Does size matter?

I am totally not an expert in dicks, but for my experience I would say that proportions are very important even though we tend to forget them easily, and in some cases, these are so overwhelmingly huge that it is almost impossible to get a glimpse of what they really mean. No worries, do not be scared, I am not talking about giant dicks, or am I?

Bill Gates, one of the wealthiest men on earth founded in the year 2000 the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that disposes today of an estimated 50 billion dollars.

Because I read some pretty aggressive articles published in The Guardian that basically destroyed the no-lockdown strategy adopted by Sweden, which at that time was doing pretty great according to numbers of cases and deaths, I wanted to know who funds one of the most influential and as independent self-portrayed newspaper in the world. It is the Scott trust limited that fully owns The Guardian, it appoints the editor in chief but gives journalistic freedom without interfering with its policy. They also claim, I quote, “our journalism is free from commercial and political bias – never influenced by billionaire owners or shareholders. This makes us different. It means we can challenge the powerful without fear and give a voice to those less heard”. Not true! Without exploring the dark web or hacking into the white house servers, I found that since 2010 the guardian has a partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that donated 5 million dollars for launching the Global Development Page which, no surprise, covers the developing world, including issues like poverty, hunger, infant mortality, adaptation to climate change and economic development.

5 million. Is it a lot or not? Einstein would say: it’s all relative! He must be right! I mean, it’s Einstein.

If the Gates Foundations wealth is around 50 billion dollars, 5 million represent a ten thousandth of the whole money. So now if we assume that my wealth instead is around 50 thousand dollars, which could be a possible average in some European countries, and that I donate the same proportion of money, well the Guardian would receive from me… exactly 5 dollars…probably not even enough to launch a paper airplane war between guardian colleagues during the coffee break! I can pay a coffee or two. I mean, 5 dollars, that’s like my average tip when I go out for dinner. So basically, Bill Gates contributed to launch one of the todays most influential websites giving the equivalent of a tip! I had to repeat this shockingly easy math several times, because the output was quite weird and unrealistic at first sight.

To make the almost unconceivable wealth of billionaires more comprehensible and in order to visualize its proportions, Humphrey Yang made a video, in which he shows the estimated wealth of Amazons CEO Jeff Bezos using rice where every grain of rice represents 100’000 dollars. It took him quite a while but at the end he summed up 122 billion. It might sound even more confusing but at the end he had a mountain of more than 26 kilos of rice, where half of a grain of rice represents my whole wealth and I am a lucky bastard that belongs to the richest 7% of the world population, living with more than 50$ a day. Mind blowing right?

By donating the equivalent of what would be a dollar for me, Bill Gates makes millionaires out of people! Here it’s where Rutger Bregman comes handy. You don’t know him, right? It’s a dutch writer and historian famous for his book “Utopia for realists” that in 2019 went to the World Economic Forum of Davos to invite the richest people and wealthiest companies of the world to finally pay taxes and to start implementing a global strategy to end tax avoidance by making tax free havens illegal. Yeah, you got it, no standing ovation for him. Weeks after the same guy was interviewed by Tucker Carlson one of the most important Fox News “journalist”. Tucker, Carlson and journalist in the same sentence just sounds weird. Bregman claimed that the most influential people and media in general are bought by the billionaire class and that the reason Fox News never talks about tax avoidance is that all fox anchor men are millionaires funded by billionaires. This assumption made Tucker Carlson pretty furious and soon after that he said something like:

Why don’t you go fuck yourself, you tiny brain!

Tucker Carlson responding to Rutger Bregman

Of course, the interview has never been aired, but it’s funny and informative. What got stuck in my mind was the idea of “millionaires funded by billionaires”… is it really plausible?

You can see it as a long-distance adoption, every year you make a small donation but instead of a sick, disabled, malnourished, sub-Saharan black child you support a fat, right winged, definitely sick white supremacist, Fox anchor-man. Makes totally sense to me.

And the save the children slogan “sponsor a child and change their lives” becomes from a billionaire perspective “sponsor an anchor man and he will not change your amazing life”. This practice beyond lobbing of buying someone’s silence or influence with money the agenda of media groups or any organization is a well-known pattern that doesn’t even spare NGOs. Greenpeace activists for example never raise their voices against the dairy and cattle industry, even though it’s a proven fact that livestock alone is responsible for 51% of all the worldwide greenhouse gas emissions and that animal agriculture is the leading cause of species extinction, ocean dead zones, water pollution, and habitat destruction. So we know who the bad guys are. But Greenpeace prefers to engage in some random spectacular prime time actions just to give the impression that they are actually doing something for the planet. Check out Cowspiracy – The Sustainability Secret – old but gold and hard but fair. It’s all about addressing the real causes. Imagine the planet being a chain smoker that just discovered to have a lung cancer and the doctor instead of going: you have to stop smoking… says, well maybe you should live on the country side where the air quality is better, less fine particles. Shit like this.

And because the interest groups have billionaire (aka unlimited) resources all this hidden bribery resumes to: I give you a small tip and you shut the fuck up. Easy. As a billionaire my quality of life is not affected in any way or have you ever had the feeling that giving a tip to someone deprived you from your wealth and pushed you towards famine?

So these are the proportions we have to be aware of to have a better understanding of the power of money related to the unbelievable resources of billionaires and trillionaire corporate and trust companies that affect the whole planet and its entire population.

So it is absolutely legitimate to ask: is there something on the planet billionaires cannot buy? Love maybe? Just kidding. But the answer is no, billionaires can virtually buy everything, but this only because we are used to give a value in money to every single thing we dare to imagine.

This is why we have to change the paradigm. Not everything on the world should have a price. Let’s for example start from the basics: WATER. Our body is made by 60% of water. We need it more than anything else.

The UN resolution of 28th July 2010 declares for the first time in history the right to water as “a universal and fundamental human right”.

The resolution repeatedly stresses that drinking and sanitation water, as well as being a right of every human being, more than other human rights, concerns the dignity of the person, is essential for the full enjoyment of life, and is fundamental to all other human rights.

Unfortunately, the resolution is non-binding and only recommends but does not oblige States to implement initiatives to guarantee quality, accessible, affordable drinking water for all. Which is not surprising because the transformation of water into a commodity is the strategy strenuously pursued by supranational bodies such as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which have long linked the granting of loans to the deregulation and privatization of services, including water supply. As a result 1,1 billion people still lack access to drinking water and 2,4 billion people lack access to sanitation. But it gets worse. In fact, according to the WHO, 1,55 million people die every year because of diarrea, that is directly linked to polluted water and is the 8th cause of death worldwide. But the list of waterborne diseases is far longer and the fact they are all preventable simply through clean and safe water makes it even more cynical. Cholera, typhoid fever, hepatitis A, malaria, dengue and even polio, just to name a few. All together they account for around 5 million death every year. Polio is a good example of how the WHO prefers to invest in global immunization instead of going to the root of the problem, which would be to guarantee the access to clean water.

In fact, 27% of the whole WHO budget goes to the production and distribution of vaccines against polio, a disease that is still endemic only in Afganistan and Pakistan, and the only form of polio left in Africa is found in Nigeria, and believe it or not is created by the vaccine himself. Yes, the attenuated form of polio (the vaccine) gets expelled in the human feces and so it contaminates other people…through polluted water and the circle is complete.

Since 2017 there are more cases of polio created by the vaccine itself than the wild form of polio.

So if we decide to extend this universal and fundamental human right (clean water) from theory to all humanity, we will be able to wipe out a long list of diseases and illnesses that would be only preventable through medication and vaccines. So again we know what to do but we are not doing it? And it is almost unfair to thing that the WHO could stand for humanity or for a supposed greater good, because 80% of the money flowing into the WHO comes from the private sector for specific projects that must be profitable and so today 10% of all the projects in the WHO receive 80% of all the entire budget. But wait, wasn’t Bill Gates a philanthropist? Yes, of course, if his investments make him richer and wealthier then he will be happy to be one.

Nevertheless… I believe in humanity