WHAT REALLY MATTERS/

Millions of viewers, me included, were carried away by the interview on 60 Minutes with Melinda Gates. Her husband Bill is the richest man in the world. I will not be surprised to see him become the first trillionaire in history. They have led the way in generosity. Their philanthropies are a signal to all billionaires to start caring about people. In fact, number two world’s richest, Warren Buffet, the sage of Omaha, has joined Gates to start giving away his fortune. According to Melinda, their aim is to give away 90% of their fortune. Not meaning any cynicism but that would still leave them several billions to maintain their lifestyle, and in spite of their protestation that their children re not going to be the big beneficiaries, will still find those kids sitting pretty.

I am not poor-mouthing them. Far from it. If more people with money would open their purse strings, there might be a lot less misery, both at home, and in Third World countries.

I have however, just one teeny-tiny little caveat; just one little concern about “charity’ just a bit of fear that the kind of charity we talk about are really (although the scope is far greater and the effect more far reaching) alms for the poor.

What Melinda is doing in the poorest province of India to combat infant mortality it incredible. What they are doing to make drugs available for diseases the big drug companies no longer care about i.e. malaria, is prodigious.

But I do have the very same feeling about their generosity as I do about the myth of Mother Theresa, who will be elevated to sainthood on the basis of a very flawed example of a “miracle.”

Like Mother Theresa, who quite openly said she is only there to comfort the poor and sick, but she is not there to help change the social conditions that make poverty inevitable. The poorest people in India can’t feed the children they have. They have nothing. The Gates Foundation will not, as nearly as I can see, change anything about the underlying social, political, and economic conditions that make suffering inevitable. They are not social changers. They are charity-givers.

Yes, they spend billions to help educate forgotten children in America, but do they exert the kind of social and political pressure that makes real social change possible? Why would they?

I don’t question their generosity. I certainly do not question their sincerity. But haven’t we had enough of very rich people putting money into help that is not really help?

Are the Bates any better than Andrew Carnegie, who sweated his workers and built .libraries? Or his henchman Frick who did all the strike breaking head busting dirty work and built a magnificent art galley in New York. Or Harry Oakes who discovered gold in Kirkland Lake then took all his money to Nassau and his idea of public giving was to create a magnificent part at the side of Niagara Falls. While the streets of Kirkland Lake subside into the holes he dug for gold.

I am not against good deeds. I am against the underlying evil that gets papered over with good intentions.