Quote: "It is the natural right of corporations to fight for their own interests."

It is? It's certainly a natural right of *people* to fight for their own interests -- in fact, arguably the only real "natural" right. But corporations are not natural and so have no natural rights -- just the rights we as a society give them under our system of laws. It may be good to grant corporations a sweeping

anthropomorphic package of rights -- or maybe they should be considered to be only legal entities, leaving the possession of rights to the actual, *natural* human stakeholders and to the humans affected by their actions. The first situation may be the case under current law, but it sure ain't natural.

Matthew Miller wrote:

Quote: "It is the natural right of corporations to fight for their own interests."

It is? It's certainly a natural right of *people* to fight for their own interests -- in fact, arguably the only real "natural" right. But corporations are not natural and so have no natural rights -- just the rights we as a society give them under our system of laws. It may be good to grant corporations a sweeping

anthropomorphic package of rights -- or maybe they should be considered to be only legal entities, leaving the possession of rights to the actual, *natural* human stakeholders and to the humans affected by their actions. The first situation may be the case under current law, but it sure ain't natural.

Natural? What's natural anymore? Anthropomorphic package of rights. Hmm. Interesting terminology. If you want to talk about natural, this all just seems like the natural evolution of the way things are headed. Afterall, originally it was a thing called the "consumer" that was the focus of our economy. ("Consumer" is just an economist's way of saying "individual person" regardless of whether or not one is fully aware of one's individuality or not.) Whether these consumers had jobs or not was important to the economy. Now the consumer has nothing to do with economy. Whether they have jobs or not is also irrelevant to the economy, hence the "jobless recovery" which begs the question "Whose recovery??". We know that answer, don't we? The new consumer is the corporation. The new person is the corporation. We as individual homo sapiens are no longer people. We are goods to be traded or replaced.

So since it's shifted this way, it makes sense that they should take over our "anthropomorphic package of rights". Good for them. Power to the "people". We may one day herald this in orwellian history books of the future as the Emergence of Corporate Rights. It will be up there with Martin Luther King Day and we all be forced to celebrate it.

Sorry, Bill and Melinda make WHO irrelevant?

Let me preface this by saying that what's happening to world health in this day and age is a tragedy. Millions upon millions have died because of simple to treat diseases, and they suffer horrendously because of corporate interests. If we don't have the ability to end this kind of suffering, than we have no place to call our world "modern."

That being said, I think that the Gates Foundation may be trying to solve the wrong problem. The amount of money that they can spend is historic, and unlike governments which have to play politics with their money, the Gates' are free to spend it on whatever they desire. They can look at any problem in the world, no matter how large, and honestly say "I have a chance to fix this." And right now, there are huge problems that threaten to derail all human progress, including global warming, peak oil, escalating international tension (Does anyone else NOT see a buildup in rhetoric, parallaled to pre-WW2 Europe?), and a looming international depression that will dwarf anything seen before.

All of these problems are linked to one distinct cause: resource competition. As our population grows more and more, we have to compete more fiercely for smaller pieces of total wealth. On average, everybody ends up with less, but those in undeveloped countries are robbed by us in more advanced countries, since they just cannot compete. This really shows why there's so much economic disparity throughout the world, and, in addition to predatoristic practices by corporations, they cannot afford to take care of their own health crises. So, as much as the alternative is horrible, I have to honestly question how wise of a decision it is to allow more people to survive on this planet, as we are already being stretched razor thin. If their plan actually works, and they prevent a million deaths, without fixing more root problems, that's a million more mouths to feed in an area that cannot meet it's food requirements already. That's a million more people who have to suffer through that agony, and a million more people to share resources with. I just imagine this as a horrible, compounding cycle that threatens the very survival of the species. As you may remember from an biology course, species with little or no natural predators will simply grow and grow in numbers until they finally snap their resource chain and suffer massive dieoff. It's an idea that's been thrown around for years and years, but we must face the reality of a Malthusian Sword of Damocles, whose thread is stretching periously thin.

But imagine what they could do with that money if they invested it in something else. The development of short-stalk wheat fed the entire Indian subcontinent. New developments like that are happening all the time, except as Mr. Leonard has so clearly demonstrated before, now they are patented, modified to one-cycle, and sold for a premium by the likes of ADM. What if the Gates Foundation decided to develop a crop like that for Africa, but instead of patenting it, distribute it for free? Or if, after a screening of An Inconvenient Truth, decided to do everything in their power to stop GW. Think how much they could invest in green energy, carbon sequestration, or CO2 credits.

They have the power to actually CHANGE the course of this planet, and it seems like they are shooting way too low, despite their noble goals. I call on the two richest men in the world to dedicate their money to a cause so grand that when history retells their story, their riches will be mentioned after their works.