The New Prophets of Capital (12 page)

The point of contention, whether 350 years ago or today, is that turning something into a commodity means it is no longer a right, or even potentially a right. It also means that the commodity's value is now judged primarily on whether it will turn a profit, and people's access to the commodity hinges upon their ability to pay for it.

The issue of vaccines is illustrative. The Gateses say that the problem with poor countries is that they are excluded from circuits of commodity production because they have no money and so generate no demand for things like vaccines. So the foundation supplies the demand for the pharmaceutical companies, giving the companies the incentive to supply the vaccines. In doing so, health care becomes a commodity with the hope that in the long run the foundation won't have to prop up the demand side and people will be able to buy the vaccines themselves. The problem is defined as a lack of commoditization, and the solution is to create a capitalist health care market. But should health care be a commodity that people buy and sell in the market?

In a wealthy country like the United States, where health care is a commodity, people buy the things they need (like visits to the doctor and medicine) to keep them healthy, and the state steps in and buys certain things (like vaccines) for people who can't buy them. But in a capitalist market, one's ability to purchase a commodity always depends on how much money one has. The US government does not want a public health crisis, so it makes sure people have vaccines and safe drinking water, but as scholars like Vincente Navarro have shown, beyond these basic levels access to care is highly stratified by class and race.
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People with money and good health insurance live significantly longer than poor people with no health insurance. The difference in life span between a poor black man and a wealthy white woman is more than fourteen years. Despite being the wealthiest country in the world, the United States ranks 46th in infant mortality behind every rich country and even much poorer countries such as South Korea and Cuba. Babies born in poor states like Alabama and Mississippi are more than twice as likely to die before their first birthday than babies born in wealthy states like Massachusetts. The capitalist market creates winners and losers. When health care is a commodity, people die (45,000 preventable deaths per year in the United States) or suffer from chronic ailments because they don't have health insurance.
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The Affordable Care Act, passed in 2010, is designed to close some of these gaps by expanding the number of people who can purchase health insurance, but it stops far short of making health care a right.

Anything and everything should be done to save people's lives because no one should die from preventable diseases. But when we frame the problem of poor people in the Global South dying from preventable diseases as a market failure problem, we close off the possibility of building a health care system in which health care is a right and does not depend on one's ability to pay.

There is a growing global consensus on the importance of providing universal health care, as demonstrated by a 2014 World Bank event called Toward Universal Health Coverage by 2030. Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization, proclaimed that “we will not end poverty without universal health coverage.” World Bank President Jim Yong Kim and Larry Summers, economist and former director of the US National Economic Council, echoed these sentiments. The Gateses do not agree. The foundation's official position is that it has no position on universal health care. Despite a report (which the foundation funded) published in
The Lancet
calling for universal health coverage, the foundation's Post-2015 Development Report states that universal health coverage has “limitations as a global development goal,” and that evidence for its positive effects on health outcomes is “mixed.”
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The foundation's deep pockets give it an enormous amount of leverage to shape the way people think about health care globally. The Gates's position that health care works best as a commodity, despite overwhelming evidence that countries with universal health care have the best health outcomes, is deeply problematic and closes the door to frameworks that consider the underlying causes of global health disparities.

The Gateses also think that market logic should apply to public education. Bill Gates argues that the “top-down government monopoly provider” system is broken and that public education would be vastly improved with more competition.
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The Gateses aren't advocating for a complete privatization of the US education system, unlike some other education reformers. Instead, they argue that public schools should operate according to a market logic, meaning that they should have to compete with other schools and demonstrate their value through improved test scores or else be shut down and/or replaced with private, charter schools.

According to Bill Gates, public education in the United States is failing because we don't hold teachers to the same standards as we do other professionals:

The value of measuring effectiveness is clear when you compare teachers to members of other professions—farmers, engineers, computer programmers, even athletes. These professionals are more advanced … because they have clear indicators of excellence, their success depends on performance and they eagerly learn from the best. The same advances haven't been made in teaching because we haven't built a system to measure and promote excellence.
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The market logic is straightforward. The product of education (test scores) will be improved when educational production processes (teachers) transform the inputs (students) with more skill and efficiency. Right now the state has a monopoly on education, so we aren't able to optimize production processes by getting rid of teachers who aren't effective at producing high scores. Programs like Race to the Top and the (Gates-funded) Common Core state standards will enable us to optimize our production processes by increasing the frequency and number of standardized tests so that we'll be able to accurately measure the value each teacher adds to her students.

But there is a problem with applying capitalist market logic to education. The way a capitalist makes money is by using the best inputs and the most efficient production processes to make the most profits. This logic can't be applied to schools. Why? Jamie Vollmer, a businessman who once thought education should be run like a business, explains it well: In 1991, in the thick of the lean-production, “total quality management” craze inspired by the breakout success of Japanese manufacturers, Vollmer was lecturing a group of teachers, administrators, and staff on how to improve their school. Vollmer ran a highly successful ice cream company whose blueberry ice cream had been voted America's best in 1984. He told the group that they should run their school like he ran his company.

During the Q&A a teacher stood up and asked him how he made such delicious blueberry ice cream. He informed her that he only used “super-premium” ingredients. She then asked him, “Mr. Vollmer, when you are standing on your receiving dock and you see an inferior shipment of blueberries arrive, what do you do?” He replied, “I send them back.” The teacher jumped to her feet. “That's right!” But “we can never send back our blueberries. We take them big, small, rich, poor, gifted, exceptional, abused, frightened, confident, homeless, rude, and brilliant. We take them with ADHD, junior rheumatoid arthritis, and English as their second language. We take them all! Every one! And that, Mr. Vollmer, is why it's not a business. It's school!” All 290 teachers, principals, bus drivers, aides, custodians, and secretaries jumped to their feet and yelled, “Yeah! Blueberries! Blueberries!”
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Vollmer realized then that children are not inputs, but today's reformers aren't there yet, as demonstrated by their enthusiasm for schools like the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) chain of charter schools. According to Bill Gates, “There are a few places—very few—where great teachers are being made. A good example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP.”
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The schools (which are funded by the Gateses) were founded by two Teach for America alums and cater to poor black and Latino students from urban neighborhoods. The KIPP schools follow an extended-day, strict disciplinary regime. Students learn how to walk, get off the bus, and use the restroom in the KIPP way. Students are not allowed to talk at school except to answer questions, and they have to “earn” their desks. At some KIPP schools students who break minor rules are isolated and forced to wear signs around their necks that read MISCREANT or CRETIN.

KIPP is not unique. At the Achievement First network of schools, minor infractions such as whispering, humming, or not following directions quickly enough, warrant “re-orientation”—students (including kindergartners) must wear a white pinny over their uniform shirt and are not allowed to speak with other students or participate in music or phys ed while wearing the pinny. To remove it the student must present an official apology to the class and get all of her teachers to sign a letter saying she is ready to be readmitted to the group, and her classmates must vote to decide whether to welcome her back to regular activities.
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Reformers say these disciplinary models (KIPP's is based on the work of Martin Seligman, an American psychologist whose techniques of “learned helplessness” have been adopted by the CIA to enhance torture) are worth it because they dramatically improve test scores. What they do not say is that students who cannot conform are “counseled out” or expelled. Only 40 percent of students who start at KIPP schools finish.
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At a Hartford, Connecticut, Achievement First school nearly half the school was suspended during the 2011/12 school year, including kindergartners. Low-performing students and students with psychological or emotional disabilities are also less likely to be admitted to charter schools in the first place, and more likely to be suspended or expelled. This practice is so widespread among charter schools that the US Department of Education issued a “guidance” to charter schools in 2014 reminding them that they must comply with federal civil rights laws.

No one would claim that the purpose of education is to produce high test scores, or students who nod in unison, spend hours in complete silence, and be humiliated and debased for minor infractions. Yet this is precisely what happens when we organize schools according to a market logic. Education is not a commodity, learning is not a production process, and children are not human capital.

Undemocratic and Unaccountable

The second, and perhaps even bigger, problem with foundations (and many NGOs) is that they are profoundly undemocratic. They can use their money to fund absolutely anything they want. Their deep pockets give them open access to the corridors of power, and they are completely unaccountable for any negative outcomes that may occur as a result of their programs.

This may seem like an extreme indictment. After all, polio vaccines and bednets in malaria-ridden places are good things, as is challenging Malthusian narratives of population growth and promoting contraception, which the Gates Foundation also does. But the Gates Foundation does whatever it wants. The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), a Gates/Rockefeller joint project that started in 2006, is one such example. The foundation contends that since the vast majority of poor people in African countries like Tanzania, Mozambique, Mali, and Ghana are farmers, improving the productivity and yields of farmers will lay the foundation for more sustained economic growth and pull people out of poverty. The goal with AGRA, as with other Gates projects, is to show investors that there are profits to be made in African agriculture. To demonstrate this, AGRA is implementing programs to create input markets in Africa for seeds, pesticides, and new loan programs for farmers.

AGRA argues that one of the major barriers to success (measured by improved yields) for African farmers is that they rely on informal, shared-seed systems. AGRA's plan is to replace these shared seeds with hybrid, high-yield seeds and in the process demonstrate that there is money to be made improving African seeds. These new seeds will be supplied by new, local private seed retailers in formal seed markets and protected by intellectual property rights. The new “certified” seeds will require increased pesticide use, so the foundation is also supporting the creation of pesticide markets. (The Gates's ownership of 500,000 shares in Monsanto may partially explain their enthusiasm for genetically modified seeds.)

When AGRA was announced it sparked an outcry from scientists, development scholars, and food sovereignty activists from both the Global South and North.
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They argue that the Green Revolution hasn't passed over Africa, as AGRA's title suggests. The World Bank tried for decades to implement Green Revolution programs in poor African countries, and these efforts not only failed, but left increased levels of inequality, landlessness, and ecological damage in their wake.
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AGRA policies are more sophisticated than the 1980s World Bank policies, but they trot out the same traditional-modern dichotomy, in which traditional (read: Backward) African farming practices are to blame for African poverty and malnutrition—a claim that doesn't hold up to empirical scrutiny.
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Thus, African farmers should follow the modern (read: Smart) practices of Western farmers to increase productivity and pull themselves out of poverty.
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AGRA is an ongoing program and has generated sustained criticism from activists and political leaders around the world. In October 2014, representatives from six African countries and more than a dozen US food sovereignty groups convened the Africa–US Food Sovereignty Strategy Summit in Seattle. But the outcry against AGRA has had little impact, because the foundation has the resources to pursue any policy goals it wishes. It has used its money to gain support inside the UN and from numerous other foundations and private donors, and it is accountable to no one other than Bill and Melinda Gates. The Gateses play down their power by situating themselves within a global network of partners that includes farmers and community groups, but the farmers who would supposedly benefit from the program have almost no voice in it. Simon Mwamba of the East African Small-Scale Farmers' Federation analogizes the situation: “You come. You buy the land. You make a plan. You build a house. Now you ask me, what color do I want to paint the kitchen? This is not participation!”
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Instead of asking farmers and community groups how the foundation could support and strengthen the existing farmer seed system, the Gateses propose to replace the system with a new private one in which production and distribution are guided by a profit motive.