05.12.13
Posted in Bill Gates, Finance at 11:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: More complaints about yet more rogue influence that is masqueraded as “public interest” or “for education” (whilst in fact having the opposite effect)
The Gates Foundation has been upsetting teachers and parents who increasingly realise that schools are being taken over by special interests of the world’s richest, assisting indoctrination. The bribery fronts, charitywashing the lobby of the super-rich in the US, have been closely tracked by Dr. Diane Ravitch, whom we mentioned a lot in the past, e.g in [1, 2, 3, 4]. She is very influential. Her latest output asks, “Is There Any Organization That Is Not Funded by Gates?”
“Billionaires don’t just try to buy elections. They try to buy anyone who might help them or hinder them in their quest for power.”
–Dr. Diane RavitchShe writes: “Obscene amounts of money translate into power,” she says, stating the obvious. Gates swaps some slush funds to get more lobbying power for his for-profit investments. To quote the author further: “Obscene amounts of money–billions–often translate into the ability to buy elections. But not always, as we saw in the recent school board election in Los Angeles, when the candidate of the Billionaire Boys Club was beaten by Steve Zimmer.
“Billionaires don’t just try to buy elections.
“They try to buy anyone who might help them or hinder them in their quest for power.
“The Gates Foundation, for example, underwrites almost every organization in its quest to control American education. It supports rightwing groups like Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Educational Excellence and Ben Austin’s Parent Revolution. In the recent past, it gave money to the reactionary ALEC. It pays young teachers to oppose unions and to testify against the rights of tenured teachers. It also pays unions to support its ideas about evaluations, despite their flaws. It spends hundreds of millions of dollars to support “independent” think tanks, which are somewhat less independent when they become dependent on Gates money.”
It is noteworthy that she names the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which we recently saw slamming Google in a complaint after getting some Gates staff inside it and perhaps some Gates money too. Ravitch mentions the ACLU to show yet another controversy. Merciless lobbying by Mr. Gates, eh? Never mind the handicapped, or students with disabilities.
“Power corrupts. So does money,” she concludes.
“None of it is charity. The man owns too much and too many people have to do as he says. Unless we address the root of the problem, he will continue to abuse his assets to gain more power,” Will Hill says. █
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05.07.13
Posted in Bill Gates, Microsoft, Steve Ballmer at 5:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Gates, Zuckerberg Meet for Wired Cover Shoot (fair use)
Summary: Mark Zuckerberg gets closer to Microsoft not just on the technical/corporate front but also on lobbying, including non-technical and non-corporate lobbying
Bill Gates has been trying to acquire cheaper labour with fewer workers’ protections. He recruited lobbyists such as the criminal Abramoff, who had also worked for Bill’s father.
Recently, the partly Microsoft-owned Facebook, which lobbies against Google with Microsoft-favoured AstroTurfers, has been doing the same type of visa lobbying and “it’s stocked with softers and thus only serves to forward their agenda using mark’s money,” reminds us a reader. Mark Zuckerberg is a Gates wannabe and he recently confessed he would have joined Microsoft if Facebook had not succeeded.
Facebook is showing yet more signs of aligning with Microsoft, as Gates and Ballmer both align with Zuckerberg:
Mark Zuckerberg adds Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer to his FWD.us lobbying group
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg launched an immigration reform group, FWD.us, earlier this month, designed to promote innovation and investment in the US jobs market. After teaming up with some high-profile technology executives and venture capitalists to form the group, Zuckerberg is adding some more household names today: Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.
Zuckerberg has also been lobbying schools, just like his role model, bribing them for change while pretending to help children and marketing it as such.
The Gates Foundation is again being criticised for what it does to schools. Teachers are catching on, but can they teach the wider population about it in spite of media ownership or bribery by the likes of Gates? Here is what the veteran educator writes:
Bill Gates’s School Panopticon
The latest effort by Bill Gates to reform schools involves spending $5 billion on video cameras in every classroom (“Bill Gates Wants America to Spend $5B for Video Cameras in Every Classroom,” Education News, Apr. 24). Reformers like the idea because they say it will prevent teachers from offering excuses for the failure of their students to learn. Of course, the cameras will also provide evidence of student misbehavior, which reformers ignore in their criticism of teachers.
For people in education to confront Gates it takes some guts because some face retaliatory firings/suspensions for merely saying the truth.
In India, where corruption levels are notorious, education officials recently sold out to Microsoft. A blogger of Indian descent says they betrayed more than just software freedom, fair tendering, and national sovereignty:
AICTE is putting Indian students under US surveillance
The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) may be an education body, but it needs quite some education itself. It’s recent decision to ‘force’ it’s students to use Microsoft’s proprietary and vendor locked Online Productivity suite raises many serious questions.
[...]
Indian students under US surveillance
AICTE is also putting it’s students data under the eyes of Microsoft where the company will know everything that these students do using its online suite. The US government will also have access to this user-data. Unlike Google Microsoft doesn’t stand for user’s rights. The company very closely works with the US government to support bills like SOPA and CISPA. Since Microsoft is a US company, and by using its cloud service the US government will have direct access to the data of these students and AICTE is making a huge mistake by doing so.
A former FBI official has just publicly admitted that the US collects call recordings and digital communications from all over the world. It’s not only illegal but also expensive, counter-productive, and bound to lead more people to face-to-face conversations, especially those who plot to commit acts of violence (so those under surveillance will be law-abiding citizens or dissidents).
Facebook too is US surveillance. Tying all of this together, what we have here is a bunch of globalists seeking to control and brainwash young people while also devaluing workers and leaving college graduates out of a job. It’s all about power. All that lobbying has got nothing to do with education, opportunity, or public good; it is about the private profit of very few billionaires like Gates and Zuckerberg. Sociopaths should never be given so much power. █
“i’m going to fuck them, probably in the ear.. . I have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns, people just submitted it, i don’t know why, they “trust me”, dumb fucks” –Mark Zuckerberg
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05.06.13
Posted in Bill Gates at 2:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Billions of dollars not enough, still mining for pennies
Summary: Gates and fellow ‘one-percenters’ gain trillions of dollars in wealth (during a so-called recession) by robbing the rest of society and physically harming it for profit
Despite being funded by Bill Gates (through his proxy) for bias, The Guardian had this to say then other day:
The giants of the green world that profit from the planet’s destruction
[...]
Purists will point out that no big green group is clean, since virtually every one takes money from foundations built on fossil fuel empires – foundations that continue to invest their endowments in fossil fuels today. It’s a fair point. Consider the largest foundation of them all: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. As of December 2012, it had at least $958.6m – nearly a billion dollars – invested in just two oil giants: ExxonMobil and BP. The hypocrisy is staggering: a top priority of the Gates Foundation has been supporting malaria research, a disease intimately linked to climate. Mosquitoes and malaria parasites can both thrive in warmer weather, and they are getting more and more of it. Does it really make sense to fight malaria while fuelling one of the reasons it may be spreading more ferociously in some areas?
There are more examples of this kind, such as tobacco and polio, Gates habitually pretends to embrace one side while actually, for profit, embracing the opposite side with his wallet. He really likes to mess with politicians’ minds so that they foolishly give taxpayers’ money to him and fellow plutocrats (we provided many examples ranging in their nature), who according to some statistics gained 6 trillion dollars in the economic ‘recovery’ while others (the lower 99.9%) lost a lot of money. Transfer of wealth and power is what this whole “crisis” really is and what our reader called “pocket pool” helps show how Gates perceives heads of highly-advanced nations. He treats them like inferiors, like tools. The real leaders or the world are those with obscene amounts of money and now they try to abduct the education (indoctrination) establishment in addition to the fourth estate, the media. The non-Koch-owned media is full with reports about the Koch brothers buying the press these days, but little attention is paid to much bigger bribery (for self censorship and propaganda) by Mr. Gates.
On a positive note, as time goes by more people get the guts to chastise Gates for what he is really doing under the guise of ‘charity’. He got $7 billion richer last year alone. So much for an economic ‘crisis’ and a giveaway of wealth… █
“The rich worry over their money, the poor over their bread” –Vienamese proverb
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05.03.13
Posted in Bill Gates, Finance, Microsoft at 2:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A look at the outrageous government action (infiltrated to varying degrees by Microsoft executives) which passes vast amount of taxpayers’ money/entitlement to Microsoft and Bill Gates
THE world is controlled by oligarchs who pay little or no tax and at the same time tax almost everyone else, usually by covert means. A reader wrote to tell us that the “Irish bailed out Bill Gates!”
He cites an article about Gates’ tax-exempt investment apparatus (Gates Foundation) and notes that not only Microsoft gets extraordinary benefits in Ireland; Bill Gates got a bailout for his investment:
Bill Gates was bondholder in bailed-out Irish zombie banks
Billionaire held €27m in bonds here at end of 2006, including at Anglo and Irish Nationwide
[...]
Gates was a bondholder in Anglo Irish Bank, Irish Nationwide Building Society, Bank of Ireland and Allied Irish Bank, according to filings seen by the Sunday Independent. The filings detail investments held by Gates’ Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The identities of wealthy bondholders in the Irish banks, bailed out in most cases by Irish citizens, have never been revealed fully. Billionaire Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich emerged as a bondholder in Irish Nationwide after his investment vehicle Millhouse was involved in a UK lawsuit in which it tried to extract full payment for its bonds in the building society as part of a tender offer. Abramovich and his partners lost, but many other bondholders were repaid in full despite backing bust banks. German and French banks were the largest holders of Irish bank bonds.
But wait, it gets worse. In the US too Gates and Microsoft enjoy special treatment that exempts them from tax. How? They put their own cronies in key positions in government. A reader who showed it to us called it “a nasty threat to national sovereignty starting at the state level. First Nokia, now Washington state. “former” my ass” (sorry for the language).
The Gates-funded Seattle Times [1, 2] and Microsoft’s booster in the publication would go too soft on this matter by calling it anything less than corruption:
What happens when you put Microsoft managers in charge of the state budget
For the first time in state history, the Washington state budget is being written by Microsofties, with company alums chairing both budget committees, writes editorial columnist Sharon Pian Chan.
So Seattle Times Realizes Microsoft’s Running the Legislature, as one site put it. What took the Gates-bribed Seattle Times so long to show this? Reifman kept pressuring them in an effective awareness campaign, usually in his blog where he now marks “The Third Anniversary of Washington State’s Big Tax Gift to Microsoft” (and still not enough press response to this fiasco).
Let’s hope that more sites get out there the message that Microsoft is still dependent on corruption. This needs to stop. █
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Posted in Asia, Bill Gates, Microsoft at 2:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Yet more depressing stories about government officials kowtowing to Gates and his monomaniacal gang
LAST month we chastised AICTE for its latest (not the first [1, 2]) sale of Indian children to the foreign abusive monopolist, Microsoft, whose criminal activity is unique and truly deserving of a boycott. The Indian Express has an article about it and it is titled “Against freedom” [via Atul Jha]
“Why the AICTE’s decision to partner with Microsoft is unimaginative” is the summary and it frames the situation as follows: “The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has become Microsoft’s biggest customer for cloud services. By June 30, students and teachers at 11,500 technical institutions will be locked down to Microsoft’s online productivity applications and storage. Cloud services reduce the cost of computing and increase reliability, so this is a good route to go. But a better fork in the same road could have been taken. What would it have cost to develop a free and open source cloud? Or to catch the interest of free and open source software providers who already offer such services to large populations? Even if big brands are in favour, Microsoft has competition which may have been more open.
“Comparisons between proprietary and free and open systems usually focus on the cost advantage — free means free to use. It is a compelling argument for poorer countries that face the challenge of educating, skilling and connecting large populations very rapidly. But the real, long-term advantages lie in the alternative meanings of free — free to play with, free to change, free to reprogramme, free to apply to unintended purposes. And most importantly, free to learn from and free to share. When the users of a system have technical interests, the potential gains from these flavours of freedom are immense. Instead of being passive users of a locked system, they would be encouraged to be curious, to tinker with the very tools they use and innovate ways to adapt them to their needs — or to future needs. The cloud itself could be adapted. And users would have access to at least 40,000 software packages to use, study or get involved in developing.”
It has long been the ambition of Microsoft to use state mandates to indoctrinate populations at taxpayers’ expense (passing cost to leverage tax). Bill Gates publicly said, “they’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”
Right now, using the Gates Foundation, Gates seeks total control of education, going far further than just IT.
Toby showed me this new report which he says is about “Pro-Bill Gates propaganda is part of mandatory Washington State tests for grades 3-8… How predictable”
Here is what the post says:
In a 3rd grade student workbook for MSP Reading Assessment preparation, which is a Washington State mandated test for grades 3 through 8, a parent found this question:
Dora Taylor sums up with: “Propaganda fed to our children? Gates and his foundation are starting to feel the heat of controversy over his ideas of how public education should be managed as well as his investments in Monsanto. a company that produces GMO seeds. This pushback is happening in his own backyard and around the world.”
As we shall show in a later post, Microsoft veterans now directly manage many of the public policies in this state. The Monsanto agenda is also being promoted in Washington universities in particular with funds from Gates, a Monsanto shareholder and part-time lobbyist. It’s a nice way for the food monopoly to pass a bribe to academics while making it look like charity.
India, one of the main victims of Monsanto (high suicide rates due to Monsanto-induced debt and record yield without GMO dependence), should reject this cult of monopolies and choose freedom to assure a promising future for the next generation. █
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04.18.13
Posted in Bill Gates, Europe, GNU/Linux, Google, Patents at 11:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Bill Gates back in the days when he wasn’t too big to jail
Summary: News about patents in Europe, software patents in particular; ACLU now occupied by Gates staff
IPKat, a patent lawyers’ blog, continues to show its apathy towards justice and empathy towards self-service and profit at the expense of producing workers. The software patents boosters over there are lobbying and cheering for software patents through the unitary patent. The Court of Justice of the European Union has dismissed the Italian and Spanish complaints, according to this site, never mind if Spain was blackmailed before the Spain v Council case. Gérald Sédrati-Dinet writes: “Judgment of the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union in joined cases C-274/11 (Spain v Council) and C-295/11 (Italy v Council), requesting to annul Council Decision of 10 March 2011 authorising enhanced cooperation in the area of the creation of unitary patent protection (2011/167/EU, OJ 2011 L 76, p. 53).”
“IPKat, a patent lawyers’ blog, continues to show its apathy towards justice and empathy towards self-service and profit at the expense of producing workers.”We cannot help recalling Bill Gates lobbying Europe for software patents, as we covered years ago. There are many players out there looking to achieve the unthinkable. The Gates Foundation also helped promote Monsanto patents in Europe, as this site helps remind us: “Many have long suspected that U.S. policy on genetically modified (GM) organisms was being influenced by the multinational corporations that profit from genetic engineering and the export-oriented agribusiness. However, recently released Wikileaks cables document just how close that relationship has become.
“The U.S. Department of State has virtually become an agency for promoting the private interests of the Monsanto Corporation.
“As European social movements pressure their governments for an ongoing moratorium on GM seeds and foods, Monsanto and other biotech corporations have been pushing to find new market footholds, using hybrids even in impoverished Haiti following the January 12, 2010 earthquake. They have been pursuing such goals in collaboration with USAID, the U.S. State Department and the Gates Foundation Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).”
Speaking of Gates, one reader turns our attention to this news about ACLU turning against Android. It turns out there is Gates staff there. “ACLU Asks FTC To Force Carriers To ‘Patch Or Replace’ Android Devices,” says the headline.
“Interesting, to me,” says the reader, “that the ACLU would have such a hissy fit about Android. Why no concern about MS-Windows? Windows have suffered far more attacks than Android. This does not smell right.
“I have discovered that Melissa Chabrán is on the board of the Washing State ACLU. She is also the Senior Program Officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.” █
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04.08.13
Posted in Bill Gates at 7:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Gates’ power grab advances
Summary: A site which criticised Gates and Microsoft — a news outlet called Crosscut — has been taken over by Gates’ staff
The Gates Foundation likes to buy the press and sometimes blogs too, as it helps Gates control information, especially in particular fields where he pillages and plunders. A site called Crosscut had published some hostile pieces about Microsoft and Gates but negative coverage stopped, even erased (see first link in the list below) when Bill Gates paid them. It’s censorship followed by self-censorship. See the following as a reminder:
A report from last year said that the site had been taken over (we missed this report at the time):
“Big coup for us,” Brewster said in an email.
Shaw brings a background in journalism, marketing and philanthropy to his new duties. He has worked since 2004 as part of the senior leadership team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and is currently director of grantee partner engagement. He has headed the foundation’s Pacific Northwest Program.
Well played, gagging your critics one at a time. Money talks. And now there is another unofficial mouthpiece for Gates, run by his own staff. █
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Posted in Bill Gates, Patents at 7:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Another timely analysis, filled with new links to articles, about where Bill Gates is investing his great wealth which he gained by illegal practices at Microsoft
A lot of press, excluding the corporate press, is covering the criminal behavior of those who stash trillions of dollars in offshore tax havens. This is what’s causing an economic turmoil and it should be recognised that the world’s richest people are still getting richer at everyone’s expense. They just get better at hiding it. Bill Gates, who has a tax-exempting foundation, is widely lauded for giving away his money, but he actually increased his wealth by about ten percent or more in the past year alone. He makes a lot of money from his investment in monopolies, one of which he co-founded after dropping out of college.
There is a report in the Gates-funded Seattle Times about the PR campaign which seeks to capture the minds of gullible people. Despite a promising opening paragraph, this piece is hogwash as it in no way follows through with a sceptical analysis of Gates’ agenda.
“…it should be recognised that the world’s richest people are still getting richer at everyone’s expense.”Over at at TED, a favoured venue for Gates marketing [1, 2], PR is being seeded yet again, leading to suggestions that Oprah, a routine Gates/Microsoft PR outlet [1, 2], is being replaced in some sense by the less superstitions-unfriendly TED. Well, as put last year by Gates’ boosters at Forbes (which glorifies the world’s richest without exceptions), TED is turned into something like Oprah, i.e. PR in disguise (Oprah is also notorious for promoting superstitions), for those in the business of power, which necessitates dumbing people down.
Gates has been trying to seed ignorance in the minds of the world’s less educated by teaching them to depend on corporations for their basic needs. It’s not gentle capitalism but coerced capitalism. Sadly enough, Imperial College does some PR along those lines (probably begging for grants) passing off the GMO investor and lobbyist as “pro-farming” in pieces like this (marketing photo included).
The world’s poorest people need not more dependence on the super-rich. They need social-economic justice. They need not a ‘handout’ of patents. As put last year in the Indian press:
However, it [Gates Foundation] faces the criticism of aligning with interests of big pharma and agri-business giants such as Monsanto and Cargill. Raikes debunks such criticism.
Of course he does, that’s his job. But as we have shown here before, those critics are exactly those who understand the big agenda. Will Hill quoted the other day an article/book which says:
From The Great American Fraud, 1905 – Why Medicine Should Not be Run Like a Business
“One of the most disgusting and disgraceful features of the patent medicine business is the marketing of letters sent by patients to patent medicine firms Correspondence is solicited by these firms under the seal of sacred confidence. When the concern is unable to do further business with a patient it disposes of the patient’s correspondence to a letter broker who in turn disposes of it to other patent medicine concerns at the rate of half a cent for each letter”
Microsoft ran like this and Bill Gates wants to be in medicine.
http://books.google.com/books?id=tdf8na3fqNUC&lpg=PA163&ots=WX0A8QyTsT&dq=patent%20medicine%20letters%20sold%20by%20the%20lot&pg=PA163#v=onepage&q&f=false
A PDF of the book can be downloaded from Google.
Recently we saw Indian patent battles over the sorts of patents which Gates has been promoting in poorer nations in Asia and Africa. See the article “Patent’s Defeat in India Is Key Victory for Generic Drugs“. Gates is investing (for profit) in some of these patents that impede generics and he routinely tells us the lie that without patents effective drugs would no longer be discovered. He actually used this logic to slam Free software and promote software patents in April 2008. On that same occasions he said “there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with.” In other words, Gates hates genuine sharing, he only pretends to share, when it comes to seeding a patents dependency.
“…Gates and his rich friends are using ‘charity’ to spread patents and conduct clinical trials with no risk of litigation when everything fails very seriously, as sometimes it does.”The reality of the matter is, as we wrote in dozens of articles before (with many supportive citations), Gates and his rich friends are using ‘charity’ to spread patents and conduct clinical trials with no risk of litigation when everything fails very seriously, as sometimes it does. Watch this new article from India Brian Druker is said to have “invented the drug’s molecule,” whatever it means to ‘invent’ a molecule. We need to stop ‘owning’ or monopolising everything. It is good for nobody except the tiny minority which hoards all the patents. At the top of this pyramid, considering where the capital for patents comes from, we have people like Bill Gates and his friend Nathan Myhrvold. Resist them, they’re your biggest enemies. They try to ‘own’ the world. █
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