Long ago, Bill Gates decided that he would like to spend the rest of his life using his great wealth to solve some of the world’s most pressing global problems. With an endowment 30% greater than the university he famously dropped out of, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation commits millions of dollars each year to tackle intractable global health, family planning, and agricultural problems.
This largesse will save millions of the world’s poorest citizens from sickness and starvation.
Within the United States, the Gates Foundation has spent millions funding scholarships, strengthening America’s libraries, and conducting research on world educational best practices in order to drive educational reform. The Foundation also supports Planned Parenthood, a key contributor to the health and welfare of women across the United States.
They say you can’t buy your way into heaven, but Gates sure seems to be doing his best.
Concerned about the climate havoc caused by CO2 emissions, Gates has also founded TerraPower, a company that designs next generation nuclear reactors. Nuclear energy will remain a contentious issue for the foreseeable future. But if you believe—like I do—that dirty energy represents a civilization-ending threat, you should laud Gate’s effort to add one more quiver in the armetarium of the global climate change fight.
The mystery of all of these good works, however, is that while Gates works assiduously to address these problems, he sits by idly while the Trump Administration pushes policies that may well undo every single thing that Gates has done to make the world a better place.
Just yesterday, the Trump announced the bafflingly perverse—and plainly illegal—revocation of California’s ability to set its own fuel efficiency standards. Why? Because the Trump administration has lowered fuel efficiency standards nationwide, presumably because dirty air is more lucrative to a handful of big players.
Trump has crammed his administration with nihilistic industry hacks who see the primary function of government policy than to enrich certain corporations—no matter the generational cost. The Trump administration has repeatedly rolled back regulations on methane emissions, refinery monitoring, power plant emissions, fracking regulations—while gutting the government’s ability to study (or even mention) climate change.
While Bill Gates labors to build technology that will combat climate change, Donald Trump issues policy after policy that hastens the day of reckoning. Before it swamps our coastal cities, global climate change will unleash untold misery on the global poor; millions will die from war, famine, and sickness—developing nations, which have come so far in lifting billions out of poverty, lie predominately in equatorial regions, where global climate change will hit first.
It is easy to blame Donald Trump, though it takes more than one plutocrat to raze a village. Donald Trump is the beneficiary of a vast network of far-right billionaires who, thanks to Citizens United, now flood our political system with dark money. These billionaires don’t believe in global climate change because the necessary actions don’t mesh with their ideology of ultralow taxes for billionaires and an increasingly robber baron regulatory regime.
This ideology will not go away when Trump leaves office. The plutocrats have spent billions engineering lower taxes on themselves—and these tax breaks give them ever increasing wealth to plow back into the gaming the system.
Bill Gates wants to improve education in this nation, but tax cuts and austerity will ensure that these efforts fail.
Bill Gates wants to reduce global poverty, but Trump’s allies on the religious right have encouraged this administration to decimate global family planning programs, including a radical expansion of the global gag rule. Thousands will die in the name of a hollow morality.
The same is true for Planned Parenthood. Even while Gates does his part for women’s public health in the United States, the religious right will happily swamp these efforts. How much sickness and poverty will result when Roe Vs. Wade is overturned?
Bill Gates spends a considerable amount of money helping foster good governance practices across the globe. Meanwhile, the United States—which once set the standard for transparency—continues to slide into corruption.
The far-right has the upper hand, and their power represents a grave threat to every humane effort that Bill Gates has worked to advance since retirement. And while the Sheldon Adelsons and Robert Mercers of the world have no compunction about fighting for their values in the public sphere, billionaires with a sense of human value for some reason feel it’s not their place to jump into the arena.
Until 2016, it may have made sense to stay above the fray and keep focused on noble work. But it’s 2019, and there is no mystery left about the intentions of the current regime. If left unchecked, the plutocrats will continue to consolidate their power and forcefully advance their narrow economic interests—and let’s just say that global health, climate change, and educational policy are not exactly high on their list.
Bill Gates possesses the resources necessary to counterbalance to the antidemocratic forces on the right, especially if he were to take a strong and vocal political stand in favor of the very same kinds of practices his organization advocates in the developing world: fair elections, anticorruption and government transparency, and addressing income disparities. For whatever reason, however, the left-of-center ultra wealthy insist on keeping their hands clean, clearing the field for the plutocrats.
I can only assume that Bill Gates wants a legacy richer than: “I worked hard for a multitude of losing battles.” The only way to fight that fate might be for him to get off the sidelines. If he doesn't, everything he's worked for might well come to naught.
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