‘Thanks to You, I Realized Bill Gates is Horrible’

One of my proudest moments as an adult ESL teacher had little to do with the English language

Teaching in-company English courses, I leave my political ideology at the door. Well, I try my best to do so. I’m there to help them polish their usually high-level abilities with some pronunciation work, grammar clean-up, and introducing new expressions, business idioms, and vocabulary. I’m not there for a political debate.

But we do discuss current events. We read the BBC, the Guardian, the Financial Times, the NY Times, and other mainstream news outlets. I’ll be on the eighteenth floor of a massive glass building reading and speaking in English with bank employees about inflation, central bank policy, COVID, bailouts, artificial intelligence, The Queen of England, or vegan food.

Not revealing one’s personal politics is obviously possible in those moments, but one has to actively stay ambiguous and keep them hidden.

Again, it’s never a political debate, but I do share my opinions. They do ask me about American politics. We’ve built a level of trust, and they ask for my thoughts on Biden, Harris, Trump, and the US. I don’t go full uber-lefty, unbuttoning my collared shirt to reveal a Che Guevara T-shirt, but I tell them how I feel.

I tell them Biden is a joke, Harris is the most unpopular VP in modern history and the Democratic Party will probably try to dump her, and that Trump is a xenophobic fake billionaire, who speaks at a fourth-grade level, but taps into an anti-establishment anger that pervades working America in an age of neoliberal economic policy and purchased government.

I think they appreciate the takes because they continue to ask. And I honestly try not to insert my opinions unsolicited — occasionally slipping up. But again, it’s an English lesson and never a political debate.

A few months ago though, there was a moment when we were talking about the ‘billionaire space race,’ and Bill Gates came up.

I couldn’t let it slip by without correcting the record.

Not revealing one’s personal politics is obviously possible in those moments, but one has to actively stay ambiguous and keep them hidden.

It was with this group of young employees from an internet services company — one of my favorite lessons. We get along very well and have met for beers on the weekend. We have fun, lively discussions.

So we were reading about how Bezos and Branson each spent ungodly sums of money just to shoot up into space for bragging rights.

The multiple gargantuan mansions, private islands, fleets of cars, hangars full of Gulfstreams, mega-yachts, priceless art collections, designer million-dollar decorative trees, and fleets of jet skis just aren’t enough; they needed to spend billions of dollars to momentarily leave the earth’s atmosphere just to say they were the first private individual to accumulate that insidious level of wealth and go to that extreme for recognition, heal some childhood wound, and maybe get their parents approval and love.

We were making fun of it, and then one student said something about how at least Bill Gates was trying to help get poor people medicine and vaccines.

I winced.

I debated going into the ugly details about Mr. I’m-just-a-sweater-wearing-nice-guy-trying-to-help. Was it worth it to take a detour and rid one of my favorite students of this notion? I decided to test the waters.

It was an online lesson, and I was sharing my screen, so after a winced, I said, “well…about the vaccine thing…”

I opened a tab and quickly googled ‘Oxford University Vaccine Patent Rights Gates Foundation.’

I scrolled to an article and explained to the group how Oxford created a COVID vaccine and was going to make the intellectual property public, meaning any country or company with the ingredients and know-how could produce and distribute it, a move that obviously had the potential to save countless lives.

Then Gates and his lovely foundation stepped in and pressured Oxford to sell the patent rights to Astra Zeneca. And shocker of all shockers, Bill Gates is an investor in Astra Zeneca, which because they now had exclusive rights on a vaccine, was about to make billions and billions in profits.

Not only that, but Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation were blocking the WTO — along with others — from implementing what they called a ‘TRIPS Waiver’ that would have waived the patent protections on the vaccines and, again, given countries and other pharmaceutical companies the ability to make their own vaccines and administer them to their populations without fear of legal action from Pzifer, Johnson & Johnson, the US government, etc. Rather, they were being forced to buy them in the ‘open market’ from an artificially limited supply while competing with nations one hundred times more wealthy.

Instead of allowing multiple factories around the world to make the vaccine much quicker and cheaper through a patent waiver, Gates was promoting his pet project ‘COVAX’ program, which relied on donations from rich countries to poor and only administered a minuscule fraction of the doses it promised.

It was an abject failure because it wasn’t designed to solve the problem. It was a PR move to pretend the rich countries were ‘doing everything they could’ to get developing nations vaccines.

It was a cruel joke and created vaccine apartheid, with Canada purchasing and hoarding five doses per citizen before many countries dished out a single jab.

I skimmed the article aloud to them and highlighted the important aforementioned details. They were appalled and quite receptive.

And so I continued.

Gates and his lovely foundation stepped in and pressured Oxford to sell the patent rights to Astra Zeneca. And shocker of all shockers, Bill Gates is an investor in Astra Zeneca, which because they now had exclusive rights on a vaccine, was about to make billions and billions in profits.

I told them how Gates made his money through Microsoft's intellectual property and was now using that method everywhere in medicine and genetically modified seeds.

He’s not trying to ‘revolutionize the agriculture industries’ of developing nations; he’s trying to monopolize them by forcing farmers to buy GMO seeds he’s invested in.

Just like everyone who gets Microsoft Office sends him some cash, he wants to get a cut every time a seed is planted.

I told my students there are groups in West Africa that are trying to get him to leave, but he won’t. I didn’t bring this quote up, but I think it sums up the situation pretty well:

I think that for us in Africa we have great concerns about what we call a very neocolonial approach to two checks of Gates funding…we have found that through the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa Gates has successfully lobbied African governments in terms of changes in regional and national agriculture policy to embrace an antiquated, discredited, ecologically unsustainable and socially (un)just agriculture policies based on the idea that pharmacy systems are inferior, backward and that the path to advancement is to embrace improve seed, particularly corporate seed, the use of chemical fertilizers, agricultural chemicals, and basically to create an elite class of commercial farmers at the expense of the majority of peasant farmers on the continent…

…And then the most recent project we are extremely concerned about is the Target Malaria project…which is geared towards releasing 10,000 genetically modified mosquitoes in a village called Bana west of Bobo in Burkina Faso. And this is a project funded by Gates in collaboration with Imperial College in London…we’re kind of feeling like new technologies are being tested in Africa as if we treated Africans as yet more, you know, you know, guinea pigs for technologies that even the US military is interested in, which is the gene drive technologies, the US military is funding this Target Malaria project to the tune of $100 million.

— Mariam Mayet Executive Director of the African Center for Biodiversity

Again, it has nothing to do with altruism; they’re attempting to monopolize the agriculture industry by controlling the seeds and government policy while testing new gene-editing technology in those same developing nations without the consent of the citizens.

Nobody voted for him. It’s neocolonial. And it’s disgusting.

I pulled up another tab with one of his best critics from India, Vandana Shiva. He’s doing the same things in India, and the farmers want nothing to do with it, but he’s the de-facto tzar when it comes to all things global agriculture and medicine. Not for the betterment of the people or society but to line his own pockets.

The Gates Foundation itself — like all billionaire foundations — isn’t there to solve problems; it exists to monopolize solutions. As the aforementioned Mariam Mayet said, “Gates is funding a network called African Biodiversity Network of Experts.”

And of course, it’s a nice tax write-off for so-called ‘donations.’ The foundation wields like $40 billion, and as with all semi-fake billionaire charities, only has to spend 5% annually.

With that amount of money and power, they can fund the business-friendly answer to every problem — no matter how unpopular — and drowned out more democratic ideas.

That’s the game.

In class, I left it at that.

A student brought up another billionaire’s pretend foundation, and then we shifted the conversation back to Bezos and Branson and their bullsh*t space race.

Fast forward a few weeks, Elon Musk was buying Twitter, and we were talking about billionaires again. I was asking for everyone’s opinions on him, and my student said, “yeah, thanks to you I now realize Bill Gates is horrible.”

My face lit up with a massive smile, I did a little fist pump, said I could talk sh*t about billionaires all day, and then returned the conversation back to Twitter.

It was a rewarding moment.

The more people that realize these guys are not our friends, the better.

Again, it has nothing to do with altruism; they’re attempting to monopolize the agriculture industry by controlling the seeds and government policy while testing new gene-editing technology in those same developing nations without the consent of the citizens.

But there’s a reason Gates’ image is ‘fun-loving and warm’ and not ‘sinister oligarch.’ He has a great PR team, but more importantly, he funds media outlets.

The Gates Foundation in the past few years has given, this is solely to media outlets, has given $4 million to the BBC, $5.7 million to The Guardian. He funds the entire global development vertical at The Guardian. And by the way this is annual gifts. And he’s given $100,000 to Le Monde, to $1 million to Al Jazeera, $2.7 million to NPR and PRI, about a million dollars to the Canadian media giant Post Media Network, $800,000 to Univision, $300,000 to MTV, VH1 and BET, $1.3 million to Universal Media LLC and $2 million to the Participant Media Foundation, which is a shell foundation that was used to finance the film Waiting for Superman, which heavily featured Gates singing the praises of charter schools without of course noting he funded the film. — Media analyst Adam Johnson

That’s why we rarely see negative articles about him in any American or European media outlets. He’s not a direct owner like Bezos or Bloomberg, he’s more clever, subtle, and strategic than that.

That line about the film Waiting for Superman is an important tidbit as well. Public schools are one of the last remaining government entities that haven’t been swallowed by the corporate privatization wave. Oligarchs want to own them and get those government education funds.

So Bill Gates and ‘Team Benelovent Billionaire’ promote corporate-owned charter schools.

The problem is not that public schools need more funding, serious investment, better-paid teachers, or that the rich should pay more in taxes. No. The answer lies in just handing corporate-run schools that state money per pupil, and they’ll run them ‘more efficiently.’

Like most of Gates’ projects, it’s a cruel joke. That’s not to say all charter schools or private schools are Gates-run or the devil, but the voucher privatization push isn’t the answer to America’s education woes.

But yeah, as I told my class, I could bash billionaires all day.

I think the image in general is changing. Of course, the sycophantic and ridiculously predictable ‘Billionaire Mindset’ podcasts are everywhere, but I think the majority of citizens see the uber-wealthy for what they are.

With this level of child poverty, people living paycheck to paycheck, and food bank lines constantly growing, spending five-plus billion dollars for a joy ride to space just isn’t seen as cool.

Pledging to ‘give away’ half of your multi-billion-dollar fortune but then somehow adding one hundred billion to it just isn’t cool.

The richest like ten people doubling their already ridiculous wealth during a global freaking pandemic just. isn’t. cool.

It’s a tough media and PR machine to go against, and maybe I should stay more focused and keep the lessons solely on the intricacies of the English language.

But you know, somebody has to be out there telling these unpleasant truths, because we know Vox won’t.