Walking through Gates biography is interesting because it tells the tale of a man who was ruthless in his business dealings   (his bio states that he lied on a number of occasions to win.)  Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. Gates has been criticized for his business tactics, which have been considered anti-competitive, an opinion which has in some cases been upheld by numerous court rulings.

Therefore, do you  honor a man who walks through life winning by cheating others.  Is that why he has formed a foundation as a philanthropist and trying to give away his money?

His family (father was a lawyer – that speaks for itself –  is that where he learned to lie and manipulate the truth) encouraged competition; one visitor reported that “it didn’t matter whether it was hearts or pickleball or swimming to the dock … there was always a reward for winning and there was always a penalty for losing”.

One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC), which banned four Lakeside students – Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans – for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.

After reading the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that demonstrated the Altair 8800, Gates contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), the creators of the new microcomputer, to inform them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform.[44] In reality, Gates and Allen did not have an Altair and had not written code for it; they merely wanted to gauge MITS’s interest

He gained a reputation for being distant to others; as early as 1981 an industry executive complained in public that “Gates is notorious for not being reachable by phone and for not returning phone calls.”

As an executive, Gates met regularly with Microsoft’s senior managers and program managers. Firsthand accounts of these meetings describe him as verbally combative, berating managers for perceived holes in their business strategies or proposals that placed the company’s long-term interests at risk.

He has interrupted presentations with such comments “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard!” and, “Why don’t you just give up your options and join the Peace Corps?” The target of his outburst then had to defend the proposal in detail until, hopefully, Gates was fully convinced. When subordinates appeared to be procrastinating, he was known to remark sarcastically, “I’ll do it over the weekend.”

Criticism

In 2007, the Los Angeles Times criticized the foundation for investing its assets in companies which have been accused of worsening poverty, polluting heavily, and pharmaceutical companies that do not sell into the developing world. In response to press criticism, the foundation announced a review of its investments to assess social responsibility.

It subsequently canceled the review and stood by its policy of investing for maximum return, while using voting rights to influence company practices. The Gates Millennium Scholars program has been criticized by Ernest W. Lefever for its exclusion of Caucasian students.

(Why is the foundation excluding caucasian students?)

The scholarship program is administered by the United Negro College Fund. In 2014, Bill Gates sparked a protest in Vancouver when he decided to donate 50 million dollars to UNAIDS through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for the purpose of mass circumcision in Zambia and Swaziland.

Bill Gates And The Common Core: Did He Really Do Anything Wrong?

Howard Husock ,
Contributor

I focus on philanthropy, civil society, housing and the welfare state.

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

In a recent front page article, the Washington Post tells what it casts as the story of how Bill Gates, through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, used his fortune to promote adoption of the now-controversial Common Core education standards, the national goals backed by the Obama Administration but vilified in some quarters on both right and left.

The implication of “How Bill Gates Pulled Off the Common Core Revolution”, however, goes well beyond the specific issue at hand. In what amounts to unusual criticism of his influence and impact, the Post strongly implies that Gates can and did buy the policy result he wanted—with democracy potentially at risk. The Post, in other words, has raised a question not just about how the Common Core came to be widely adopted—but about the legitimacy of big foundation grants and other forms of philanthropic giving.

It’s a tempting narrative—but one that almost certainly overstates the capacity of any individual donor to advance his own ideas, without the stage having previously been set by others. And it undervalues the importance of a distinctive virtue of American society: having institutions outside government that have the ways and means to advance serious ideas.

In the Post article, by reporter Lyndsey Layton, the story of the Gates success in promoting Common Core to the point that 45 states have now adopted it, is recounted almost as a sort of plot. Once Gates decided to push the idea, writes Layton, “what followed was one of the swiftest and most remarkable shifts in education policy in U.S. history.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation didn’t just bankroll the development of what became known as the Common Core State Standards. With more than $200 million, the foundation also built political support across the country, persuading state governments to make systemic and costly changes. Bill Gates was de facto organizer,. . .” All it took, says the Post, was cash. “The Gates Foundation spread money across the political spectrum . . .” from business to labor and, as a result, groups “who routinely disagree on nearly every issue accepted Gates money and found common ground on the Common Core.”
This is an implicit calumny which has come up before when the topic is education reform. Reformer turned reform-critic Diane Ravitch, for instance, used the term “billionaire boys club” to describe a group of hedge fund heavyweights who have supported the charter school movement. Both she and the Post can be said to be channeling (consciously or unconsciously) an influential academic paper about super-rich philanthropists.

In his 2003 paper, “Hyperagency and High-Tech Donors: A New Theory of the New Philanthropists”, Paul Schervish of the Social Welfare Research Institute at Boston College, asserts that the new super-rich comprise a class of “hyperagents” who possess “an array of dispositions and capacities that enable individuals relatively single-handedly (to) produce the social outcomes they desire”.

This would be a rather frightening aspect of American society if it were true—but there’s good reason to think that it’s not. Indeed, Schervish himself provides virtually no examples of this actually occurring, except for an isolated local case of a philanthropist who had the means to purchase land to be set aside for conservation.

The idea that money alone can buy impact is no more true in public policy than it is in elections. The Gates success actually demonstrates that philanthropic money can play a role in influencing process—when momentum for change has already long been building. Simply put, Bill Gates did not invent or seize upon an obscure idea and foist it on an unsuspecting public. The idea that school curriculum—not just spending or choice—matters had a well-established intellectual pedigree.

As my City Journal colleague Sol Stern has written, the education critic/reformer E.D. Hirsch, in a series of increasingly influential books, had “during the past quarter-century, warned over and over that something is dangerously amiss in the nation’s classrooms. His diagnosis could be summed up with the admonition ‘it’s the curriculum, stupid’.”

To this deep intellectual foundation—shared by a number of other influential thinkers and popularizers, including Stern himself and the Thomas Fordham Institute’s Chester Finn—one must add the fact that, prior to Gates’ involvement in the issue, no less a laboratory than the New York City public schools, during the period when Joel Klein served as Chancellor, had undertaken a pilot implementation of raised curriculum standards—and found that they helped raised student achievement.

One could go on at length about the building intellectual, professional and political interest in such standards prior to the involvement of the Gates Foundation. The point here is that the Gates money could make a difference because of all that had preceded it—and that, contrary to Schervish, absent such a foundation for the Foundation, it is unlikely that philanthropic money alone could have carried the day.

Such money is part of a food chain, as it were, that leads to change—not a super-weapon that can force it. One finds the evidence for this in counter-examples. Major liberal foundations, from Ford to Carnegie, have long promoted policies more welcoming to immigrants—but had precious little to show for their efforts. Similarly, ostensible hyperagents such as hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer may be able to help hold up approval of the Keystone pipeline—but he’s hardly been able to “single-handedly” turn back the tsunami of new fossil fuel (natural gas) production.

Similarly, George Soros might well be credited with playing a key role in advancing marijuana legalization (through philanthropy which supported state referenda on the legalization of medical marijuana) but the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, founded in 1970, had helped lay the groundwork long before—as had the personal choices of countless baby boomers. Hyperagents, in other words, can be powerfully effective not when they endorse an idiosyncratic, personal cause—but when they promote an already-emerging public consensus.

The same sort of overstatement of any one “agent’s” influence is often made about mass media. The attention paid to some documentary films, for instance—from Edward R. Murrow’s “Harvest of Shame” to the Vietnam era “Selling of the Pentagon”—can lead to the false conclusion that films are uniquely potent in changing public attitudes and policy.

There is, in fact, such a profusion of films and new media today, that it’s more likely that even big-budget efforts will leave little mark. When they do, it is likely that, as per Gates, they have built on a long-evolving consensus.

It’s a point I made in my 1989 paper for the Woodrow Wilson Center, “From Moynihan to Moyers: The Black Family and the Political Agenda”, which focused on the apparently outsized impact of a Bill Moyers film set in Newark, which documented family breakdown there—and likely went on to play a role in influencing the later adoption of federal welfare reform. Moyers, in effect, stood on the shoulders of thought leaders from Daniel Patrick Moynihan to Charles Murray who, as with the example of E.D. Hirsch, had laid the groundwork for change.

The effects of foundations and philanthropy in the U.S. can, without doubt, be cause for great concern, as my colleague Heather MacDonald has pointed out powerfully in her book, The Burden of Bad Ideas. Charles Hamilton, former executive director of both the JM Kaplan and Clark Foundations, and who has written extensively on family foundations, puts it well: “While money is important, I don’t think it alone, determines everything—and I can’t figure out the alternative”.

Indeed, would we really want to live in a society in which ideas advanced through government alone? At their best, philanthropy validates and amplifies serious ideas that might otherwise never get a hearing. That’s what Bill Gates did—and, as the emerging backlash against the Common Core underscores —it’s not even clear how long-lived his victory will be. His fortune, whatever its impact, certainly did not repeal democracy.

This statement:

That’s what Bill Gates did—and, as the emerging backlash against the Common Core underscores —it’s not even clear how long-lived his victory will be. His fortune, whatever its impact, certainly did not repeal democracy.  I disagree with the statement – did not repeal democracy is false – look at the state of confusion of our country – at this very moment in time the government is trying to turn this country into socialism which Gates has repeatedly wanted.

The other problem was Gates and common core removed Christianity from the values and injected Islam values to brain wash our children in our schools which was under the direction of Obama – that is where the rubber hit the road and sparks flew and are still spewing.

My question is – if Gates, Soros, the Koch Bros, and Buffet want to live in a country that serves up socialism on its plate every day – why don’t they move to China or Russia instead of tearing up America which is built on Christian values?

As far as I am concerned, I am sick and tired of these evil perverts.

Or better still, since they are so rich – they can afford an island in the middle of nowhere and bring in their own kind – since they all think they are so special – but then they wouldn’t be able to sponge off the American people with Obama’s help.

kommonentsjane