04.06.15
Microsoft Does Not Act Like a US-based Company (Espionage Against US Citizens, Tax Evasion, Among Other Symptoms)
Summary: Debunking the myth of Microsoft as a US company or even an international company, as opposed to globalist (lacking loyalty to anything but its own bottom line)
Microsoft is not a US company but a globalist company when it comes to taxes. It just doesn’t want to pay taxes and this new article calls out Microsoft for hiding money in offshore account so as to avoid tax. The headline names Microsoft although Microsoft is no longer unique in the area of technology. It’s just the worst. To quote the opening part: “So it is with companies that keep massive stockpiles of cash in foreign countries in order to avoid paying US corporate tax rates. In fact, the only thing that prevents this issue from being relentlessly bleak is the absurdity of what some of these companies get away with. For example,according to the advocacy and lobbying group Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ), American corporations claim to have earned so much profit selling goods in tax-free zones like the Cayman Islands and Bermuda that the figure amounts to 16 times these countries’ total GDPs — which defies reality.”
Microsoft basically evades not only US tax. It evades tax everywhere. It’s globalism; it’s the plutocrats’ sovereignty (broderless and above international regulations).
Apple and Microsoft, as the article above goes to show, have more offshore cash and pay lower foreign tax rates than most any other Fortune 500 companies. Microsoft and taxes are two words that only go hand in hand when it pertains to taxation of users of Windows, Office, etc.
Considering how Microsoft helps the US government (among other governments) spy on US citizens, one cannot consider it a US company. It helps espionage against US citizens, which is inherently against US law. This is done not just because Microsoft loves and embraces surveillance but because it wants lucrative government contracts all around the world and it is willing to betray users of its software for these contracts, even in Russia, as we showed half a decade ago. Microsoft even works for Putin when it suits its agenda, helping to imprison Russian dissents by framing (through surveillance) and misuse of law enforcement privileges, however unjustified. Microsoft is loyal to nobody except Microsoft and lobbying operations such as the Gates Foundation, which helps Bill Gates evade tax and rapidly increase his personal wealth.
Microsoft has just dumped ‘Do Not Track’, showing that Microsoft has perhaps grown tired of pretending to care about privacy. Only a fool would ever choose a ‘cloud’ for government, especially a proprietary software ‘cloud’ from a foreign company that engages in espionage activities or at least facilitates them. Using a Web browser from Microsoft is worse than reckless.
Microsoft likes to pretend to be a national company in every nation by creating subsidiaries like “Microsoft UK”, but it’s a lie and a sham. There is an ODF debate in the UK at the moment. Microsoft pretends to be an ODF company and a British company after attacking it through British proxies (like partners), though we’ll soon see how that worked out. Microsoft once tried to frame ODF as anti-American, as if Microsoft itself was pro-American (it’s pro-whoever-pays-Microsoft). As Glyn Moody pointed out the other day, the latest moves seem to make it likely that Microsoft will get altogether dropped, at least Microsoft Office. “Back in July last year,” says Moody’s article, “I wrote about an incredible opportunity for the open source world. After years of disappointments, and despite the usual lobbying/threats by a certain large US software company [Microsoft] against the move, the Cabinet Office announced that it was officially adopting the Open Document Format (ODF) for sharing or collaborating on government documents. At the time I exhorted everyone involved to do their utmost to make this work, since it was the biggest chance to show that open standards and open source were not just viable as a government solution, but actually better than the alternatives.”
Moody just calls or alludes to Microsoft as “a certain large US software company”, but not naming it is playing into Microsoft’s hands and Microsoft should not really be described as a US company, it’s just a pariah that views itself — much like Gates himself — as Napoleonic and thus above every international law.
As Moody put it at the very end, “there’s no timetable for this development, which means it might be a while before we can actually use this software. Still, it’s further testimony to the fact that the ODF ecosystem is one of the most exciting places in free software at the moment. Much of that can be attributed to the boost given by the UK government’s high-profile decision to adopt the format last year, for which it deserves recognition and our thanks.”
The sooner the world recognises how Microsoft views the world, the more swiftly it will unburden itself from abuse, including systemic looting (tax evasion, taxes on citizens), extortion (e.g. with patents), and bribery. █
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