Erris's Journal: Investigating Gates Charity.

Corpwatch looks into the effectiveness of Gates charity works and illustrates the dangers of amoral investment.

In a contradiction between its grants and its endowment holdings, a Times investigation has found, the foundation reaps vast financial gains every year from investments that contravene its good works. ... The Gates Foundation has poured $218 million into polio and measles immunization and research worldwide, including in the Niger Delta. At the same time that the foundation is funding inoculations to protect health, The Times found, it has invested $423 million in Eni, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and Total of France â the companies responsible for most of the flares blanketing the delta with pollution, beyond anything permitted in the United States or Europe. ... local leaders blame oil development for fostering some of the very afflictions that the foundation combats.

Like most philanthropies, the Gates Foundation gives away at least 5% of its worth every year, to avoid paying most taxes. ... It invests the other 95% of its worth. ... at least $8.7 billion, or 41% of its assets, not including U.S. and foreign government securities, have been in companies that countered the foundation's charitable goals or socially concerned philosophy. At the Gates Foundation, blind-eye investing has been enforced by a firewall it has erected between its grant-making side and its investing side. The goals of the former are not allowed to interfere with the investments of the latter.

The article also mentions the pharmaceutical IP controversy and shows how the Gates foundation would punish IP violators before providing medicine to AIDS patients.

the foundation holds its grant recipients to a far higher standard than the drug companies on which it bets large portions of its endowment. Its grant form says it expects recipients "to exercise their intellectual property rights in a manner consistent with the stated goals of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to promote the "availability of inventions for public benefit in developing countries at reasonable cost."

What you buy and promote today is what you have tomorrow. Gates could use his influence better, to say the least. Other charities that pick and choose more carefully are cited as models.