After all, the guy is quitting Microsoft (or at least cutting way back) to focus on the Gates Foundation, which has been spending money hand-over-fist on all sorts of progressive causes. I can understand the skepticism about Wal-Mart, though. I don't trust them as far as I can throw them.

I was wondering the same thing - while Bill is obviously, based on his past business behavior, a souless monster in that arena - his foundation has done very good work and he seems to understand that his legacy will be that, not the number of Windows licenses he sold. I'm not saying he's nice or amythign, simply that he seems to have done the calculus and figured out the best road to immortality (though not as good as Woody Allan's method - not dying).

However, the Gates Foundation needs to cut off any and all funding to the idiots at the Discovery Institute. I don't care if it's going to Seattle Mass transit studies or whatever the hell it was, and not specifically to Intelligent Design promotion - those people need to have their funding cut off, like cutting the blood supply to a cancer.

I'll shut up now.

There's a significant difference between Gates and the CEO of WalMart: Gates WAS Microsoft in the beginning. He is not a Harvard-educated MBA who joined a company he has a marginal personal stake in. He built the damn thing from the ground up and learned to be an enterpreneur by, I suppose, faking it till he made it. He was one of the starters of the computer boom, after all, they all flew by the seat of their pants at first.

Take this with a grain of salt, but there's a likelihood that Gates means what he says because he's an individual doing his own thing, a human being who thinks like a human being and has a human being's concerns. Whoever speaks for WalMart does just that: speaks for WalMart. WalMart is a corporate entity, interested only in making moolah, the more the better, never mind how. If it means giving a pep-talk on helping people, well, that's what they will do.

I'm a lot more inclined to believe the human Gates rather than the corporation WalMart.

Any attempt at trying to find differences in the motives for Gates' and Wal-Mart's newly discovered consciences is splitting hairs. I'm sticking to Mr. Leonard's story unless someone has some new facts.

Both are inexorably linked to the Conspicuos Consumption that is devouring our planet. Neither one of their companies is doing much to mitigate the problem and the only reason they can speak out is that they are not tied down by banks, both companies are self funding.

What we have here are two attempts to change the dialog without addressing the problem of the environmental and human catastrophy caused by insatiable debt based capitalism.

Did you know that Angelo is leaving Countrywide? And he is leaving behind millions of dollars in previously-arranged compensation?

I would have thought you would have trumpeted this, Andrew. Anyway, do you suppose Angelo will join Mr. Gates in big time philanthropy? I guess No.

He's the major shareholder of one software company that he himself founded and has now decided to give most of that fortune away. I don't know how that qualifies him to be anything more than Bill Gates. Philanthropist, yes. But authority on how things work? Uh uh.

Bill Gates is probably not who you, or me, or anyone else thinks he is.

You could put an army of saints on the board of a major corporation and it would still do bad things. It's the structure, not the people.

I seem to recall having read somewhere that Melinda Gates is Bill's conscience and is behind an awful lot of the decisions about what the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation does.

You write:

Bill Gates is probably not who you, or me, or anyone else thinks he is.

In speaking about who Mr. Gates is, you seem to suggest he has only one persona, only one role he plays. Apart from the whole question of what we mean when we talk about "who someone really is" (and I would argue we can't really answer that question when pressed), I'm talking specifically about Mr. Gates as a public person. I neither know nor care (nor is it any of my business) whom Mr. Gates is as a private person. It's only the role he plays in public that interests me here.

My point in citing Lewis is that public declarations have a certain weight in determining future behavior. Anyone who has made bold declarations in public, even if the public is merely our own circle of friends, knows how difficult it can be to back down from one's proclamations. Pretending to be responsible citizen is the first step in becoming a responsible citizen. That's how children learn how to do it, after all, right?

And second, the first point goes double--even treble--for public figures. Their statements are parsed more closely, and their behavior observed more critically than average janes and joes. The pressure to make words and actions meet is more intense. And then, of course, the words and actions of public figures can actually change the discourse. They can shift the window of possible words and actions in the future. They can start trends, set the fashion, and "make it Ok" to follow suit.

I see your point about the impotency of saints in corporations, although I think your diagnosis of the problem goes astray. In the first place, publicly traded corporations and privately held corporations have very different track records. Nearly identical legal structures. But publicly traded corps behave much worse as a rule.

Secondly, prior to the recent invention of "shareholder value" as a concept (I believe the phrase was coined by Alfred Rappaport in the Harvard Business Review in 1981; I'd appreciate a correction if anyone knows of an earlier usage of the term), even publicly traded corporations could be counted on to behave rather differently than they do now. Again, nearly identical legal structures, but quite different behaviors.

Maybe it's not the structure that's the problem, but rather the obsession--our obsession--with shareholder value. And as the holding of shares becomes ever more prevalent, the problem looks more and more like a social attitude. Saints notwithstanding, doesn't there seem to be a general understanding that a private company's first and most important responsibility is to make a profit? And then, what does it mean that the foregoing question seems hopelessly innocuous? Why don't we reflexively believe that business have to navigate a weave of complex, interrelated responsibilities, just like the human beings who comprise them?