PR

Sainsburys had a 5 minute free advert on the Today programme last week. Peak time. Justin Webb was enamoured, mmm-ing and aagh-ing and popping a few dummy questions to the CEO (Justin King), but mostly leaving him to stray over the high quality of sainsbury products, expanding profits, the uniqueness of the Sainsbury service, how they were doing the right thing for customers, responding to their needs, helping them with their weekly budgets. And to plug the new Sainsbury campaign: live well for less (twice).

"It's very interesting talking to you" says Webb, "you get a sense that you are preparing yourelf and your business for a really very different longer term situation when it comes to the decisions that shoppers make..."

A longer term situation where people can't afford to shop. Or eat.

"Keith Harrold of Project 5000 in Loughborough, which runs a hot food service once a week from a local church, agrees. "People are struggling. Supermarket prices are shooting up and they aren't coping."

"[Fairshare] works from 17 sites in the UK and shifts 3,600 tonnes of food a year, worth more than £8m. In the past 12 months the number of people it feeds has risen from 29,000 to 35,500. The number of organisations signed up to receive food has risen from 600 to 700. And 42% of those organisations are recording increases of up to 50% in demand for their services.

John Willetts, a former NHS trust chief executive and now the volunteer project director for FareShare in Leicester, said: "It's a constant ramping up in demand all the time. The volume of food we're distributing has risen from 41 tonnes a year three years ago to 98 tonnes now, and that's to the same number of organisations."

From http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/oct/01/families-queue-for-food-ha...

Listen to Webb at http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9607000/9607794.stm

The Gates Foundation has poured $218 million into polio and measles immunization and research worldwide, including in the Niger Delta. At the same time that the foundation is funding inoculations to protect health, The Times found, it has invested $423 million in Eni, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and Total of France -- the companies responsible for most of the flares blanketing the delta with pollution, beyond anything permitted in the United States or Europe.

Indeed, local leaders blame oil development for fostering some of the very afflictions that the foundation combats.

Oil workers, for example, and soldiers protecting them are a magnet for prostitution, contributing to a surge in HIV and teenage pregnancy, both targets in the Gates Foundation's efforts to ease the ills of society, especially among the poor. Oil bore holes fill with stagnant water, which is ideal for mosquitoes that spread malaria, one of the diseases the foundation is fighting.
Dark cloud over good works of Gates Foundation

So why is the Guardian promoting the Foundation (and the man) as a true friend of development? The article above identifies many more examples of the B&MG Foundation pouring money into companies which work against the poorest of the world.

Of course, the more the Gates Foundation funds the killers of development, the more there is to do to patch the sores created by those killers. And they - Bill Gates and Co. - will get the credit for their generosity (in giving away what they could not possibly need or spend themselves), and for the effectiveness with which they stick the sticking plaster onto sores they have themselves created.

At least - they will as long as people fail to make the links between the killing companies, and the Foundation Trusts set up by millionaires, which buy the killing shares and help the killing companies pour out their pollution and their GM seeds and toxic chemicals - as long as Gates, Buffet and Soros seem to be the ones mending the world, not funding its destruction. These men will be our liberal heroes, feted by the liberal press.

Letter to the liberal press

UPDATED:
- letter to Oxfam

Oxfam has the following claim up on its website - under the rubric 'Bin the myth'.

Oxfam spends all its money on admin

This one's definitely not for recycling! The fact is we spend just 10p in every £1 donated to Oxfam on support and running costs – money vital to keeping an effective, professional organisation going. Everything we do depends on it – running efficient projects, getting people, equipment, supplies and funds to where they're needed. The whole life-saving shebang.

Bin the Myth: 'Myth' no 2

I wonder how most potential donors interpret that claim. They probably assume that 90 pence out of every pound donated goes towards direct assistance to those who need it most - perhaps on famine relief, medicines, building wells, buying tools or machinery. Some of them may also realise that part of the money will be used to train and build up the skills of local groups and individuals, and may therefore go towards the salaries of Western consultants or 'experts'. But most will probably assume that Western salaries are counted as 'support' and therefore come out of the 10 pence, rather than the 90. And most will probably assume that 'running costs' include those run-up in the local offices, as well as those incurred by staff employed at central office in the UK.

They would be wrong. The claim does indeed imply that all 'support and running costs' are covered by the 10 pence, not the 90. But support and running costs within each country in fact come out of the 90 pence, not the 10 - as we will see if we look at the small print, hidden away at the bottom of page 60 of Oxfam's 2009 Annual Report and Account, long, long after the pretty picture (on page 42) informing readers how the funds were used: