Letter to Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
To whom it may concern:
I was looking over your excellent Web site and I remarked that you channel funds to organizations working in the Pacific Northwest with "homeless families".
I think highly of Bill Gates as a software entrepreneur and now a philanthropist and overall I was very impressed by your Foundation and its web site.
However, one has to take text on a Web site, especially as prepared by your organization, very seriously, and to say that you want to help "homeless families" implies that organizations that serve homeless single men and homeless single women will not be able to get assistance.
I recognize that web page text has to be carefully constructed because all sorts of people all over the world will draw conclusions about your organization from this text. However, the biggest groups of homeless are single people, their status having to do with their homelessness in the case of family breakdown.
In working with homeless fathers, the default experience is to learn that their status resulted from their brave attempt to pay large child support bills.
It is true that in public relations, the sensitivities of corporate sponsors and large private donors are important. At the same time, it's my belief that while doing the public relations, you make these sensitivities, while important, take second place to the truth of mission in a lexical sense (in the strict sense of a strict sorting operation, in geeky terms).
I expect more of your Foundation since its founder, billg, has always appeared to me to be a precise intellect, and as such precisely unsatisfied with decisions, such as the decision to refer to "homeless families", and not "the homeless" in order to negate the bad semantic freight when addressing people on the other side of the big lake, that are made serially in unstructured, unsorted, non-lexical meetings which proceed as it were by a stream of consciousness.
Now, if a conscious decision was made to exclude homeless single people from consideration, then we really have nothing to talk about, since in this case I was mistaken in my high opinion of your Foundation.
Edward G. Nilges
"His money, his decision?" Think, willya?
"It's his money and his decision": this is false. I shall explain it to you.
The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is a non-profit, tax-exempt (in part) foundation set up, not to directly assist the poor and for other eleemosynary activities, but to properly direct funds to the direct helpers.
Under the law it has the right to say "we will help homeless families" and even to say "we will not help homeless men, or homeless hos for that matter".
However, this particular exclusion means that far from being truly universal in its goals as OTHER pr texts have stated, the goals will be trimmed for the benefit, not of the poor, but of the US upper-middle class and elite, and their narcissistic fears of the Other, as a dirty, homeless, single man.
This is at best a grudging gesture, which I still support overall. However, a government US venture, staffed by dedicated public servants instead of elected or appointed mobsters as current, would be better, because under the 14th amendment it would at least in the US be required to help ALL people, not just people embedded in possibly abusive poor families under stress.
To get assistance from the foundation, poor women will have to stay in their families: homeless families are often abusive families.
"It's his money" is the mantra that losers of my generation used while their jobs fled to India and in general they allowed bullies to dispossess them, and the American middle class.
Software developers in particular justified all sorts of management bullying by pre-emptively asserting their Politically Correct adherance to Holy Private Property, and the absolute right of an abstract User, defined by Dijkstra as a man with lots of money and no taste, to make them work all night for peanuts on crap software.
The result is documented by feminist writer Susan Faludi in a book called Stiffed, which is it in a nutshell. If you treat each and every act of entrepreneural money-making as some sort of goddamn sacrament, a temple mystery, you will be Stiffed.
The losers rage against an abstract class of redistributionist liberals which doesn't effectively exist.
But it is a reduction to absurdity to say, of an eleemosynary venture, that the philanthropist has an absolute right to define who gets the money in every case.
This was found to be the case in America's Progressive era and the New Deal. Originally, the government proposed assisting only the deserving poor but this was used to discriminate against poor people of color.
It was realized that the only fair and efficient way to provide relief was in fact by making it an ENTITLEMENT. "Entitlement" is a bad word (rather like "the homeless" as opposed to "homeless families") but all it means is a simple test for said entitlement, so the government doesn't have to waste its time.
Of course, the poor and the homeless aren't "entitled" to billg's money...BEFORE he says, ok, I will fund the best and most effective causes, those with results that can document their success. He has of course the right to make this allocation and provide grants to organizations that best meet his criteria.
But he cannot think himself a true benefactor if he keeps a nickstick of who's worthy. True philanthropy MEANS suspending, after a point, your personal opinion of the person you are helping.
However, it's been found that one of the most effective ways to end homelessness (which happens to be such a plague in Seattle that, according to a recent BBC program, people can no longer have a cup of coffee at Pike Place without being disturbed by the large numbers of homeless single men) is to focus on the largest group, homeless single men, and to give them, rent-free at first, an apartment!
This, it has been found, gives the man a base from which he can realistically seek a full time job. You can't go on a job search after a night in the typical shelter or the rain.
However, by restricting its contract on the Web site to homeless families, Microsoft seems as a matter of policy to be excluding itself from the most effective way of ending homelessness in King County and the Pactific Northwest. And, in some cases, it will throw money at families to keep them together when their troubles are caused by an abusive man, who needs to chill by himself in a small flat, go to work, and relearn how to be a man.
In particular, he'll unlearn saying things like "it's their money" which pass on to a new generation an unhealthy respect for money and power!
This is a programmer issue, because as sociologist Phillip Kraft noted in 1978, so many programmers have to emit texts worshipful of private property as a condition of employability in a deliberately created oversupply of people who can at least fake being programmers by passing simple tests in programming.
his money, his decision
None