This article (link at page footer) is a repost of an article by the same name in MintPressNews.com
Author’s Note
In her award-winning book “The Shock Doctrine“, Naomi Klein brilliantly describes this chapter of the same name from the NeoLiberal playbook, where a large-scale traumatic event or disaster is used to usher in national, societal or socio-economic changes that would otherwise be rejected out of hand under normal conditions. It should be noted that Richard Nixon’s CIA successfully employed this tactic in 1973 with the overthrow and death of the Democratically Elected President of Chile, Salvador Allende, and the subsequent imposition of a brutal dictator and individual who was politically aligned with Nixon and then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and someone who would promote US interests in the region, the genocidal monster, Augusto Pinochet.
From a key review of the book:
“the shock doctrine”: using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters — to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. Sometimes, when the first two shocks don’t succeed in wiping out resistance, a third shock is employed: the electrode in the prison cell or the Taser gun on the streets.
By inviting NeoLibearl Billionaire Bill Gates to New York, Governor Cuomo is using this tactic -during the CoronaVirus Pandemic -and the public’s response to it, in an attempt to impose changes to NY’s educational system that would normally be rejected.
I’m writing this primer to the main article to provide historical context, background and insight into Bill Gates’ character and personal integrity, and why Gov. Cuomo’s decision, “inviting Microsoft founder Bill Gates to implement his controversial ideas about education statewide” will be a disaster, will set a dangerous precedent for public education in the state and nationally and why it should be resisted at all costs.
I am old enough to remember the browser wars of the late 1990s and, previously, between Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Apple/MacIntosh founder Steve Jobs and Gates’/Microsoft’s theft of the Windows Graphical User Interface (GUI) from Apple/Jobs, a technology previously developed by Xerox Corporation, some employees of whom subsequently went to work for Apple/Jobs. The case was litigated in the courts for over 4 years with Apple entering into a private settlement with Gates and Microsoft in 1997. The case was always a bone of contention between the two Tech Titans and rightly so.
During the first browser wars, Gates foisted his inferior Internet browser “Internet Explorer” on all users of his MS-Windows Operating Environment, a GUI layer installed “On Top Of” the MS-DOS operating/command interface/environment. While Apple/MacIntosh is a real Operating System based on the Unix/Linux operating systems, with a real boot-level kernel, MS Windows (through the last iteration of the MS-DOS based Windows GUI, Windows ME), was simply an “Operating Environment“, not a real operating system.
Competing with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was Netscape Navigator, a product of Netscape Communications Corp. and a far superior browser to the Microsoft product. Janet Reno, the Clinton Administration’s AG along with 20 States Attorney General, brought an anti-trust law suit against Gates and Microsoft, accusing the tech giant of monopolizing the then nascent personal computing industry. After various appeals, the government ultimately prevailed through a settlement that required Microsoft, among other provisions, to make its source code available to third-party developers.
The original decision by US District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ordered the breakup of Microsoft into two separate entities, one that manages the operating system, and the other to produce other software components. In his findings of fact and conclusions of law, Judge Jackson found that Microsoft had committed monopolization, attempted monopolization, and tying in violations of Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act; Microsoft immediately appealed the decision.
I remember that case well with Judge Jackson excoriating Microsoft and Gates as follows:
Most harmful of all is the message that Microsoft’s actions have conveyed to every enterprise with the potential to innovate in the computer industry. Through its conduct toward Netscape, IBM, Compaq, Intel, and others, Microsoft has demonstrated that it will use its prodigious market power and immense profits to harm any firm that insists on pursuing initiatives that could intensify competition against one of Microsoft’s core products. Microsoft’s past success in hurting such companies and stifling innovation deters investment in technologies and businesses that exhibit the potential to threaten Microsoft. The ultimate result is that some innovations that would truly benefit consumers never occur for the sole reason that they do not coincide with Microsoft’s self-interest.
Andrew Chin, an antitrust law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and someone who assisted Judge Jackson in drafting the findings of fact for the trial court, described the settlement as giving Microsoft “a special antitrust immunity to license Windows and other ‘platform software’ under contractual terms that destroy freedom of competition.”
Just like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates is a Harvard Drop-out, someone who never developed anything original, most notably his Windows Operating Environment, but made his fortune buying-up smaller software developers, plagiarizing original code and then requiring onerous licensing fees for continued use of his software products, a NeoLiberal monopolizing scheme that will never be challenged in the world we live in now as it was under AG Janet Reno.
This is the person that Gov. Cuomo is bringing to NY State to “revolutionize” its education system, a college Drop-out billionaire, someone who is socially and mentally incapable of understanding the needs of the common student in a public education setting, a NeoLiberal who is consistently pushing Charter Schools and thus, cannot conceive of the notion of a public education, someone who is incapable of any meaningful insight into the concept of what Public Education is and, most troubling, someone who is obsessed with the pseudoscience of Eugenics.
This cannot be allowed!
James Daly, Ph.D
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said he will use the COVID-19 virus as an opportunity to “revolutionize” the state’s school system, inviting Bill Gates to implement his controversial ideas about education.
Source: Cuomo Announces Partnership with Bill Gates to “Revolutionize” NY Schools in Wake of Coronavirus