http://overland.org.au/2013/07/bill-gates-vs-polio/ https://archive.ph/hSlmf

Excerpt:

It can certainly appear as though the loony flagbearers of rampant disaster neoliberalism believe that things can go on as they are, forever. But it’s also possible to read the massive transfer of wealth and resources we’ve seen over the past few decades into the hands of a tiny elite, as an unconscious realisation that the game is up and that if things go on the way they are you will need a few billion in the bank, a private jet, a mega-yacht and homes on several continents just to be able to live a comfortable life.

It is becoming increasingly obvious, for example, that our political leaders have zero interest in doing anything about climate change. There could be lots of reasons for this, not least of which is their stupidity and the clout of the fossil fuel and mining industries, but I’d guess there’s also a belief that it will be the ultimate feeding ground for disaster capitalism, which will fix it.

Of course, this is completely insane. Not only is the system using the system to fix the problems that the system has created but in doing so it subtly positions those problems as occurring outside of it, as though climate change were being inflicted on us by someone else. This is also the dynamic of the Gates version of international aid and the US military’s version of war. Childhood mortality in Africa and insurgency among occupied people have no connection with Western economic practices of war and violent dispossession and colonisation any more than the Queen of the Fairies was responsible for the sinking of the Titanic. Bill Gates makes war on polio, just as Petraeus and Amos made war on insurgents – and they use the same business model.

In his book Fates worse than death, Kurt Vonnegut described a trip he made to Mozambique in the late 1980s.

"The photograph at the head of this chapter shows me in action in Mozambique, demonstrating muscular Christianity in an outfit that might have been designed by Ralph Lauren. The aborigines didn’t know whether to shit or go blind until I showed up. And then I fixed everything."

That neatly defines a future that neoliberal elites are prepared to run with. Those of us not fortunate enough to be billionaires will be mired in endless poverty and catastrophe praying for a mega-wealthy mentor to parachute in and save us with his data-crunching, but too afraid to move in case PRISM has our number.

But underneath the Gates Foundation’s rebranding of panoptic capitalism as a benign tool for humanity’s use and Bill’s construction of an image of the soulless plutocrat as compassionate superhero is a revisioning of the very idea of the inner world.

Only a miser would think that giving $100m was intrinsically better than giving $10. How the money was earned and how it is used count for something. In Gatesian philanthropy, the more money you give the more generous you are. So the rich can always trump the poor in the generosity stakes.