07.05.10
Microsoft Plays Government
Summary: How Microsoft takes positions of power inside government and uses these to advance its financial goals (tax drops, child indoctrination, data grab, etc.)
American EDGI is a programme whereby Microsoft imprisons entire US states [1, 2, 3, 4], but since Microsoft indoctrination is being labelled “computer skills”, it’s easy to be misled. Microsoft has already ‘pulled an American EDGI’ in Alabama [1, 2] and in Tennessee.
Here is an update on the situation in Alabama and in Tennessee. Microsoft is still scamming state governments to support indoctrination by and for a monopolistic corporation. As we have shown on previous occasions, this is sometimes enabled by former Microsoft employees who enter the government. Based on the following report from just a week ago, Microsoft pays to have its former employees inside the government:
For the third election in a row, U.S. Rep. Dave Reichert faces a well-financed Democrat who worked at Microsoft but has no political experience.
[...]
She has raised $1.27 million for her campaign, including $500,000 of her own and more than $100,000 in contributions from Microsoft employees, and has won the endorsement of the state Democratic Party and several party leaders.
It’s pretty much the same with Hunter, the former Microsoft manager who now enables Microsoft to dodge tax in the United States (not just Washington). As the following new article reiterates, members of the Gates Foundation also play a role in assisting the tax dodge of Microsoft:
Wash. Income Tax Initiative Steps Closer To Ballot
[...]
Bill Gates Sr., father of the Microsoft Corp. co-founder, and about two dozen other supporters of Initiative 1098 turned in 350,000 petition signatures Thursday in Olympia, many more than the roughly 241,000 required to get on the ballot. The campaign says it will turn in an additional 20,000 Friday.
These rich people are running the country, lowering the tax imposed on themselves.
So far we’ve covered new examples where Microsoft puts its people inside the government, but previously we also gave examples where Microsoft hires government figures to become Microsoft lobbyists. One example is Charney [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] and another is Donna-Bea Tillman from the FDA, whose goal is to influence the government so as to give Microsoft control of US healthcare. To be fair, Google uses similar tactics to promote “cloud computing” (Fog Computing) in government. In simple terms, it means outsourcing of government data to private, unaccountable companies.
“Google, Microsoft Pitch Cloud Computing To Feds,” says the headline of this new report.
In Washington on Thursday, government officials held a hearing to examining the benefits and risks of the federal government’s transition to cloud computing.
Another headline says, “Will Amazon, Microsoft Cloud Strategies Meet in the Middle?” (yes, Amazon is also a threat to autonomy)
The risk of the NHS letting Microsoft control UK healthcare was mentioned here last week. The hardware solutions architect for the NHS has just said that Microsoft licensing “broken”. From 3 days ago:
Licences from Microsoft are so complicated as to be “broken”, according to Miles Gray, a hardware solutions architect for the NHS.
Regardless of such resistance, Microsoft has begun the marketing blitz for control of healthcare and there are even new press releases like this one from the UK:
Four years ago Microsoft Ltd (UK) were first awarded a 5-star grading by the British Safety Council. This made them eligible to compete for the coveted Health and Safety Sword of Honour, which they were awarded on their first attempt.
Microsoft advertises this whole outsourcing of data using the press which it sometimes owns in a sense, e.g.:
- How Microsoft’s Azure platform will work for feds
- Get Comfortable with the Cloud
- Microsoft: Azure’s showing business allure
- Windows Azure: Inside Microsoft’s cloud computing strategy
CNN went as far as just publishing Microsoft employees’ output as articles, this time courtesy of their anti-Google new hire.
The Sunlight Foundation warns about “revolving door hires”:
Microsoft and Google have “spun the revolving door” to bring on 112 lobbyists who previously worked in government, the Sunlight Foundation said in a report released Friday.
More on that in the Washington Post:
Turns out there are proportionally as many pro-net neutrality lobbyists being hired from government as those on the other sides, according to an analysis by the Sunlight Foundation.
In a blog post today, Sunlight said Google and Microsoft, proponents of net neutrality rules for broadband providers, have hired 112 former government officials to lobby as Congress and the Federal Communications Commission have both pushed new broadband Internet policies.
For the first three months of 2010, seventy-four percent of the lobbyists hired by both Google and Microsoft have previous experience in government, according to data obtained from the Center for Responsive Politics and lobbyist disclosure forms. This is a very similar number when compared to the percentage of former government officials hired to lobby for the top six telecommunications organizations.
When it comes to Fog Computing, both Google and Microsoft are bad. Those who subscribe to it in lower/higher education, for example, are handing over control of children/students’ and educators’ data to a private company rather than the school/university itself. Here is Brown University deciding to make Google its extension last week:
There is also news regarding Google grabbing part of Microsoft’s ‘search’ engine:
- Google’s newest acquisition target powers Microsoft search
- Google’s Latest Acquisition Target Powers Part Of Microsoft Search
The bottom line is, governments and public universities ought to stay independent from companies which hoard people’s personal data. Governments should generally abstain from hiring from these companies and also prevent former employees from becoming lobbyists for these companies as they only cause trouble and rob taxpayers (as in the case of Microsoft). In a Utopian world, government and commerce would be separable. It’s essential to democracy. █
