12.10.09

Gates/Microsoft Tax Dodge and Agriculture Monopoly Revisited

Posted in Bill Gates, Finance, Microsoft, Patents at 10:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

“My background is finance and accounting. As a socially conscious venture capitalist and philanthropist, I have a very good understanding of wealth management and philanthropy. I started my career in 1967 with the IRS as a specialist in taxation covering many areas of the tax law including the so-called legal loopholes to charitable giving. […] However, the Gates Buffet foundation grant is nothing more than a shell game in which control of assets for both Gates and Buffet remain the same. […] The only difference is that the accumulation of wealth by these two will be much more massive because they will no longer have to pay any taxes.”

The Gates and Buffet Foundation Shell Game

Summary: Microsoft’s lesser-known and more evil sides receive unwanted limelight time

A FORMER Microsoft employee has asked the company to finally pay the tax it was dodging. We wrote about this in:

Progress has been made as more people are speaking about the problem and ask Microsoft to pay up. There are older issues that were never truly resolved [1, 2, 3].

Amanda Congdon’s Sometimesdaily Internet Justice: Bill Gates Owes A Bill-ion!

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It’s now been ten days since we asked Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer to honor his commitment to transparent business practices and open up Microsoft’s Washington state tax records…we’re still waiting. For now Steve, we’ll take that as a non-denial confession.

This week, Internet video reporter Amanda Congdon interviewed me for Sometimesdaily’s latest installment… Internet Justice: Bill Gates Owes A Bill-ion! It’s a fun look at a subject that we take very seriously here in Washington State.

As another noteworthy new post, consider the following critique of the Gates Foundation, which has also been accused of evading tax on behalf of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

The Gates Foundation’s agriculture program: experimenting or floundering?

Here’s what we know about the Gates Foundation’s agriculture program:

* Gates believes it’s suggestive that “Apart from a few states and small, oil-rich countries, no country has managed a rapid rise from poverty without increasing agricultural productivity. In the poorest countries, agriculture employs a majority of the people.”
* This isn’t a new argument or an undisputed one. See Peter Timmer on Green Revolution “optimists” vs. “pessimists”.
* Gates’s approach is “comprehensive,” targets “no single, simple solution”, and includes farmer training/support, irrigation initiatives, market access initiatives, and funding of agricultural research with a focus on gender empowerment.
* This isn’t a new approach or a historically successful one. The World Bank has focused on essentially the same set of interventions recently, with unclear results, and the previous “holistic” approach of “Integrated Rural Development” is widely considered to have failed. Details at our overview of agriculture aid.

In other words, the Gates Foundation approach – as described – appears to be neither a continuation of things that have worked before nor a fundamentally new approach to the problem. So what might be different this time around?

This is not the first such criticism. It is about making Africa dependent on patents that Gates and Rockefeller are investing in (references below for the uninitiated). █

On Gates and Monsanto: