 investments), as might be expected of an organization with $32 billion to invest. But a good reporter is not afraid of research.

And what did the LA Times dig up? Some very tantalizing facts, worthy of publication and syndication, which is where the Seattle Times picked it up for its January 18, 2007 apologia, under the headline "Gates Foundation faces multibillion-dollar dilemma." I was naturally drawn to the article and read it avidly, thus quickly. Now, several weeks later, I have the leisure to think about what the world’s richest philanthropy is doing with all that dough, and I discover that some of it is invested in some of the very companies whose exploitative and destructive operations are exacerbating the very problems the Gates Foundation is trying to eradicate, namely malaria, polio and AIDS. Shocking indeed, and juicy. Nothing like showing the giant’s feet of clay to get us proles salivating.

I am one to believe that the wealthiest, and supposedly most privileged among us must be held to a higher standard. After all, people like Bill Gates (if there are any others) are examples for youth, who because of him, aspire to great wealth through entrepreneurial struggle. There are chinks in the armor, of course – there always are. Here we have the drop-out rich kid propped up by his wealthy, powerful family until the crazy software-for-profit scheme gets legs. All of us should be so disadvantaged. But he has come a long way, and now he is an example for us all, except for this thing about the hundreds of millions he has invested in trashy companies. Of course his home town newspaper will not trash nor tarnish, so they make up the ususal excuse for bad behavior: everybody does it, so it’s okay. And more subtlely, who’s it hurting, anyway?

BP (British Peteroleum) is one among many oil companies that rape the earth and reap enormous profits for stock holders. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is only one among their thousands of stockholders, among them Greenpeace. Of course, Greenpeace does not buy BP stock by the armload, but by the pinch with nose closed, in order to get in the door of the stockholders meetings where the really mean stuff happens. One would register surprise if the Gates people showed enough interest in this confab to ask Expedia about the cost of a roundtrip.
Be calm, everyone “ so far the foundation has managed its investments separately from its grant programs. It invests in a diversified portfolio for a steady return, and then uses the profits toward greater social goals,” simpers Seattle Times reporter Kristi Heim. Of course the grant programs are managed separately! Of course they aren’t commingled with the investments. They’re separate offices on separate floors. These people hardly speak!

How dare you!!!

The long and short of Heims’ piece is that the Gates Foundation is doing what almost everybody does: they’re investing their wealth where it does the most good – for them. Forget the environment or third world health, where are the profits, dammit?! If they were going to inspect their investments with an eye toward eliminating the most egregious offenders of Gates Foundation’s Goals and Objectives, which they’re are not, then they would have to work really, really hard to get the job done. And there is simply not time nor money nor staff enough to do it. So, in short, the answer to the Los Angeles Times is a huffy: “You don’t get it, do you? We’re the GATES Foundation. Dammit.”

But the hometown apologia newspaper says that COO Cheryl Scott promised to review the foundations investments, although they were not planning to meet the challenges head on by actually doing anything. They, no doubt, will rely on the sacrosanct factor and the how-dare-you reaction to kick in and make this silly business go away.

Not so fast. On closer inspection anyone familiar with foundations will find a familiar pattern. Any of them worth over 10 million is heavily diversified, meaning they don’t know where their money is invested because it is handled by a money manager whose job it is to maximize the return on the investment. I’m sure the Gates Foundation has a battalion of such people to manage its billions and to assure that the bank account grows. So that is what is at the root of this ostensibly evil regime: a legitimate need to see the money safe and growing for the benefit of the world, with an unfortunately blurred if not blind eye toward how exactly it’s done.

Now that the world’s attention has been called to the issue, the Gates Foundation vows to revamp its investment strategy to eliminate any awful disease-carrying, planet-raping enterprises among its stock buys. Good luck to them. With so many profitable grass-roots organizations around, how will they ever decide? What price political correctness?