EditorsAbout the SiteComes vs. MicrosoftUsing This Web SiteSite ArchivesCredibility IndexOOXMLOpenDocumentPatentsNovellNews DigestSite NewsRSS

08.28.11

Preloading Microsoft Linux

Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Novell at 7:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Containers

Summary: SUSE wants to put its Microsoft-backed distro on people’s computers

ONE SUSE blogger (there are not many left except Attachmate/SUSE staff and people who are paid to work on SUSE through GSoC) speaks of a “preload department at SuSE,” stating that the network Image Installer he works on is “also capable of installing arbitrary openSUSE / Fedora / Ubuntu versions…”

It is probably worth emphasising yet again that SUSE is funded by Microsoft and it pays Microsoft for GNU/Linux. If SUSE gets preloaded on a machine, that’s a victory for Microsoft. Here at Techrights we officially boycott SUSE following its patent deal with Microsoft. SUSE is also a subsidiary of a Microsoft partner.

Having Trashed Novell, Paul Singer Moves on to Brocade

Posted in Finance, Novell at 6:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: The ruthless man behind Elliott Management Corp. is reportedly agitating Brocade

CORPORATE RAIDERS are a parasite of society and they have a very negative impact on everything around them. Nobody wants them except those who use them to destroy a competitor, such as Yahoo! or even Novell. In prior years we wrote many posts about the man who put Novell on sale against Novell's will. His name is Paul Singer, but he hides behind a firm called “Elliot”.

According to several news reports, Mr. Singer is still on his warpath of destruction (for profit). “Elliott Gains Opening to Press for Change With Brocade Stake” says one headline and in all the mentioned article Novell is mentioned too, including this one, stating:

Elliott Management Corp., the investor that pushed Novell Inc. to sell itself last year, amassed an 8.5 percent stake in Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (BRCD), gaining an opening it could use to agitate for change.

The man who should be under investigation for his unethical operations from tax havens, but he is celebrated as a rich man and he is still out for new prey. This is a sad testament that helps show why the bubble economy has had no barriers. For more context see:

  1. Novell May be Going Private, Hedge Fund Has Cash
  2. Analyst Expects Microsoft Bid to Buy Novell
  3. Ron Hovsepian Receives Another Large Lump of Cash as Novell Sale Looms
  4. GNU/Linux-Savvy Writers View Elliot Associates as Bad Neighbourhood
  5. Firm Behind Novell Bid Has Shady Past, Could be Tied to Microsoft (Paul E. Singer’s ‘Vulture Fund’)
  6. Simon Phipps: “Seems Even With Microsoft’s Support Novell Couldn’t Cut It”
  7. Vulture Fund Still the Only Bidder for Novell

Whether it’s Carl Icahn or Paul Singer, the US citizenry needs to realise that this type of activities is far more dangerous/costly than foreign and domestic terrorism. This is akin to some kind of “financial terrorism”, but those who commit those acts are never punished. The corporate press usually glorifies these people.

Cablegate Reveals US Pressure for EU Patent (Unitary Patent) Alongside ACTA, More Pro-Patents Lobbyists Observed

Posted in America, Europe, Patents at 6:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Bradley Manning
Bradley Manning, by Daniel Joseph Barnhart Clark

Summary: US politicians who are funded by taxpayers are seen pushing the agenda of big corporations into Europe, elevating the risk of software patents there

WIKILEAKS has been releasing many Cablegate leaks over the past week. One that caught our attention which also relates to Techrights mentions the EU patent mess (going under many names that keep changing to confuse critics) just before it talks about ACTA. To quote this item from a year and a half ago:

 

EU Patent breakthrough 
-------- ------- ----- 
¶2.  (U)  On December 4 the EU Competitiveness Council battled toward 
a so-called 'general approach' on a future patent system, together 
with an agreement on the basis of a draft regulation for European 
Union patents.  The issue has bogged down the European Commission 
and the Council for over 40 years.  Today, the cost of getting an 
EU-wide patent is eleven times that of getting the same protection 
in the U.S.  The Council conclusions also contain the main elements 
of a single European Patent Court that will try cases on both the EU 
patent and existing European patents.  In today's system, patent 
processes for one and the same invention must be conducted 
separately in each Member State.  The establishment of a single 
court could mean annual savings of up to USD 42 billion for European 
companies. 
 
¶3.  (U)  Leading the objections to the Swedish EU Presidency's 
proposal for a general approach was Denmark.  The Danes, though, 
finally withdrew their legalistic objections after it became clear 
that changes to the Swedish proposal would not be acceptable.  The 
Swedish 'general approach' on the EU patent regulation means a real 
breakthrough.  The all important issue of translation will now be 
left for agreement at a "later" date. 
 
¶4.  (U) The agreement paves the way for further discussion, under 
Spanish and other Presidencies, towards a future patent system. 
This would be based on two main pillars.  Firstly, a unified patent 
litigation system with exclusive jurisdiction for civil litigation 
related to patent infringements and validity of EU and European 
patents.  There would be a court of first instance comprised of a 
central division as well as local and regional divisions (in member 
states).  There would also be a court of appeal. 
 
¶5.  (U) Comment.  This is a major accomplishment of the Swedish 
Presidency.  It was the top EU Presidency priority of Trade Minister 
Bjorling.   The issue has been blocked for over 40 years.  Sweden 
made a serious effort to break the deadlock during its EU Presidency 
in 2001.  Although the tricky language question remains, it is 
likely that it will be possible to solve that piece separately. 
This breakthrough on a European patent is a welcome addition to the 
Swedish list of accomplishments during the Presidency, which 
includes the Lisbon treat...

Let’s remember that some pro-patents people tried to daemonise Richard Stallman for warning about this. We named some German patent lawyers who did this; they really want software patents (more so than any other EU-based lawyers we have seen so far) and among them there is also a soccer lobbyist pretending to be a patents expert and occasional Mono apologist (Mono is mostly history based on the news as the most exposure it receives is from blogs). He is pretending to be the opposition while patent lawyers pretend to be the voice of German people. Watch this pro-software patents lobbyist being called “anti-software patents campaigner” in this article which says: “They are not the only ones: Apple’s Hague-based action has also spurred some interesting questions in the patent community about the role of IP in competitive products. In a blog posting, prominent EU anti-software patents campaigner Florian Mueller suggested that the patents cited in Apple’s Hague complaint should not have been granted in the first place.”

Microsoft also hired front groups to pretend to represent small business. Writers who describe this lobbyist as “anti-software patents campaigner” are either dishonest or gullible and they ought to be corrected.

Links 27/8/2011: Free Software in India, a Lot of Cablegate Releases

Posted in News Roundup at 5:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • A Brief History of My Life on Linux: Part II

      Two distributions I found myself playing with time and time again were Ubuntu and Mepis. Ubuntu was still a fledgling at the version Breezy Badger, so I restricted it to a separate partition from Mepis. Mepis quickly became my main squeeze in the place of Mandriva. It came on a Live CD (which many distributions had yet to do at this time period), came with handy tools for repairing botched installations (which happened a lot with all my tinkering and learning), was easy to use, and was blazingly fast. Best of all though the community welcomed me with open arms and never in the entire time I spent there made me feel like a “stupid noob”.

  • Server

    • BICTU readying for eTRACS deployment, holds Linux Training

      Linux systems have long been used as server operating systems, and have risen to prominence in that area. They have become increasingly popular in the last decade due to pricing, compared to other operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. In fact, the ten fastest supercomputers in the world run on Linux.

      The development of Linux has been one of the most prominent examples of free and open source software collaboration; typically all the underlying source code can be used, freely modified, and redistributed, both commercially and non-commercially, by anyone under an appropriate license.

  • Kernel Space

    • Samsung Puts Out New Open-Source ARM DRM Driver

      Samsung has published the code to a new open-source DRM driver for its EXYNOS4210 System-On-a-Chip. The EXYNOS4210 has impressive 3D graphics capabilities, uses the dual-core ARM Cortex A9 processor, and is used in various smart-phones. The Samsung Galaxy S II is one of the smart-phones using the Exynos 4210 SoC. Samsung is hoping to push this DRM driver into the mainline Linux kernel.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Digikam : premier photo management on GNU/Linux

        In Fedora Linux 14, the default photo manager and digital camera application is Shotwell. I tried using it, I really tried, but I ended up giving up because it was not easy to use in my opinion. In fact, I also tried to run one of my relatives through it on his desktop which also runs Fedora 14, and I concluded it just wasn’t worth fighting. For one, Shotwell seems to want to keep all information about photos and their data in its own database. That’s fine, but it makes it non-intuitive when you want to move photos into folders and sort them in ways that are different than Shotwell sorts them (which by default is to create one folder per year, month, and day). When simply moving photos to subfolders, Shotwell loses the thumbnails and doesn’t know where the photos are moved to. Also, Shotwell has its own Trash folder which makes it confusing when trying to clean up photos. While Shotwell’s features could be an advantage to some, in this case it did not work out so well.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME3 and AMD – in a nearby future…

        A long time has gone since I posted the (in)famous bug regarding graphical corruption on GNOME3 seen only by ATI users who use the proprietary case. After long hours of frustration I’ve decided to jump into Intel chipsets which work very nicelly out of the box and leave ATI behind, but new developments suggest that ATI/AMD has fixed the bug and it’s under internal testing, so it seems that within one or two releases this bug will be fixed.

  • Distributions

    • AppSet: a refreshingly nice package manager for Arch Linux in the times of app stores

      I’m a rather outspoken user of Arch Linux after having used and tried many other distributions (MandrakeSoft/Mandriva, Suse, Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, SLAX, Chakra and even a few others) and I think I got to like the rolling release concept quite a lot. The rolling release concept essentially takes away the notion of milestone release for a Linux distribution and replaces it by incremental and almost continuous updates. Which means that everyday I can update my system and it’s thus almost always running the most recent stable software versions. Note that the upgrade is my choice only, I could stop doing this for 3 weeks instance and that would be fine. Using Arch Linux does not only mean embracing the rolling release distribution model. It also means being ready to install your system from the command line (granted, you only do that once in theory) which can be tedious but not reall difficult. Another “side effect” of using Arch Linux is that the distribution’s package management is done entirely through the command line and with the help of the excellent package manager pacman. Pacman is however not a graphical package manager, or rather, it does not come with a default, out of the box graphical front-end. Several of them do exist but it does not seem to be in the culture of Arch Linux to use one on a regular basis. Enter AppSet. AppSet is a very nice graphical package manager written in Qt; it even got me use KDE again on par with Gnome. AppSet does not only run on Arch Linux, it also supports Chakra (a very close fork of Arch Linux) and works in theory with any other packaging system.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • 12 Things New in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneric[Screenshot Tour]

            Ubuntu 11.10 Oneric Ocelot is marching ahead. Through our detailed reviews of Alpha 2 and Alpha 3 releases, we followed Ubuntu 11.10 in its each and every developmental phase so far. A lot of things have changed since the third alpha release and as we had promised, here is a preview of latest round of changes in Ubuntu 11.10 and a quick screenshot tour.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • ENT: Bodhi easy to install, operate – Online with Bob Vaillancourt

              There is a new Linux distribution making the rounds and it is pretty impressive for a number of reasons.

              The first is the minimal requirements it has and the second is the clean look and feel of this distribution.

              It is called Bodhi Linux and is available at bodhilinux.com.

              Among its many features is that this distribution will run on just about any piece of hardware. It has reportedly been successfully installed on a 386 machine from decades ago. In fact, the stated minimum requirements for this free operating system are a 386 processor, with 1.5 gigabytes of hard drive space and only 128 megabytes of ram.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Most phones shipped in 2015 will be smartphones

        Most phones shipped in 2015 will be smartphones
        ANALYST OUTFIT IHS Isuppli claims that smartphones will make up the majority of mobile phone sales by 2015.

      • Android

        • HTC Flyer and Motorola Xoom prices are slashed

          TWO IPAD RIVALS, the HTC Flyer and Motorola Xoom tablets have had their prices slashed by several retailers.

          Although the tablets haven’t seen the same deep price cuts as HP’s Touchpad, which was reduced to around $100 last week and is now sold out, the Flyer can be picked up for £150 less at Carphone Warehouse.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Is this what Amazon’s tablet will look like?

        It remains to be seen if it’ll materialize and cannibalize Amazon’s own bestselling Kindle e-reader, or if those two devices will remain separate draws for buyers (as a recent Nielsen survey suggests). Msnbc.com’s own Wilson Rothman thinks that when it does appear, it’s going to give the iPad a run for its top spot, mostly because of its might as a retailer. It’s a major factor that Kravitz agrees with: “Not only does Amazon have the name and reach to get an attractive piece of hardware into millions of hands at a competitive price, but they also have the content and retail inventories to sweeten the pot with all sorts of tie-ins.”

Free Software/Open Source

  • Your Zorp remains strong
  • ICE FOSS 11 inaugurated

    He said that world class open source digital resources are developed and used in the education sector in India.

  • ICFOSS to prepare roadmap on future of FOSS in India

    As part of the 10th anniversary celebrations of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in India, the Technopark, Trivandrum based International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS) recently held a consultation on ‘Future Directions of FOSS in India’ at Technopark, to establish future directions for use and promotion of FOSS in India.

    The consultation session is first of a series of similar sessions that build on Kerala’s early lead in FOSS initiatives and serving to consolidate and leverage the lead with international initiatives. The participants of the consultation, representing a cross-section of stakeholders from the Government, technology organizations, institutions of Higher Education, NGOs, and the FOSS community, outlined their vision for the future of FOSS in their respective domains, highlighting gaps and limitations to be resolved, and making suggestions on the way ahead.

  • Lemma a Free Open Source Twitter Client For the PlayBook

    If you are not satisfied or want more options for PlayBook twitter clients here is a new one called Lemma. The application is free and offers quite a few options. The creators also said they created the app as a proof of concept to show the PlayBook potential. They promise to release the source code so that the BlackBerry development community can keep improving the app. So far the app has received good reviews from PlayBook users.

  • Computer and internet briefs

    The site, which is run by the US-based company Geeknet, lists Open Source software broken down in various categories such as ‘Audio & Video’ or ‘Graphics’. All told, there are more than 300,000 programs available for download on the site, which also includes short summaries about the applications and the developers. The site also allows programmers the chance to manage their projects.

  • Web Browsers

  • Project Releases

Leftovers

  • An Introduction to Giganews’ & Golden Frog’s VyprVPN!
  • Steve Jobs: a reality check

    Hard-core journalists appear to have put all their scepticism aside and wallowed in trying to outdo each other in superlatives.

    The emotional tributes give Jobs the credit for anything and everything that Apple has ever done, especially its achievements in the noughties.

    The reality is a bit different. And if one strikes a sour note, there are no apologies – this is not a reality TV show where selective reality is played out. No, this is life and the warts and sores are as real as the plastic and the botox.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Cablegate

    • Wikileaks: Kenya still paying ghost Anglo leasing Companies

      Kenya continues to lose millions of shillings in corrupt payments to Anglo Leasing companies, according to a new cable by online whistleblower, WikiLeaks.

    • US Top Diplomat Monitored Internet in Cuba

      Chief of Mission of the US Interest Section in Havana, Jonathan Farrar, monitored the Internet for possible subversive actions, according to a cable released by Wikileaks and reproduced by Cuban websites on Saturday.
      Farrar’s monitoring of the Internet along with his wife occurred in August 2008, when he addressed a memorandum to the US State Department described as sensitive, without reporting any obstacle from Cuban authorities.

    • Full Commission Of Inquiry Report Released

      More than two years after it was completed, Sir Robin Auld’s complete Commission of Inquiry Report 2008-09 of alleged corruption in the Turks and Caicos Islands government has been made public.

      “I believe that the people of the Turks and Caicos Islands deserve to see the entirety of the final report,” His Excellency the Gov. Gordon Wetherell said Aug. 19 in one of his last actions before leaving office and the country Aug. 22.

    • Armenian police forced homosexuals to reveal gay public figures – US Embassy
  • Finance

    • Factbox: Goldman faces myriad legal challenges

      Conventional wisdom in legal circles has long held that Goldman Sachs (GS.N) might escape further large fines or criminal charges for its role in the 2007-2009 financial crisis after reaching a $550 million settlement with securities regulators in July 2010.

      But news that Goldman Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein and other senior executives have hired their own lawyers — separate from the army of attorneys already retained by the company — was a powerful reminder for markets that Goldman is still the subject of myriad investigations.

    • Nurses Take the Message “Heal America Tax Wall Street” to 60 Congressional Offices

      Across the country on September 1, nurses will converge on local congressional offices to demand a tax on Wall Street financial speculation, a move they say is a step towards healing the nation, trimming the deficit, and preserving social programs.

      National Nurses United (NNU) is planning a day of action in over 60 congressional offices in 21 states. In Wisconsin, the group is sponsoring a soup kitchen outside of Rep. Paul Ryan’s Janesville office “to provide residents with the sustenance they are not getting from Paul Ryan,” says NNU spokesman Charles Idelson.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Paul Ryan’s Office Locks the Door on Unemployed Constituents
    • Since 9/11, Koch Industries has fought against tougher government rules on chemical plants
    • Toxic Koch: Keeping Americans at Risk of a Poison Gas Disaster

      In 2010 Koch Industries and the billionaire brothers who run it were exposed as a major funder of front groups spreading denial of climate change science and a key backer of efforts to roll back environmental, labor, and health protections at the state and federal levels. Through enormous campaign contributions, an army of lobbyists, and funding of think tanks and front groups, David and Charles Koch push their agenda of a world in which their company can operate without regard for the risks they pose to communities, workers, and the environment. This report, Toxic Koch: Keeping Americans at risk of a Poison Gas Disaster, examines how Koch Industries has quietly played a key role in blocking yet another effort to protect workers and vulnerable communities; comprehensive chemical security legislation.

    • The Lewis Powell Memo: Corporate Blueprint to Dominate Democracy

      Forty years ago today, on August 23, 1971, Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., an attorney from Richmond, Virginia, drafted a confidential memorandum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that describes a strategy for the corporate takeover of the dominant public institutions of American society.

      Powell and his friend Eugene Sydnor, then-chairman of the Chamber’s education committee, believed the Chamber had to transform itself from a passive business group into a powerful political force capable of taking on what Powell described as a major ongoing “attack on the American free enterprise system.”

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Why Michael Robertson of Mp3Tunes deserves our gratitude

        To recap the decision in the Mp3Tunes case, EMI sued the company for what it said were a number of copyright-infringing features of the service — including that users could “sideload” songs to their online lockers, by transferring them directly from online sources such as Amazon, and that the service “de-duplicated” songs stored on its servers, so users who shared a specific song would simply access one copy instead of having to store two separate copies. As with many similar music-sharing lawsuits, EMI also argued that the simple act of copying a song to a cloud service was an infringement of copyright.

      • Hey, Music Industry. You’re suing the wrong people

        You’d never know this by watching the Recording Industry Association of America, the music industry’s trade organization, which has spent over a decade launching lawsuits against individuals and groups within the United States. And although the RIAA decided to drop its strategy of mass lawsuits back in 2008, it continues to collude with the MPAA to hound ISPs into spying on their users in an effort to fight piracy.

IRC Proceedings: August 27th, 2011

Posted in IRC Logs at 5:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME Gedit

GNOME Gedit

GNOME Gedit

#techrights log

#boycottnovell log

#boycottnovell-social log

Enter the IRC channels now

08.27.11

Amplifying Techrights

Posted in Site News at 7:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Microphone

Summary: Misguided individuals think that writing about Techrights would cause harm to Techrights

Over the years there have been several Web sites created purely for the purpose of attacking Techright (or Boycott Novell) and its editors. The people who ran those anti-Techright Web sites, consistently Linux-hostile individuals, were very tactless because their sites only brought more attention to Techright. In many ways, they advertised the site rather than cause damage. So our general position remains the same; if people wish to dedicate their lives just to smearing poor ol’ Techrights, they add credibility to the site and validate its impact. Sooner or later, those who run these sites lose interest because they realise that what they do serves the very opposite purpose of what they originally intended (anti-Groklaw Web sites were also short-lived). It’s a well known fact. The Huff & Puff, for instance, amplifies Fox.

Funded by Gates, the Seattle Times Anonymously Lobbies for Gates Foundation Agenda

Posted in Bill Gates at 7:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Ship in Seattle

Summary: Super-rich people like Bill Gates still drive policy (and newspapers too) in Seattle

THE mischievous Gates Foundation shows no signs of stopping its corporate lobbying for those seeking to privatise seeds, life, and education. It’s all about profit disguised as charity and journalists are pawns in this battle. They are being paralysed by a massive budget that constitutes a form of retaliation against those who speak truth.

As we discovered last week, the Seattle Times is funded by the Gates Foundation, which helps explain why it chooses to praise the Gates Foundation and a few months ago a teacher from Seattle wrote that politicians “should hang tough against the bullying anonymous editorial writers of the Seattle Times, and the giant wallets of the Gates Foundation and Broad Foundation whose merit pay, anti-seniority, union-bashing, and kid-harming policies do not belong in our state laws.”

The teacher has amassed a lot of evidence about Gates’ astroturf in education, adding: “Arguably it takes more courage to stand up against the slings and arrows of anonymous newspaper editorial writers or the clout and influence of billionaires like Gates and Broad and their posse.” More on that in our next post.

Astroturf Alert: “Vibrant Schools Tacoma Coalition” and “Alliance for Education” Directly and Indirectly Funded by Bill Gates to Lobby for Privatisation (Profit!)

Posted in Bill Gates, Deception at 7:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Seattle at night

Summary: By astroturfing and busting unions, Gates and fellow plutocrats are perturbing and controlling the public education system, warn Seattle teachers

Teach for America, Inc. (TFA) and other such Gates-funded lobbying groups are hard to keep track of. They flood the news with Gates-funded propaganda and there is one blog which we know researches the issue and identifies some of Gates’ front groups. Here is another one. To quote: “Further revealing its corporate, anti-union bias, “Vibrant Schools’” membership includes Stand for Children (an Oregon-based, national corporate ed reform, political lobbying enterprise, funded by Gates and others) and the League of Education Voters (a Gates-funded, pro-corporate ed reform group).”

But wait. There’s more. Like this one from back in May:

League of Education Voters, also Gates and Broad backed pushing the corporate reform agenda of privatization of our schools.

Stand for Children, ditto but a national organization.

[...]

Included on the list of people involved in the selection of this new Communications Director were “External Organizations”, Kimberly Mitchell with the GATES Foundation, Sara Morris with the Alliance for Education and George Griffin, past chair, Alliance for Education board.

I can understand damage control in the wake of our former Broad-trained superintendent’s poor performance and involvement in scandals, but a Strategies 360 veteran taking the lead, and an expensive one at that? And it took 39 folks to decide on the proper candidate including the Gates Foundation and the Gates backed Alliance for Education? What’s at stake for these folks besides the control factor over our school district? Gates doesn’t do anything regarding education unless it’s part of his specific agenda of charter schools and merit pay based on student performance.

[...]

The Seattle Foundation received $1M in funding last year from the Gates Foundation. No doubt CCER would be up for funding with the passing of this levy. The sponsors of CCER include The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the League of Education Voters.

[...]

It’s now starting to make sense why it was so important to hire a Strategies 360 veteran to prop up the image of Seattle Public Schools. There is a lot at stake here for Bill Gates and other corporate interests. It is to be education reform their way and we are to pay for it.

[...]

They just keep promoting each other in this vicious circle brought to you by Bill Gates & Co.

Furthermore there’s this to point out:

All the celebrity names of corporate ed reform are collaborating in this pile-on: Arne Duncan, Michael Bloomberg, Michelle Rhee, Jeb Bush, Bill Gates and his foundation’s “ed reform” grantees. The Eli Broad-trained school superintendents are indoctrinated with this cut-throat corporation uber alles mindset. New Mayor Rahm Emanuel is squawking the same anti-labor dogma in Chicago (Emanuel backs crackdown on teachers, Chicago Sun-Times). And one of the key targets is teachers.

[...]

Today we have a Democratic president whose education policies target unions and workers. After all it’s Obama’s ed reforms, spearheaded by his basketball buddy and former Chicago School District “CEO” Arne Duncan, powered by the endless wallets of billionaires Bill Gates and Eli Broad, that have taken aim at teachers, unions, seniority, job security, professionalism and teacher pay relentlessly these past few years. This assault has taken the form of promoting privately run, publicly funded charter schools, which are predominately non-union, handing out taxpayer favors of $50 million to enterprises like Teach for America, Inc., which sends fresh college grads with a scant five weeks’ training to do one of the most important jobs in our society, thus effectively deprofessionalizing the teaching profession. These “reformers” are pushing for “alternative certifications” of teachers, no longer rewarding teachers with advanced degrees for their dedication and scholarship, and tethering teacher evaluations to standardized test scores, a discredited policy that stifles both teaching and learning.

[...]

Even here in Washington, stealthy attempts to allow “alternately credentialed” teachers, eliminating seniority or weakening collective bargaining rights have slipped into numerous “ed reform” bills (for example, HB 1443 –since renamed HB 2111 or HB 1546) – supported, I am sorry to say, by the feckless or misleading PTA leadership (not the members themselves, who are largely unaware of what’s going on in Olympia in their name), and organizations with names like “League of Education Voters” which is truly only in league with the Gates Foundation which funds it, along with its privatizing agenda.

[...]

Which leads us to another uncomfortable word: plutocracy. Who elected Eli Broad and Bill Gates to dictate our nation’s education policy? No one. Yet, right now, national education policy is being dictated by those with the most money.

Notice TFA being there. It’s like Gates’ front groups are everywhere and one teacher notes that his cronies too are already in key positions. Quoting a later post: “Another facet of this story is the reported role of new Executive Director Brianna “Bree” Dusseault in the summary dismissal of Floe. She is one of former Superintendent Goodloe-Johnson’s hires from last year. She came from the New Orleans Charter Middle School where she was principal for two years. She taught for a few years before that. Her husband, a former Teach for America, Inc. trainee, teaches in a middle school here. Dusseault is also affiliated with the Center on Reinventing Public Education, where she has written papers on charter school management. (The Gates Foundation has funded a study of charter school management by CRPE.) She is also a former resident of the Gates-funded New Leaders for New Schools, an enterprise that trains principals.”

Teachers are very concerned about this, but their voice is being robbed by Gates, who created an astroturf of huge proportions, pretending to be several grassroots movements. Microsoft uses similar tactics to steal the voice of small businesses.

« Previous Page« Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries »Next Page »

RSS 64x64RSS Feed: subscribe to the RSS feed for regular updates

Home iconSite Wiki: You can improve this site by helping the extension of the site's content

Home iconSite Home: Background about the site and some key features in the front page

Chat iconIRC Channels: Come and chat with us in real time

New to This Site? Here Are Some Introductory Resources

No

Mono

ODF

Samba logo






We support

End software patents

GPLv3

GNU project

BLAG

EFF bloggers

Comcast is Blocktastic? SavetheInternet.com



Recent Posts