In Bill and Melinda Gates 2015 annual letter, they claimed “[t]he most dramatic problems caused by climate change are more than 15 years away, but the long-term threat is so serious that the world needs to move much more aggressively — right now — to develop energy sources that are cheaper, can deliver on demand, and emit zero carbon dioxide.” Yet, according to their 2014 Form 990, the foundation invests in close to a dozen major oil companies, including Hess, Conoco, Chevron/Texaco, Phillips, BP and Anadarko Petroleum. The latter two were involved in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The Gates Foundation also owns corporate bonds in the oil, natural gas and mining company Kerr-McGee (recently bought by Anadarko), which has a long-time record as an environmental polluter, has fought to undermine Navajo sovereignty and is well known for violating labor and human rights. Warren Buffett, who refers to himself and other venture philanthropists as the “great givers,” is also a major investor in the fossil fuel industry and the largest donor of the Gates Foundation.
The Gates Foundation also invests in numerous coal, mining and fracking companies. According to the human rights organization London Mining Network, one such company named Rio Tinto has distinguished itself with a decades long record of colluding with dictators, violating human and labor rights and “environmental devastation… around the world… [f]rom Papua New Guinea to Namibia, from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the U.S. to Madagascar, and from Cameroon to Indonesia.” Gates also invests in the Brazilian mining company Vale, of which in 2012 Public Eye awarded “the corporation with the most ‘contempt for the environment and human rights’ in the world.”
In response to growing calls for the Gates Foundation to divest from fossil fuel companies, Bill Gates has been dismissive of divestment, claiming that all that matters is what will happen with investments in clean energy, not current investments in dirty energy. To Bill Gates, apparently the future of “clean” and “sustainable” energy lies in the nuclear power industry, which is why he is the “chairman of the board” of the nuclear reactor company TerraPower.
The Gates Foundation states on their K-12 Education webpage, “We have a passion for America’s public schools—a hunger to make each one of them excellent for every student… public schools are the best idea this country has had for giving every child an equal opportunity to succeed.” Yet, in the U.S. Gates is well known as the preeminent driver of the privatization and finalization of public education. In effect, Gates and other venture philanthropists have “pioneered” and “seeded” new education markets through direct funding and by shaping “education reform” policies. Privately managed charter schools are an essential component of this mission and epitomize the first stage development of impact investing. Having been properly “pioneered” by Gates and others over the past decade, a wider array of “eager” individual and institutional investors are well positioned to step in, as reported in the recent Inside Philanthropy article titled “Is Impact Investing About to Turbo-Charge the Charter School Movement?” The article goes on to report:
As the number of students in charter schools grows… charter building efforts funded by impact investors are growing along with the market. The reality is that with impact investing, the pace of development can be accelerated beyond what philanthropy has been able to provide for charters. The fact that so many donors from Wall Street back charters would also seem to bode well for efforts to find major private capital to scale such schools.
By design, charter schools serve as instrumental incubators for “innovative” digitized curriculum and systems of accountability. This school design is allowing impact investors to be the drivers of the education reform industry’s final mission: to fully dismantle public education by way of “anywhere, anytime learning” and “personalized” technologies. Correspondingly, the Gates Foundation K-12 Education page declares, “At the heart of learning is the bond between teacher and student.” The foundation’s response to this principled position consists of “Creating personalized learning experiences for students” to help “them to discover their interests and create a joy of learning.” Just a brief overview of “personalized learning” exposes the duplicitous nature of this claim and how its core data mining technologies serve as essential infrastructure that links schooling with the militarized surveillance apparatus that is the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence.
On a basic level, impact investments offer ever evolving financing opportunities to a wide range of nonprofit and commercial enterprises that have a social mission – or an agenda – that is tied to the power interests of global financialization. As Ekkehard Thümler from the Centre for Social Investment at Heidelberg University puts it:
… financialized philanthropy replicates the technical architecture of the financial sector so as to perform similar production tasks in similar ways. Although this transformation is still in its early stages and incomplete in important respects, it may ultimately result in the creation of a structural isomorphism that straddles the spheres of finance and philanthropy.
Private equity is considered to be the most profitable source of investment capital and is the most common asset class within impact investing. It entails the pooling of money from high-net-worth individual investors, charitable trusts and pension funds in order to acquire or buy out private and publicly traded companies for the purpose of restructuring their governance, financing and operations to increase the company’s liquid value so they can eventually sell (“flip”) it for considerable profits. The term “corporate raider” is attached to private equity and is notorious for leading to massive worker layoffs and reductions in pay and benefits, with one of the most notable being Mitt Romney’s firm Bain Capital; with former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick now running their impact investment fund.
According to The Conversation, the emerging social impact investment market is estimated to be worth $650 billion by the year 2020. To better facilitate its growth by connecting for-profit social enterprises with financial investors, a network of global social stock exchanges (SSX or SSE) are quickly being established. According to the Stanford Social Innovation Review, SSEs are:
… trading platforms listing only social businesses. Using SSEs, investors can buy shares in a social business just as investors focused solely on profit would do in the traditional stock market. An investor would come to a SSE to find a social business with a mission according to his or her preference. This is great news for all players in the industry (including governments, multilateral financing institutions, community organizations, development agencies, and social entrepreneurs.
Countries that currently have SSX’s include the UK (which trades on the ICAP Securities & Derivatives Exchange), Singapore, Brazil, Kenya, Canada, South Africa and the United States. The leading U.S. SSX is called “Mission Markets” and has the stated mission “to provide products and services that make it easier to use the power of the capital markets to create a better world” by “supporting a variety of social and environmental sectors, from empowering communities to conserving our natural resources and ecosystems.”
Generally, SSX’s serve as internet-based platforms that connect investors with social impact industries in sectors considered to be of high social value and not surprisingly infrastructural in nature. According to the “boutique” financial firm In3 Finance, in order to “address the world’s most pressing social and financial challenges” in sectors of “high social value,” the impact investment market provides capital to private enterprises that can most efficiently deliver Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) services, which most often include water, housing, healthcare, agriculture, energy, environmental, community development, financial services, and education.
Bottom of the Pyramid (bottom of the wealth pyramid) is a term associated with the “world economic pyramid,” which was popularized by C. K. Prahalad and Stuart L. Hart in an article and then book titled – without irony – The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. In their 2002 article, Prahalad and Hart called on western multinational corporations to expand their colonizing mission by looking “at globalization strategies” that offer “companies with the resources and persistence to compete at the bottom of the world economic pyramid” to reap “prospective rewards [that] include growth, profits, and incalculable contributions to humankind.” According to Prahalad and Hart, “Countries that still don’t have the modern infrastructure or products to meet basic human needs are an ideal testing ground for developing environmentally sustainable technologies and products for the entire world.” The pyramid became a popular instrument within the world of global finance in terms of mapping out marketing and investment strategies.
As Prahalad and Hart outline in the following chart, the world economic pyramid is composed of 75 to 100 million prosperous “Tier 1 consumers” composed of middle-class and wealthy people in “developed countries” and the few wealthy elites in the “developing world.” Tiers 2 and 3 – in the middle of the pyramid – are composed of 1,500- 1,750 million “poor consumers” in the “developed nations” as well as the middle-classes in “developing countries.” At the bottom of the pyramid in Tier 4 are the four billion poorest “consumers” whose “annual per capita income — based on purchasing power parity in U.S. dollars — is less than $1,500, the minimum considered necessary to sustain a decent life.” Over a billion “consumers” in Tier 4, “roughly one-sixth of humanity” live on less than $1 per day.
The world economic pyramid and its BoP model is becoming even more relevant as social impact investment markets flourish, because as the Financial Times simply points out, BoP “theory suggests that new business opportunities lie in designing and distributing goods and services for poor communities.” Inherently, the dehumanizing narrative attached to BoP frames the most dispossessed people as being untapped profit generators to be further exploited by the same opulent minority whose wealth and power was built – and depends – on their ongoing subjugation.
In the U.S., the global neoliberal project of the past half century has made significant strides in impoverishing record numbers of people through structural adjustment and austerity policies that center on disinvestment from public programs, services and infrastructure. In doing so, this has created the rationale to transfer traditional public sector responsibilities to venture philanthropists and financial investors who are now applying the BoP model to employ impact investment strategies throughout the country. Guided by the belief that “impact investing is a powerful model with the potential to build markets and drive change for the people who need it most” (Bill Gates), BoP investment strategies or “opportunities” in the U.S. are focusing on: healthcare, education, microfinance, housing, real estate, small business development, natural resources conservation, sustainable agriculture, water and sanitation and clean energy.
Social Impact Bonds (SIB) are one of the most popular instruments of the impact investment industry, which are, in essence. derivatives or swaps (bets). According to the Rockefeller Foundation, which has pioneered SIB’s:
Sitting at nexus of the Foundation’s work in scaling innovation and impact investing, social impact bonds (SIBs), like ‘pay-for-success’ projects, represent one component of the rapidly growing field of innovative finance, aimed at helping state and local governments fund critical social programs through a combination of government initiation, private investment, and non-profit implementation.
In sum, impact investing is promoted by neoliberal governments and their private sector partners through manipulative marketing storylines intended to convince us that elite financial investors are best positioned to mitigate long-standing social inequities. Never mind the fact that these social conditions are the generators of their wealth and power and result from the financial instruments they employ to allegedly “do good.” Thus, in the age of financialization and within the ever solidifying state-finance nexus, venture capitalists – through the veneer of their generous and public spirited foundations – are the benevolent titans of international development and the arbiters of public, civic and social life. More dramatically, these powerful dynamics enable billionaire foundations to hasten the process by which financial institutions serve as the overlords of all aspects of life on our planet.
Chronological History of Events Involving Tax Exempt Foundations
Report: Gates Foundation Sent Over $54 Million To China Since COVID, Including To Wuhan Collaborators
Jeff Bezos Donates $100 Million to Obama Foundation
15 Vials of Smallpox (variola) were Reportedly Found at Merck’s North Wales, PA Lab
200 Organizations Deliver Letter Asking Gates To Stop Funding ‘Failed’ AGRA Projects
The German Club of Clear Words Report: Exposes the network of individuals and organizations responsible for the COVID scam
Report: Private Foundations Directly Finance UN Experts to Write Reports that Align with their Agendas
IRS rejects tax-exempt status for Christian group over ties to Republican Party
Bill Gates-Funded Company Releases Genetically Modified Mosquitoes In US
Austrian Court Rules PCR Unsuited For COVID, Lockdowns Unlawful
