Day: June 14, 2020

Rioters in SAR will never understand what is happening in the US

Ms. Cat

A young woman who wrote to me an email from Hong Kong never mentioned any of these horrors. Most likely, she knew nothing about them. Most definitely, she never went out of her way to find out what the West is doing to her fellow human beings. For her, that “censored internet” or inability to discuss certain topics “openly” has been the highest “crime” she could imagine. Or that is how she was told to think. That is how most of people around her are conditioned to think.

Years ago, I spoke to “Occupy Central” participants, and to the recent partakers in the riots of 2019 and 2020: They knew absolutely nothing about the barbarities committed by the NATO countries, all over the world.

Rioters in SAR will never understand what is happening in the US

Damn! That’s sad!

Philanthrocapitalism, past and present: The Rockefeller Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and the setting(s) of the international/global health agenda

Ms. Cat

Philanthrocapitalism, past and present: The Rockefeller Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and the setting(s) of the international/global health agenda

This article reflects critically on the roots, exigencies, and reach of global health philanthropy, comparing the goals, paradigms, principles, modus operandi, and agenda-setting roles of the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations in their historical contexts. It proposes that the Rockefeller Foundation’s early 20th century initiatives had a greater bearing on international health when the field was wide open—in a world order characterized by forceful European and ascendant U.S. imperialism—than do the Gates Foundation’s current global health efforts amidst neoliberal globalization and fading U.S. hegemony. It concludes that the Gates Foundation’s pervasive influence is nonetheless of grave concern both to democratic global health governance and to scientific independence—and urges scientists to play a role in contesting and identifying alternatives to global health philanthrocapitalism.