Gates: Businesses Need To Help The Poor

CNet News:

In two separate speeches on Friday, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates made the case that businesses need to see serving the poor as part of their mission and that governments need to see private businesses as potential partners.

One of the big topics for both audiences was the notion of microfinance--improving the access to credit and banking to the poor.

"The idea of how they create loans for the poorest is part of it," he said at the Government Leaders Forum. But although today microfinance has focused on loans, there is more to it. "We need to get savings and even some insurance products."

Read the whole story: CNet News

Comments

[Vexed]

04:17 PM on 04/06/2008

What a friggin hypocrit... Here's a guy that routinely appears before congress and lobbies for increasing the number of visas the US grants to hi-tech foreign workers... Oh, by-the-way, these hi-tech foreigners work for 25-30% less then US hi-tech workers... He's been very successful in convincing our legislators of the need... So much so that apart from increasing the foreign hi-tech workers working in the USA by millions, he succeeded in driving down the wages and benefits of American hi-tech workers in the process... Help the poor?!?! He's working very hard to make middle class hi-tech workers a part of his new cause...

[sculptor]

03:44 PM on 04/06/2008

As much as I loath Bill Gates for how he acquired his weath I have to laude him for how he spends it.

[FreedomCorpse]

03:13 PM on 04/06/2008

Businesses can help the poor by paying their workers in 'developing' nations a lot more than subsistence level wages, extorting huge profit margins from this wage exploitation and exploiting economic differentials between trading nations (called 'competitiveness' in econ speak) and stop paying the people at the top criminal salaries to do this to everyone. But nope Bill would never say that.

[gcallaghan]

12:30 PM on 04/06/2008

Shouldn't that headline be: Gates: OTHER Businesses Need To Help The Poor

[dadw5boys]

12:24 PM on 04/06/2008

The states are scamming the Welfare moms for all they can get. Claiming part of the child support for extras above the normal rents.

[NoahVail]

02:10 AM on 04/06/2008

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are both pretty good people. They both believe in corporate responsibility, but the guys who run most of the oil companies, banks and arms manufacturers do not. We will have to restrain big business in general, though. The international plutocracy would love to turn the US into just another Latin American dictatorship, but we the people need to stop them. We the people-- and I guess Bill is one of the people. One with a gazillion dollars....

[ChristianEcon.com]

03:55 PM on 04/05/2008

Businesses don't need to help the poor, democracy needs to re-regulate Corporate America.

And the ultrarich need to pay off their national debt.

[chronic]

08:54 PM on 04/06/2008

EXACTLY!!!!

[maggiemae656]

02:32 PM on 04/05/2008

Bill has to remember who he is talking to--we're not one of those developing nations that he has been devoting his all of his energies to. We are fully aware of our demise at the hands of the corporations, and also fully aware that he has earned his billions of dollars by steam rolling over anyone who tries to get in the way of his amassing a fortune.

He is a real trend setter--but the trends he sets are hurtful, not helpful. Go ahead, Bill, and make us all poor by leading a cause to import foreign labor and export American jobs, and then try to come off like you have "concern for the poor"? You want to make us poor, and then make it easy for us to get credit? You want to train all children on computers so your software become part of the required expenses of living? It's too late now to buy your way out of the mess you have willfully contributed to.

Bill Gates can do us all a favor and keep his sorry *ss out of our affairs altogether. He may be better in math and science than the Americans that he doesn't want to hire, but he is lacking the moral skills necessary for living in a mutually dependent society. I don't think that's something that can be taught in school--what good are brains if you have no conscience?

[SouthJerseySteve]

03:20 PM on 04/06/2008

Absolutely true in what you say!! Bill Gates was in front of Congress just a couple of weeks ago, asking them to allow more foreign labor into the U.S. because Americans are too stupid to work for Microsoft. No wonder we are poor--@$$holes like him won't hire Americans because then the employer will have to pay a fair wage AND benefits--so IT guys end up working for Best Buy's Geek Squad for $12/hour and are poor, it's a vicious circle.

[olephart]

02:30 PM on 04/05/2008

People wouldn't be poor if businesses paid living wages. The latest unemployment figure, U-6 unadjusted, is at 9.8%. That's about 13,000,000 people looking for work. You and your billionaire brethren are asking Congress for 75,000 H1B visas, you don't think that out of those 13,000,000 you couldn't find enough qualified Americans to fill your needs? Maybe you couldn't find enough to work for half the going rate and no benefits. Maybe with the addition of 75,000 underpaid imports you can keep the pay rates depressed. Wages for the Middle Class haven't risen for 7 years. Another reason for these stagnant wages is the presence of 12,000,000 illegal immigrants. Many bust ass jobs that used to pay three to four times the minimum wage, which is still historically low, pay less than twice the minimum wage. Now these physically demanding jobs go to illegals who are illegal because of their criminal employers. The Bush administration has intentionally not enforced the laws against the hiring of the undocumented. The lame assed Democrats supporting Amnesty would legalize and solidify this fall into poverty for millions.

So Mr. Gates, if you want to actually do something for anyone other than yourself, support fair wages and policies that promote fair wages for the citizens of the Country that allowed you to make your wealth. If you are unwilling to do that, just join Paris Hilton and get stammering drunk so your notoriety will match your character.

[DFL]

02:10 PM on 04/05/2008

ONES LIKE GATES AND BUFFET MAKE ME PROUD TO BE A DEMOCRAT, IMAGINE ANY NEO CON CARING ABOUT THE POOR OR GIVING AWAY MONEY FOR THEIR BENIFIT, HA HA HA HA, GOP MOTTO: I GOT MINE AND TO HECK WITH EVERYONE ELSE!

[mommadona]

12:13 PM on 04/05/2008

Oh, GOOD GRIEF.

BubbleBoy speaks.

BubbleBoy deigns to speak of what he does not know.

Ick.

[winoohno]

03:20 PM on 04/05/2008

Could not agree more...

Hey Bill Gates: SHUT UP!

He has spent millions on charities all over the world... how about some of the money spent here in the U.S. -- where we all buy Windows software.

How about donating computers & software to schools?

How about ponying up some of your money for the poor you bliterthing idiot..

[kae]

12:07 AM on 04/06/2008

How about Bill Gates promoting a fair tax for all americans - then the poor WILL have an actual chance.

[berensma]

10:48 AM on 04/05/2008

Ugh. Another article/statement from a powerful person implying that marketing to poor people is somehow going to raise them out of poverty....

[unbozo]

09:46 AM on 04/05/2008

Hey Bill! What poor are you talking about? The people that you disenfranchise in this country by going to congress to beg for more H1B workers to fill positions that American workers aew perfectly qualified to do? Clue to Bill charity begins at home.

[krocklin]

09:40 AM on 04/05/2008

Unfortunately, since Reagan the dominant perspective in this country is just the opposite.
It is more accepted - and promoted by the party most in power for 30 years (the Republicans) - that the rich should help the poor WHEN THEY DEIGN TO. When they magnanimously decide to forgive them for being poor.

Rather as it was in the feudal and phaoranic societies of the past. Forget the Magna Carta and the U.S. Constitiution and the humanist thrust of Western Humanist philosophy and thought since the time of the Greeks.

Ronald Reagan is currently considered a great philosopher and political thinker and his ideas dominate.

[drumz]

12:29 PM on 04/05/2008

"Ronald Reagan is currently considered a great philosopher and political thinker and his ideas dominate."

Only the stupid GOP thinks he was great. He started the decline of the middle class. Raygun is the biggest POS anywhere well, except next to the chimp.

[VivaZapata]

09:12 AM on 04/05/2008

If they want to help the poor. the rich should not work so hard for tax breaks for themselves. also, they could support socialized medicine, stop raping impoverished nations (and bombing them), improve schools (lower class sizes) and offer free higher education and/or skilled technical training. gates could probably do most of it by himself if he gave a real damn. he could at least speak out against the horrors of the Iraq War, the use of Blackwater on the streets of New Orleans during Katrina and the 99 cent per load of wash done by Halliburton in Iraq.

[maggiemae656]

02:11 PM on 04/05/2008

Speaking of price per wash load...maybe he could set up some laundrymats so that the poor people in this country who don't have the ability to own their own washers and dryers don't have to pay $5.00 per wash load at a coin operated laundry mat--and that doesn't include the laundry soap, or the dryer. (Sometimes a laundry mat may give some dry time for free.) I think it is a crime to bleed people this way.

[VivaZapata]

05:35 PM on 04/05/2008

the increased cost of living brought on by the anemic dollar is nothing more than a tax on people with fixed and/or low incomes. maggie, you're right: they're cruel, greedy bastards. don't forget: when it's time to chop off their heads, show no mercy.