From Slashdot
http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/08/08/1622238/bill-gates-promotes-vaccine-projects-swipes-at-google
Quoted from link
"Bill Gates is not the philanthropist he pretends to be. The Gates Foundation has an endowment of $30 Billion making it the largest philanthropic organization in the world. But one third of that money is invested in companies whose practices run counter to the foundation’s supposed charitable goals and social mission. In Niger, the Foundation has invested more than $400 million dollars in oil companies including Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil Corp, and Chevron. These firms have been responsible for much of the pollution causing respiratory problems and other afflictions among the local population. The Gates Foundation also has investments in sixty-nine of the worst polluting companies in the US and Canada, including Dow Chemical.
It holds investments in pharmaceutical companies whose drugs cost far beyond what most patients around the world can afford and the Foundation often lobbies on behalf of those companies for "Intellectual Property" protections that make obtaining low cost medicines more difficult. Other companies in the Foundation’s portfolio have been accused of forcing thousands of people to lose their homes, supporting child labor and defrauding and neglecting patients in need of medical care. In the mean time, Bill Gates' net worth has gone from $50 Billion to $70 Billion over the last 3 years."
Bill Gates is a new kind of "philanthropist" and I use the term loosely. He's a Venture Philanthropist which I would argue often becomes an oxymoron depending on the outcome of what he tries to do to make money.
Bill Gates does things like back "Education Reform" in the guise of making education better, while actually forcing the whole reform movement towards requiring the use of his technology in the form of companies he owns. So spend money on "reform", while actually requiring the purchase of your technology and make far more money off the Venture Philanthropy.
In some cases you might be able to argue the result is positive, so it's likel a retarded cousin of true philanthropy but more often than not it ends up benefiting Gates only and just making the Gates Foundation money.
So, yes - not everything on the Internet is true but there is truth to the fact that the Gates Foundation is there to make money off what it markets as philanthropy.
