The vagueness of the Zuckerbergs' announcement highlights how little anyone should be impressed. "Our initial areas of focus will be personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people and building strong communities," they said.
Sound familiar?
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was founded in 2000 with billions of dollars Microsoft extracted from American consumers via price gouging and gangster-style monopolistic tactics so ugly the feds almost broke up the company. The charity's (it's charted as a 501(c)) mission sounds remarkably similar to those of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative: "Our foundation is teaming up with partners around the world to take on some tough challenges: extreme poverty and poor health in developing countries, and the failures of America's education system."
Which, right out of the gate, meant donating PCs to schools so that fewer kids would grow up using Macs.
If you're a conservative who thinks government can't do anything right, let me show you a charity that's worse. The Gates Foundation wants to destroy teachers' unions to take away their benefits and drive down their wages -- hardly a way to attract the best and brightest young college graduates into the profession. And it has poured millions into the disastrous Common Core, which has created today's "teach to the test" culture in public schools.
Given Zuckerberg's previous involvement in public schools, a $100 million fiasco in Newark, New Jersey that declared war on teachers, fetishized standardized testing and led to so many school closures that kids wound up walking miles through gang territory to new schools chosen for them by, really, an algorithm -- it isn't a stretch to guess that Chan Zuckerberg will look a lot like Bill and Melinda Gates.
I wouldn't expect much -- much good, anyway -- from Zuckerberg on the poverty front, either. After all, Facebook is spreading poverty among American STEM workers by pushing Congress for more H1C visas for foreign workers hired by big tech companies to replace better-paid Americans. Odds are that, here too, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's approach will be similar to the Gateses.
Too young and too rich to have a clue -- and the only people they know are over-privileged corporate pigs. How do you think this will turn out?
In 2010, for example, Bill and Melinda drew fire for subsidizing African projects by agribusiness conglomerates Cargill and Monsanto, both notorious for crushing small farmers, to the tune of $23 million. They're way into sketchy genetically-modified foods. They wind up propping up authoritarian and dictatorial political regimes by focusing on technocratic short-term "quick fix" projects that don't address the underlying causes of poverty (psst -- capitalism). It's a safe bet Zuck's anti-poverty stuff will make more people poorer.
It's Zuckerberg's billions. He can do what he wants with his money. But let's not make the mistake of calling him a charitable giver, much less a great guy.
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