Anti-Asian Sentiment to the Gates Foundation

 I. Anti-Asian Sentiment to the Gates Foundation"

Since mid-March, STOP APPIGATE, an incident reporting center founded by the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, has received more than 1,800 reports of a pandemic -fueled harassment or violence in 45 states and Washington, D.C." Like many Asian Americans, the article's author, Anna Purna Kambhampaty, has learned to feel a "sense of shame over the things that supposedly made us foreign: our food, our language, our haircuts, our smell, our parents." "At the same time, anti-Asian sentiment remained a reservoir of major feeling from which Americans could always draw in a time of crisis. Asian Americans still do wield enough cultural presence to make many of our fellow Americans hesitate in deploying a racist idea." "Pointing the finger at Asians in Asia, or Asians in non-Asian countries, has been a tried and true method of racism for a long time in the U.S., it dates from the 19th century." The result was white mobs lynching Chinese migrants driving en masse out of towns and  burning down Chinese towns." "The slur of the 'Chinese virus' has revealed how fragile our acceptance and inclusion was." [1] 

"Asian Americans are caught between the perception that we are inherently foreign and the temptation that we can be allied with white people in a country built on  white supremacy, and anti-Native racism runs deep in Asian American communities." Multiculturalism may make us feel good, but it will not save the American dream: reparations, economic redistribution, and defending or abolishing the police might." "The U.S. is still a country built on war and for war. "Faced with this problem, Asian Americans can be a model of apology, trying to prove an Americaness that cannot be proved." "The national poverty rate was 15.1% in 2015, while the rate for African Americans about 24.1%, and for Hmong Americans, 28.3%."

"So long as this crossbred system of white supremacy and capitalist exploitation remains in place, there will always be  someone who will write that sign: ANOTHER AMERICAN OUT OF BUSINESS [Fill in the blank], because racism always offers the temptation to blame the weak rather than the powerful." "America is built on the business of driving other businesses out of business."

II. Mormon History

"In each place, local opposition increased in tandem with the growth of the Mormon population." "During this period, the Missouri governor, Lilburn Boggs, declared in an executive order that 'the Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the state if necessary from the public peace.' " "Smith had continued to receive revelations about how the faithful were meant to serve God, so this new sanctuary housed new religious rituals. One of them called for posthumous deism, through which Mormons cold babtize a living person as a proxy for someone already deceased." "Smith publicly denied knowledge of polygamous marriages, and the few records of those unions which do exist refer to them as 'sealings' " [2]

"Like the Quakers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony before them, and the Rajneeshees in Oregon after them, the Mormons in Illinois came to be seen as a  danger to democracy: not a mini-America where the saints could take  refuge,but an anti-America, where social deviance threatened the moral order, and religious authorities sought too much power." "Many denominations came and went during the proliferation of faith,and fanaticism that characterized the Second Great Awakening." "It was also a vote to constrain the power of the executive branch, which Joseph Smith had wanted to strengthen,and to uphold traditional democratic principles, which Smith and his early followers had sought to undermine.

III. No Primary Medical Care in China

"By that point, the country [China] was deep into the most ambitious quarantine in history, with at least seven hundred and sixty million people confined largely to their homes." "In China, there's no comprehensive primary-care system, which is one reason that the coronavirus spiraled out of control in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province." [3]

"Masks also made it easier for people to ignore one another." "These costumes of the  quarantine, along with all the other restrictions, helped citizens inward, and people directed their energy toward      whatever space was left to them."

"During the lockdown, the Minister of Education estimated that more than two hundred million children and adolescents had been confined to their homes." "Young people, in general, suffer significant stress in China, where suicide is the leading cause of death among those aged between fifteen and thirty-five." "According to the W.H.O., by February 20th, children under the age of nineteen represented only 2.4 per cent of the  reported [coronavirus] cases in China." "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States has noted that countries that closed schools at  an early stage have not necessarily handled the epidemic better than those which didn't, and such closures likely have to be longer than four weeks to have any benefit."

"One irony of this pandemic is that,while it exposes the gaps in our social  and medical  safety nets, it also punishes people for behaving well."

IV. The Gates Foundation

There is a new model of charity in which the "most direct beneficiaries are sometime not the world's poor, but the world's wealthiest, in which the goal is to help the rich, not the needy." "Through an investigation of more that 19,000 charitable grants the Gates Foundation has made over the last two decades, 'The Nation' has uncovered close to $1 billion in tax-deductible donations to private companies." "By Bill and Melinda's Gate's estimations,they have seen donations through 2028, resulting in around $4 billion in avoided taxes.' "If Bill and Melinda Gates don't pay their full freight in taxes, the pubic has to make up the difference..." [4]

The Gates Foundation "has given money to groups that push for industry-friendly government policies and regulations..."

"Microsoft's bottom line is heavily dependent on patent protections for its software. These patent protections are widely criticized for making life-saving drugs prohibitively expensive, particularly in the developing world." "The Foundation's clearest conflict of interest may be the grants it gives to for-profit companies in which it holds investments. That's because when the rich give away their wealth, they reduce the assets that the estate tax targets."

"Gates, along with a growing chorus of billionaires,has also used his public platform to push back on a proposed wealth tax." "The Gates Foundation's investments are not an insignificant part of its charitable efforts. Its $50 billion endowment had generated $28.5 billion in investment income over the last five years. During the same period, the foundation has given away only $23.5 billion in charitable grants." "According to IRS statistics, there are around 100,000 private foundations in the United States,having close to $1 trillion in assets. However, foundations generally pay a rate of only 1 or 2 percent, and the IRS was auditing, at most, 263 foundations in 2018."

ADDENDUMS:

*There's one Republican senator or every 260,000 Wyomingites, but only one Democratic senator for every 20 million Californians. [5]

*8 billionaires have seen their wealth grow by over a billion dollars apiece during the pandemic.

*Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell contends that Trump has the power to fire anyone in the Executive Branch.

Footnotes:

[1] Anna Purna Kambhampaty, "Facing racism," TIME, July 6-13, 2020.

[2] Casey Cap, "God's Country," The New Yorker, March 30, 2020.

[3] Peter Hessler, "Life on Lockdown," The New Yorker, March 30, 2020.

[4] Tim Schwab, "Saint Bill," The Nation. Date not recorded, but near the end of March 2020.

[5] Paul Fariler, "Minority Rule," Sierra, May/June 2020.