When Clinton debuted in the White House, it was said that the Chinese wanted to see Bill as soon as possible, but not Bill Clinton but Bill Gates.
It was the late nineties, the Internet was still a minor and the digital bubble of the beginning of this century had not burst.
This character so desired by the growing Asian empire is now described in
The Problem with Bill Gates
as “a harasser, bossy and rude, a boiling pot of passions that explodes at the slightest opportunity” and, as a former employee of his tells the author, “ a total asshole when it comes to dealing with people” 70 percent of the time.
Although for the rest, he seemed like “a hopeless, funny, super-intelligent nerd.”
Also in the nineties, the conflict between Microsoft and the Netscape browser, now defunct, occurred, which challenged what was already openly described as the former's monopolistic practices.
Gates was investigated and impeached in Congress for these practices, although he ultimately won the battle.
However, the case affected his reputation and he resigned in 2000 as chief executive of his company.
From there he undertook an expansion of the foundation that he had established with his wife and to which he has dedicated his main efforts in the last two decades.
In 2006, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation received the Prince of Asturias Award for International Cooperation.
With $100 billion in personal fortune and tens of billions more in his private foundation, Gates has been one of the richest men in the world for decades, and the foundation has been the most generous entity of its kind.
It specializes above all in health aid, education and child nutrition, with a large presence in Africa and India, among other regions of the formerly called third world.
Schwab, a contributor to
The Nation
, a legendary weekly newspaper of the American left, has carried out a detailed investigation to denounce what in reality was already known: that American foundations, like Spanish ones, are largely a way to avoid taxes on part of the billionaires.
In order to prove this, he has investigated to the point of exhaustion the accounts and procedures of Bill Gates, the failures and eventual successes of his philanthropic policies, and has come to the conclusion that under this mask of aid to the needy an operation is actually hidden. of power.
He is ruthless in his criticism, although accurate in his analysis of the growing inequality in the world.
However, his literature is too reminiscent of the ideological slogans of the French indignados or the Spanish
podemites
.
Absorbed by revolutionary rhetoric, he laments that the Gates Foundation has maintained “a stony silence” about movements such as Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter, which demand social change in the face of “the excess of wealth and the
white savior
mentality that drives the philanthropic work of Bill Gates.”
He does not fail to attribute some good intentions to him, but his criticism is merciless, in some cases ribald, while the absence of solutions for the problems he denounces, outside of calls for goodism, is frustrating.
The essay provides great information, I don't know if it is absolutely verified, and a lot of cheap ideology
His abilities as an investigative journalist are thus overshadowed by a somewhat naive militancy against the
creative capitalism
that Gates promotes and an evident intention to discredit not only his work but above all his person.
The demands he makes for transparency and the accusations of obscurity are dulled by the author himself in the pages he dedicates to Gates's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the famous pimp and criminal, corrupter of minors at the service of the international
jet set
.
Gates has explained the meetings and interviews with him endlessly and in no case has any type of relationship other than commercial relations or some confusing efforts to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize been demonstrated.
But Schwab raises verbatim, without any evidence, the possibility that “the connection between the two men could have something to do with Epstein's main activities: sexual gratification and the exercise of power.”
The work is full of this type of opinions and conjectures, to the detriment of a more serious analysis of the errors committed by Gates in the management of his foundation, the problems of shielding the intellectual property of vaccines in the hands of the pharmaceutical industries and, In short, about the objective power that big technology companies have in global society.
I met Bill Gates at his home in Seattle, where I stayed a couple of times, and at the annual meetings he used to host at Microsoft headquarters.
Also during his visits to Madrid, where I interviewed him at length and invited him to visit the Royal Spanish Academy.
He didn't seem vain or arrogant to me, nor did he seem as self-satisfied as Schwab claims.
With the RAE he signed a collaboration agreement to improve Microsoft's grammar checker and was interested in the substantial unity of the Spanish language in all the countries that speak it, almost 600 million people.
Someone very far from the miserable predator, sexist and arrogant that Schwab portrays.
Nor did I deduce, and this can be extrapolated to the personal adventure of Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Zuckerman or Jeff Bezos, that his vital objective was world domination as can be seen from this book.
If they have arrived or can achieve it, it is due to the dynamics of digital civilization and the objective difficulties of governing it.
The deregulation of financial capitalism, which has multiplied inequality among humankind, is due to the incapacity of obsolete political institutions and leaders more attentive to their own destiny than that of their people.
Criticisms against the excess of “lame and wasteful” government bureaucracies may be part of the propaganda promoted by the rich people of the world, but we have also seen them these days in the mouths of smallholder farmers in half of Europe.
In short, I found the book more entertaining than interesting.
It provides great information, I don't know if it is completely verified, and a lot of cheap ideology.
Above all this shines the personal challenge of the author, willing to demonstrate that Bill Gates is a problem for democracy and the millionaire philanthropists are a gang of fraudsters.
The world needs his money, it is not known if administered by party bureaucracies.
Bill Gates' money, that is, but not Bill Gates.
Look for it in your bookstore
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