Microsoft founder Bill Gates pitched a new form of capitalism on Thursday that would help better serve the neglected poor  in a speech to company bosses assembled in Davos.

He posited that capitalism worked because people were motivated by self-interest to create wealth, but the system did not reflect the other key driver of human behaviour: the desire to help others.

This could be overcome if companies made more philanthropic gestures and gained recognition from the public for doing so. They could also work at stretching their activities to serve neglected and seemingly unattractive markets.

“The challenge here is to design a system including profit and recognition to do more for the poor,” he said, calling for a new form of “creative capitalism.”

via Harness capitalism to help the poor, urges Bill Gates – Yahoo! Canada Finance.

(I must admit to being a bit confused by the timing of this item. It came out in January but it only being reported on now by Yahoo)

I think he makes a point that has been made, from time to time, by others, including Bill Clinton and Jean Cretien.

There is a widening gap between rich and poor, in North America and around the world. Oh, and the middle class is being gutted. Historically, a large gap has led to global unrest, often global violence. World wars, civil wars. This time we’re seeing terrorism on a level that was never seen previously, but it’s still violent unrest.

Mostly the decisions that contribute to this gap, this disparity, are made by nations, but with the increasing power of corporations, especially multi-nationals, there are decisions that can be made by non-elected individuals that might contribute, at least somewhat, to a solution.

The Getty Images Settlement Demand Letter is a deliberate attempt by Getty Images to intimidate and bully recipients to pay an extravagant “settlement fee” in exchange for Getty Images agreement to NOT sue the recipient. Recipients of this letter have allegedly infringed on the alleged copyrights owned by Getty Images.

There are two sides to every story and disagreement. Recipients of the Letter know Getty Images side. This website will assemble the stories and legal arguments of “the other side”. We trust this website will be both helpful and beneficial to you.

The above is a quote (slightly edited) of the lead paragraphs on the following web page.

via The Getty Images Settlement Demand Letter: Reporting on the Extortion Letter Scheme.

Here’s another resource: http://www.zyra.info/getstu.htm

I found out about this scheme recently when someone I know got this letter. I had not heard of the scheme previously, and knew Getty to be (I thought) a reputable stock photography house. I was surprised what I found out when I googled various phrases in the letter.

Now, I’m no lawyer, so take what I have to say with a grain of salt. And do your own research.

But it seems odd to me that they are going so hard against people who, as far as they know, did nothing wrong, tried hard to obey the rules, obtained the pictures in what they thought was a legitimate manner, made essentially no money from the pictures, etc

This heavy-handed approach can only tarnish Getty’s reputation. Why would they want to do this?

Until we admit there are things we don’t know, we can’t even start asking the questions to find out. Until we admit that America can make a mistake, we can’t stop the next one.

via Bill Maher: New Rule: Smart President ≠ Smart Country.

The root cause of the world economic collapse was a socioethical malaise rooted in greed. Now it appears that this wasn’t limited to the financial sector.

via Elsevier published 6 fake journals :The Scientist [7th May 2009].

Today it got worse.

From: The Scientist [7th May 2009].

Elsevier put out a total of seven publications between 2000 and 2005 that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and looked like peer reviewed medical journals, but did not disclose sponsorship

[...]

six other titles in a “series of sponsored article publications” were put out by [the Australian office of Elsevier] and bore the Excerpta Medica imprint from 2000 to 2005. These titles were: the Australasian Journal of General Practice, the Australasian Journal of Neurology, the Australasian Journal of Cardiology, the Australasian Journal of Clinical Pharmacy, the Australasian Journal of Cardiovascular Medicine, and the Australasian Journal of Bone & Joint.

So where are corporate ethics and responsibility? In any of these companies? (the other 6 companies have not been disclosed yet).

At the very least, one has to look at the people who cooked up this scheme. Gee, let’s pay someone else to publish a pretend journal to influence doctors by distorting the facts and pretending to have data we don’t.

Then let’s look at the people at Elsevier. Let’s accept some money for producing a fake peer review journal that doesn’t. Let’s lend our good corporate name to it.

Then let’s look at the people above these schemers, all the way up to the top, who failed to maintain enough oversight or else to fail to enforce it, who didn’t notice notice or didn’t stop this fairly clear ethical violation.

To me, this is the same kind of lack of corporate responsibility we see over and over again in recent history. The bad mortgages, the repackaging of low grade debt and calling it wonderful, safe debt. Where was the corporate responsibility in all this?

[update: the number was originally published by The Scientist as 7, but later revised down to 6]

From an article in theScientist.com (free site registration required).

Merck paid an undisclosed sum to Elsevier to produce several volumes of a publication that had the look of a peer-reviewed medical journal, but contained only reprinted or summarized articles–most of which presented data favorable to Merck products

The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, which was published by Exerpta Medica, a division of scientific publishing juggernaut Elsevier, is not indexed in the MEDLINE database, and has no website (not even a defunct one). The Scientist obtained two issues of the journal: Volume 2, Issues 1 and 2, both dated 2003. The issues contained little in the way of advertisements apart from ads for Fosamax, a Merck drug for osteoporosis, and Vioxx.

We rely on drug companies for things we put in our mouths, which are supposed to help us. This feels like betrayal to me.I won’t rehash the implications, which are explored in the articles referenced below.

Credit where credit is due. I first saw this on slashdot (a computer geek journal) in their science section. It’s being fairly widely reported. A google search currently turns up over a thousand entries. The American Journal of Bioethics and their web site Bioethics.net reported it in their blog. Wikipedia has a stub about it, added fairly recently. It’s also being reported in boing boing. The Australian is covering the trial of a Vioxx user who is suing Merck. The information surfaced in that trial. I don’t know any of these organizations (other than slashdot and Wikipedia) so I can’t speak to issues of accuracy or authority.

Here is an example of a doctor quoting this pseudo-science journal.

Merck responded on this page (part way down the page, the line labelled 30 April 2009).