The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was among a few dozen banks, insurance companies, mutual funds and others entities that loaned $350 million to MediaNews Group Inc. for its purchase of four newspapers from publisher McClatchy Co.
The Seattle-based Gates Foundation, the world's largest philanthropy with an endowment of about $30 billion, contributed an unspecified amount of money toward the transaction, according to an Aug. 8 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission by MediaNews Group. Others listed as contributors include General Electric Capital Corp. and Blue Shield of California.
Spokeswoman Monica Harrington said she could not confirm how much the foundation had contributed to the loan. A message left with the foundation's investment team Monday was not immediately returned.
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Denver-based MediaNews, a privately held company headed by William Dean Singleton, bought the Mercury News and Contra Costa Times to establish itself as the largest newspaper publisher in the San Francisco Bay area. Hearst Corp. bought the Monterey and Minnesota papers but is turning both over to MediaNews in exchange for a stake in MediaNews' operations outside the Bay Area.
MediaNews already owns the Oakland Tribune and a cluster of suburban papers in the Bay Area. Its other properties include The Denver Post, The Salt Lake Tribune and The Detroit News.
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The Gates Foundation awarded about $1.36 billion in grants last year, much of it for public health initiatives in developing countries. In the United States, its donations focus on education and technology in public libraries.
The foundation's loan to MediaNews is part of a broad investment portfolio designed to fund the endowment. The foundation's assets include more than $4 billion in stock in companies including oil behemoths BP PLC and Exxon Mobil Corp., club warehouse chain Costco Wholesale Corp., and pharmaceutical makers Merck and Co. and Schering Plough Corp., according to a recent SEC filing.
Gates Foundation: Helping the world, one murderous investment at a time.
Look at that list of corporations. Does any one of those represent your vision of what the world should look like in the future? It's almost a top ten list of the world's top environmental marauders.
The capitalistic vision of charity is more than tapeworm-like -- it is positively cannibalistic: We will eat our hands to feed our feet,or some sort of madness. Gates' father was reputed to be a pretty nice guy. How did he ever manage to raise such a psychopath?
When I was working in software, I watched his company gobble up smaller companies like a shark, solely in order to keep their superior technologies off the market and not competing with MS's inferior technologies. Everything good was devoured, while pure shit emerged from the Microsoft end.
For some reason this all reminds me of Future Sound Of London's 'Dead Cities', decaying, desolate urban sprawl. Rats chewing through rubbish on the cracked pavement. A solitary psychopath monitoring the noise of his neighbours. A weirdo snorting his own dead skin cells to stay young. All these compulsive disorders that arise out of city life. Once the corps have sucked us dry and moved abroad...Dead cities. They should burn this fucking place down and start again...
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