US billionaires club together - to give away half their fortunes to good causes

[jose v]

America's ultra-rich are queuing to join in a grand gesture of generosity. Forty US billionaires have signed up to pledge at least half of their fortunes to charity under a philanthropic campaign kicked off by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.

In an unprecedented mass commitment, top figures including New York's mayor Michael Bloomberg, the hotel heir Barron Hilton, CNN media mogul Ted Turner, and the Star Wars director George Lucas have lent their names to the "giving pledge", an initiative founded six weeks ago to encourage America's richest families to commit money to society's most pressing problems.

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Bill Gates and Warren Buffett share a good chuckle about the unfairness of it all

The pledge is not a legally binding contract but is described as a moral commitment. Inspired by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which pumps billions into fighting disease in developing countries, it does not prescribe any particular charitable causes but is a statement of principle. [...]

On the face of it, the sums involved are enormous. Among those committing to give away money are the Oracle business software tycoon Larry Ellison, whose fortune is estimated by Forbes magazine at $28bn, the banker David Rockefeller ($2.2bn), oilman Boone Pickens ($1.1bn) and private equity tycoon Pete Peterson ($2bn).

Also on the list are the media entrepreneur Barry Diller and fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, his wife. A former Citigroup banking boss, Sandy Weill, has signed up, as have fellow Wall Street names including David Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle private equity group. [...]

Some are sceptical of the way Gates and Buffett are creating a highly public philanthropic elite.

Pablo Eisenberg, a senior fellow at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, at Georgetown University, Washington DC, said ultra-wealthy donors tend to give money to higher education, arts and established healthcare causes, with relatively little going to poverty reduction, disability causes or to disadvantaged ethnic minority communities. Billionaires generally gave away funds through tax advantageous foundations.

"These mega-foundations, which are effectively family enterprises with no accountability, are going to dictate public policy priorities for this country," said Eisenberg. "I'm not sure that tax receipts haven't done a better job, over time, of meeting the needs of our neediest people, than philanthropists." The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation invests money in Big Pharma projects that produce vaccines and drugs, and in oil companies (like BP) that are destroying the countries that they are claiming to help. When people come down with illnesses that result from their crimes, Gates and company will be there with the vaccines and medicines to push them over the edge.

Of course, it's not just vaccines and "aids drugs" for the poor of this world that the mega-corrupt are interested in; they are also using their ill-gotten gains to sponsor "nano-vaccines" for the rest of us. One hare-brained scheme is "sweat-triggered vaccine delivery", a program based on nanoparticles penetrating human skin. The technology is described as a way to "...develop nanoparticles that penetrate the skin through hair follicles and burst upon contact with human sweat to release vaccines."

That would be the kind of stuff that can be sprayed in places like airports, malls, security checkpoints, hospitals, etc, so that you get the "vaccine" whether you like it, or know about it, or not.

Then there's the money they spend on what sounds a lot like "population reduction". One of the programs recently funded by the Bill's foundation is a sterilization program that uses sharp blasts of ultrasound directed against a man's scrotum to render him infertile for six months (or so they say, anyone want to step up and test it?) It might more accurately be called "surgery-free castration technology."

Having helped them plunder our world, we are now deemed expendable and surplus to requirement. Can't you just feel the philanthropic benevolence of it all?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/aug/04/us-billionaires-ha...