Gates’ connection to the U.S. detention and deportation machine is a company called Signature Aviation. Signature calls itself “the world’s largest network of private aviation terminals,” and it’s a linchpin in the day-to-day machinery of Trump’s immigration enforcement apparatus.
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The private firm that holds Gates’ and the Gates Foundation Trust’s assets, Cascade Investment, increased its stake in the company to 30% in 2021, when it and two partners bought Signature outright for $4.7 billion. Human rights advocates — plane trackers and activists who keep tabs on deportation flights, as well as the aviation and logistics companies profiting from them — say Gates’ stake in Signature is at odds with his humanitarian work, including the Gates Foundation’s support of a plethora of immigration-focused nonprofits. Without FBOs like Signature, they say, Trump’s mass deportation agenda would be stuck on the ground.
Gates himself has not publicly commented on Signature Aviation’s crucial role in servicing ICE Air flights. Neither the Gates Foundation nor Cascade Asset Management Company, which oversees Cascade Investment, responded to multiple requests for comment.
Bill Gates has been working very hard since he retired to make himself look like a nice old man doing good around him spending his money on philanthropy.
But here’s the truth: the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation makes more money through its investments than it disburses through philanthropy, and its tax-exempt status is used by Bill Gates as a vehicle for tax evasion.
Just like all rich fucks’ foundations incidentally: if you ever wondered how comes so many of those psychopaths do philanthropy, that’s why. They don’t give a damn about their fellow man. If they did, they’d pay their fair share of taxes for the good of everybody instead of cherry-picking a few high-profile causes that make them look good. Billionaires philanthropy is all about tax evasion.
And now this.
Make no mistake: Bill Gates today is just as disgusting an individual as you remember him to be when he was running Microsoft.
The Gates Foundation paid for my town’s shiny new rural hospital, bringing in multiple MRI machines, a PET scanner, etc to make it one of the most advanced hospitals in the region.
But the hospital can’t afford to staff radiologists, so the machines are useless. Last year they sat around hemming and hawing for several hours while my husband was laying there with symptoms of a stroke, trying to decide whether it would be faster (let’s be real, the debate was cheaper) to call in a radiologist or transport him to another hospital (they ended up picking the latter).
This is why philanthropy is worse than just taxing and spending.
Huge sums of money from rich people going toward “charitable causes” can be have negative consequences. Ex.
Why is there no em-dash
Also, the philanthropy is still controlled by rich guys and spent for what they want, not what’s needed. They might be doing some good but not in a democratic way. They still hold all the power
And in a way that makes people believe that they’re doing good and that we can trust the billionaires to have society’s best interests at heart. They’re laundering their image while continuing to enrich themselves.
And this whole bilkuonaire philanthropy thing is bullshit to begin with. How come one single man gets to focus a shot ton of resources on a single cause he deems worthy? Why not just pay taxes and let the people choose?
Its painful to think how many people kept praising Gates and defending him over the years. He has his greedy little fingers in everything. Kurzgesagt has a bunch of questionable episodes and whenever people pointed out their ties to Gates they were called schizo conspiracy theorists.
Adam Conover did an episode of his podcast talking to Amy Schiller about this exact thing: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4UenwOIb6jE
Man, I wish I could argue against this. But the cynicism seems more inflated in me every day
Nah. Cynicism would be me saying the Gates Foundation does good, and you saying mostly to Gates.
But you’re simply acknowledging what’s obvious to anybody who knows anything about how the rich keep themselves rich at the expense of everybody else. That’s realism, if anything.
He does work hard to maintain an image that fools most Murcans. ABAB All Billies Are Bastards.