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

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:

• Cablegate: US Sees Microsoft as Helping to Impose Intellectual Monopolies in Vietnam
• Cablegate: Microsoft Asks US Government to Help Derail Vietnam’s Migration to GNU/Linux, Wants to Treat Vietnamese Like ‘Pirates’ Instead
• Cablegate: In Vietnam, BSA+IDC+Microsoft Assure Microsoft Lock-in in Exchange for Indoctrination
• US Government Helps Microsoft Derail Vietnamese Migration to Free/Libre Software
• Cablegate: Microsoft Rushes Vietnam to Get Rid of Open Source, Including FOSS Policy
• Microsoft Strikes Back In Vietnam (Leaked)

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. █

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. █

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. █

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. █

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.:

• Microsoft Colludes Against Google
• Microsoft’s Search Endeavours: Resorting to Bribery, Deception, and Intimidation
• Microsoft’s Use of Bribes for Search, Only 4% of Microsoft/Razorfish Clients Used Microsoft Search
• Mainstream Media Finally Discovers Microsoft’s Anti-Google AstroTurf
• Microsoft’s Anti-Google Whisper Campaign

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. █

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. █

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. █

William Gates Computer Science Building at Stanford University.
Guess who pays for this manufactured credibility, to have
such buildings named after a dropout who broke laws?

Summary: Another recent example of purchased reputation laundering from Gates, characterising as a Saint someone who made a fortunate from aggressive monopoly abuse

AS part of perception control at the Gates Foundation, the foundation is bribing many academic institutions under the guide of “grants”. In return it gets the biases it needs in order to make a profit and push agenda for monopolistic friends like Monsanto.

A sceptic notes that despite or because of new lies from the Gates Foundation, we should look closer:

The project failed in three of the six Indian states where it was tested. And many are concerned that the amount of money spent to achieve these mixed results makes the approach highly impractical for poor countries.

The analysis of this project’s impact was done by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, also sponsored by the Gates Foundation. This awkward situation is hardly unusual, as the Seattle philanthropy is now one of the primary funding sources for all things global health.

Some people died in these low-liability clinical trials from Gates and his mates.

This was cited by Gates Keepers, which also quotes this

Their dominance of global health creates a monoculture of priorities, which may or may not reflect the widest needs or the most effective interventions. This very article highlights some of the questions raised about their ability to conduct effective research – this has been an ongoing concern. And Tom had an article a couple of days ago talking about mental health as a major global health issue – The Gates Foundation refuses to even consider 1developing world, period, end of sentence.

On domestic policy, the educational reforms they favor are totally unsupported by any outcomes research, and they dominate education reform as well.

Gates controls not only much of the press but also the funding of sciences. He can crush whatever research he does not agree with. Then, he can claim that the only surviving method (the one he has not annihilated) was a “success” — a bit like claiming that Windows “won”. █

“The chief of malaria for the World Health Organization has complained that the growing dominance of malaria research by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation risks stifling a diversity of views among scientists and wiping out the world health agency’s policy-making function.

“In a memorandum, the malaria chief, Dr. Arata Kochi, complained to his boss, Dr. Margaret Chan, the director general of the W.H.O., that the foundation’s money, while crucial, could have “far-reaching, largely unintended consequences.”

“Many of the world’s leading malaria scientists are now “locked up in a ‘cartel’ with their own research funding being linked to those of others within the group,” Dr. Kochi wrote. Because “each has a vested interest to safeguard the work of the others,” he wrote, getting independent reviews of research proposals “is becoming increasingly difficult.”

“Also, he argued, the foundation’s determination to have its favored research used to guide the health organization’s recommendations “could have implicitly dangerous consequences on the policy-making process in world health.””

–New York Times, 2008

Summary: Good examples of the political intervention by Bill Gates and also the purchase of a consensus in the press, by means of gentle bribes

THE world’s top lobbyist and famous criminal, Bill Gates, is still up to no good. He tries selling/promoting patents he is investing in and in the process he offers bribes to politicians who serve his agenda:

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – Any Nigerian state governor whose state improves routine immunization coverage and end polio will be awarded $500,000 each by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the foundation said in a statement yesterday. .

That’s the spin; as pointed out by a critic:

Some call these cash prizes. Others call them bribes. Does the Gates Foundation really want to be seen bribing politicians?

Gates’ investments actually contribute to polio (we covered this before, e.g. here), not its avoidance. But never mind that. As pointed out in the previous post, the Wallart Foundation now takes staff from Gates’ house of lobbyists:

Wal-Mart Stores Inc named Sylvia Mathews Burwell as the president of the Walmart Foundation, its philanthropic arm, replacing Margaret McKenna, who is retiring after four years in the role.

“When Sylvia said she wanted to spend more time with family she didn’t say it was the Walton family. More concentration of power at the heart of the philanthropy-industrial complex,” remarks Gates Keepers. She didn’t say which family. Why are so many top people leaving the Gates Foundation these days? Maybe they realise that the PR generated by those lobbyists is just a smoke screen; maybe they can see clearly from the inside what the foundation really is about. It’s publicity and agenda-pushing (for profit).

AllAfrica, which was bribed by Gates, does some agenda advancement in birth control and credits Gates for it. Here is another bribed-for article:

Dr. Rilwan Mohammed, executive secretary, FCT Primary Healthcare Development Board (PHCDB), stated this when Susan Rich, Senior Programme Officer, Melissa and Bill Gates Foundation, visited the Family Health Clinic, at Area 2 recently.

There are many articles just like this, seeded and paid for by Gates (who also pays the BBC and The Guardian to do this, to name just a couple of British examples). It’s a nasty charade of self-promotion, disguised monopolisation, and ultimately profit (Gates is still getting richer). A lot of people do not know this because Gates spends about 1 million dollar per day just bribing/buying the press (according to 2011 estimates). A lot of people sincerely believe that Gates is giving his money away, not getting more powerful and wealthy (which he is). What a successful spin machine. █

Summary: Quick updates on monopolisation efforts of Bill Gates in the public sector

TECHRIGHTS has written many articles about the Gates Foundation‘s work to abduct the public education system, for power and for profit.

According to teachers from Gates’ home state, Gates carries on as “the PTA is under siege by Stand for Children (SFC) and the League of Education Voters (LEV). Both organizations are backed by Gates and big corporate money. They want nothing more than to turn the state of Washington into charter school country, privatizing our entire public school system.”

For the sake of brainwashing children they invest a lot of money in lobbying:

Race to the Top has been a money-maker for many. That’s where all of these dollars are coming from, from people who believe that they will make a profit off of their investment. (See the category “Cashing in on ed reform in the right column of this page.) Of course there are all the millions from Gates, Broad and the Walton’s who think they know more than the rest of us do about how our children should be educated. It’s that paternalistic attitude that men in their position have taken over the centuries, thinking that they know more than we do so they are here to help us when we are perfectly capable of taking care of ourselves. To all of those venture philanthropists I say, “Just stop taking money from us by way of the billions that you receive in tax credits and we would be able to manage just fine on our own”.

As we are doing to show later, the Waltons now have more in common with Bill Gates, including staff. The intent here is clear, as is the damage. █

Summary: The call to reform the BBC (or discard it as a news source) is now accompanied by a long list of items

AFTER YEARS of writing about the BBC we decided to make a BBC wiki page wherein we accumulate relevant posts. We are going to push for disclosure and reform at the BBC, mostly in the interest of truth coming out, not manufactured consensus.

This was partly inspired by a list that Slated had accumulated and to name the more recent examples from the site:

# Microsoft’s infiltration of the BBC: “the iPlayer is not what it claimed to be, it is built top-to-bottom on a Microsoft-only stack, the BBC management team who are responsible for the iPlayer are a checklist of senior employees from Microsoft who were involved with Windows Media.”
# The “cross-pollination of Microsoft and the BBC”: Microsoft’s former IPTV platform Mediaroom and Zune chief, Daniel Danker, infiltrates the BBC’s Audio & Music, Vision, iPlayer, online search, and online products and services divisions
# Microsoft’s £20 million bribe to the BBC: Undisclosed “funding compromised media objectivity”
# BBC’s Chief Technology Officer, John Linwood, is a Microsoft mole: “John spent 11 years at Microsoft beginning as an Architectural Consultant in 1993 then progressing to occupy a variety of senior positions within its MSN business.”

We weren’t aware of that last one, which we had missed. The one before the last is about Gates, who actually paid the BBC more than once (many millions) and it shows. The Gates Foundation controls many other publications/media outlets through financial strings. This helps gag critics.

The famous criminal, Bill Gates, is now a Microsoft/patents lobbyist and he is going to lobby the EU Parliament later this month, according to this program. We will hopefully find more time this month to cover the mischiefs of the Gates family, and the ringleader in particular. He continues to profit by promoting patents which he paints as “charity” — a subject I had to explain to a professor whom I met here earlier today. As a biology professor he could see what I was getting at. Take for instance Gates' relationship with Novartis and mind these new Novartis patent monopolies from the news:

A patent is a window into a company’s activity that may never show up in a press release.

No, that’s not what a patent is. And the BBC won’t explain it correctly, either. As we showed many times before, Novartis and companies like it (which make up the Gates Foundation) artificially elevate the price of drugs and price them out of reach to many, rendering them dead. Where Gates comes in is the lobbying for governments to give taxpayers’ money for private profit (Novartis et al., which Gates invests in) and ‘free’ samples to create dependence and PR for Mr. Gates. With the watchdog press suspended (strings attached), do not expect to hear this from corporate media. But this is known to many experts in the field. Many are too shy to speak out about it. When they do speak out about it, the press ignores, or labels them “jealous”. █

Summary: A quick update on the education front, which is being influenced (by proxy) by Bill Gates for the sake of private profits

THE GATES FOUNDATION, which already embezzles the American public, has been trying to hijack the US education system for several years now, turning it into a profit-making machine for all the wrong people, mostly at the expense of children and teachers.

Techrights has been tracking the matter for about 3 years now and a comment from Danaher M Dempsey Jr stood out as saying:

What the ed reformers are doing, de-professionalizing and demonizing teachers, will have the opposite effect. Who in their right mind would want to teach under the conditions of high stakes testing, standardized curriculum with matching tests, longer days with no additional pay and no additional support? And of course, larger class sizes which seems to be a new thing for Bill Gates and the other geniuses who know what’s best for the rest of us. According to him, class size doesn’t matter and why should it? His idea is ultimately online learning so basically in his eyes teachers, human beings, are expendable, Teachers are “Human Capitol” as the Gates backed NCTQ reports claim.

Another post from the same blog says:

Last year Bill Gates, a big promoter of charter schools, gave Stand for Children $3,476,300 in funding.

And then there’s PIE, another moneyed group, who is also funding SFC and is a big proponent of charter schools.

[...]

So, who is Chad Magendanz and what does he have to do with Stand for Children and charter schools? Apparently a lot. It might have happened innocently enough for Mr. Magendanz who received campaign funding from SFC and endorsements from Kelly Munn and Lisa MacFarland both with the Gates backed League of Education Voters during his campaign in 2008 when he ran for the Issaquah School board and again in 2009 when he ran for re-election. Even before that he was a member of SFC but this boost to school board member seemed to help him rise up through the ranks of SFC and become a spokesperson for the organization during the last legislative session.

[...]

So, where did that name just surface again? As one of the PTA members involved in developing the proposal for charter schools that will be introduced in the Washington State Legislative session this week. The same session where one of the Gates backed organizations, LEV, an organization that is pushing charter schools in our state will be speaking. See So much for fair and balanced with our Washington State PTA. The speaker is George Scarola and he is a lobbyist for LEV.

We are going to provide some more examples of front groups that Gates is funding to ruin the education system for the sake of private profits. The problem is, we lack the time to research the issue more profoundly like we used to. We catch up with older news, still. █

GATES WATCHERS is a Web site that keeps an eye on the Gates Foundation.

Critics of Gates do not receive the exposure they deserve, in part due to financial strings that Gates attaches to publications (we provided evidence before). In a copy of a paid articles (thus less accessible) we find that “Tim Ogden writes the Foundation has issues with hearing the truth, accountability, and focus.” (source)

Another summary says: “It has pushed well past the boundaries of traditional foundation behaviour, intervening in and influencing public policy on both domestic and international matters – for good or ill, or very likely for a mixture of both.”

And another copy of an article alludes to Monsanto lobbying when it says:

And he says that Rockefeller no longer works in the same areas as the Gates Foundation. Huh? Don’t they both fund AGRA?

We wrote about this before, many times in fact. Gates keeps pushing his own numbers funded by himself to praise his work and push his agenda, so paper trail says a lot:

The DCP2 was published by the Disease Control Priorities Project, a joint enterprise of The World Bank, the National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization, and the Population Reference Bureau, which was funded primarily by a $3.5 million grant from the Gates Foundation.

Regarding this shameful article, Gates Watchers asks:

How many grants did it get from the Gates Foundation before it gave Melinda this award?

As points out in our IRC channels this week, Gates also bribes many departments to have these rebranded after him, creating the illusion that he is loved (reputation laundering using the money he illegally earned). The Melinda worship is equally disturbing as we already saw how The Guardian and the BBC praised her right after they had gotten bribed by her husband. We covered this at the time and put forth then evidence.

As pointed out in another posting:

Here we see a Gates Foundation-supported evaluation of a Gates Foundation-supported project with a comment by chairs of a Gates Foundation-supported evaluation group. The potential for bias is clear.

It’s all stacked.

It turns out that homeless people surround the tax-evading corporation known as Gates Foundation (based on local news), but do they know the extent to which this foundation is exploiting the public and distorting information which gets presented to the public?

About 100 homeless people and anti-poverty activists staged a “sleep-out” Monday night outside the new Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation building in Seattle to protest a funding shortage that has forced the closure of 15 shelters.

Unless there is profit and PR to be made from the homeless, Gates will do nothing. It is class warfare from Gates and fellow criminals (who use PR to hide past crimes from media attention givers who do their work properly). We will need to write about this subject in length at a later stage. But basically, Gates keeps getting richer while controlling the press to the point where it says he “gives” (free samples to create patent dependence, PR, and so forth). It’s a big scam. █

Summary: Tax exceptions aside, the whole Gates family is now participating in the pocketing of public budget

B

ILL Gates’ monopoly skills are put to new use in areas other than computing. As Max Keiser explained last month, the same business model is being applied to make a profit out of what used to be free or a commodity. Bill Gates’ father acts as a conspirator in the plot to hijack the US education system, which taxpayers pump half a trillion dollars into every single year. Bill and his friends want some of this money (public spendings for private profit). As a teachers’ blog put it:

The proposal that each PTA member is to receive and review regarding charter schools only has a pro side. No opinions are offered providing another viewpoint. Apparently this is how they roll in the state of Washington and I can attest to that during my time as a PTA Legislative Chair. At the PTA legislative session last year where the guest speaker was Bill Gates, Sr., there was an ed reform proposal for merit pay and the only voice in the wilderness at the time against this plank was mine. There was no one there to officially provide a “con” to every “pro” that was proposed. So much for fair and balanced.

Then I found out this morning who the guest speakers were to be for the PTA legislative session and who should be on it? None other that George Scarola, Legislative Director with the “facts don’t matter” League of Education Voters (LEV), a Gates backed organization that has beat the drum for charter schools since last year when they started a speakers series on the subject. The speakers included the ed reform all-star list of Richard Barth, President and CEO of the KIPP charter franchise, his wife Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America, Inc., Steve Barr, founder of the Green Dot charter franchise, Ben Austin of the failed Parent Revolution, Tom Vander Ark former Executive Director of Education for the Gates Foundation and now failed charter school entrepreneur, John Danner, who assisted in the creation of a charter school law in Tennessee and subsequently founded 12 charter schools in that state and then to top it off, Kevin Johnson who spoke to an almost all African-American audience at Mt. Zion Baptist Church talking about his charter school St. Hope Academy. And now LEV’s lobbyist will be speaking to the PTA legislative session about all things ed reform including charter schools and their next big push, online learning.

What’s important here is the active participation of Bill Gates’ dad. We see him help his son quite a lot behind the scenes. It’s malevolent. The Gates Foundation is just another family business (self-named foundation) that pays no tax and hides some of its lobbying activities behind front groups (like TFA) which it is funding. David Fisher explains:

This is really disheartening and perhaps criminal. I am really depressed about the ability of the School District and the State Office of Sup. of Ed. to override anything they choose to irregardless of ethics, morality, laws, or the will of the vox populi. We get stonewalled, Gates gets a foothold on privatization of public education in Seattle, and our student population gets shafted. This is a good reason to take all money out of elections and provide really free elections with no financial influences. It would be much less expensive both economically and socially.

The state legislators give Gates and other billionaires big tax write-offs depriving the public education system of much needed funding, then these revenues are placed in tax-sheltered investment portfolios, like the Gates Foundation, collecting even more tax free money and finally the profits are used to privatize the very education system that has been denied essential funding in the first place thanks to Gates and his cronies. What a racket!

Without campaign funding Gates wouldn’t get the tax write-off’s in the first place, not to mention the conflict of interest involved with using so-called non-profit foundations for political purposes such as influencing state legislatures on policy decisions like public education. This is not a democracy.

As we showed last month, the Gates family members are still getting richer while pretending to give away their wealth and employing PR people to spread this false perception. One teacher put it succinctly by stating:

Charter schools have not met the test of time and there is no reason for our students to be the lab rats for Gates, Broad, the hedge fund millionaires and the rest of the folks who are looking for personal financial gain by using public money.

Bill Gates’ criminal enterprises no longer affects just technology. These costly crimes can be ascribed to the problem that led to OWS. The public is being looted by few plutocrats, one of whom is Bill Gates. This ought to be recognised despite the propaganda Gates runs at the expense of more $300,000,000 per year (just influencing the media alone). █

The Gates Foundation is part of the patenting cartel and it monopolises many things. Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert explain this in their new episode, which is pretty well made. For those who wish to get right to the ‘beef’, skip the first 5 or so minutes.

Summary: A roundup of Gates stories and what they teach us about the Gates Foundation

THE WORLD’S top lobbyist might in fact be Bill Gates, who operates under the umbrella of a foundation. He does not run a company per se, but he is making money in other ways without having to pay tax.

The Korean president is visiting him like he is a political figure (which he is, but the public never elected him), leaving the president susceptible to lobbying for patents and for power. As the Korean press put it a few months ago:

President Lee Myung-bak returned home Saturday from a trip to New York and Seattle that included speeches at the U.N. General Assembly and a high-level nuclear safety meeting, bilateral summits and a meeting with Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

And as Gates Keepers put it: “One wonders what Le Myung-bak’s electoral constituents think of him taking ‘global advice’ from a nonKorean college drop out code developer?”

This is “all irrelevant and say nothing,” claims Toby, “what he is, fundamentally, is a criminal sociopath.” Well, behind the scenes he is bullying employees, acts impolitely, and using the F word. Here is another example of it:

BE: I’d have to say they are Planners, top down. And it surprises me because Bill Gates is an entrepreneurial businessman and they tend to be Searchers. The one and only time I met Gates was at Davos several years ago. I figured he’d be friendly to my ideas but he seemed quite hostile. He came up to me and said, “What’s all this searching crap?” (chuckles)

It it is not Bill’s idea, then it is “crap”. This is how and why we see monopolisation in health science, for example. And for those who think that he is giving away his wealth (that’s the PR nonsense), here is a new reminder:

Bill Gates’ wealth increased by $5 billion to bring his net worth to $59 billion

And best of all, he does not pay tax because he is, one would believe, “giving away” money. The above article is very silly by the way and it confused correlation and causation” as Gates Keepers explains. Mr. Gates and his minions keep seeking celebrity endorsements for their campaigns (we provided many examples in the past). This PR effort recently hit a jackpot:

Moonshots and Mandela. Can’t lose with those images. Here is a talking head of Melinda from the Social Good Summit where hundreds of people were put in a room to listen to people talk about how good their programmes were. The audience was expected to tweet about it – manufactured consent for the networked generation.

In summary, the PR operation works. Bill Gates gets richer, the press says he is giving away, and he continues to receive access to the ears of world leaders, to whom he pushes an agenda for his investment. What a cruel trap. The media keeps playing along:

Another example can be found in the ongoing Education Nation series sponsored on a number of platforms by NBC. It’s endorsement of market-driven anti-public education policies are evident in its parading of the likes of Bill and Melinda Gates and their utterly anti-public, charter school, privatized and technocratic vision of education.

Where has the watchdog media gone? Need we rely on blogs for a sobering perspective? NBC should be recalled in the context of MSNBC, where MS is Microsoft. █

Summary: A somewhat belated roundup of reports about what Bill Gates is doing to privatise (and perhaps monopolise) US education

THE school/public education agenda has been mentioned briefly in our daily links, but we have not touched on this subject in relation to the Gates Foundation for quite some time.

Things have not changed for the better because Gates’ ego is still funding AstroTurf groups that do the opposite of that they claim to be doing. Many of these are funded by Bill Gates for his selfish agenda and teachers bemoan this over and over again. To quote a fairly recent observation (we catch up chronologically):

Since the last board meeting, it was announced by Norm Rice of the Seattle Foundation that he was funding TFA, Inc. This is the same foundation that in 2010 received almost $6M in grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The same Bill Gates who last year gave TFA, Inc. $2.5M to open up an office in Seattle.

We are hoping that people who work for Gates on this agenda will realise how evil this agenda is. Many such people are already fleeing. To quote a recent article:

Hilary Pennington, director of education, postsecondary success, and special initiatives in the foundation’s United States program since 2007, told grantees in an e-mail last month that she would leave her position by spring 2012 to “get closer to work on the ground.” Pennington, who has led the foundation’s gradually intensifying involvement in issues of college completion, productivity and technological innovation, said in announcing her departure that she was optimistic that the foundation’s work would continue because “I am so confident about the strength of the strategy, the [postsecondary success] team, and our grantees and other partners.”

We wrote about more such departures before. Going back to examples of Gates’ privatisation of education systems:

Our state PTA is busy promoting charter schools along with the Gates backed League of Education Voters, Stand for Children and DFER.

Some of those front groups were covered here before and their Gates ties shown.

Gates’ folks are trying to bash and silence the truth, which does not have as much PR funds (if any) allocated to it. Teachers, parents and students/pupils are helpless in this battle. Here is a relevant article on this subject:

The New York Times recently ran a story portraying the Gates Foundation as the puppeteer of American education policy, bribing or bullying scholars and politicians into dancing as it desires. Rick Hess, of the American Enterprise Institute, feels that the story misrepresented his position on the potentially corrupting influence of foundations, making it sound as though he were referring to the Gates Foundation in particular when in fact he was referring to the impact of foundations generally.

Front groups are easy to expose, but they keep changing names and “one of their wealthiest financiers, Bill Gates” (to quote this article) funds the shell du jour as long as it promotes his agenda. To quote further:

But, this is how the PTA has worked over the past few years in our state. From my experience as a Legislative Chair during the last legislative session, which was an example of top down decision making using typical ed reform manipulative language to push the agenda of one of their wealthiest financiers, Bill Gates, who has funded the National PTA for $2M as well as the Washington State PTA this year for $191,000 and is a big proponent of charter schools, I have seen how far away the Washington State PTA has drifted from its’ roots as an advocate for parents, teachers and students. The PTA in our state no longer represents all or even many of the parents, teachers or students which explains one of the reasons for the quick growth of Parents Across America.

There is more here:

Besides the fact that they have received a few mil from Gates?

Part of Washington State PTA’s mission is to be a relevant resource for families and communities, and a strong advocate for the well-being and education of every child. Charters could promote school choice, flexibility and local autonomy, and give communities new options.

As critics of Gates point out, the PR/spin that their PR agents keep plating and seeding (yes, they hired many and spend hundreds of millions on it) keep bubbling to the surface, arguably showing the futility of fighting against this sort of corruption. With Melinda Gates pushing her agenda in the Huff & Puff (quite frankly as usual) we constantly see that PR and money can trump truth. Most people out there still think that Gates reformed his behaviour.

This is class war. They don’t use guns or anything heavy in this war, but they loot massively and enslave people around them, including teachers. Mind this blog post “Privatize Everything! Say the 21st Century Pirates”. It says quite shrewdly that:

Gates, along with hedge funds, are pushing an agenda of privatizing public schools, and funding a PR push in support of that cause with films like “Waiting for Superman” and the NBC “Education Nation” that included a panel with the title “Does Education Need a Katrina?“.

Diane Ravitch’s book review with the heading “Class Warfare” addresses some of these issues and the title is not so strong on a relative basis.

“One of the chairs of the Gates Foundation is quoted: “There’s class warfare, all right,” Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”” (source)

Quoting further:

The wealthiest American is Bill Gates, who in recent months has attacked teacher tenure, teacher pay schedules, seniority layoffs and smaller class sizes. The Gates Foundation is now actively pursuing those regressive goals: it provided significant resources to promoting the anti-teacher, anti-union propaganda movie “Waiting for Superman.” (Gates himself appeared in “Waiting for Superman” as an ‘educational expert.’) Since the second wealthiest American, Warren Buffet, does his philanthropy through the Gates Foundation, he is effectively aligned with Gates’ educational agenda.

[...]

Teachers and teacher unions have not sought out this class warfare. To the contrary, the American Federation of Teachers made an effort to establish a dialogue with Bill Gates, inviting Gates to address our last national convention in Seattle. This overture had its critics, but it would be a serious mistake for unions to talk only to those who agreed with us. By the same token, we need to be honest about the results of our efforts at dialogue: Gates has become outspoken in his anti-teacher pronouncements. There’s not much left to discuss when he assumes such a posture.

It’s getting quite serious and OWS protesters should not lose sight of Gates. He uses the most PR to whitewash his past and he knows why he is doing it. The population increasingly recognises its real enemies. They are domestic ones.

One of Gates’ PR angles is that Khan Academy is a model to be mimicked, but as several bloggers and others writers point out [1, 2], that is just a load of nonsense. The PR offensive has not got the support of experts. As one critic of the foundation points out, however, Bill and Melinda are just preaching, they are not listening. To further illustrate this point: “Like tens of thousands of folks (soon to be millions), I now follow Melinda Gates on Twitter. I also follow her husband’s Tweets.” They never respond, they just instruct. It’s more like tyranny, even dictatorship, to use words from the previously covered op-ed. As another critic points out:

Melinda tweeting is not going to solve the ‘communication problem’ at the Gates Foundation. Twitter is talking. There is no way to ensure Melinda is listening to the small dairy farmer in Kenya who probably works too many hours to use Twitter anyway.

The Gates family can screw up the education system for their profit and not face the consequences, let alone the liability. As Alliance Magazine put it some months ago:

It’s a truism that foundations lack accountability – unlike (democratic) governments and companies, which are at least in theory accountable to voters and shareholders. The justification for this – in the eyes of the philanthropy world, and presumably the wider world – is the assumption that foundations probably do quite a lot of good, and almost certainly don’t do any harm.

Bill and his wife are meanwhile celebrating on the taxpayers’ ATM (half a trillion dollars per year for education) with permission from Duncan, their accomplice, whose role in this we covered here before. Here is more on that:

In anticipation of the new NCLB initiative rolled out yesterday (my response in the making), Arne Duncan announced recently a new corporate ed reform money maker called “Digital Promise,” which promises to fill the pockets of some of Duncan’s favorite techie sidekicks who are already lining up at Duncan’s “innovation-inspiring” federal ATM machine at the U. S. Department of Ed. Take Reed Hastings, for instance (please), whose rattle-trap outfit, NetFlix, is beginning to flicker toward extinction just as Hastings moves into the edu-biz in a big way.

What can be done to stop Gates, his AstroTurfers, the PR machine, and corrupt politicians who let him take over childrens’ minds? It is a truly serious issue even if it is not purely tech-related. █

–AIDS organisation manager, December 2009 (New York Times)

Summary: Criticisms of monopolisation in the medical field and another appointment from a drug company, consisting and reinforcing yet another conflict of interest

THE NEW empire of Bill Gates seeks to monopolise more areas of life, not just software. Some of the tricks are familiar, including the attack on dissent and marginalisation of competition.

We have a wiki page for the uninitiated and today we present a recent article where Gates is called “public health dictator” because he ought to be called that. To quote a weak response to it:

Last week, Laura Freschi and Alanna Shaikh published a piece in Alliance magazine that raised some interesting and thought-provoking question about the role of the Gates Foundation in setting the global health agenda. They conclude that Gates is becoming a “public health dictator” because of his financial resources and the power and influence that come as a result. They are, of course, not the first to complain about Gates’s focus on technological solutions to global health challenges. Some of the most recent grumblings were in response to the Foundation’s “reinvent the toilet” campaign this year, but similar concerns have been voiced for years. The Foundation places too much emphasis on technological innovation and “quick fixes”; their undue influence diverts funding from other priorities; their goals are not realistic. These are all valid concerns which deserve to be voiced (heck, we have already written about it here), particularly in a field where nearly everyone has a different opinion on how problems should be solved.

This article is actually somewhat of a coverup, but we link it here anyway. It is worth noting that around the same time a bully called Tachi, the head of health, left the foundation, only to be replaced by another guy with a conflict of interest. To quote:

Mundel succeeds Tachi Yamada, who came from GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) to run the Gates Foundation global health program.

He comes from Novartis, which we previously wrote about in relation to Gates. One point that we emphasises is that such appointments help sell products (essentially patents) under the disguise of being ‘charity’ or goodwill. As a Reuters report helps show, Novartis gets embedded in Gates’ bed even further:

The Gates Foundation, belonging to Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his wife Melinda, could poach Novartis’s head of global development, a Swiss newspaper reported on Sunday, citing two sources.

This will be good news for Novartis, which will now have one of its people lobby politicians to buy drugs at taxpayers’ expense. He can lobby them not as a corporate head but as “charity” guy. Wonderful loophole and guess who is investing (for profit) in those drug companies? Bill Gates of course. This not only affects healthcare but also other areas where Bill Gates became a dictator. Another example will be given in the next post. █

SLASHDOT is lending some space to the latest FUD from Black Duck. For the uninitiated, Black Duck came from Microsoft.

The 451 Group seeks to validate the claims from Black Duck, but upon a close look at comments it is possible to see the flaws.

NB: I am relying on the current set of figures published by Black Duck Software for this post, combined with our previous posts on the topic. I am aware that some people are distrustful of Black Duck’s figures given the lack of transparency on the methodology for collecting them. Since I previously went to a lot of effort to analyze data collected and published by FLOSSmole to find that it confirmed the trend suggested by Black Duck’s figures, I am confident that the trends are an accurate reflection of the situation.

There are already rebuttals to this, so we won’t make more. Another similar company that came from Microsoft, called OpenLogic, is spreading some more FOSS FUD to sell its products. Remember that the company is run by a former Microsoft guy. These are the companies that push nonsense like “Intellectual Property” in the FOSS world (like the GPL-hostile CDDL^*), which smells a bit like this thing too:

Today I presented about the complicated relationship between FLOSS and Intellectual Property at the Technical University of Berlin. The presentation was part of a lecture about Intellectual Property management, targeting students in an international master’s program in business administration. This setup guaranteed for a kind of culture clash, since the motivation for students to attend this lecture is to learn about how to increase the value of their companies by building IP assets. Openness, sharing and collaborative development is usually not the focus.

Clarification (5/1/2012): the above turns out to actually be a talk from a FOSS proponent who educates people on the subject. He does not really promote “Intellectual Property” as a concept.

Watch out for another of Microsoft’s proxies for ‘open source’ infiltration. It is “squar[ing] off against the GPL” as one would expect:

I am consistently amazed by the lengths people will go to to try to succeed in the marketplace.

Actually, that’s not true. Having been around fellow humans for 45 years, I would have to say that such destructive behavior doesn’t really surprise me. What does surprise me, though, is the repeated use of the same, tired memes when it’s been proven time and again that they don’t work.

So it was with sad dismay that I read a DotNetNuke blog entry this morning that took unabashed aim at the GNU Public License (GPL) used by DotNetNuke’s (DNN) primary (and more successful) competing content management systems, WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal.

Microsoft’s front group CodePlex/OuterCurve is accommodated by this company. Surprise, surprise. Loyalty. █
___
^* Quoting Wikipedia, “In the words of Danese Cooper, who is no longer with Sun, one of the reasons for basing the CDDL on the Mozilla license was that the Mozilla license is GPL-incompatible.” Cooper now works for Bill Gates based on her LinkedIn page.