09.14.09
Microsoft Brings to the United Kingdom Its Equivalent of EDGI or “Elevate (Addict) America”
“They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”
Summary: Under the guise of “job creation”, Microsoft creates Windows drones out of less fortunate people
THE EVER SO GENEROUS Microsoft has decided to come over to the UK where it will take advantage of an economic crisis to squeeze its dependency and lock-ins down people’s throats while passing it off in the press as “goodwill”. This strategy is known in much of the world as “EDGI”, which has an equivalent for Western nations, notably “Elevate America” [1, 2, 3, 4].
So, what will this whole “charitable” thing from Microsoft involve? Let us look closely at Microsoft advertising disguised as “news”:
Microsoft will provide about 450,000 training vouchers to low-skilled people giving them access to courses offering ‘digital literacy’, for example how to use Windows or a keyboard.
The use of Windows, eh? Why not GNU/Linux? Does “digital literacy” — as the item above puts it — imply memorising menus in Microsoft Windows? Here is another foolish article which casts Microsoft training/indoctrination as “job creation”. How heartwarming.
Microsoft said it would work with other organisations and local government to deliver its “ambitious” target through a combination of apprenticeships, training and a new job matching service.
The sad thing is that many people are actually buying it. The superficial coverage in the press consistently supports this spin doctoring, ushering the arrival of another generation of Microsoft servants and clients. Watch what “Community Education” has come to mean in the United States and weep at the sight of Microsoft getting chummy with the US Labor [sic] Department (also covered here).
Microsoft Corp. has asked the Labor Department for authorization to fund benefit risks through the Vermont branch of its Bermuda-based captive insurance company.
We needn’t even revisit the topic of Microsoft’s tax avoidance [1, 2], which is further facilitated by shells like the Gates Foundation whose latest public relations for some personal publicity is this:
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is partnering with Viacom Inc.’s television networks, education leaders and celebrities to launch an awareness campaign to reduce the number of dropouts.
That’s a meager investment for some air time and publicity in national television, benefiting a foundation that does a whole lot of other things, with investment scale an order of magnitude greater. █
“Gates’ gimmick of becoming a philantropist repeats the Rockefeller scam almost one to one a century later.”
–Dark cloud over good works of Gates Foundation
