Gates’ connection to the U.S. detention and deportation machine is a company called Signature Aviation. Signature calls itself “the world’s largest network of private aviation terminals,” and it’s a linchpin in the day-to-day machinery of Trump’s immigration enforcement apparatus.
…
The private firm that holds Gates’ and the Gates Foundation Trust’s assets, Cascade Investment, increased its stake in the company to 30% in 2021, when it and two partners bought Signature outright for $4.7 billion. Human rights advocates — plane trackers and activists who keep tabs on deportation flights, as well as the aviation and logistics companies profiting from them — say Gates’ stake in Signature is at odds with his humanitarian work, including the Gates Foundation’s support of a plethora of immigration-focused nonprofits. Without FBOs like Signature, they say, Trump’s mass deportation agenda would be stuck on the ground.
Gates himself has not publicly commented on Signature Aviation’s crucial role in servicing ICE Air flights. Neither the Gates Foundation nor Cascade Asset Management Company, which oversees Cascade Investment, responded to multiple requests for comment.
Surprising how?
Linus Torvalds is an immigrant.
Say what?!? A billionaire who exploits labor is a piece of shit???
He always has been.
That’s the point I was making
Wait until you learn that the ICE computers run Windows as well.
People are too easily conned by grandpa looking fuckers. The number of people that think Warren Buffet is the “one good” billionaire is astounding. Being austere does not make you a good person. Especially since it’s part of your extreme commitment to money hoarding.
breaking news: billionaires are shitty people
Bill Gates has been working very hard since he retired to make himself look like a nice old man doing good around him spending his money on philanthropy.
But here’s the truth: the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation makes more money through its investments than it disburses through philanthropy, and its tax-exempt status is used by Bill Gates as a vehicle for tax evasion.
Just like all rich fucks’ foundations incidentally: if you ever wondered how comes so many of those psychopaths do philanthropy, that’s why. They don’t give a damn about their fellow man. If they did, they’d pay their fair share of taxes for the good of everybody instead of cherry-picking a few high-profile causes that make them look good. Billionaires philanthropy is all about tax evasion.
And now this.
Make no mistake: Bill Gates today is just as disgusting an individual as you remember him to be when he was running Microsoft.
And this whole bilkuonaire philanthropy thing is bullshit to begin with. How come one single man gets to focus a shot ton of resources on a single cause he deems worthy? Why not just pay taxes and let the people choose?
The Gates Foundation paid for my town’s shiny new rural hospital, bringing in multiple MRI machines, a PET scanner, etc to make it one of the most advanced hospitals in the region.
But the hospital can’t afford to staff radiologists, so the machines are useless. Last year they sat around hemming and hawing for several hours while my husband was laying there with symptoms of a stroke, trying to decide whether it would be faster (let’s be real, the debate was cheaper) to call in a radiologist or transport him to another hospital (they ended up picking the latter).
This is why philanthropy is worse than just taxing and spending.
Huge sums of money from rich people going toward “charitable causes” can be have negative consequences. Ex.
- The money can be spent wastefully or stupidly, like in your example.
- The money can be used corruptly. It could be rewarding friends, buying power, or simply redirect other funds toward other business interests of the donor.
- Destructive to established systems. Allocating money to X can shift high value employees or entire industries away from Y.
- The money could suddenly just go away if the billionaire favors another pet project or something else.
Also, the philanthropy is still controlled by rich guys and spent for what they want, not what’s needed. They might be doing some good but not in a democratic way. They still hold all the power
And in a way that makes people believe that they’re doing good and that we can trust the billionaires to have society’s best interests at heart. They’re laundering their image while continuing to enrich themselves.
Adam Conover did an episode of his podcast talking to Amy Schiller about this exact thing: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4UenwOIb6jE
Its painful to think how many people kept praising Gates and defending him over the years. He has his greedy little fingers in everything. Kurzgesagt has a bunch of questionable episodes and whenever people pointed out their ties to Gates they were called schizo conspiracy theorists.
Man, I wish I could argue against this. But the cynicism seems more inflated in me every day
Nah. Cynicism would be me saying the Gates Foundation does good, and you saying mostly to Gates.
But you’re simply acknowledging what’s obvious to anybody who knows anything about how the rich keep themselves rich at the expense of everybody else. That’s realism, if anything.
He does work hard to maintain an image that fools most Murcans. ABAB All Billies Are Bastards.
Fuck Bill Gates. We all saw, him prostrate himself at that fucking dinner with Trump.
No surprise. I don’t get how anyone can see microsoft bill as anything other than a cold calculating asshole. Its like now that he has stepped away macroshit he is suddenly a good person. The whole company was founded on IP theft and his mom getting him in at IBM. Just another cluster B asshole.
Bull Gates went to pedo Island, that’ll tell you everything you need to know about his true character.
Shocking? Only if you forget that all Billionaires are Bastards
Oh wow, a billionaire owns a stake in the largest private airline in the country? No fucking way!
What a nothingburger of an article. HuffPo used to be good, now they’re just being useful idiots.
Bill Gates a bad guy? 😱
he’s in the files… and not he MS ones
Actually some pages in that birthday book do look like they might have been printed from an MS document.
surprising to whom? i am so bothered by this needing to be news. we are so propagandized very few can see billionaires for what they are. there are no “good ones.”
I’ve been arguing for many years that being a billionaire is incompatible with being a decent human.
We live in an economy of finite means, and being willing to put an absolutely insane portion of that finite resource into a bank account is exactly tantamount to ensuring poverty exists elsewhere. Anyone willing to horde such an insane amount of money is simply evil.
I think part of why the public doesn’t get more upset about this though is that most people don’t understand how big a billion is. It is a number so large that our feeble little brains really struggle to grasp it, and we in common discourse talk about millionaires and billionaires like it’s just the next logical step.
The difference between a million and a billion is about a billion.
The problem is that 2/3 of Americans don’t want to villainize them because they still hold on to some fantasy that they may become one soon. Somehow through bootstraps and luck they might just magically become a billionaire, because they’re fucking stupid.
I’m just working minimum wage and praying inflation will get to the point where it carries me there. If it happened in Zimbabwe, it can happen here!
When the world sells off us treasury bonds and stops trading in the dollar that’s highly likely. But it’ll cost $500,000 for a loaf of bread and minimum wage will still be $7.25.
Propaganda works. Bill Gates’s tax evasion and PR foundation has managed to whitewash his reputation in a lot of circles.
Call me an optimist, but given billionaires’s propensity to buy supposed journalism outlets, I think it’s better to ask “why is this news” than “why isn’t this news”.
I’m not surprised, being a billionaire implies a complete void of morality and ethics. He’d profit from any level of cruelty if the opportunity presented itself.
