WhackyNation

No, change that to dream a lot in this instance. Let’s pretend that you are as wealthy as Microsoft’s Bill Gates and had close to $60 billion in the bank and close to $30 billion in your private foundation. What would you do with all that money — or at least some of it?

In Gates’ case, he and his wife, Melinda, have been the most generous donors in history, and much of their foundation’s funds have gone toward fighting diseases like AIDS in African nations. They have also given generously toward a variety of educational institutions. And I applaud them heartily for their generosity and good will.

But what would you do with that kind of money if you had it in your bank account? While you’re thinking about that enormous dream, I’ll tell you what I would do if I were lucky enough to have about $60 billion in the bank and a foundation with assets that were half that amount. First, I would do everything that Bill and Melinda have done to conquer diseases in poverty-stricken countries.

Then I would do some other things. For example, Bill and Melinda have concentrated on supplying medicines and other treatments to African nations, where the AIDS epidemic has taken the highest toll. But why stop there?  For example, why not extend the Gates program and make the campaign against diseases a “world peace program” aimed at all the Third World and even Second World nations?

In other words, why not use the health funds to promote peace in all needy countries — and insist that all nations in dire need of medicines, doctors, hospitals, and various treatments should first dedicate themselves to following a program of making peace with all its neighbors and, in fact, with all other nations on earth?

Good health and the prolonging of life are, in my view, the strongest incentives a foundation or, in fact, a nation, could offer countries suffering from epidemics, poverty, and hunger. In addition, I would use a good portion of that “phantom $60 billion, plus a $30 billion foundation treasury” to promote one of the most important ideas I have ever offered in my books, commentaries, and speeches.

That idea is to cancel all financial-aid programs now offered by the U.S. and substitute for it, as a matter of our foreign policy, my proposed Foster Nation Program. Under that program, we would send some of our brightest minds to poverty-stricken nations to help them develop their agriculture, their resources, their industries, their professions, and everything else in order to raise their standard of living to the same level we enjoy.

Helping these needy nations, one at a time, would eventually end world poverty and hunger and make all nations self-reliant. Imagine what a boon it would be for the U.S. if we could quit worrying about the people of other nations risking their lives to cross oceans and sneak across borders to become residents of America! If their homelands were suddenly to achieve a standard of living similar to ours, they would have no need nor desire to flee to our shores.

Combine the world-peace-through-better-health program with my Foster Nation proposal, and a much better world could be achieved. And, hopefully, it could all be done with a treasury of about $60 billion or so. It would be a godsend for our beleaguered taxpayers!

In an impassioned plea to Congress on Wednesday, Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, the world’s largest software firm, outlined a list of admirable proposals for improving American education and particularly for our schools to turn out the proficient technical workers the nation will need to maintain its position as the world’s technology leader. According to the Associated Press, he told the lawmakers

“the shortage of scientists and engineers was so acute that we must reform both our education system and our immigrations policies.  If we don’t, American companies simply will not have the talent to innovate and compete.”

Good for Mr. Gates!  I agree with him for the most part, but I think he left out an important point in his appeal.  It’s a point I have brought up many times with regard to similar appeals made by the Microsoft genius.  I must make it again, with the hope that its premise will eventually make its way into the Gates prospectus.  Here it is:

Microsoft is constantly expanding its facilities in Redmond, Bellevue, and Seattle, and the remarkable company continues to draw billions in profits as its products lead all others in sales in the U.S. and abroad.  Depending upon which week the “wealthy” statistics are announced, Gates is either the richest or second richest man in the world.

Why, then, don’t Gates and Microsoft establish a school or college or their own in which high-caliber students are trained for the jobs Gates wants to fill with foreign imports?  Aren’t our young people just as talented and ready for specialized careers as are the people Gates wants to bring in from other lands?

Microsoft and other computer firms have already been bringing in skilled workers from India, China, and elsewhere in the Far East.  If we don’t call a halt to the importation of many, many more workers from foreign countries, aren’t we creating a nation in which American-born students will not be able to find a job because foreign workers work for less pay?

Some time ago, I tried to encourage Seattle University, for example, to invite Gates and Microsoft to create a “new communications college of the future” under the banner of Seattle U.  In my proposal, Gates would not only finance the college, which he could do easily.

He would also have complete control over the curriculum of the new Gates College.  There he would be able to train the people he and other Computer Age companies will need in the future — as well as to train the new breed of communicators the news media and related fields will need in the years to come.

Unfortunately, Seattle U. did not follow up on my proposal.  But there is still time for Gates and Seattle U. — or some other university — to adopt the proposal.  Wouldn’t it be far better to train our own young people than to add millions more immigrants to a nation already overburdened with newcomers from other lands?

On his visit to Tanzania earlier this week as part of his weeklong stops in Africa, President Bush told the citizens at a hospital in Anusha that the program he announced back in 2005 to help reduce malaria-related deaths in 15 African nations was working and that the death toll was declining steadily and rapidly.

“Our strategy to achieve this goal is straightforward,” the President said of the $1.2 billion program. “First, the initiative supports indoor residual spraying to keep deadly mosquitoes at bay. Here in Tanzania, spraying campaigns have reached hundreds of thousands of homes and have protected more than a million people.

“Second, the initiative supports treatment for those who are most vulnerable to malaria, especially pregnant women. Here in Tanzania, more than 2,400 health workers have been trained to provide specialized treatment that prevents malaria in expectant mothers. Third, the initiative provides life-saving drugs. Here in Tanzania, the program has supported more than a million courses of treatment and has trained more than 5,000 health workers to use them.

“Fourth, the initiative supports the distribution of insecticide-treated bed nets, and Laura and I are about to distribute some of those bed nets…. Here in Tanzania, we’re working with the government and partners such as the Global Fund to provide bed-net vouchers for infants and pregnant mothers.”

All well and good. In these commentaries, I have mentioned the bed-net program and the new protective anti-mosquito fences that have been introduced in African countries. They are helpful in the campaign against malaria in Africa, as well as in many Asian countries. But all these new programs aren’t enough in the worldwide fight against malaria.

I’m hoping that before he leaves office, President Bush will finish the fine job he has done to prevent malaria and AIDS in Africa and elsewhere. To finish the job, he should ask Congress and all the Western Powers to end the misguided ban on DDT and thereby end malaria infections everywhere on the planet.

Thanks to environmental extremists, the extremely successful application of DDT about 75 years ago eventually cut the 3,000,000 malaria deaths each year down to a few hundred, and it would have ended malaria for all time if the ban had not been enforced in the 1970s, the result of Rachel Carson’s grossly inaccurate book, Silent Spring.

DDT was one of the most successful insecticides created by scientists. It should be utilized once again, not only in the swamplands of America’s Southland but in every country where swamplands — and mosquitoes — exist.

A campaign to restore DDT should also be joined by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has poured millions of dollars into the fight against both AIDS and malaria in Africa. The foundation also has supported the mosquito-fence and bed-net program in African nations, but its millions would be far better spent in restoration of DDT.

The monstrously large and greedy hand of Big Government has stretched out once more to grasp an important private area in which it has no business interfering — the vast and significant domain of private charities and foundations, where, traditionally, it has been “persona non grata,” and wisely so.

For some time now, the federal government, spurred by several Liberal elements in Congress, has had its eye on the billions in the treasury of the world’s largest and most generous foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Liberals have cast their collective eye on the foundation as a result of the gift to the foundation of $31 billion by another billionaire, Warren Buffett, increasing the foundation’s total to more than $60 billion.

Together, the Gateses and Buffett have agreed to expand the Gates’ remarkably generous program to promote better health and education in the world’s most poverty-stricken regions. That program is going well everywhere, and it must not be sullied by the greedy hand of Big Government.

However, the Liberals are pointing to the examples of the convicted lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, and irregularities discovered in the management of Red Cross and Nature Conservancy funds to make a case for their insistence that the operations of the Gates Foundation and other charity organizations must be controlled by government under a new set of rules.

At the moment, the elements in Congress seeking to invade private charities’ arena are relatively quiet, possibly because the Gates Foundation in particular has achieved extraordinary successes in its multi-million-dollar programs to fight AIDS and other diseases in several African nations.

But large charitable institutions should remain on guard to forestall a new assault on their funds by the tax-mad creatures in Congress and in federal government. Under no conditions should money advanced for worthy charitable purposes be subjected to federal tax programs.

In fact, Congress should be following an opposite tack and move to pass legislation specifically forbidding government or any other source from trying to extract funds from any charity for tax purposes. The whole idea is devilish and un-American, and the people should stand at the ready to ward it off for all time.

Furthermore, it is well known that Gates, Buffett, and other billionaires and millionaires in our midst have already paid their dues in the form of federal taxes. Wouldn’t any proposal to tax their foundation funds actually amount to a case of “double taxation,” something that has long been forbidden in America?

Amazingly, Bill Gates’ remarkable foundation has taken a big step toward what amounts to adoption of an idea I’ve been trying to promote for several years. In addition to pouring millions into the eradication of AIDS and other diseases occurring principally in African nations, the foundation has now granted $350 million in an extraordinary effort to boost farm productivity in poverty-stricken areas of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

By great coincidence, it is the first step in the program I have tried to persuade our federal government into establishing. My proposal is for the U.S. to end all foreign-aid programs and to replace them with my Foster Nation plan. Under that plan we would select one underdeveloped Third World nation at a time and make it a Foster Nation.

We would then send to each nation selected several of our best minds in the fields of agriculture, industry, education, the professions, and every other field in an effort to vitalize their economies and raise their standard of living. Our representatives would help them find and utilize their natural resources, improve their farming and industrial programs, and do the same for their schools and all the professions.

The U.S. would save billions in foreign-aid funds, most of which are frittered away through faulty administration. At the same time, we would be helping to feed millions, as the Gates Foundation grants are now doing. But even more important, by raising the standard of living in each of the countries aided, we would be eliminating the people’s desire to flee to another country — most often the U.S.

The Gates program, directed by a foundation fellow named Rajiv Shah, is already at work “introducing new seed varieties, irrigation, fertilizer, training for farmers, and access to local and international markets,” as the Seattle Times has reported.

“In the poorest countries, 65 percent of jobs are in farming. Yet Africa’s share of food production is shrinking and the number of people who are hungry is going up — in sharp contrast to improvements in the rest of the world.”

In an astounding statement, the Times’ article reported that

“in sub-Saharan Africa, more than 200 million people are hungry or malnourished — one third of the population.”

As could have been expected, the Gates plan has drawn criticism from certain quarters. Some of that criticism has come from environmentally extreme quarters and is based on the notion that the Gates program is market-driven and that its farming procedures are going to wreck the environment in the downtrodden countries.

What malarkey! It seems the extremists would rather see millions starve than to help them revitalize their lives and their economies so that their standard of living could begin to rise toward the standards in the First World nations.

I’m hoping that the U.S. will take a cue from the Gates venture and adopt my total Foster Nation Plan, which is a great improvement over our ongoing foreign-aid programs. Although better farming would help feed the poverty-stricken nations, they also need new industries, better school systems, improved medical and dental programs, and all the rest.

I have a great suggestion for Bill Gates, the brilliant chief wizard of the Microsoft Corporation, and I hope someone carries it to him, since I have been unable to break through his wall of receptionists, secretaries, and others for several years, even though I have many more valuable ideas for him and Microsoft.

The suggestion referred to involves a complaint he has been making for some time now and which addresses an issue that grows more serious by the day for the U.S. In his most recent statement, Gates lamented the fact that the nation is not turning out the technicians and engineers that are needed to keep our economy going and steadily improving.

Gates referred to the problem as one for Microsoft in particular. He said his firm, a world leader in computer technology, relies on “thousands of engineers skilled in math and computer science” and that the jobs are there waiting but the workers needed to fill them are not being trained.

My idea for Gates has several potentials I hope he will consider. The first concerns Microsoft itself, as well as Gates and Steve Balmer, who is now running the company as Gates devotes most of his time to his foundation. Why don’t Gates and Balmer create their own school at Microsoft to train the engineers they will need?

Another potential goes this way: Why don’t Gates and Balmer take their case to school systems in Washington State and to all other state school systems, as well? For years, I have been pleading for all states to follow the lead set by states like Ohio, Illinois, and a few others in establishing technical high schools to train the much needed workers of the future?

I was a graduate of such a high school, East Technical in Cleveland, which was one of two high-tech schools in the Greater Cleveland area. While there, I was enrolled in the five-year preparatory course under the Smith-Hughes Act, which Congress passed back in the 1930s to begin filling the need for high-tech workers.

As a result, East Technical and West Technical High Schools were soon filling the skilled-worker needs of Cleveland’s mammoth industrial complex — and has continued to do it to this day. In this day and age, the computer sciences are very much a part of the skilled training courses needed — and which Gates says Microsoft needs.

Still another potential has just been announced by the Federal Way School System, which is creating a special course that will concentrate on science and technology, very much like the technical schools in Cleveland. The new academy will include youngsters from Grades 6 through 12.

The sad note in Federal Way’s case is that the much larger Seattle Public School System has rejected proposals for establishing science-and-technical schools for the past three years and shows no signs of doing so in the future. Now, there’s a target for you to work on, Messrs. Gates and Balmer!

Technical-training schools would accomplish at least one other desirable goal — which is to reduce the number of technically trained migrants from the Far East, who have been taking the jobs that should have been filled by American-born students.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has poured billions into combating AIDS and other diseases, primarily in Africa, has invested $1.14 billion into scientific research designed to find a miracle drug to cure malaria cases, also an extremely serious problem in African countries.

Reporters for the Seattle Times have just detailed the great effort that is being made in Tanzania, Africa to develop that cure. However, it is unfortunate that neither the Times reporters nor the Gates Foundation have devoted any time at all to the real solution to the world’s malaria crisis.

I have written and spoken about that real solution so many times that I am amazed that little or no attention has been paid to it — except in recent times by the World Heath Organization. Instead of spending so much time, money, and effort on finding a cure, which has been totally elusive to scientists, the world should be zeroing in on the malaria preventative, which already exists and which once proved extremely effective.

My old friend, Dr. Dixy Lee Ray, and I documented the tragic story of DDT in our book, Environmental Overkill, and repeated it again and again without attracting the attention of American and foreign political leaders. Because it’s so important, I must tell it once more with the hope that it will bring positive action.

Early in the last century, scientists came up with the new insecticide and pesticide, DDT, whose purpose was to be spread over swamps and other lands, particularly in hot climates. After extremely successful testing, DDT was employed in mosquito-infested areas in America’s South and, gradually, in swamplands in many other nations.

Beginning in the 1930s, the deaths from malaria began to plummet markedly wherever DDT was used. Before DDT, the annual world death rate from malaria was at the astounding 3,000,000 mark. Within just a few years late in the 1930s, the yearly death rate was reduced remarkably from 3,000,000 to just a few hundred — and the complete eradication of malaria was in sight before long.

Then, with the publication of Rachel Carson’s scientifically inaccurate book, Silent Spring, the extreme environmentalist camp began a movement to persuade political leaders to ban DDT from use because, they said, they had proof that the insecticide damaged eagles’ eggs, of all fairy tales! It is to the political leaders’ eternal disgrace that they permitted the ban to go into effect — a ban that was copied worldwide.

Within a short time, the world’s malaria death rate began soaring again, until at this date in history, it has risen once more to the 3,000,000-a-year mark. The Gates Foundation should heed the advice of the W.H.O. and legitimate scientists and re-direct its efforts to restoring use of one of the greatest scientific discoveries known, DDT — and to saving 3,000,000 lives a year!

In the meantime, I believe those wacko environmentalists who led the movement to ban DDT in the 1970s should face charges of genocide!

Splashed all over the front of the Seattle Times today is the news feature article headlined, “Gates Foundation tackles a giant that preys on African children.”  Its a newstory documenting the horrors of the disease and efforts to find a vaccine.

But before you start asking yourself, “Could this be a Pulitzer?” ask yourself, “Could the reporter Sandi Doughton find her own ass with her own two hands?”

For Doughton misses the real story about malaria these last 35 years: “Why does the world tolerate a million deaths a year if almost every one of them is avoidable?”

Doughton gets close to answering the first part of the question here:

About 90 percent of those who die from malaria are African children under the age of 5. The World Health Organization estimates malaria kills a child every 30 seconds. At that rate, Seattle’s 46,000 public schoolchildren would be wiped out in about two weeks, and the outrage would reverberate to the highest levels.

But Doughton doesn’t ask the question “Why tolerate all the deaths if they are avoidable.”

The Western World and Seattle liberals don’t give a damn about little black, African babies if they stand in the way of their closely held Mother Earth religion called “Environmentalism.”

Evangelized by Rachel Carson’s debunked Bible, Silent Spring, the hippy baby boomers pressured lawmakers in the 1970’s to outlaw the miracle chemical, DDT, which had all but wiped out malaria deaths.  Carson claimed the chemical was the reason some bird species were threatened, a claim real scientists later said was over-the-top.

But since the world’s non scientific politicians outlawed the chemical, malaria deaths have been averaging a million for the last 35 years.  That’s nearly three times the tragic deaths lost in the Holocaust.  But the people dying now are only black, so that makes it okay for the Seattle liberals and the Sierra Club:

“Better a million black babies dies each year than to admit our ’science’ was wrong.”  By the way, many of the people who think this also preach the world is doomed by manmade global warming.  Same “religion;” same “science.”

Why didn’t Doughton ask the question, “Why not allow limited DDT use in malaria prone areas?” as African health officials have recently asked?  Good question.  It gets back to the two hands and an ass dilemma for her.

I commend Bill and Melinda Gates and their friend Warren Buffett for putting up the millions to battle the disease.  Says Gates,

“This is the time period where malaria can be largely conquered,” he said in an interview. “Whatever it takes, we’re just going to stay at it.”

Whatever it takes, Bill?  Well, my billionaire humanitarian, if you really want to eradicate the disease, why don’t you call for the use of DDT, a simple and inexpensive cure for one of mankind’s worst medical problems?

Sometimes, Bill, pencil and paper do a better job than a computer.  You could do the world a huge, humanitarian favor if you would just ask the question, “Can we use DDT?”