An article by Charles Piller, Edmund Sanders and Robyn Dixon, LA Times Staff Writers includes:
In a contradiction between its grants and its endowment holdings, a Times investigation has found, the foundation reaps vast financial gains every year from investments that contravene its good works.
More at: latimes.com/gates.
They only touched the surface of some of the PTC issues, such as their investments in "Pharmaceutical companies that price drugs beyond the reach of AIDS patients the foundation is trying to treat".
Some critics say the foundation's failure to use its own investments "to promote … public benefit in developing countries at reasonable cost" might trace back to the source of most of its money — Microsoft — which Bill Gates serves as chairman.
Microsoft monopolies in computer operating systems and business software depend upon the same intellectual-property and trade-law approaches favored by drug companies.
Mr. Gates personal ideological view is that knowledge should be treated as property, and that the owners should always seek monopoly-rents (royalties). This is how he is said to direct the Gates foundation to mirror this ideology, is harming the very people he is trying to help. Key areas such as scientific, medical and educational materials are increasingly moving to "Open Access", "Peer Distribution" and sometimes "Peer Production" methods which focus on the fixed costs of development and distribution of knowledge and allow the marginal cost to be zero (IE: do not charge monopoly-rents on intellectual "property").
In my ideal world we could turn Gates ideology into honest philanthropy, but I am sceptical that a man who became the richest man on the planet via societal misinformation around the nature of knowledge is going to turn around any time soon.
See also: Richest man in the world still admired, even if he believes the world is flat..
