01.07.11

IRC Proceedings: January 7th, 2011

Posted in IRC Logs at 7:37 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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Links 7/1/2011: Linux Foundation Expands, GTK+ 3.0 is Near

Posted in News Roundup at 7:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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Standalone Linux on PS3 Slim (27c3 demo update)

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Teach for America, Inc. (TFA) a New Gates Euphemism for Indoctrinating American’s Next Generation

Posted in Bill Gates, Microsoft at 8:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Microsoft plutocrats together with Bill Gates are taking control of schools and this post contains over 50 new references about the subject

THE previous post ought to have shown that people are no longer as gullible as the Gates Foundation requires them to be. Well, older generations may not yet have been ‘charmed’ by Gates-run schools, so they retained some critical skills and could therefore see past the fog.

MSN, which is Microsoft’s means of controlling some news output, expands to more areas while increasingly dominating minds through the media. Techrights wrote so much about the subject of marketing and media control and it is assumed that most people are aware of the problem. Media control is expensive. PR is expensive. Journalists are also expensive, but in later posts we are going to show that Bill Gates is buying many of them. He specifically targets journalists in the areas where he does business, so by being selective he avoids having to buy every single journalist in every area. But, here comes the key point…

Where does one acquire free marketing?

Yes, that’s right. Free (as in very cheap) marketing.

To ask this differently, how does one get taxpayers to fund their own indoctrination?

If information is power, then brainwash is extremely valuable.

“How about using schools and teachers, who are funded by the taxpayers via the state, to teach/preach one’s own agenda?”To be a little less vague, how about taking all those whose characters is being shaped for later in life when they perform repetitive tasks? How about using schools and teachers, who are funded by the taxpayers via the state, to teach/preach one’s own agenda? This is notorious among religious and atheistic circles, which always strive to use compulsory education to further their world views. But what about Gates? How many people bother to question Gates’ hijacking of US education and global education at large (he starts with the States, then expands for scalability reasons)? Sadly, not enough people think about it, let alone write about it to their elected officials or local papers. Gates is not alone in this. There are other rich families like the Broads and they operate via shells with AstroTurfing (fake grassroots). It’s just too easy to come across Teach for America (TFA) in recent months. It seems like a new euphemistic banner for what Gates et al. do to the education system in the States. In our many posts about Diane Ravitch, who was last mentioned the other day for criticising other megalomaniacs who claim to “aid” schools, we did try to give exposure to her writings because she is very influential and almost revered among teachers. She can reach many of them through her books and hopefully stop Gates’ abuse of the school system, which is a multi-billion-dollar PR assault with masqueraded blackmail (“do this of you won’t get the funds”). Diane Ravitch recently won the Moynihan Prize and made Salon’s “Best of 2010″. She won an award and special recognition because she dares to investigate and say what many others are too afraid to utter (for fear of retaliation or deviation from false consensus). Diane Ravitch spoke about Teach for America, Inc. during a recent forum in Seattle. In blog posts such as this (there are several more) it is made abundantly clear that more and more teachers get exposed to facts that Gates paid enormous amounts of money to hide. He even ‘bought’ education-oriented magazines and/or sites by paying them millions in ‘donations’. They just cannot be gagged, can they? Techrights admires Diane Ravitch’s bravery when upon new year’s eve she says: “Insisting on controlling the use of one’s gift of money is another low form of philanthropy. Today’s givers want to control others’ lives.”

She also says (writes actually, but it’s informal) that “[i]nsisting on recognition for philanthropy (cf. Mark Zuckerberg) is the lowest form of philanthropy. It is ego-driven.”

We quoted these tweets some days ago because they capture what we have been saying for years and they come from a figure of high authority and regard in the relevant sector. Mark Zuckerberg’s alleged ‘giveaways’ are just a gimmick and in future posts we’ll provide more references where experts explain why that is the case. Enlightenment rarely comes from passively reading newspapers which only pretend to be independent and historically speaking, the rich have almost always used the press to control the masses. Now they try to distort blogs, too (more on that in an imminent post).

“It’s a classic collusion between the press and the PR industry and this is a taboo subject among both sides.”Here is an example of Microsoft PR for domination of schools in India. Watch it for educational reasons alone. See how journalistic propaganda works^*. It’s pretty cheap to grant an award and get so much good press for it, produced in part after pressure from PR agencies that Microsoft assigns to the task. It’s like lobbying because their operation involves prodding journalists and sometimes passing to them some pre-made (ghostwritten) ‘articles’, just like proposed legislation. It’s a classic collusion between the press and the PR industry and this is a taboo subject among both sides. Secrecy harbours mischief.

Techrights has so much more to say about the subject, but owing to my daytime job I cannot sacrifice any more time writing this long post and I apologise for just dumping many links to make up the remainder of this post. I will annotate them (in brackets) for our smart readers to find it easier to see the purpose and relevance. So here it goes:

i. “Microsoft donates $1 million to L.A. school to bridge technology gap (thank you Microsoft! $1 million will be enough to bridge the technology gap)

ii. Microsoft Donates $1M To Local Education Effort

iii. Microsoft Makes Its Largest Technology Donation Ever to a Single Los Angeles School to Help Prepare Students for Their Future (this is the official press release from the greatest, bestest [sic] company in the whole world)

iv. Microsoft donates $3M to refugee children (so that it can carry on with abusive leverage over schools. Thanks, AP, for the very insightful, in-depth, ‘investigative’ reporting)

v. Microsoft donates $2M to help veterans find jobs (we covered this very recently and here it is covered by the Seattle Times, which is known for its shallow, pathetic coverage of Microsoft/Gates Foundation issues)

vi. Microsoft donates $3M for legal services for kids (from the Seattle Times)

vii. Microsoft gives $1.4M total to local schools, libraries (more lousy reporting from a Microsoft blog in Seattle)

viii. Microsoft gives $3.5 million to UW lab (that’s the University of Wisconsin, which will worship Microsoft’s Jim Gray, who called Linux “a cult” [PDF])

On we move to “Teach for America, Inc.”:

ix. Teach for America Testimony

x. Teach for America and “Clinically Based Teacher Preparation”

xi. Seattle School Board rubber-stamps yet another item on its Broad Superintendent’s ed reform agenda: Teach for America, Inc.

xii. Teach for America, Inc. is in Seattle (welcome to home of Microsoft). To quote: “Why was it so important to bring TFA, Inc. to our state? Because there are well paid lobbyists and Broad/Gates backed organizations along with DFER, who just set up shop in our state, who are already lobbying for charter schools.”

“Teach for America” is like “Elevate America”, which we humourously call “American EDGI”. “Teach for America” it a silly euphemism intended to whitewash privatisation of a public system which already works. They curse the system and then use that to take over it, just like Abramoff/Gates did for cheaper labour at Microsoft. On we go:

xiii. Controversial “Teach for America” Back on the Agenda for Seattle’s Schools (this blog increasingly mentions the Dells for obvious reasons — because they too play the rich men’s game)

(Not to worry, though, we’re being told by the district: the Gates Foundation will pay for it. Good old Bill — always ready to foot the bill for his reformite friends, thus avoiding a possibly uncomfortable public discussion about the cost and value of bringing another reformite agenda item to town. What a nuisance is that thing called democracy!)

[...]

What does Teach for America, Inc. do with all its money?

Teach for America, Inc. is a multimillion dollar enterprise. It collects tens of millions of dollars from the Gates and Broad foundations and various others (see below). For some reason the Obama administration recently determined that TFA, Inc. needed another infusion of $50 million. So why is TFA, Inc. also demanding another $4,000 per year from cash-strapped school districts like ours? How much can five weeks of training possibly cost?

[...]

Why, at a time when the corporate ed reformers have turned the national Klieg lights on the humblest of professional teachers and declared them failures and demanded they perform miracles, are these same enterprises (Broad, Gates, Goodloe-Johnson, Carlyle et al) out of the other side of their mouths pushing for uncredentialed, inexperienced “teachers” to take on our most challenging schools?

[...]

I did some research and was surprised to discover that Teach for America, Incorporated is actually a multimillion-dollar enterprise. It is funded by all the usual suspects and then some: Gates, Broad, the (WalMart) Waltons, Dells, (the Gap) Fishers. Its founder sits on the board of directors of the Broad Foundation (alongside Seattle’s Superintendent Goodloe-Johnson), one of the unelected, unqualified but main drivers of education policy in America right now.

xiv. Seattle Schools data guy has resigned – a casualty of 17 Percent-Gate?

Meanwhile, some parents have wondered in the blogosphere whether Bernatek, who came up with the false 17 percent figure was “just following orders” to find a low number that would instill a sense of crisis in SPS that would justify the new’s superintendent’s severe reforms.

If so, is Bernatek merely the latest fall guy for this scheme?

Another speculation is that Bernatek will land softly in the Gates Foundation, alongside Vicki “Hurricane” Phillips, the former controversial superintendent of Portland’s public schools.

We’ll see.

xv. An analysis of education activities of the Gates Foundation by a reader

Probably the one issue that the Gates Foundation tries to address that stimulates the most critical analysis is US education. No surprise there. Educated American voices can be raised. Uneducated African or Asian farmers have problems being heard. With all the voices being raised, Gates Keepers don’t need to say much.

[...]

I just found your website and read the post noted in the subject line. After reading it, I suspect that private investment in public schools are Obama’s bargaining chip with Gates, et al. I really enjoyed reading your other blog articles since very little is published about Gates east of the Mississippi that he has not had some degree of influence. After perusing your blog, I noted you have many articles on Gates Foundation donations to medical and energy interests, but not so much on his education giving. Those of us in the education community are very unnerved by his and the president’s education reform initiatives. Obama and his Sec of Ed Arne Duncan’s (Gate’s secretary of education puppet) Race to the Top Mandates are Bush’s No Child left Behind on steroids.

In the comments, from Dora Taylor of SeattlEducation2010 (excellent blog by the way):

And needless to say, read anything at Seattle Education 2010
to find out what’s going on with Gates and the other billionaire bullies in terms of public education.

In reply, Gates is being called “bully” (it’s that blackmail technique we mentioned earlier, but it’s disguised as generosity). Here is how Murdoch’s press puts it (the implicit rule is that the rich protect the rich, so Murdoch’s bias is expected):

xvi. Gates Foundation forges education partnerships

xvii. Gates Foundation partnership will lead us down slippery slope (very encouraging to see more people coming out, daring to point out the obvious and not shying away because of the PR machine, such as Murdoch’s tabloids/rags)

Rochester City School District (RCSD) Superintendent Jean-Claude Brizard earlier today announced a new charter school partnership project between the city school district and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The partnership proposes to create opportunities for new and existing charter schools and city school buildings to share various resources, including training and data systems. RCSD, like other city school districts that are participating in the program, was able to negotiate its own agreement specifying resources the district will supply to charter schools currently operating in Rochester.

According to early reports, the agreement includes a mentoring program that will serve to bring together successful city school principals with their charter school counterparts. Charter schools, though, do have the option of not partnering with the city school district. Charters are privately operated but publicly funded; they have until now functioned separately from public schools.

This is indeed a blockbuster announcement but creates a whole bunch of questions. For starters, did the school board sign off on this partnership? How long have discussions between the RCSD and Gates Foundation been in the works? Are city residents going to have meaningful opportunities – referendum, community meetings – in which to voice their opinions? Would their opinions even matter? Are those principals who are deemed successful considered as such based on what criteria? Test scores, for instance?

xviii. Bill Gates – out of touch with teachers

Lindquist’s response?

“This appears to be the idea du jour of how to change our schools,” she says. “I honestly appreciate the interest in trying to figure out some way for our schools to address the huge budget shortfalls and the cuts to education. I see this as an attempt, perhaps a misguided one, to try and figure out some way to stretch those dollars.”

She also says now is not the time to be debating teacher pay kinds of issues.

“When your house is on fire, you probably need to focus on putting out the fire and not worry about decorating your living room,” Lindquist says. “We need to be looking at the bigger issues and broader problems facing our schools and not trying to do these interesting, perhaps intriguing ideas. We need to take a step back and really address the bigger issue.”

xix. Consensus or Groupthink? (rhetorical or not?)

The issues have been raised now and then in connection to K-12 education — amid concerns that the Gates Foundation has excessively influenced Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top program — but when discussed at all in postsecondary education, they are raised quietly, since rare is the higher education association or think tank or researcher that is not receiving checks from Gates, Lumina or both.

xx. Weekend Roundup: Big-Girl Pants, Parent Trigger, & the Charterfest Comes to Town (Oh my!)

Which leads us to the LEV/Gates Charter Lovefest (the C-word that dare not speak its name in Seattle)

Though Washington State voters have voted “No” to charters multiple times, and we certainly have good, qualified teachers available, the League of Education Voters and the Gates Foundation brought two charter school franchise operators and a teacher-training operation to town this past Monday under the rubrics of “Voices of the Revolution” and “Leaders of Innovation.” Why do you suppose they did that?

“We’ve put together a powerhouse panel of three innovators in education: Richard Barth, CEO of KIPP Foundation, Timothy Daly, President of The New Teacher Project, and Steve Barr, Founder of Green Dot Public Schools. The discussion will be moderated by Adam Porsch of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation”

Noticeably absent from much of the press material for this gathering was the word “charter,” even though both KIPP and Green Dot are charter school franchises. Hmm… interesting. Why don’t these pro-privatizing ed reformers just come out and say what their agenda is? The reformers have this strange stealthy manner that implies dishonesty.

xxi. How to create a faux grassroots ed reform organization! (as we showed before, for power over schools Gates has resorted to AstroTurfing, funding of propaganda films, etc. [1, 2, 3, 4])

1. Think of a name using these words: STAND, KIDS, STUDENTS, FIRST, ALLIANCE, EDUCATION, ED, OUR, SCHOOLS, COALITION, COMMUNITY, VOTERS, REVOLUTION, REFORM, NOW

2. Put two or three of those words together in any order (possibly linked by a preposition like “with,” “of,” “for” — or if you want to be really with-it, use “4″ instead of “for”!).

3. Add an exclamation mark at the end!

[...]

8. Ask for money. This is the easiest part of all. Just pick up the phone and dial 1-800-BROAD or 1-800-B&MGATES. Operators standing by!

xxii. Lessons To Be Learned

And below is a link to a paper regarding the Gates’ Foundation and their influence in our country. An interesting read. It’s sad to think that so much money has been spent by the Gates Foundation thinking that what they are doing is the right thing and yet it is turning out to be so wrong for our children.

If only they had started with the appropriate “experts”, educators, students and parents. Unfortunately, we have been left out of the picture entirely and in the process what is occurring is chaos and uncertainty within our public school systems.

The Gates’ Foundation and the Future of U.S. Public Education: A Call
for Scholars to Counter Misinformation Campaigns

xxiii. Thank you

There is a Broadie, by the way, in charge of grants who our Broad-trained superintendent hired but we think that the only grants they look for are the ones from Gates and Broad.

xxiv. The Robert Bobb Sad Saga Continues: Part 2

Shanta Driver, the National Chair of BAMN and one of the attorneys on the case, said “This decision rejects the educational program and the political methods that U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and plutocrats like Bill Gates and Eli Broad have used in their attempt to destroy public education.

xxv. Hijacked!: The Battle for Seattle, Part 3

During this time, Don Nielson was on the Board of Directors for the Alliance for Education, a foundation that now receives the majority of its’ money from Gates and Broad, The Seattle Foundation, heavily funded by Gates and on the Board of Advisers at the University of Washington’s School of Education. As a side note, earlier this year, just before our superintendent introduced a proposal to bring in Teach for America to the school board, the Dean of the School of Education at UW wrote an Op Ed on how Teach of America was such a great organization and how students can benefit from their presence in the classroom. Coincidence? I think not.

That same year, Raj Manhas issued his district newsletter describing “strong partnerships” with the Gates’ and Broad foundations. This was also the year that Raj Manhas brought in Brad Bernatek, as a Broad resident. This action is described in the Status Report issued in 2006.

In 2007, the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Graduate School in Education hosted the Public Education Leadership conference. The participants included Steve Barth, founder of the KIPP charter franchise who recently as a guest of the Broad/Gates backed League of Education of Voters spoke in a forum on the glories of charter schools in Seattle, Don Nielson, who at that time was Chairman of TeachFirst, a company that later was to become a part of editure, Thomas Payzant, an educator at Harvard who would later become active with the Broad Foundation and was to lead our superintendent’s evaluation with the school board in 2009 as a representative from the Broad Foundation, and, as always, Randi Weingarten who at the time was president of the UFT in New York. Eli Broad later states that his foundation had given money to the two charter schools that Ms. Weingarten had opened in New York. See Eli Broad Describes Close Ties to Klein, Weingarten, Duncan.

This is also the year that our Broad trained superintendent, Dr. Maria Goodloe-Johnson, was appointed by the school board and began to “lead” our district.

Her reign as superintendent and the confluence of the Broad/Gates’ agenda in Seattle will be described in Hijacked!:Part 4.

xxvi. During this season of giving…

Gates & Co. can spend their millions on tests and online learning but that will not have a positive impact on education if the child cannot focus on what is in front of them.

For too long now, the wealthy, including Gates, Broad, the Walton’s and all the wall street milkemaires have ignored their responsibility of paying their share of taxes, of returning some of what they have gained by living in this country, using our resources and taking advantage of tax incentives in making their own fortunes. Because of that, the educational system in this country has been weakened. Along with that, the systems that are in place to support families with the greatest need are faltering due to a lack of financial support. Those very systems that would help any child succeed in school are being chipped away even here in our state as we look at a recession/depression that we never thought we would see again in this country.

[...]

It’s ironic that Bill and Melinda Gates can be exhorted for helping the babies in Africa while ignoring the children who need help in the city where they live. And by assistance, I mean help that would really make a difference and is not based on some out-of-touch billionaire’s idea of helping. That would mean ensuring that instead of losing the school counselors that so many families have relied on based on determinations made by our Broad-trained superintendent, that we gain counselors instead. And instead of having students losing library time which for many means tutoring time and time online because of a lack of funding for our public libraries, that they have more time to spend in a quiet place where they are safe and warm and can do their homework.

xxvii. The United States of Gates

Through the sheer power of his dollars, Gates has cast himself as the central figure in the deliberations of American public school policy even though the educational expertise he brings to the table is impressively empty. But then again, “When you’re rich they think you really know.”

Gates’s influence on American public education has become so thoroughly pervasive that Michael Petrilli, vice-president of the conservative Washington, D.C., think tank, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a recipient of nearly $3 million dollars in Gates Foundation grants said, “It is not unfair to say that the Gates Foundation’s agenda has become the country’s agenda in education.”

Tom Loveless, an education analyst at the Brookings Institution, believes that Gates’s influence is everywhere “in absolutely every branch of education, whether you’re talking about the federal, state or local levels of government, schools, the press, politicians or think tanks.”

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has a number of Gates Foundation people working for him in highly influential positions at the federal Department of Education and President Obama has openly shared his enthusiasm and support for the Gates campaign to change the culture of American schooling from local public control to authoritarian corporate control.

Gates’s educational largesse is motivated by a new kind of giving called venture philanthropy, which is strikingly different from the more-traditional 20th century philanthropy of foundations such as Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford, who viewed their giving through the lens of public obligation.

Venture philanthropists (VPs), on the other hand, view their grants through the lens of investments, employing business models to leverage their objectives. VPs have set their sights on turning public schools into private schools and have for-profit educational management organizations run them as corporate entities grabbing as much as they can of the roughly $600 billion the public spends each year on educating their children.

Understanding how useful propaganda is in weakening resistance to one’s efforts, Gates and his cronies, among them The Broad Foundation and the Walton Family Fund, have successfully, with the support of a generally unquestioning and irresponsible mass media, particularly NBC, MSNBC and Tom Friedman of the New York Times, carpet bombed the nation into believing all our public schools are failures. Such claims are beyond absurd! They are lies. If people believed their local public schools were indeed failures, the results from the latest Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll (September 2010) would reflect such feelings.

[...]

If Gates and his buddies hold even the slightest degree of sincerity in their pursuit to improve American public education they would cease their claptrap and surgically focus their efforts on mitigating the poverty suffered by 25 percent of America’s school children.

Hello, Thomas Friedman. Which invasion does he want to evangelise today? For much of his other pro-Microsoft propaganda see this post, which had us produce this:

Thomas Friedman, 1990

Watch what a Microsoft employee does in the Huff & Puff. Does Arianna and her husband the oil plutocrat know that they promote harm to US schools? Is this the notion of “third-world America” Arianna promotes in her new book? An America which needs to be run by Gates, whom she has dinners with?

Here is similar PR that’s tied to Microsoft’s annual Imagine Cup. It shows the difference between large sites and small sites, which hopefully get the word out to antagonise the PR. This is all fine, but many of the above items come from blogs (people, not corporations) while the Gates Foundation reaches the masses by ‘buying’ TV channels (shows like Oprah), newspapers, etc. We’ll write about that later. That’s a true danger to society — accentuated when people lose their voice to plutocrats and corporations.

“That’s a true danger to society — accentuated when people lose their voice to plutocrats and corporations.”As another new example of corporate press playing ball for Gates, watch Newsweek, which has ties with MSN. Gates’ school agenda/propaganda was there in a couple of articles towards the end of the year [1, 2] and there is so much more that we’ve missed over the past 2.5 months while not watching the Gates Foundation.

Finally, there are also more bribed-for ‘studies’ from the Gates Foundation — ones that promote its agenda by insulting schools and teachers, thereby justifying intervention by Gates. For example:

xxviii. New(ish) Stanford-AP-Gates survey asks white, Christian, rural and suburban non-parents about education. Huh?

A relatively new Stanford University- Associated Press survey is published in today’s Seattle Times in which the main spin presented by the AP is the statistic that 78 percent of respondents say they think bad public school teachers should be easier to fire.

(Not surprisingly, this survey was funded by the Gates Foundation, which is currently obsessed with public school teachers.)

xxix. Gates Foundation Teacher Study Reaches Halfway Point (and thank AP for its spineless ‘reporting’ of paid-for propaganda disguised as ‘studies’)

xxx. New lawmaker knows of student debt (more fake ‘studies’ that are agenda-setting)

To quote: ‘The Project on Student Debt, a nonprofit research group funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Ford Foundation, says it’s not uncommon for Americans, particularly those with professional degrees, to still be paying off their student loans into their 40s. “It’s taking longer and longer as people borrow more,” said Edie Irons, the project’s communications director. “We’re definitely troubled by it.”’

Remember why Melinda Gates is no longer in the Washington Post. All that lobbying can anger quite a few people because the Gates family tries to gain power at their expense.

xxxi. Canadians want jobs they don’t have to relocate for (Microsoft probably tries to influence Canadian lawmakers already, using another ‘study’)

The survey, done by Ipsos-Reid and commissioned by Microsoft Canada, showed that three-quarters of those asked believe employers limit their hiring options by not offering the choice of working off-site — possibly in a different city.

xxxii. Canadian firms too limiting on technology: Survey (like the above, but headlines still omit Microsoft)

xxxiii. Over half of 16s to 18s think they know more about tech (Microsoft-funded version/perception of reality, the headline says nothing about Microsoft’s role in it)

Going back to education:

xxxiv. Oops, I Did It Again!

Brad was brought on board to be the interim manager for research, evaluation and student assessment and was paid by the Broad Foundation. He was a History major in college and received an MBA from Indiana U but has no experience in education. But education, schmeducation as far as Eli Broad, Bill Gates or Wendy Kopp with Teach for America, Inc. are concerned.

xxxv. The Doublespeak of Ed Reform

The biggest players in ed reform — President Obama, Ed Secretary Arne Duncan, billionaires Bill Gates and Eli Broad: the “Superman” crowd, let’s call them — keep pushing privately run charter schools as the answer to all that ails our public schools (the central theme of ‘Superman’). One of the main winning traits of charters, they say, is their freedom to “innovate.” Indeed, free of public and school district oversight and mandates, privately run charter schools are granted the right to create their own curricula and empower their teachers to, allegedly, “innovate.” (They’ve also been allowed to exclude and expel students who don’t perform to their liking, a serious flaw of charters that even Secretary Duncan has acknowledged.)

[...]

Unfortunately this is just one of many conflicting messages coming from this latest breed of ed reformers. Those who are driving the national dialogue about the direction of our kids’ public education — from President Obama, Secretary Duncan, and lurking in the shadows with their open checkbooks, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the Waltons, the Fishers and the Dells — are saying one thing out of one side of their mouths and another thing out of the other.

xxxvi. “A liberal Republican can win in 2012″ — if s/he ditches ed reform

Obama’s teacher-bashing policies as pushed by Ed Secretary Arne Duncan and his Broad-trained and Gates-funded minions and cheered on by the odious L.A. Times have damaged Democratic Party-teacher relations beyond repair. Yet another segment of the Democratic Party’s base that’s been betrayed by this presidency. This one is more serious than just the mere loss of individual votes because unions have traditionally provided foot soldiers and funding for political campaigns.)

xxxvii. Hijacked! (Previously Titled “The Battle for Seattle”)

The moderators included Tom Vander Ark, Executive Director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Dan Katzir, Director of Program Development at the Broad Foundation along with Wendy Kopp, Founder and President of Teach for America and an assortment of representatives from KIPP and Aspire charter schools.

[...]

In 2005, according to a Seattle school district publication titled An Overview of Accomplishments, Seattle Public Schools received an $800,000 Gates Foundation Grant to fund the strategic implementation team, work on the first round of school closures, something that Manhas had not been “successful” at doing, and “implement additional recommendations from the Community Advisory Committee on Investing in Educational Excellence”.

It was also stated in the handout that “A grant-funded Broad Foundation resident is working on strengthening strategic planning capacity in the district”.

Gates was also busy in 2005 on another front, electing Michael DeBell, the now president of the Seattle School Board, to his first term as school board director. Gates, along with nine board directors for the Alliance for Education, including Hanauer, Don Nielsen, Anne Farrell, Peter Maier, who himself is now a school board member, and John Warner, a retired Boeing executive, funded the campaign to elect DeBell and two other candidates through a PAC named Strong Seattle Schools. According to an article in the Seattle Times, a PAC had not been formed “in recent memory” to support the election of a school board director.

As you will see in the next installment, The Alliance for Education will figure prominently in this race to “education reform” as dictated by Eli Broad and Bill Gates.

[...]

When a district is run by Broad and Gates, no one outside their realm of associates has a voice in the decision-making process. You will not have a voice in the vision and goals of the schools in your communities. You will not have any say in the nature of individual schools, the curriculum or the caliber of teachers, principals or superintendents who are a part of those schools. You will have no control over how your children are taught and who teaches them. Capiche?

Stay tuned for what might be the last installment in this series. Looking at my notes though, I see at least two more posts on the horizon. A lot has gone on in the last few years that needs to be described.

xxxviii. Gates Foundation commissions Ghanaian artist – El Anatsui work will be centrepiece of new campus in Seattle (an artwork ‘gift’ is assured to inspire a lot of studying, right?)

MIAMI. Microsoft’s Bill Gates and his wife Melinda have commissioned a major new work by African artist El Anatsui to be the centrepiece of their foundation’s new campus, due to open in spring 2011.

xxxix. Bill Gates Is At It Again In Seattle (see previous item and put those two together)

For anyone out there who still doesn’t believe that Bill Gates is not pulling the strings in Seattle to get his way with charter schools, check out his latest donations.

Amount: $40,000 given to the League of Education Voters “to support a series of education-related speakers in Seattle”.

And who were those speakers? Kevin Johnson who spoke about how wonderful charter schools are, Richard Barth with KIPP Schools, a charter franchise, Steve Barr, founder of Green Dot Charter Schools and of course, Adam Porsch from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation who moderated the discussion. Was that rigged or what?

Amount: $105,000 given to the League of Education Voters in October, 2010 “to support raising awareness of educational attainment issues in King County”.

Like…Teach for America and charter schools.

Check out their blog. It is an advertisement for all things ed reform and all things that Bill Gates thinks is best for the rest of us.

And now for the icing on the cake.
Amount: $235,000 given to Center for Strengthening the Teaching Profession in October, 2010 “to develop a network of teachers in Seattle Public Schools who are informed about and actively supportive of district education reform”.
…like Teach for America, good luck with that, and charter schools that do not hire unionized teachers.
So now he is trying to buy the teachers on something that for them is self-destructive, de-professionalizing the field of teaching.

Of course now the League of Education Voters (LEV) is touting Teach for America but I’ll get back to that in another post. The irony of this is that part of the “community engagement” that Teach for America did was to meet with the League of Education Voters! Teach for America, by the way, received $1,000,000 from the Gates Foundation in 2009. So much for “community engagement” that’s required.

[...]

For now, just know that Bill Gates is trying to buy us. He wants charter schools in our state, he wants to pull the strings and control how our children are educated. It doesn’t matter if we agree with his vision or not, he doesn’t care. He is bound and determined to get his way and will pay any price to get it.

xxxx. To all of you TFAer’s, Don Nielson’s, Broadies and Gates’ backers and Wannabes

And one more from Gates. Videotaping teachers while they work. 1984 anyone?

xxxxi. Teacher Ratings Get New Look, Pushed by a Rich Watcher

Now Bill Gates, who in recent years has turned his attention and considerable fortune to improving American education, is investing $335 million through his foundation to overhaul the personnel departments of several big school systems. A big chunk of that money is financing research by dozens of social scientists and thousands of teachers to develop a better system for evaluating classroom instruction.

[...]

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, which has several affiliates participating in the research, also expressed reservations. “Videotaped observations have their role but shouldn’t be used to substitute for in-person observations to evaluate teachers,” Ms. Weingarten said. “It would be hard to justify ratings by outsiders watching videotapes at a remote location who never visited the classroom and couldn’t see for themselves a teacher’s interaction and relationship with students.”

xxxxii. The Battle for Seattle

xxxxiii. The Battle for Seattle: Part One

That retreat, as well as others, had been funded by the Alliance for Education which receives the majority of its’ funding from the Broad and Gates’ Foundations. See The Lines of Influence in Education Reform.

[...]

Both the Alliance for Education and the Seattle Foundation receive most of their funding from the Gates’ and Broad Foundations and the Alliance for Education was instrumental in ensuring the election of our now school board president, Michael DeBell.

xxxxiiv.Plummeting teacher morale in Seattle’s Public Schools — a serious issue (thank you, Mr. Gates, for making teachers feel like incompetent unwanted idiots)

Please take a look at this article in today’s New York Times in which Bill Gates speaks out against advanced degrees for teachers and against smaller class sizes.

Quite frankly, this is nuts. Research shows that children most definitely do benefit from more one-on-one teacher time, and professional development for teachers is indeed valuable.

Gates has zero expertise in education, yet he is a driving force behind ed reform. He supports the deprofessionalization of the teaching profession, and along the way, is aiding and abetting the current, ugly national trend of teacher-bashing. (Local observers fully expect his foundation, or perhaps the Seattle Foundation with funding from Gates, to pay the TFA annual fees, thus enabling an agenda item Gates supports but which most Seattle Public Schools parents don’t even know about.)

Finally, here is a “Testimony Regarding Teach for America”. Teachers don’t want it, do you?

Our message to heroic US-based teachers who fight back: there is nothing wrong with you, just with the surrounding environment which is dominated by the wealthy, greedy few. The same ploy used to belittle you was previously used by Gates to bemoan US programmers, in order to raise quotas for visas of foreign workers, thus improving the bottom line of corporations such as Microsoft. Gates is not a pedagogue, he is not even a programmer by trade (he is a law school dropout with exceptionally affluent parents). These pretexts are used by corporations in many walks of life to turn public services into private franchises. So please fight back by informing people, for the betterment of all nations that sooner or later fall prey to the same hooligans (who use ‘free’ trade agreements and other internationalised instruments of expansion). Teachers help raise tomorrow’s adults while today’s adults are too busy at work, battling for survival as wages stagnate and work hours expand. Don’t allow Gates and his buddies to turn teachers into his taxpayers-funded docile PR agents. Teachers are fantastic at informing people and we are grateful to bloggers from SeattlEducation2010, whose site is underrated and criminally under-subscribed. █
____
^* As a fun exercise, sometimes I like to pick up the daily newspaper, raise it in front of people, then deconstruct its components (cover page, centrefold, etc.) and explain how the classic structure works and how each is designed by the editor/s to tell people how to feel and think, with headlines that are written or modified by the chief editor to shape the overall message so as to evoke panic, fear, hatred, jealousy, artificial craves etc. (usually a combination of these) whilst also providing something to appeal to the less sophisticated readers (e.g. references to celebrities and the sport section at the side parts). People find this exercise entertaining because they rarely or never thought about it that way, but that’s just how it works. Advertisers too are factored in by the publishers who manage the budgeting.

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Education Scandal Leaves Melinda Gates Out of the Washington Post

Posted in Bill Gates at 5:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Copyright by World Economic Forum, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Summary: The board of the Washington Post drops Melinda Gates “shortly after the release of a highly critical report, funded partly by her foundation, which likened for-profit colleges to subprime-mortgage lenders, targeting low-income and traditionally underrepresented students.”

TECHRIGHTS still has a huge backlog of posts (drafts), which need editing, fact-checking, and additional research/references before they can be reliably published. Many are about Gates’ abuses. Any help that readers can offer will speed things up and ensure we can deliver more output. We recently got a lot of help with translations and with the Wiki.

One story we have not had the time to cover in a while is about Melinda Gates. Just before we publish a megapost about Gates in education we must deliver this post on which it is dependent.

Some weeks ago the Washington Post published the article “How billionaire donors harm public education”. The author had previously criticised Gates’ scheme (for schools deform) in this section of the paper and we commend her for it. To quote some of the latest:

Today the foundation set up by billionaires Eli and Edythe Broad is giving away $2 million to urban school districts that have pursued education reform that they like. On Friday a Florida teacher is running 50 miles to raise money so that he and his fellow teachers don’t have to spend their own money to buy paper and pencils, binders (1- and 2-inch), spiral notebooks, composition books and printer ink.

Together the two events show the perverted way schools are funded in 2010.

Very wealthy people are donating big private money to their own pet projects: charter schools, charter school management companies, teacher assessment systems. (The latest example is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation to the Newark public schools, given with the provision that Zuckerberg, apparently an education reform expert, play a big role in determining success.)

What this means is that these philanthropists — and not local communities — are determining the course of the country’s school reform efforts and which education research projects get funded. As Buffalo Public Schools Superintendent James A. Williams said in an interview: “They should come out and tell the truth. If they want to privatize public education, they should say so.”

[...]

Coincidentally, it is the same amount of money that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave away earlier this year to a company simply to market the education film “Waiting for Superman,” which portrays a distorted idea of the root causes of the problems facing urban school districts as well as the solutions. [Disclosure: Melinda French Gates is a member of the Board of Directors of The Washington Post Co.]

Gates Keepers linked to this article and said the author was very brave for voicing such opinions in the Washington Post, which mostly treats the Gates family like Gods by giving PR and constant worship (it still does that).

It was just shortly afterwards that it was revealed that Melinda is not in the Washington Post. Well, not anymore anyway. But why? It doesn’t really say, but at least one report claims that she resigned and was not fired [1, 2, 3, 4]. She “filed papers from the board” and left “the Board of The Washington Post Company” after 6 years there. We got very curious. What is it that motivated her to resign? Was it encouraged by the Washington Post Company? Did they have a fight? Well, the corporate-backed Washington Post (yes, different large companies are in the board) had no reason given/specified initially, so apparently it had to ‘leak’. Greenberg asked, “Was Melinda Gates’ WaPo Resignation a Coincidence?”

On November 12, the Washington Post announced that Melinda Gates had resigned as a director of the Washington Post, which gets the lion’s share of its operating income from Kaplan University, a for-profit university.

There was no formal explanation.

Then on November 23: The Education Trust, which is partially funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, issued a report headlined, “Subprime Opportunity: The Unfulfilled Promise of For-Profit Colleges and Universities.”

Sounding somewhat similar to earlier criticism by hedge fund manager Steve Eisman, the report takes aim at the for-profit education industry.

The obvious question: Was there a link between Gates’ departure from the Washington Post board and the report? In response to my question, the Washington Post said, “No.”

A little later on it turned out that she was abusing her position to push her agenda:

Melinda French Gates, philanthropist and wife of Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates, has resigned from The Washington Post Co.’s board of directors.

Her resignation comes shortly after the release of a highly critical report, funded partly by her foundation, which likened for-profit colleges to subprime-mortgage lenders, targeting low-income and traditionally underrepresented students. The Washington Post Co. gets more than half of its revenues from its for-profit higher-education unit, Kaplan.

Neither Gates nor The Washington Post gave a reason for her departure.

Gates, who runs the multibillion-dollar Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with her husband, joined The Washington Post Co.’s board in 2004.

Here is what Gates Keepers wrote:

The plot thickens around Melinda leaving her board position at the Washington Post. “former Kaplan employees allege they are instructed to invoke the name of its parent company, The Washington Post, as well as the names of board members such as Gates, to persuade students to take classes at the company.”

Now she can write op eds for the WaPo without being accused of using her influence there to get them published.

Just because Melinda is out does not mean that the Washington Post will cease acting like a mouthpiece of the Gates Foundation. Here is the head of the Gates Foundation in the very same paper around the same time. They advertise themselves and Gates Keepers labels this: “Jeff Raikes interviewed by the Gates Foundation newspaper of record”

Jeff Raikes was interviewed by the Gates Foundation newspaper of record last month days before Melina resigned from the board. He gives little away.

Some time later we are going to explain why Melinda and her husband’s tax-exempt bank account are behind much bigger scandals. At least she is no longer in the Washington Post. There are similar stories almost just like this, e.g. where the Gates Foundation was forced to withdraw its support of tobacco.

Always assume nothing and look up the facts, which PR is by definition intended to hide or to blur. █

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The Relationship Between Microsoft and Twitter (Possibly Takeover) Keeps Identi.ca Strong

Posted in Microsoft at 3:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Rumours of a Microsoft acquisition of Twitter are the result of meeting/s between their respective CEOs; Microsoft already pays Twitter for promotion

FOR THOSE who do not know this yet, Twitter monetises the platform with a(n anti-)feature called “Promoted”. In simple terms, it means that companies/people/accounts can pay Twitter to have their output ‘promoted’ in more pages, which violates the natural synthesis of the site/platform.

Microsoft is of course one of those companies which pay Twitter to have its account promoted. Several of us Free software enthusiasts have reported in recent weeks that Microsoft is being ‘promoted’ to us. It is not pleasant, especially if this is something which Microsoft pays Twitter to do and Twitter also accepts. It disregards the users. And speaking of Twitter, Microsoft has a real crisis in the platform’s natural content. “Research In Motion Beats out Microsoft on Twitter” says this report.

Top 10 Companies on Twitter for 2010:

1. Apple
2. Google
3. Twitter
4. Uniqlo
5. Research In Motion
6. Microsoft
7. Facebook
8. Nintendo
9. Sony
10. BBC

As we explained before, Microsoft had begun AstroTurfing in Twitter. To recap, here are some posts on the subject:

• Microsoft Twitter Bots, FTC Blowback, and Paid-for Vista 7 Glorification
• Are Microsoft Employees (Technical Evangelists) Using Spammers in Twitter?
• More Microsoft AstroTurfing (aka ‘Technical Evangelism’) in Twitter
• User “Microsoft Incentives” Wants to be Your Friend, Too
• Microsoft’s Twitter AstroTurf Continues
• Who is Pumping MSFT and Pimping Microsoft in Twitter?
• Does Microsoft Still Create Twitter Accounts for Guerilla Marketing?
• Microsoft’s AstroTurfing, Twitter, Waggener Edstrom, and Jonathan Zuck
• Microsoft Offers Gentle Bribes to People Who Mention Vista 7 in Twitter
• Microsoft Was “Twitter’s First-ever Association with a Marketer”
• GE, Microsoft, Comcast and (Microsoft AstroTurf at) Twitter: Pact of Lies
• Microsoft Hires Federated Media for Twitter AstroTurfing
• Microsoft Announces More SPAM and Bribery Tactics
• Microsoft Employees Push Vista Phone 7 [sic] in Twitter, Without Disclosure

Users of Twitter may wish to watch out because Microsoft and Twitter CEOs are allegedly having breakfast: “Microsoft and Twitter CEOs, Steve Ballmer and Dick Costolo are said to have been seen taking breakfast together and this sparked rumors that a possible takeover of Twitter by Microsoft or another deal would be imminent. There are no clues about the nature of that discussion, but both companies have refused to comment, hinting to business and not personal discussion. It is also unknown how frequently the two CEOs have met.”

This is not some isolated rumour. In the previous post we showed how Microsoft tried to buy Facebook and new articles about the possibility that Microsoft would like to buy Twitter are aplenty [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. It was the same when Adobe’s CEO met Ballmer. People hastily jumped to the conclusion that takeover was negotiated (or at least a partnership) but in this case, an acquisition is not likely because Twitter previously expressed desire to be dissociated from Microsoft and its bad behaviour (in a leaked document/E-mail we covered here). Microsoft’s Twitter Astroturf will probably be sufficient for now. That, dear readers, is why at the very least as a safety net we recommend opening and using an Identi.ca account. More and more of us in Techrights and TechBytes are opening accounts there and mashing them up with IRC (the best of both worlds). Identi.ca is not dominated by companies and celebrities; in Identi.ca, ‘celebrities’ are users like Tim Berners-Lee and Free software is the main theme. █

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Microsoft Rebrands and Leans on Facebook While Goldman Sachs Enters the Scene

Posted in Google, Microsoft, Office Suites, Open XML, OpenDocument at 3:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Microsoft’s #1 cash cow still suffers on/from the Web, so Microsoft rebrands and also uses help from Facebook, which it partly owns

“Microsoft [is] trademarking ‘Be What’s Next’ slogan,” which comes as no surprise as the company craves an image makeover (there is a new Web site coming). A lot of people associate Microsoft with being “uncool” and the monopolist is aware of this. Even BPOS (which has the acronym “POS” in it) may be in the process of phase-out following many downtimes and failures that we covered here last year. “Microsoft Office 365″ is a new identity Microsoft introduces as part of a rename that’s necessary for competing with Google in online office suites. As the previous post showed, Microsoft uses many other methods against Google. It’s just abusive. Boys will be boys and Microsoft will be… well, Microsoft.

“Microsoft recently lost its Office president (he became the CEO of Nokia) and its ‘Web’ president left around the same time.”Even Goldman Sachs recognises Microsoft's imminent demise and the slow decline of cash cows is indicative of it. This whole B-POS business is not something which Microsoft can monetise like it’s used to and just slapping a different label on it (insinuating a 365-day uptime despite the many downtimes B-POS has had) is a case of evading bad reputation, not innovating anything. Microsoft is playing catch-up here, even in the office suites space. Who would have thought this could happen by transitioning from the operating system to the server room (SaaS) for workloads. Microsoft recently lost its Office president (he became the CEO of Nokia) and its ‘Web’ president left around the same time. Yes, that would be Ozzie, who expressed deep concerns after he had left and then started blogging atop GNU/Linux with Free software (WordPress).

Let’s put this more briefly again: for Microsoft to rebrand Office “Office 365″ amid shifts to the Web (Fog Computing or SaaS) is to imply uptime that cannot really be delivered using Windows and the rest of Microsoft’s underlying stack (ask Microsoft’s poster child the LSE about this stack). This is not going to work and the exodus of presidents indicates that they too are giving up. Before anyone yells, “but hey! There’s still Microsoft Office 2010,” well… read this new report which says that “Microsoft Office 2010 Migrations [Are] Delayed”:

Concerns around the complexity of migrating to the new productivity software in Microsoft Office 2010 will delay broad deployment until 2011, according to a global survey of 953 IT professionals conducted by market research firm Dimensional Research and sponsored by Dell’s Kace division.

Microsoft’s booster Preston Gralla says that he finds Microsoft Office 365 beta “occasionally frustrating” [1, 2] and these rants are being noticed. Yet again we see Microsoft’s biggest cheerleaders ranting about Microsoft’s offerings.

Earlier this year we showed that the malicious site Facebook (partly owned by Microsoft) came to Microsoft Office’s rescue, promoting OOXML in the process. “Microsoft May Be Using Facebook as a Trojan Horse for Office” says one new headline:

The answer may have more to do with Microsoft’s priorities than Facebook’s. Outside of its Facebook collaboration, Microsoft has been experimenting with Docs.com, which has been a kind of proving grounds for its cloud-based Office suite, Office365. Docs.com is now piloting its own Facebook integration, but only with Facebook Groups. The idea is that a group of friends can collaborate upon a single cloud-based document, just as on Google Docs. (The Docs.com/Facebook Groups collaboration is a separate but parallel project to the Facebook Messages/Office365 support. Confusing, yes.)

Also see the very recent reports titled “Microsoft enhances Facebook partnership”; “Facebook opens up your data to Microsoft”; “Microsoft infuses Facebook data in Bing search”; “Docs.com Now Supports Facebook Groups”; Microsoft bolsters online document-sharing for Facebook” and “Microsoft’s Docs Now Supports Facebook Groups”.

“Facebook already shares its data with Microsoft.”Watch out as Facebook is not much different from Microsoft. A Microsoft executive recently confirmed that Microsoft tried to buy Facebook for $15 billion and some people still think that Microsoft should buy Facebook, which in some sense means acquiring many profiles of very many people. It would essentially make Microsoft more of a Big Brother than it already is. In reality, Microsoft doesn’t need to buy companies; it only needs to tilt them into Microsoft’s agenda (e.g. .NET, OOXML); see Yahoo!/Novell for recent examples. Older examples include Corel. Facebook already shares its data with Microsoft.

Over at Forbes, Microsoft’s agenda has been promoted quite a lot recently. One post said that “Facebook And Bing Threaten To Throttle Google’s Growth” and Quentin Hardy — a shameless Microsoft booster and Wikileaks basher on the face of it — promotes Bong [sic], advances/welcomes Microsoft’s case against Google, and bashes Chrome OS. It’s a consistent Microsoft booster on the face of it, but Forbes blogs are a fairly new addition, so the sample size is too small for judgment at this stage.

For those who argue there is legitimacy in Microsoft’s case for Google antitrust, bear in mind that “Microsoft has been funding anti-Google group since 2007″ while Google responds by arguing exactly that. IBM too says that Microsoft's “satellite proxies” are the cause of antitrust actions (yes, IBM used those exact words). Mind the sensationalism in “Google’s monopolisation of the internet” and the article posted by Google Watch in a couple of eWEEK sites (US and Europe):

Europe’s Antitrust Hunt of Google Smells Like Microsoft

Search engine experts are exasperated by the European Commission’s pending witchhunt of Google for alleged anticompetitive behavior.

As Microsoft might put it, why compete when one can cheat and use lawyers instead? Appalling.

“It’s very bad when people’s social platform is subjected to censorship by unknown people. It limits people thoughts and expressions among peers (or ‘friends’).”Back we go to Facebook, which is said to have just “remove[d] Gmail from “Friend Find” List”. That’s quite telling, isn’t it? Facebook is picking sides. It’s not as though Gmail can be ignored. Many people use it. Is Facebook engaging in a form of censorship to please its owner (in part), Microsoft? More and more people also use Google’s Web browser, which capitalises on the fact that Microsoft is asleep at the wheel and too incompetent to keep up (it insists on developing a rendering engine alone, the proprietary way).

Why is Facebook censoring Google? Some sites say that Facebook plays hard to get in order to rub Microsoft and Google off against each other and thus retrieve the best deal available on the table. There is this recent article titled “Should Amazon Censor? Should Apple? Facebook? Microsoft?”

Everybody censors these days, as it seems to have become worryingly fashionable. All large companies do this. Then again, Facebook censorship is a standard and frequent practice (Apple censorship, new Microsoft censorship, and Amazon censorship aside). It’s very bad when people’s social platform is subjected to censorship by unknown people. It limits people thoughts and expressions among peers (or ‘friends’). The whole idea behind Facebook is revolting and we wrote many posts to warn about the dangers.

For those who have not heard yet, the deeply corrupt and Bill Gates-funded Goldman Sachs comes under US probe after investment in Facebook. Here is an article that provides background:

Far from turning up the heat for Facebook to go public, Goldman Sachs’ $450 million investment, along with Digital Sky’s $50 million more, may actually delay the social-networking giant’s IPO, says David Kirkpatrick.

Francine McKenna from Forbes says that “Goldman Sachs Wants You To Invest In Facebook” (headline is almost instructive):

Facebook wants the public’s money – and their trust – with none of the disclosure and none of the regulatory scrutiny of a public company. Goldman Sachs strategy to raise $1.5 billion for Facebook from “sophisticated investors” and invest another $450 million of their own money is an example of wanton disregard for accountability to the securities markets.

P2PNet’s headline is “Facebook, Goldman, Sucks”:

Fa$ebook has “raised $500m from Goldman Sachs and Digital Sky Technologies, the Russian investment firm, in a deal that values the social networking site at $50bn, according to people familiar with the deal”, said p2pnet in the January 3 headline roundup, quoting the Financial Times.

p2pnet hasn’t raised a dime but it, too, is worth $50 billion, according to me. And my valuation has as much validity as that of the Goldman Sachs / Digital Sky Technologies Facebook.

If you’re Goldman Sachs, come up with a figure – any figure — and it’s quoted just as though it’s really real.

Fortune/CNN has published “Five reasons why I’m not buying Facebook” and The New York Times asks, “Why Are Taxpayers Subsidizing Facebook, and the Next Bubble?”

Remember that Goldman Sachs is now a bank-holding company – a status it received in September 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, in order to avoid collapse (see Andrew Ross Sorkin’s blow-by-blow account in “Too Big to Fail” for the details.)

This means that it has essentially unfettered access to the Federal Reserve’s discount window – that is, it can borrow against all kinds of assets in its portfolio, effectively ensuring it has government-provided liquidity at any time.

Any financial institution with such access to such government support is likely to take on excessive risk – this is the heart of what is commonly referred to as the problem of “moral hazard.” If you are fully insured against adverse events, you will be less careful.

Goldman Sachs is undoubtedly too big to fail – in the sense that if it were on the brink of failure now or in the near future, it would receive extraordinary government support and its creditors (at the very least) would be fully protected.

Techrights covers several companies that disregard people and Facebook increasingly becomes one of these. It’s not because of its scale but because of its practices and their rather far-reaching effects. █

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Microsoft Proxy Entities Continue to Harass Google, Spread Misinformation While Microsoft Distorts the Market

Posted in Google, Microsoft, Search at 1:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Google is still under pressure from Microsoft’s firing line of existing and former employees, as well as existing business partners

MICROSOFT cannot compete anymore. To be fair, it never could compete, not fairly at least, but this time it is ever more evident. In Japan, for example, Microsoft filed a formal complaint against Google, but it was all in vain, obviously.

“Japan’s FTC Approves Yahoo Japan/Google Search Partnership, Despite Microsoft’s Objections” says one headline that we found (there are more [1, 2], along with suspicious case of possible entryism), so Microsoft’s attempts to interfere with a rare Google-Yahoo! tie — having done this with hired AstroTurfers a couple of years ago — were just a waste of valuable time.

ficial….! Yahoo Japan (TYO:4689 | ETR:YOJ) has received clearance from Japan’s FTC to use Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) search technology. Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) had protested the move to the Fair Trade Commission, but the ruling was made public yesterday. Yahoo is just a minority shareholder and could not block the move, despite its own competitive deal with Bing in the U.S.

Microsoft’s major losses in this area are still being noted by the press. The company loses around $3 billion per year on its Web efforts alone. It must run after Google on the Web because Google runs after Microsoft in the operating systems and office suites space. Microsoft’s plan is basically — to use Steve Ballmer’s words as quoted from memory and published in the Sydney Morning Herald — to “f—ing bury that guy [Google's CEO], I have done it before, and I will do it again. I’m going to f—ing kill Google.”

Microsoft uses a variety of other companies to incite regulators against Google. As TechDirt puts it, “Expedia Against ‘Search Discrimination’… Unless It Gets To Do The Discriminating”. To quote further: “That’s because Expedia is a leading member of a lobbying group called FairSearch, which was set up mainly to protest Google’s planned acquisition of ITA.”

For those who don’t know, Expedia is derived from Microsoft. To quote an old article (from 1999), “Microsoft Spins Off Expedia With IPO” (headline) and “Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) Corp. is busy reorganizing itself in a major way without the government’s intervention.”

Why can’t Microsoft compete fairly? It’s far from the only alleged complaint by proxy. Jeff Atwood, who used to work at Microsoft and now runs a popular blog, is trying to give Google antitrust trouble too on the face of it.

“Why can’t Microsoft compete fairly? It’s far from the only alleged complaint by proxy.”The former leadership of Yahoo! is mostly gone as Microsoft’s hijack of Yahoo continues to deepen and many projects die as a result. The revamp is overdue, it’s hard to believe it will fix Yahoo, and there are more layoffs as “Yahoo Prepares To Cut Up To 5% Of Work Force, Say Sources” (more in [1, 2, 3]). What an utter failure of ‘free’ markets if one company can shatter its competitor in this nefarious way, leading to a sort of advertising/search cartel at competition’s expense [1, 2, 3], which benefits nobody but Microsoft. Ask too is collapsing and “Former Yahooligan Fiorentini joins Microsoft Australia” says one report among several from Australia [1, 2]. “Ex-Yahoo exec Ku joins Microsoft” says the Microsoft booster from Seattle, so it becoming like the same company with high-level staff swaps, which carry on at a steady pace. It sure seems like foul play.

Microsoft’s business partner comScore [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10] meanwhile spreads the dubious claim that “Microsoft’s Bing [is] growing faster than Google” (undisclosed conflict of interest here) and it is widely reported without scepticism [1, 2], despite comScore at one point admitting that its numbers are bunk. This same firm which has clients whose situation wrt the competition it charts without disclosure is also quoted on other meters [1, 2, 3], yet almost nobody — if anyone at all — bothers to look critically at the science behind those numbers. What ever happened to investigative journalism? That’s why people increasingly turn to outlets like Wikileaks, which prides itself in what it calls “scientific journalism” (citing original, raw sources). █

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Now It’s Official: Banshee Included in Ubuntu by Default

Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Patents, Ubuntu at 12:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Mono trap from Novell entrenched deep inside a ubiquitously-used distribution of GNU/Linux

OMG!UBUNTU! not only promoted Banshee but it also jumped the gun when it claimed that the program had been added to the next Ubuntu. Well, only now is it official:

he day we’ve all be waiting for has finally arrived. After much hard work by the Banshee Project and Ubuntu, Banshee has finally been made the default music player in Natty.

As I am informed currently the switch will hit the next daily image build.

Canonical is putting a Microsoft/Novell Trojan inside everyone’s default install. Since lawsuits can ensue, all we can say is, how utterly irresponsible. Banshee-Ubuntu posts go a long way back, e.g.:

• Banshee (MCP-Excluded Mono Trap) is Not Yet in Next Ubuntu, There is Still Time to Stop It
• Canonical Probably to Put in Next Ubuntu GNU/Linux Mono Parts Which Microsoft Disallows Free of Lawsuits/Charge
• Ubuntu Users Plead to Keep Novell’s Banshee Out (and Other Miscellaneous Mono News)
• Microsoft-funded Media Player to Become Ubuntu’s Default?
• Mono Warning: Fresh Attempts to Inject Banshee Into Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10
• Novell/Microsoft Mono Poison (Banshee) Put in Ubuntu 10.10 NBE by Default
• Patent Threat Banshee Gets Hooks Into Ubuntu 10.10
• Banshee is Novell, Mono, and ‘Forbidden’ Microsoft Software Patents
• OpenSUSE 11.3 Users Sensitive to Microsoft Lawsuit Due to Banshee Bundling
• Fedora 13 Replaces F-Spot (Mono) With Shotwell (Vala), MeeGo Still Mono Encumbered
• What Alfresco and Android Can Teach About Ubuntu
• Mono Advocacy is Deluded, Avoids the Facts and Personally Attacks Critics Instead
• Bad Decision Made at Canonical Regarding Media Player
• Mono Lie of the Week: AttachMSFT’s Banshee is Safe
• .NET is Microsoft’s Patent Poison Pill Inside Any GNU/Linux Distribution With Mono

This subject was discussed with Jono Bacon (Ubuntu community manager) last night. █

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