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The former Mrs. Gates is the Andrew Carnegie of the Gates’ fortune.

Two American billionaires: One loved books, the other hated them
Andrew Carnegie was born in Dunfermline, Scotland, in 1835, migrated at 13 with his family to Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 1848, immediately went to work in a small factory for $1.20 a week. The owner had a library of 400 books on many subjects that his workers could borrow.

Carnegie had little formal education, but his family believed in the importance of libraries, books and reading.

Carnegie later wrote: “They were valuable books, and I will never forget the enjoyment and the instruction I gained from them when I was too poor to buy books myself.”

At the age of 56 he was wealthy enough to fund a library for his birthplace, and by the end of his life had funded 2,509 libraries, with 1,581 of them in the United States. He was known as the “Patron Saint of Libraries.”

He also established Carnegie-Mellon University in 1904.

I spent a lot of time in the downtown Fargo Carnegie Library, and my family has a lot of classic library furniture I purchased when the library was demolished in 1968.

Librarian Richard Waddington was a friend. The Fargo Carnegie College Library was demolished in 1964.
Carnegie became a billionaire by working as a factory laborer, telegraph messenger and operator, several positions with the Pennsylvania Railroad, created the Keystone Bridge Company, and finally as the owner of Carnegie Steel Company. He built steel plants around the country using new technology and built his plants near coal fields, railroads and ships.

At the age of 54 he wrote a famous essay “The Gospel of Wealth,” which summarized his philosophy on the uses of wealth:

1. The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.

2. Surplus wealth is a sacred trust which its possessor is bound to administer to his lifetime for the good of the community.

3. No man becomes rich unless he enriches others.

4. Wealth is not to feed our egos but to feed the hungry and to help people help themselves.

5. The thoughtful man must shortly say, ‘I would as soon leave to my son a curse as the almighty dollar.’

6. Why should men leave great fortunes to their children? If this is done from affection, is it not misguided affection?

7. Libraries are ladders which the aspiring may climb.

Hey! Donald J! Hey, Donald J!
How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?
Donald Trump was born in New York City in 1946 of multi-millionaire parents and demonstrated as early as a toddler that he was a victim of malignant narcissism.

In order that he get disciplined, they sent him to the New York Military Academy High School, from where he graduated in 1964. It is one of the oldest boarding and day schools located at Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, and is the choice of wealthy families whose children need discipline, time-management skills and behavior control.

Cadets follow a rigorous schedule that includes leadership training, athletics and military discipline.
Donald once claimed he was the best baseball player in the state of New York!

After the military academy he attended Fordham University, a Catholic institution, for two years, majoring in economics. He then transferred  to Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and graduated in 1968 with a BA in Economics.

Naturally, he claimed he was “first in his class,” but his name never appears in any rankings or honors list. Trump has always shielded his records legally. Even his graduation is suspect. ‘Tis rumored father Fred had to put up a couple of buildings at Penn to enroll him.

Now — a little surprise. Like Carnegie, Fred Trump came from a poor family, and when his father died when he was 13 he earned $5 a week working in a fruit store 12 hours a day. His early goal was to become a carpenter.

After he graduated from high school in 1922, he built his first house. To cut a long story short, Donald’s father went on to build and manage more than 25,000 apartments in New York, creating one of the largest real estate empires in the U.S. in 70 years of work.

When he died in 1999 at age 93 of Alzheimer’s he left Donald $481,000,000.

What he has done with it would take several large books because of failures and successes, thousands of lawsuits and thousands of lawyers, six bankruptcies, and hundreds of examples of mismanagement and “stiffing” companies and workers.

The Trump family was part-time Episcopalian and Norman Vincent Peale, but Donald thinks he is God or sits in the ultra-right chair next to Him. He often has ministerial hands laid on him by Christian evangelicals and fundamentalists when they trade votes for power.

The Bible has more than 2,000 entries about the poor and marginalized but these Christians are interested in only three subjects: abortion, sexuality and wealth.

Donald carries and sells Bibles but has never read one. He should read Luke’s story of the rich man who doesn’t take care of the thirsty, starving Lazarus covered with sores who is lying by the rich man’s mansion.

Donald may not understand why Lazarus ends up in Heaven and the rich man is assigned to Hell.
I have been studying Donald for two decades and have determined he is a jerk, prick, asshole, psycho-sociopath, malignant narcissist and war criminal because he possesses all of the characteristics of these mentally deficient people. Check dictionaries and the Manual of Mental Disabilities of the American Psychiatric Association for specific characteristics.

Roy Cohn, a young lawyer who was advising Senator Joe McCarthy in the Army-McCarthy hearings, forced a “HAVE YOU NO SENSE OF DECENCY, SIR? From lawyer Joseph Welch, became young Donald Trump’s fixer-mentor in Manhattan when he was a real estate developer.

Cohn was a homophobic gay man-about-town. A reporter accurately described Cohn as “the polestar of human evil. The worst human being who ever lived…the most evil, twisted, vicious bastard ever to snort coke at Studio 54.”

Cohn was consigliere or mentor of the present leader of the Trump crime family.

There is no doubt that the Lyin’ King and his administration with its anti-science and health policies will kill millions of people before they finish their world holocaust in 2029.

They have already separated 100,000 children from their families with their immigration and deportation policies. It’s beyond cruelty. It is life-destroying. 

If we examine the goals of Project 2025, the America First program, and their authoritarian policies, they reveal the philosophy of the Trump administration:

1. Women should be submissive to husbands and men, should not vote and are sexual objects.

2. Homosexuality is an intrinsic disorder that requires health and conversion programs. Same-sex marriage must be obliterated. An executive order states that only two genders should be allowed.

3. Abortion must be outlawed and controlled by extreme penalties.

4. All citizens of the country must be of the white race following guidelines established by the MAWF (Make America White Forever) program promoted by Stephen Miller and wife.

5. No unions or strikes should be allowed.

6. Continued expansion of the   White House Gold Gilts, Real Estate, Gifts, Grifts, Bribes, Pardons, Caps and Mercantile Shoppes.

7. End the Iran War that costs us $25 billion in its first phase and costs us about $1 billion a day to maintain. The first phase would have covered Medicaid for 14 million people at risk of losing their insurance, food stamps (SNAP) for four million people, even with new work requirements, and expanding Medicaid to an additional 13.3 million people.

8. Close all public schools and universities and turn them into classic Christian institutions.

9. Dedicate the first day of each month as 2nd Amendment Day and blow sirens at noon and midnight in tribute to the 100,000 Americans killed and wounded each year by the 435 million weapons of war available each year to the worst of the worst.

Because of the huge cuts made by the anti-science Trump administration in USAID, climate change, EPA regulations, and hundreds of health programs around the world, it will be responsible for millions of deaths. We are not prepared to contain diseases that end up causing world pandemics.

Bill Gates: Billionaire bully and philandering philanthropist
My third billionaire in this column is Bill Gates, a man who has the characteristics of both Andrew Carnegie and Donald Trump. He seems stoic and unhappy today because he acted like Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump by using dozens of women as sexual objects, targets and sexual partners until his wife Melinda of 27 years divorced him and said she would rather live in a 1,500 sq. ft. ranch house rather than a $200 million MAGA-mansion on a lake beach.

Unlike Carnegie, he had fast money from the beginning. The son of wealthy Seattle parents, he attended Lakeside, a very expensive private school and had a short shot of Harvard until he decided to quit and write computer code instead. A genius perhaps, he formed Microsoft when only 20 and gained a reputation as a nightmare boss. Most of my information is from an article “Whither the Nerd-Bully?” by Anapreeta Das in the New York Review of Books. His employees related he had “expletive-laden fits of rage,” and reporters described him as being “arrogant, disdainful, indignant, angry, condescending, petulant, condescending, truculent, evasive, hyperaggressive, despotic, bullying, an enfant terrible of the tech industry and a robber baron.”

That doesn’t leave much. I remember when President Harry Truman said he always wanted one-armed economists so they wouldn’t say “On the other hand…..”

On the other hand, Bill Gates is always listed as one of the richest men in the world. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has saved millions of lives by funding hospitals, clinics and health programs throughout the third world, particularly Africa. It is still known as the world’s largest charitable organization. In 2014 he was named the most admired man I the world. I always listened to his interviews about what was happening in the world.

On the other hand, Gates fell into the spell of Epstein, made some trips to the forbidden island of sex trafficking and kept apartments in New York for transgressions with Russian prostitutes.

Melinda Ann French was a Duke University MBA grad in Computer Science and Economics when she went to work at Microsoft as marketing manager in 1987. She was the youngest and the only woman in the section. She married Gates in 1994, co-founded the Gates Foundation in 2000 and divorced him in 2021 after discovering his sexual affairs and escapades. She had directed the strategy of the foundation for almost two decades.

In 2015 she founded Pivotal Ventures, a company designed to drive social progress and advance women’s power in the U.S. She has pledged billions toward gender equality and women’s reproductive rights. She has also written several books about her personal journey through life.

She certainly represented the “Carnegie” of the Gates family. Yes, Gatsby, the rich are different. They have more money. A few have spines, morals, a sense of humanity and are high on the ladder of the chain of being.
N

o doubt Melinda will donate her $37 billion wisely before she dies.