Microsoft Workers Protest War Profiteering

Be Interesting to see if they all are fired

By
PaulCraigRoberts.org

March 15, 2019

A global coalition of employees of the Microsoft Corporation is demanding that a contract for work with the U.S. Army be dropped.

Some employees —I don’t know the percentage—have sent an open letter to both the CEO and the president/chief legal officer of Microsoft stating alarm that “Microsoft is working to provide weapons technology to the U.S. Military, helping one country’s government ‘increase lethality’ using tools we built. We did not sign up to develop weapons, and we demand a say in how our work is used.”

The employees say that Microsoft has previously licensed technology to the US military, but until a recent contract Microsoft has not crossed the line into weapons development. “With this contract, it does. The application of HoloLens within the IVAS system is designed to help people kill. It will be deployed on the battlefield, and works by turning warfare into a simulated ‘video game,’ further distancing soldiers from the grim stakes of war and the reality of bloodshed.” The Neoconservative Th... Roberts, Dr. Paul Craig Best Price: $7.49 Buy New $15.31 (as of 10:30 UTC - Details)

The employees tell the company that ‘intent to harm is not an acceptable use of our technology” and that they “do not want to become war profiteers.”  The employees demand that the IVAS contract be canceled, that Microsoft cease developing weapons technologies and appoint an external ethics review board to ensure Microsoft does not “empower the U.S. Army’s ability to cause harm and violence.”

One wonders why the employees’ demand left out the Air Force, Navy, CIA and NSA. Nevertheless, it is encouraging that after 20 years of murderous mayhem created in the world by the criminal and corrupt Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump Regimes, some people finally found their voice.

I owe my awareness of this protest by Microsoft employees to RootsAction.org.  The protest is vastly under reported.  RootsAction.org supplies this news source and the letter to management from the employees.

The Best of Paul Craig Roberts

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, associate editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week’s first outside columnist, columnist for the Scripps Howard News Service, contributor to the editorial page of the Los Angeles Times, and columnist for the main French and Italian newspapers, and for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles. He served in numerous academic appointments in US universities and was  appointed to the William E. Simon Chair for Political Economy at Georgetown University’s Center for Strategic and International Studies where his colleagues were Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, James R. Schlesinger (one of his former professors), and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Thomas Moorer. His article, “How the Law Was Lost,” was published in the January 1999 Cardozo Law Review.
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