Penance for their sins?
Sanders asks if corporate philanthropy merely soothes aching consciences
Jim Sanders

Some truly wealthy people are very clever at massaging their public images to seem benevolent and giving.

Take Saint Bill Gates for instance. The Gates Foundation, with its $35 billion endowment, often attains white knight status for fighting such diseases as malaria, polio and HIV in Africa.

But as the L.A. Times just recently reported, Gates’ philanthropic empire has a dark side. It turns out that only around five per cent of the endowment goes to support good deeds — just enough money to ensure that most taxes can be avoided.

So what’s being done with the other 95 per cent? It’s being invested in some of the world’s worst polluters, companies such as Dow Chemicals, Dutch Shell and Tyco International. The Gates Foundation also invests in oil development throughout Africa.

What the Times discovered was that three of the diseases purported to be concerns of the foundation — malaria, polio and HIV — are often spread by the social and environmental conditions created by the oil industry itself.

You can’t be the villain and claim to be the hero.

Philanthropy is a ruse. At best, it’s no better than a feeble attempt by people of high net worth to appease their consciences, and at worst it’s a deceptive enterprise designed to gain more wealth and power. The act of philanthropy gives rich people feel-good things to talk about at their cocktail parties and black-tie events. (I’m sure it can’t always be fun to mingle and chat about how one rapes the planet on a daily basis.)

Here in Winnipeg, the Richardsons, one of our wealthiest families, know how important it is to maintain the tradition of philanthropy. Just like Gates, the Richardsons are big into oil and gas. Their company was one of the main investors in the $5-billion Muskeg River oil-sands mine north of Fort McMurray, Alta. Just as in Africa, oil development in Canada is an assault on the Earth and the health of humanity. At the rate we burn fossil fuels, the planet is going turn into big lump of coal sooner rather than later.

The fact the Richardsons donate money to local arts groups, to the Big Brother Association or to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights merely deflects attention from this inconvenient truth.

Winnipeggers should hold no illusions about the source of the wealth of James Richardson’s descendants. Since 1857, the Richardsons have been amassing extravagant wealth at great cost to the rest of society. This is most clear in relation to the First Nations people of the Prairies.

Over the course of the Richardsons corporate history, First Nations people have endured everything from forced abuse in residential schools to broken treaty promises. Genocidal government policies toward First Nations took traditional lands from aboriginal people, thereby enabling people such as the Richardson to build empires by harnessing the Prairie landscape in pursuit of grain and oil.

If people like the Richardsons and Bill Gates honestly want to do good, perhaps even save their souls, they need to do the right thing and simply stop profiting from the destruction of the planet and its people.

The Harper administration didn’t recently name Winnipeg’s airport after James Armstrong Richardson because of his philanthropic character. They were honouring a man and a corporate legacy that reflects everything the Conservative party stands for, which is the very same thing that George W. Bush stands for — the unfettered accumulation of wealth with no regard for consequences.

History will not look kindly upon these people, and at some point in the evolution of human consciousness we will realize it’s tacky to name public institutions after them.

Jim Sanders is a local documentary filmmaker and co-founder of Dada World Data Productions.