From villain to tyrant



Direct link to deposition video | Full set of the deposition videos (including Ogg Theora versions)

Footage from the Gates deposition (quotes for humour's purpose only)

Summary: The co-founder of Microsoft is quickly establishing a place for himself as a patron of the United States (and beyond), who is never elected by the population and may stay in power for decades to come

THE Gates Foundation has grown rather influential thanks in part to a huge PR campaign (probably multi-billion-dollar) which has gone on for years. As we'll show in later posts, the Gates Foundation is buying publications or journalists so that they publish glamourising pieces about the Gates Foundation. It's an abuse of power and the media along with its audience will suffer as a result.

Here is an example of Microsoft PR with "Child Exploitation" as the subject. It's not just Gates who uses such tactics. It' partly political, too.

Watch this new BusinessWeek headline which goes like this (listing Gates as though he is third in the US chain of command): "Obama, Biden, Gates Focus on Community Colleges for Job Skills"

President Barack Obama holds the first White House summit highlighting the role that community colleges play in educating workers, an effort boosted by a $35 million donation from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

In his quiet attempt to run more monopolies and control parts of the world using his wealth, Gates also attends another G-20 summit [1, 2]. Let's remember what he did with Harper in the Canadian summit and what Gates did with Clinton back in March.

“Why would a politician wish to associate herself with such an offensive company?”Is Gates powering/bending governmental decisions like he is a cross-border president now? Nobody elected him. He is just buying his way into politics and he never needs to go through the same process. We warned about Microsoft influence in government many times before and we see it again now that White House Speaker Nancy Pelosi goes to Microsoft. Why would a politician wish to associate herself with such an offensive company? To quote the Microsoft-friendly TechFlash: "Hang around Microsoft's Redmond campus long enough and you never know who might show up. Today's visitor will be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is set to tour the futuristic Microsoft Home -- a series of rooms inside Microsoft's conference center -- and answer questions from reporters this afternoon."

Such government lobbying and commercial entanglements are particularly disturbing because Microsoft sends jobs overseas and avoids tax; and yes, according to another TechFlash headline, "Nancy Pelosi visits Microsoft, thanks company for creating jobs" (bias noted).

This has got to be some kind of black humour. Bill Gates and his father (tax exempt) are responsible for the loss of many American jobs. And as a reader of ours pointed out some days ago, "Preston Gates is about to make a killing throwing people out of their houses. Got to love those philanthropists Gates people."

From the original article:

To keep up with demand, K&L Gates has launched a U.S. foreclosure task force designed to aid clients in addressing questions related to potential lawsuits, hearings and foreclosure moratoriums.

Laurence Platt, a mortgage banking partner in the firm’s Washington office and a leader of K&L Gates’ financial services practice, wouldn’t comment on specific clients the firm is representing, but he said they include national banks, loan servicers, and other public companies. K&L Gates also recently served as examiner in the New Century and WorldCom bankruptcy proceedings.

The Gates club is still having private meetings and trips to China. We have covered this before. It's a bunch of publicity/rave trips to China [1, 2] and few people do manage to see through the PR. Buffett is a major part of this PR. He too is trying to launder his reputation.

A lot of what's promoted by Gates is generally tied to patents and to banking^*, as we repeatedly explained in the past. Bill's friend Nathan Myhrvold (from Intellectual Ventures) is also making money from it, or at least trying to. From The New York Times:

In 2007, Bill and Melinda Gates — whose foundation now sets the agenda in global health — announced that they intended to end malaria, an ambition that both the interagency Roll Back Malaria Partnership and the World Health Organization affirmed. Funds for the job have zoomed from $100 million a year in 1998 to nearly $2 billion by the end of 2009.

The Gates Foundation has given vaccine researchers $150 million since the late 1990s. There are dozens of experimental malaria vaccines in labs across the globe, with the most clinically advanced, Mosquirix, appearing to reduce the incidence of illness from malaria by 65 percent.

Oil companies such as ExxonMobil, plagued by malaria in West Africa, have bankrolled genomics research at Western universities in search of new drugs. Even venture capitalists such as the former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold have joined in. He showed his laser mosquito-zapping system at a highly publicized lecture in February.

All hope to find a simple, permanent cure.

The new findings, however, challenge this dream. That is because eradicating a disease is, in several important respects, a goal diametrically opposed to controlling one.

Intellectual Ventures too has a PR machine going and to cite an old example:

I enjoyed Levitt & Dubner’s “Freakonomics”, and picked up the followup “Superfreakonomis” recently at an airport. The last chapter, however, was astonishing. The entire chapter was devoted to a glowing advertisement for Intellectual Ventures, pointing out that they own 20,000 patents “more than all but a few dozen companies in the world”, but of course “there is little hard evidence” that they are patent trolls.

But this bunch of wacky genius billionaires have solved global warming (much of which they dispute anyway) and can control malaria and prevent hurricanes from forming. Unlike the rest of the book which covers analysis of well-known facts and disputes them with insightful economic research, this chapter is so breathless and gushy that it makes me question the rest of the author’s work.

I first came across Intellectual Ventures when The Economist reversed their 100-year opposition to patents, and the only reason I could find was a similarly cheerleading piece about this company. (I had naively expected new research revealing some net positive of patents, or some such revelation).

Intellectual Ventures is lobbying and bullying, it is not doing research and producing any products. It's just PR which ever suggests otherwise. We'll say a lot more about PR tomorrow when many more examples from the news will be given, including those which relate to education. ⬆ _____ ^* The micro-payment gig of Gates [1, 2] and the Grameen Foundation [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] comes to Cambodia now.