“I think he [Bill Gates] has a Napoleonic concept of himself and his company, an arrogance that derives from power and unalloyed success, with no leavening hard experience, no reverses [...] They don’t act like grown-ups!”

--Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson

Summary: Anniversary of Bill Gates' illegal monopolisation and similar such attempts in the black continent

A COUPLE of days ago it was a special day. It marked the anniversary not only of Pearl Harbor but also of Bill Gates' predatory (and later criminal) behaviour against Netscape and by inference against the Net.

Glyn Moody has the details:

Yesterday was Pearl Harbour Day, which means that it's fully fourteen years since Bill Gates declared war:

On December 7, 1995, Pearl Harbor Day, Bill Gates declared war -- writing an internal memo ordering Microsoft to throw all its resources into launching a "hardcore" attack on the Internet browser market. At the time, Netscape's share of that market was close to 90%; by early 2000, Netscape's share had plunged to 20%, and Microsoft's browser appeared to have won this war.

I remember the day well, because it marked probably the biggest U-turn in the history of Microsoft. Before, Bill Gates had dismissed the Internet as too hard to use, and only of interest to academics. Afterwards, it became perhaps the single most important focus of the entire company. The success of that move was plain in the steadily rising graph of Internet Explorer's market share, and the corresponding decline of Netscape.

As we noted a few days ago, under the the "Gates Foundation" banner Bill is now working on establishing new monopolies, including agricultural ones in Africa.

Well, Africans are not as ignorant as Bill Gates needs them to be. In the face of the Gates-backed Monsanto, one blogger argues:

Gates Foundation rhetoric makes Africa sound like a basket case, land-wise: references to “depleted” or “degraded” soils.

We hear relatively little about the continent’s vast agricultural assets—which wealthy investors are now busily snapping up. Andrew Rice visits Africa’s “billion-acre Guinea Savannah zone,” which he describes as “a crescent-shaped swath that runs east across Africa all the way to Ethiopia, and southward to Congo and Angola. “The World Bank and the FAO have declared the tract “one of the earth’s last large reserves of underused land,” Rice reports.

For the convenience of those to whom this is new, more information is added below. ⬆

Related posts about Monsanto:

• Bill Gates Takes His GMO Patent Investments/Experiments to India
• How the Gates Foundation Privatises Africa
• Reader's Article: The Gates Foundation and Genetically-Modified Foods
• Monsanto: The Microsoft of Food
• Seeds of Doubt in Bill Gates Investments
• Gates Foundation Accused of Faking/Fabricating Data to Advance Political Goals
• More Dubious Practices from the Gates Foundation
• Video Transcript of Vandana Shiva on Insane Patents
• Explanation of What Bill Gates' Patent Investments Do to Developing World
• Black Friday Film: What the Bill Gates-Backed Monsanto Does to Animals, Farmers, Food, and Patent Systems
• Gates Foundation Looking to Destroy Kenya with Intellectual Monopolies