02.06.12
Posted in America, Asia, Bill Gates at 9:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The Gates Foundation is waging war on public interests
Summary: Backlash against the Gates Crusade to brainwash the young minds all around the world
MONOPOLIST extraordinaire Bill Gates wants a monopoly on children’s minds, so in his crusade for control he is trying to buy the agenda (curriculum) and organisation of US schools. It’s a form of privatisation of a $500,000,000,000 per annum system. Lots of money can be made there at the expense of taxpayers, taking away the very little that the middle class has got left.
This problem is well understood by an increasing number of teachers, despite the fact that Gates is bribing some of the education press to spread good wishes on him (we gave some examples in the past). The man who made a living by breaking the law is currently exploiting US poverty and an imbalanced system where Gates and his pals get richer and everyone else goes broke. Here is what happens in Philadelphia schools:
Last week, Philadelphia became the latest in a long list of cities to be courted by Bill Gates, when his “Great Schools Compact” was presented for consideration to the School Reform Commission. Bill Gates has taken on a reputation as a school reformer as well as philanthropist, dispensing money throughout the country for struggling schools in economically distressed cities while imposing changes in policies and procedures in those locales. Sounds like just what the doctor ordered.
[...]
Diane Ravitch, in her recent book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education,” describes how Manuel High, one of Denver’s oldest and most prestigious schools, was forced to divide itself into three separate schools because of the “small school” agenda Gates was pushing at the time; the ensuing disruption caused the school board to close it temporarily. Mountlake Terrace High, just outside Seattle, suffered the loss of many teachers and administrators in 2004 after being forced to split into five separate schools in order to receive the Gates funding.
Into the Philadelphia School District’s state of fiscal desperation rides Bill Gates. Who can say “no” to free money when you are so deep in the hole? But the money is not free, and the price is the democratic procedure in the city and the state under which the community and its elected leaders make informed decisions about its schools.
From the same blog we gather more information about more of Gates’ lobbying groups that push this agenda:
We know that LEV is heavily funded by Gates who is all about charter schools. LEV has showcased over the last year all of the “Stars” of the charter school industry as well as Wendy Kopp of Teach for America Inc. who staffs charter schools with teaching temps. LEV is now, by the way, championing the online learning industry, another cash cow for businesses and corporations including Microsoft.
This is helping Mr. Gates sell Microsoft lock-in and train children this way. For shame.
He is hijacking the voices of American parents, simply because money can buy anything. A Parents Across America member speaks out about it in a letter:
I am a parent with two children in Portland Public Schools. I have been a PTA member for five years and recently came onto our PTA board as a legislative co-chair. I am writing to see if there is any possibility of the PTA dropping its affiliation and funding from the Gates Foundation. I know that must sound shocking that a parent wants less funding, but the reason is that the Gates Foundation is supporting and pushing education policies that are NOT good for our schools and children. If you are not already familiar with well-regarded experts like Diane Ravitch, Stephen Krashen, Deborah Meier, and other groups like Parents Across America and the national Save Our Schools movement, please become familiar with them to realize that there is a growing body of people completely alarmed and speaking up against the policies Gates and his front groups like Stand for Children and others are pushing. For lack of a better term, it is the corporate education reform movement and it is NOT good for our kids.
As far as I can tell, our Oregon PTA hasn’t really gotten on-board with advocating for some of the things Gates supports, such as expansion of charters, on-line learning, data-driven models, merit pay, etc. I hear in Washington state, it is quite different. Apparently the PTA there is pushing for charters schools.
I think we have some really wonderful people who are a part of their PTA, and I would love to see PTA grow. A group that is truly genuine and has parents and teachers working together is a worthwhile thing to support. However, the policies of Gates do not do this. I am thinking that PTA accepted or went after this money due to desperately needed funding. When you look at the grant Gates gave to PTA, it says it is to support education reform, and then you see the focus on the Common Core Standards on the National PTA page and it is just so disappointing. Common Core, as it is now, will line the pockets of Microsoft and testing companies, while narrowing the curriculum and lowering engagement levels of our kids.
Sue Peters, writing for the same blog, notes that:
We still have many challenges ahead of us in Seattle, and Washington as a whole, the biggest being the gathering, moneyed forces that are pushing for charters. We still have the Gates Foundation right here in Seattle, so as long as that foundation pushes for and bankrolls discredited, failed reforms, those of us in the parent activist community will have our work cut out for us.
This form of class warfare ought to worry anyone who was in school or sends his/her children to school. While the press is bribed to take the side of the occupiers, children’s minds are being occupied with this ludicrous idea that those who exploit them are in fact looking after them. Meanwhile, profitable monopolies are established on the back of a taxpayers-funded education system. Socialising the cost, privatising the profit. Bill must be a genius.
We previously showed how state-funded laptops [1, 2, 3, 4] which were supposed to run free software turned into taxpayers-funded Microsoft indoctrination instruments. Richard Stallman is being quoted in the Indian press today as saying wise words:
The Tamil Nadu government may be trumpeting its scheme to distribute computers for free to students but it is setting a poor example for what a state should do, says American software freedom activist Richard Stallman.
“It distributes laptops loaded with non-free software to children, teaching them to be dependent on paid products. It creates a system of digital colonisation,” Stallman, who has waged a storied battle against software giants like Bill Gates, said in an e-mail interview to The Times of India. He criticised the state’s ambitious free laptop scheme that hands out computers with the Windows operating system.
Stallman, who will be in Chennai on Monday to deliver a lecture on free software at IIT-Madras, said he is appreciative of the efforts of Kerala and Karnataka, states that have extended support to the free software movement by moving schools to GNU/Linux operating systems and including lessons on them in the syllabus. “Karnataka put the system in place in high schools a couple of years ago,” he said.
“Please keep up the good work,” Stallman said to me last night in an E-mail (regarding this site). As some people may have noticed, the FSF refocused on education last week. Can we save the next generation from greedy sociopaths who buy consent from the press? █
“They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”
–Bill Gates
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Posted in Bill Gates, Deception, Microsoft at 9:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
White-collar robbery in Vietnam
Summary: The Gates Foundation goes lobbying for Microsoft again, this time in Vietnam
TECHRIGHTS has covered hundreds of examples where the Gates Foundation can be seen hacking the system and making profit while making it look like charity — a travesty to be described positively by the bribed press (that Gates is paying to do this). When the world’s biggest thief is speaking on behalf of poor people we just know something is totally wrong and journalists occasionally speak out about it (those whose publisher has not yet been bribed by Gates). The foundation is again exploiting and piggybacking farmers to spread lock-in, this time in Vietnam. Gates had already stepped into Vietnam under the "Foundation" gown in order to derail Free software adoption over there. But it’s merely a drop in the bucket. See our past posts about this country, notably:
As we explained before, software costs no money to copy, so portrayal of software as “donation” is just a trick to make Vietnamese taxpayers pay Microsoft. The Communist Party paper says this:
Bill Gates fund helps Vietnam farmers go online
[...]
The fund includes nearly $30 million of free support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and $3.64 million worth of Microsoft software. The remaining investment will be raised by the Vietnamese government.
This Windows-powered Web site fails to mention the problems with this, as mentioned at the time by Gates Keepers among several others. It’s all just a story of sentimental blackmail (an old favourite of Microsoft) and yet more Microsoft promotion. We have seen this before. Gates uses this so-called ‘charity’ quite a lot to sell or impose the sale of Microsoft lock-in, especially in places where Free software gains traction. In this case, the government (i.e. taxpayers) bear some of the costs. And then they wonder why there are problems and critics, blaming "communication" problems for the criticism. As one critic of the foundation put it, there is a brute-force charm offence going on:
Basically, I was noting that the Gates Foundation is widely viewed by many outsiders, including grant recipients, as somewhat inscrutable. It has been saying for years it wants to improve on its ability to communicate with perhaps little evidence of improvement (and even as its annual report has dramatically shrunk in size, a good thing but symbolically irresistable to me):
Remember that Bill Gates is still getting richer. The press which he bribes keep telling us that he gives his fortune away, giving people at the bottom the wrong impression and sympathy for a robber baron. By all means be sceptical of any report which sells the story of Gates taking care of the poor; he often just uses the poor for PR and for profit. One just needs to grasp the common spin techniques being crafted. Then the reality becomes very shallow. █
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02.05.12
Posted in Bill Gates, Patents at 9:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: GMO, a robbery of the right of reproduction (and a potential health hazard), is promoted by Bill Gates for profit, whereupon critics strike back
TECHRIGHTS covers patents and it also covers Microsoft, so the area of globalist/monopoliser Gates Foundation promoting GMO is very relevant to us. This post will not repeat arguments we made before, either about Gates’ promotion of GMO monopolies or the dangers of GMO (see the wiki page for an index of previous posts on that). Instead, it will draw some attention to more controversial sites which notice how Bill Gates is bribing the press while Natural News cites it and writes:
Aaron Dykes of Prison Planet recently gave an insightful TV news presentation analyzing The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s influence over the media to promote their “world health and agriculture” agendas while soft pedaling the downside of all they’re doing.
Such items as “Gates using his money to save lives … etc” have been appearing in several news outlets, including ABC news (2). Meanwhile, items that question Gates’ “philanthropic” endeavors are muffled or marginalized. Those endeavors deal with vaccinations, sterilization, and GMOs. These are depopulation favorites.
The Gates Foundation donated $1.5 million to ABC’s News Project “Be the change; Save a Life,” extolling the virtues of ensuring Africans don’t starve. The NY Times mentioned Gates as the principal private funding source and adviser for world food policy and agricultural development.
In a less controversial site we find this toned-down interview which explains what Gates ignores (they pretend he doesn’t know that, politely enough):
The Flip-Side: What Bill Gates Doesn’t Know About GMOs
[...]
TakePart: In the introduction to his letter, Bill Gates cites the Green Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, saying scientists created new seed varieties for rice, wheat, and maize, and that this resulted in increased crop yield and a decrease in extreme poverty around the world. Do you agree that this is a model to use moving forward?
Heather Pilatic: The Green Revolution is a story that some people like to tell, but it has little basis in historical fact. Take the Green Revolution’s origins in 1940s Mexico, for instance. It was not really about feeding the world; Mexico was a food exporter at the time. Rather, the aims included stabilizing restive rural populations in our neighbor to the south, and making friends with a government that at the time was selling supplies to the World War II Axis powers and confiscating oil fields held by Standard Oil (a funding source for the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the key architects of the Green Revolution).
We can also learn from India, the Green Revolution’s next stop after Mexico. India embraced the Green Revolution model of chemical-intensive agriculture. Now it is the world’s second biggest rice grower with surplus grain in government warehouses. Yet India has more starving people than sub-Saharan Africa — at more than 200 million, that’s nearly a quarter of its population. History shows that a narrow focus on increasing crop yield through chemical-seed packages reduces neither hunger nor poverty.
So no, we do not agree that the Green Revolution offers a promising model for addressing poverty.
This is not about addressing poverty; it’s about exploiting the poor for yet more profit while hijacking the voice of the poor. The whole thing is evil propaganda for people who run society. █
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02.01.12
Posted in Apple, Bill Gates, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Patents at 6:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Response to reputation laundering from Wired Magazine, the latest nonsense from Microsoft’s lobbyist Florian Müller, an update on Microsoft’s trolling against Android, and a little more of Apple’s
WE are quite cynical about the corporate press. It has become abundantly clear that journalism is dying and instead it gets accommodated/replaced by the PR industry, working at the behest of rich people with an agenda and a nickel for any press still willing to bend over (independent press is likely to perish in the process). Like a husband who tells the policeman or the judge that he deeply loves the woman whom he beats up daily, Bill Gates/Gates Foundation would love for us to believe that he is a master of Open Source. Yes, and Cade Metz trying to portray these racketeers as friends of Open Source (whitewashing Gates at the same time). Why would anyone with integrity do reputation laundering for a criminal and his company that commits acts of extortion? Even Gutierrez gets characterised positively:
But that afternoon was different. At the invitation of the company’s chief legal minds — Smith and Gutierrez — Ramji sat down with Gates, chief software architect Ray Ozzie, and a few others to discuss whether Microsoft could actually start using open source software. Ramji and Ozzie were on one side of the argument, insisting that Microsoft embrace open source, and Gutierrez offered a legal framework that could make that possible. But other top executives strongly challenged the idea.
Then Bill Gates stood up.
No, Bill Gates has been attacking Open Source for a very long time. Remember that Letter to Hobbyists? And all those court exhibits we showed? We oughn’t allow history to be rewritten like this. Over at Free Software Daily, the modified headline of this article states “Meet Mobster Bill Gates, the Man Who Charges Open Source Software even if is free Android Linux” (the original is troll article that attracted many comments, for being more inflammatory than sane).
Microsoft is currently feeding patent trolls in order to attack Linux. Microsoft does not have enough ammunition to attack Linux, so it uses help from the outside.
Pamela Jones, over at Groklaw, writes more about the case that seeks to expose MOSAID, a patent troll that Microsoft is feeding. To quote part of the analysis:
B&N and Microsoft have come to an agreement about Steve Ballmer’s participation in the Microsoft v. Barnes & Noble action at the ITC. They were arguing about it, and they’ve now agreed that Ballmer will not have to testify live at the ITC hearing, currently scheduled for February. Instead, B&N will present designated portions of his deposition, and Microsoft’s lawyers have sent a letter [PDF] to the ITC stating officially that it withdraws its motion for a protective order, attaching to the letter a proposed schedule on the parties’ next steps in figuring out exactly what each side wants in the way of details. This means there will be no further motion practice on the live testimony issue.
[...]
Microsoft is also opposing Barnes & Noble’s request that the record be held open to include Nokia and MOSAID’s evidence, if Barnes & Noble is finally able to get it. And they parties continue to try to whittle into shape what each may use as evidence.
Lots of sealed filings, once again. But don’t worry. By hook or by crook, we usually find out in due time what the filings were about.
I had a chance to talk to Andy Updegrove, of Standards Blog, who as you probably know is a lawyer who does patent work in the standards area. I wanted to pick his brain, because the 2000 patents Nokia sold to MOSAID relate to standards, according to their statements. Just how many patents could possibly be required for a phone to be built? Surely not 1,200 out of the 2,000, I was thinking. Yet, that is the claim.
[...]
He suggested that we read some Department of Justice ‘business review letters’ on patent pools, because a patent pool is an example of multiple patent owners getting together to agree on a price for technology required to implement a standard. That’s not exactly what Microsoft, Nokia and MOSAID say they are doing, but we’re getting warm. You get to read in the letters the way the pool participants set the pool up, what safeguards they took (in the request letter), and the way the DoJ analyzed the request and either approved, qualified, or rejected the request. The controls traditionally include hiring a third party expert to review each supposedly essential claim and determine whether it’s valid, whether it’s essential, and what it’s worth relative to the other essential claims. So he thought we might find it interesting to look at what a legal pool looks like, and then we can contrast that to the actual conduct that is being alleged here.
This case has not been decided yet, but it does help shed a lot of light on Microsoft’s racketeering.
The known Microsoft boosters and even lobbyists (whom they cite) try to make us believe that it’s all over and Microsoft is innocent. Some people fall for it. They also push this tripe into Slashdot with all the bias and misdirection. As Homer put it in USENET, we should just ignore the Microsoft lobbyist. To quote: “Note this is only the conclusion drawn by Microsoft’s pet shill, Florian Müller (who’s now openly on Microsoft’s payroll), and he drew this stunning conclusion from just the /title/ of a docket he doesn’t even have access to, because it’s still under seal.
“It’s also, as the title suggests, just an “Initial Determination”, and may yet be disputed by the DOJ – a fact Müller chose to ignore. He also chose to ignore several of B&N’s valid complaints that might yet cause
the DOJ to overturn this conclusion, even if it turns out to be true and “final”, such as Microsoft deliberately withholding prior art in its various patent applications, and using NDAs to cover up extortion, under
the pretext of “secrets” that are in fact a matter of public record (as all patents are required to be by law). But instead he portrayed B&N’s complaint as futile, because:
“For example, Barnes & Noble claimed that Microsoft asked for excessively high patent license fees, but the OUII quoted passages from U.S. law (statutory as well as case law) that clearly said that patent law doesn’t require a patent holder to grant a license on any terms.”
“Then he completely ignores all the other key points (above). This seems to be the entire basis for his pessimism (or I should say “optimism”, since it’s clear whose side he’s on).”
Microsoft is feeding lobbyists and trolls and it’s easy to see this. Apple is said to have been sued by trolls again, but since Apple itself acts like a patent troll we have no sympathy for it. To quote:
A patent troll is going after Apple for patent infringement of an “electronic alignment system”.
Apple’s spiritual leader’s friend, Larry Ellison, is still attacking Android with patents that he got from Sun. Google gets another opportunity.
Mr. Pogson summarises: “Google argues that Oracle’s experts are not expert as they had no intimate knowledge during deposition.”
Basically, it seems like Oracle’s patent case against Android will be coming to an end. Maybe a copyright allegation alone will be left, so think along the lines of SCO.
OIN is meanwhile growing strong:
OIN today announced a remarkable increase in the size of its community of licensees during 2011 as licensees seized the opportunity to benefit from the value of the growing OIN community and the freedom of action enabled by OIN’s royalty free licensing program. During 2011, OIN’s community grew to over 400 corporate licensees, a more than 60% year over year increase. OIN licensees, which include founding members and associate members, benefit from the leverage provided by a patent portfolio dedicated to the protection of Linux and access to enabling technologies through OIN and shared intellectual property resources.
What’s baffling is that Oracle is in the OIN. It never ought to have attacked in the first place, but maybe it was a favour to the thermonuclear CEO, Larry Ellison’s “best friend” (by his own words). It is not a far fetched hypothesis. █
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Posted in Bill Gates, Deception at 6:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Normalising the absurd notion that the world’s richest are spokespeople for the world’s poorest
Summary: Money still the vehicle by which opinions get heard, so Bill Gates exploits this for fame, power, and profit
SEVERAL months ago we explained and showed how the Gates Foundation was hijacking the voice of the poor, rendering itself a voice of the very opposite of what it is. This is extremely dangerous for reasons we went through before and it makes up a powerful lobbying tactic which we alluded to earlier today. Over at the Indian press we see more of that same old PR which associates Gates with poor people:
A delegation of Bill Gates Foundation on Friday visited Dharavi here, among the biggest slums in Asia, to study the conditions there.
As we demonstrated in the past, Gates is artificially generating coverage to earn sympathy (he bribes publications for it), sometimes with press that is already funded by Gates for this type of agenda setting. In reality, as his wealth gains show, he does this to make himself richer and more powerful, pretending to lead the poor. Here is what one of them says:
“I am confident that we will continue to innovate on behalf of the poor,” says Bill Gates in his video on development innovation for Gates Notes. He is often criticized for his top-down approach to development and that statement does little to dissuade critics. Also note the parachuted safe landing in on the ground. All seems to indicate that innovation is coming from the outside.
Unfortunately, the video ends when it shows how innovations are being shared between countries like Japan and Brazil. The recipient, in the end, is an African country. It misses the final step that shows how future innovations will involve countries like Mozambique. The recipients will not be limited to the developing world. Accomplishing this, in part, will necessitate a re-configuration of the view that innovation goes in only one direction.
We continue to do a disservice to the poor if we insist on innovating on their behalf.
And the Bill Gates-fudned Guardian writes that owing/due to the likes of Monsanto in Africa, this is no justice:
It’s strange that at this week’s World Economic Forum the designated voice of the world’s poor has been Bill Gates, who has pledged £478m to the Global Fund to fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, telling Davos that the world economic crisis was no excuse for cutting aid.
[...]
The biotech agriculture that Lord Sainsbury was unable to push through democratically he can now implement unilaterally, through his Gatsby Foundation. We are told that Gatsby’s biotech project aims to provide food security for the global south. But if you listen to southern groups such as the Karnataka State Farmers of India, food security is precisely the reason they campaign against GM, because biotech crops are monocrops which are more vulnerable to disease and so need lashings of petrochemical pesticides, insecticides and fungicides – none of them cheap – and whose ruinous costs will rise with the price of oil, bankrupting small family farms first. Crop diseases mutate, meanwhile, and all the chemical inputs in the world can’t stop disease wiping out whole harvests of genetically engineered single strands.
Both the Gatsby and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundations are keen to get deeper into agriculture, especially in Africa. But top-down nostrums for the rural poor don’t end well. The list of autocratic hubris in pseudo-scientific farming is long and spectacularly calamitous. It runs from Tsar Alexander I’s model village colonies in 1820s Novgorod to 1920s Hollywood film producer Hickman Price, who, as Simon Schama brilliantly describes in The American Future, “bought 54 square miles of land to show the little people how it was really done, [and] used 25 combines all painted glittery silver”. His fleet of tractors were kept working day and night, and the upshot of such sod-busting was the great plains dustbowl. But there’s no stopping a plutocratic philanthropist in a hurry.
And then there is the vexed question of whether these billions are really the billionaires’ to give away in the first place. When Microsoft was on its board, the American Electronics Association, the AeA, challenged European Union proposals for a ban on toxic components and for the use of a minimum 5% recycled plastic in the manufacture of electronic goods.
[...]
Free marketeers will spring to the defence of billionaire philanthropists with a remark like: “Oh, so you’d rather they spent all their money selfishly on golf courses and mansions, would you?” To which I reply: “Oh, you mean that trickle-down doesn’t work, after all?” But the point is that the poor are not begging us for charity, they are demanding justice. And when, on the occasion of his birthday, a sultan or emperor reprieved one thousand prisoners sentenced to death, no one ever called those pardons justice. Nor is it justice when a plutocrat decides to reprieve untold thousands from malaria. Human beings should not have to depend upon a rich man’s whim for the right to life.
They are basically deciding for the poor that they should accept something harmful (but profitable to the rich). Needless to say, the astorturfers are storming such voices that oppose the profitable agenda. It is “interesting how polarised the comments are,” notes Glyn Moody. What he might not know is the extent to which PR agents are employed to spin the Gates articles (messengers tend to be bullied, ridiculed and discouraged too). These are agencies that we’ve shown to be engaging in dubious and possibly illegal tactics. The Gates Foundation hires agents that also work for Microsoft and we know that among their arsenal there are bribes for bloggers, semi-automated blog comment mechanisms, etc.
As for the article above, maybe Gates will bribe the Guardian some more to gag such critics through the publishers/editors. As we are reminded by Felix Salmon from Reuters, the Guardian already carries paid ads for Bill Gates, pretending to be “content”:
Now what happens if your aims are a not selling baby stuff, or fizzy drinks, or financial products? In fact, what happens if your aims aren’t selling anything at all?In that case, you might not mind if someone else were doing the publishing, just as you managed to achieve your goals at the same time. Which brings me to a very interesting $2.5 million grant from the Gates Foundation, which is sponsoring the Guardian’s global development microsite for three years.
The Gates Foundation actually launched the site in 2010, spending an undisclosed sum to do so; the new grant keeps the site going for another three years. As part of the deal, every page in the site — be it blog post or news story — gets prominently branded with the Gates Foundation logo, right at the top of the column where all the editorial content goes. (In fact, the logo is significantly larger than the Guardian’s own logo at the top of the page, although the site looks and feels like the rest of the Guardian site, and lives at guardian.co.uk.)
[...]
What the Guardian doesn’t say, here, is that $2.5 million is what’s technically known as a shit-ton of money. It’s vastly more than it could ever get from ad revenues on a niche site like this — even at a $20 CPM, you’d need to serve up 125 million pageviews over three years to get that much money. Global development issues have a substantial audience, but not that substantial.
More importantly, $2.5 million is significantly more than it costs the Guardian to put together a micro-site like this — this deal is profitable, for a media organization which, like most, is in desperate need of profits. In fact, it’s a twofer for the Guardian, which manages to improve its revenues and also beef up its editorial offerings in one go.
Looked at from the point of view of the Gates Foundation, there’s real value here. For one thing, all of the content automatically gets a lot more credibility than it would if it were published by the Gates Foundation directly, especially given the suspicion with which it’s already regarded. And frankly, publishing well-written, agenda-setting material for a mass audience is not one of the Gates Foundation’s core competencies: if they tried to do it, there’s a good chance they wouldn’t do it very well. (Non-profits in general seem constitutionally incapable of getting out of their wonky high-serious comfort zone.)
And the way these deals are structured, they do a pretty good job of minimizing the sulfurous smell of advertorials and “sponsored content” which has a habit of lingering in even the glossiest sponsor-driven site. Which isn’t to say that they’re not criticized. The Seattle Times did a 2000-word investigation into the Gates Foundation’s media sponsorships earlier this year, and found it quite easy to find critics…
Yes, the Gates Foundation has effectively been running paid ads (charity-washing) in a lot of publications. More journalists need to speak out against it. The BBC is another British press body that got bribed by Bill Gates at least twice last year (tens of millions of pounds). It helps deceive the public and marginalise voices of reason. █
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Posted in Bill Gates at 5:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The latest dangerous hijack of education systems and the role played by creepy plutocrats with control over the press
THE world’s richest people, including two crooks who sometimes meet privately in Seattle, are engaging in a fight to capture the minds of future generations.
According to this from a few days ago, Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch are tracking children:
theodp writes “Discussing U.S. education in his 2012 Annual Letter, Bill Gates notes the importance of ‘tools and services [that] have the added benefit of providing amazing visibility into how each individual student is progressing, and generating lots of useful data that teachers can use to improve their own effectiveness.’ Well, Bill is certainly putting his millions where his mouth is. The Gates Foundation has ponied up $76.5 million for a controversial student data tracking initiative that’s engaged Rupert Murdoch’s Wireless Generation to ‘build the open software that will allow states to access a shared, performance-driven marketplace of free and premium tools and content.’ If you live in CO, IL, NC, NY, MA, LA, GA, or DE, it’s coming soon to a public school near you.”
As Toby (IRC regular in Techrights) put it, “Gates [is]] palling around with Murdoch in schemes to destroy public” and the original articles say:
This week, the Wall St Journal reported that the NY Board of Regents approved the state’s sharing of student and teacher information with a new national data base, to be funded by the Gates Foundation, and designed by News Corp’s Wireless Generation.
All this confidential student and teacher data will be held by a private limited corporation, called the Shared Learning Collaborative LLC, with even less accountability, which in July was awarded $76.5 million by the Gates Foundation, to be spent over 7 months. According to an earlier NYT story, $44 million of this funding will go straight into the pockets of Wireless Generation, owned by Murdoch’s News Corp and run by Joel Klein.
Mother Jones framed this a little differently by focusing only on Murdoch. Remember that Microsoft used Murdoch to attack Google. Recall what we wrote and also see earlier posts in this subject, e.g.:
It is one set of criminals attracting another and it would be terribly misguided to think that Murdoch is more evil than Gates; he just does less reputation laundering for himself. Gates is meanwhile dismissing teachers who stand in his way and according to this relatively new report:
Sitting at the Burger King across the street from Newsome High School, Joseph Thomas knew his job was on the line.
It was Wednesday, the day Bill and Melinda Gates were in town. Thomas, 43, was ready to discuss why he was rejecting his peer evaluator under a new system funded by the Gates’ foundation.
A social studies teacher through-and-through, Thomas considered what his students might learn if he went down for taking a stand. “It’s civil disobedience, that’s what it is,” he said.
The district called it insubordination and suspended him with pay.
Thomas, upset that his evaluator comes from an elementary school background, is unusual in that he is speaking out against a process that is radically changing the way the district treats its teachers.
In another departure from the norm, a school board member last week delivered a harsh assessment of Empowering Effective Teachers, saying it demoralizes school employees.
For Thomas, a father of two married to an elementary school teacher, this is new territory. Usually his biggest concern is how to get 14-year-olds excited about Congress, politics and the Supreme Court.
His last Gates rating was about average. He has no disciplinary record. “They don’t know me from Adam downtown,” he said.
They do now.
Gates the bully (hiding behind others who do the bullying for him, as usual) and fellow plutocrats are taking over schools and in an academic paper titled “The Gates’ Foundation and the Future of U.S. Public Education: A Call for Scholars to Counter Misinformation Campaigns” (we make a local copy of the PDF) there are many lies being debunked after they got spread at great expense. Some teachers in Seattle tell us about “Anti Teachers’ Union Activity in the State of Washington” and Gates is mentioned to. “At this point,” says one teacher, “it’s hard to tell where Chris is getting the funding for his new cause but…the League of Education Voters recently received $150,000 from the Gates Foundation “to launch a regional teacher advocacy group supportive of the Excellent Schools Now Coalition”, yet another faux roots group.”
Do not let people who gained wealth and power by breaking the law just try to educate kids. Sociopathic behaviour is infectious. Teachers, students, and parents all oppose this agenda, but Gates, Murdoch the rogue “journalist” and their lobbyists lie to all of us for a living. Gates spends over a millions dollars a day just buying the press worldwide, so he needn’t even depend on Murdoch. █
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01.29.12
Posted in Bill Gates at 12:13 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
In the words of others
How former criminals (or criminal dynasties) acquire
positions of power and worship after reputation laundering
Summary: A couple of recent articles about plutocrat #1 and his pursuit for more and more influence and power
IN AN ARTICLE titled “I am filthy rich,” the press in Zimbabwe writes about Gates and his new friends; they meet and think alike, looting the public while living it up:
So overwhelming was the presence of a team representing mega-rich couple Bill and Melinda Gates that Chombo voluntarily offered an insight into the luxuries surrounding his own life.
The setting was his Makombe Building offices this week, where the Gates Foundation representatives were paying a courtesy call after visiting to assess a housing project for the poor.
Flaunting his flamboyant life, Chombo showed them he is nowhere near the poor that the foundation is targeting.
Bragging about his American car, army of household staff and lighting that can brighten up a whole street, Chombo showed he lives the high life in a sea of poverty.
As the Gates team discussed with the minister on how best the government and local authorities under his control can improve the welfare of the poor, Chombo jumped into his lavish lifestyle, leaving the Gates crew down with sarcastic laughter.
Philanthrocapitalism.net has an article titled “King Bill” in which it states:
Yet it is the Gates Foundation’s influence on the debate about aid and development that worries others most. This was evident last week at the Humanitarian Congress held in Berlin last week, where Michael debated the role of foundations with David McCoy, who has been a major critic of the Gates Foundation’s role in public health because of its focus on tackling communicable diseases, like malaria, through ‘vertical’ interventions like bednets and (hopefully) vaccination, rather than (he claims, somewhat outdatedly) taking on the underlying causes of ill health, like sanitation, and building the capacity of health systems. More fundamentally, Mr McCoy and others at Global Health Watch warn that so much of the global health sector is now dependent on Mr Gates’ money that critical voices are being stifled.
Doctors, as much as lawyers and other professions, will often resist outsiders who want to disrupt and challenge their expert view. But this critique should not be too easily dismissed. Indeed, as we argue in the book, rather than giving the lion’s share of his cash to the Gates Foundation, Warren Buffett might have been better to divide it between two or three foundations to create a bit of competition and diversify his philanthropic portfolio. There are two important issues that are worth debating:
This is an area we shall continue to explore in this Web site because it has a lot to do with patents, not just with Microsoft and to its opposition to sharing of knowledge such as code. Take the time to learn what we wrote about the Gates Foundation over the years and try to educate more people because Bill Gates manipulates the press (at the expense of more than a million US dollars per day, based on last year’s estimate). It’s called reputation laundering and it is dangerous because it gives power to the greatest sociopaths. █
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Posted in Bill Gates, Deception at 12:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Class warfare radicalised
Summary: After papers and schools are receiving massive bribes from “king of the universe” Bill Gates (to push an agenda) dissenting voices get removed or suppressed
THE GATES Foundation is still occupying and looting the US education system, bringing to it private interests that include but are not exclusive to Microsoft Corporation. We have given many examples here before (see this index).
The US public, back when it occupied Oakland, won the support of a teacher who wrote:
That’s what Race to the Top was all about. It was a big con paid for with our tax dollars and brought to you by Bill Gates and Eli Broad.
Bill has many paid cheerleaders, hired through PR agencies (in addition to a million or more bucks a day in expenditure to control the press). We still become increasingly aware of more institutions that are funded by Gates, sometimes without disclosing it. The Center for Global Development, for instance, turns out to be paid by Gates. According to this, Morduch too is funded by Gates, but “[a]t least he comes clean about most of his work being Gates Foundation funded.”
Valerie Strauss, who previously worked under a leadership with Gates in it (until the scandal), lashes out at Bill Gates again. She writes:
Bill Gates was just in the news again, bemoaning the sorry state of America’s schools, insisting that business leaders like him have a lot to teach us about measuring performance.
[...]
Are our billionaire education reformers interested in any of this information?
We can choose tax structures that underfund our schools, we can believe that we are collectively “broke” while some people stack up the billions, and still need tax breaks. But the data is in. The gulf between rich and poor is obscene. And the schools alone will not fix this. Sending more children to college will not fix this. Only social policies that aim to reverse the concentration of wealth will make a real difference.
Bill Gates can produce the most elaborate teacher evaluation system in the world, but any system built upon the two dimensional data provided by test scores will be trumped by the smell and taste of poverty in our classrooms, and the cold hard data that shows we are failing to provide the most basic level of support for our children to live healthy lives and learn well in school.
Strauss also wrote about “[h]ow Bill Gates throws his money around in education” (her article’s headline). To quote:
What would happen if one of the wealthiest men in the world decided to remake the institution of public education in America? What if that man believed he understood the secrets to success, and sought to align the nation’s schools to his vision and methods? What if he decided to devote all his time and considerable money to this objective? Could he succeed? We are in the process of finding out just how far money and a sharply defined agenda can take you.
[...]
Influence the media: Sponsor coverage of education in the media, including major television news events such as NBC’s Education Nation. Last year’s Education Nation was tied into the release of Waiting for Superman, which had a $2 million publicity effort sponsored by the Gates Foundation.
It probably won’t be long before the publisher gets bribed and this voice of reason gets silenced. We saw that happening before. Here is part of an interesting comment we found in a blog of teachers who protest against Gates in Seattle:
Several PTA members asked questions about their connection to Stand for Children, they insisted that Stand was just one member of the coalition and did not drive policy, but also admitted that their platform had been chosen from a list of items suggested in a report created by Stand (and a consulting firm employed by Stand.) They also admitted that their funding comes from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, but said that nobody influenced what they wrote in their grant application.
Gates’ aggressive war on teachers, going as far as retaliating (by proxy) against opposition, is shown in this article:
A veteran teacher was suspended Thursday for rejecting the evaluator chosen for him under a Gates-funded initiative that is revolutionizing the way the Hillsborough County School District assesses its teachers.
School and union officials believe this is the first such act of defiance under Empowering Effective Teachers, a complex system of mentoring and evaluation funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The district’s action comes just one day after the couple themselves, Bill and Melinda Gates, toured Jefferson High School, where the computer mogul hailed the program as a national model and called its success “phenomenal.”
[...]
The Gates system, funded in part by a $100 million grant from the foundation, replaces the old method of evaluating teachers, a somewhat informal process in which the principal or assistant principal filled out a checklist.
The same sort of thing tends to happen to journalists who report truthfully about the Gates agenda. We’ll try to highlight more such examples (we covered several before). To those who are new to all this, take the time to learn what the press is paid not to cover. No single person (perhaps except Rupert Murdoch) controls the press like Bill Gates does. █
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