Driving through a town/suburb the other day I felt sorry for the residents in that area. Dementia and mental illness is a scourge in Australia. Imagine being so easily confused that you are forced to display your national flag outside your home in order to remind yourself which country you live in. It is a sad state of affairs when feeble mindedness is so apparent on the streets of our communities. It does not help that so many of the goods that these folk buy are made in China. Even the 4×4 giant Utes many of these guys drive are made in China and purchased because they are cheap. On the other hand, all the tech we use is American, the social media and much of the hardware is American owned and made in China. I am not sure if flying a flag outside your residence counts for much when your lifestyle choices tell a very different story. Paper thin patriots thick on the ground downunder.
Downunder Tax Tricks Favouring Big Corporations
Of course, we have a trade imbalance with the United States, in that we buy far more from them than they do from us. American Big Tech dominates our businesses and personal lives. The advent of Google and social media has stripped the ad revenue from our local media companies. Billions of dollars go to these large American multinationals each year in revenue. Despite this they pay bugger all tax downunder. How does that work? Clever accounting tricks allow them to shift their profits to tax havens elsewhere. Corporations are only taxed on their profits. Is this cheating? In truth yes, but not in law. It helps when the big 4 accounting consultancy forms are all American and our governments contract them to devise these same laws in consultation with our public service. If you think it is a rigged game, you might be right.
The Right Wing Legacy Media Downunder Is American Owned
Right wing paper thin patriots thick on the ground downunder. They fly the flag, buy Chinese and consume Fox News or Sky News Australia. Of course, News Corp the American company that owns most of our newspapers and these pay TV networks and shows is another profit shifting tax avoider in Australia. There is no progressive media downunder of any real size or influence. I watched the ABC Insiders show this morning and every guest on the panel was a right wing journalist – this tells you a lot about the media landscape in Australia. Rupert Murdoch has poisoned the well for decades, in this regard. It is a cabal of Zionist bought, right wing voices singing from the same American song sheet. This media does not represent the Australian people and they have that in common with our politicians.
Trump Makes Life Much More Expensive For Australians
President Donald Trump has managed to put his fat hands into the pockets of ordinary Aussies via his illegal and unsanctioned war in Iran. The Strait of Hormuz is closed to foreign oil tankers carrying the global oil supply – well 20% of it. That is enough for the neoliberal markets to skyrocket the oil price, which means high prices at the petrol pumps downunder. Fascist Netanyahu and Trump are bombing the bejesus out of Iran and Lebanon. Iran is striking back with drones and missiles to the Gulf states and Israel. War is loved by profiteering corporations involved in the killing and blowing up of property. Big Tech is there in spades, Palantir and their ilk are involved in providing AI to target Iranians as they did in Gaza, where an entire city was destroyed and more than 70, 000 mainly non-combatants were killed. Gee, AI is not so great at targeting, is it?
“This is FRESH AIR. I’m Tonya Mosley. America’s first AI-fueled war is unfolding right now. Over the last three weeks, the U.S. and Israel have launched strikes against Iran, hitting a thousand targets in the first 24 hours alone – nearly double the scale of the 2003 shock-and-awe campaign in Iraq. The system helping to enable much of this is called the Maven Smart System, and running inside of it is Claude from the company Anthropic, an AI model that millions of people interact with every single day.”
Catch The Tax Cheats
“Companies are cheating the tax system in Australia and around the world. Corporations are taxed on the profits they generate. To minimise these profits companies are shifting their profits via IP charges on their balance sheets to other companies associated with them located in tax havens. This accountancy trickery has been going on for years now and is actively taking billions of dollars of tax revenue out of nations like Australia. It is time to change the system to catch these cheats. A percentage of gross revenue should be charged to beat these devious tricks. The companies doing this are Apple, Amazon, News Corp, Pepsi, Uber, Meta, Microsoft, Google (Alphabet) and many more.”
Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of The AI Heresy; What Price Life?; America Matters: Pre-apocalyptic Posts & Essays in the Shadow of Trump; and other titles. NOW AVAILABLE AT APPLE BOOKS & GOOGLE PLAY BOOKS. Google Play Books AUDIOBOOK
©GolfDom
The AI Heresy: A Betrayal of Humanity – Epub
Golf got me started on this new book. It was my golf game that got me thinking about what was happening inside my head over the golf ball. How my expectations had been influenced by computers and the digital world we now inhabited. The expectation of instantaneous results, as if in front of a computer screen or on your smart phone. Golf, of course, is not like that – it is an ancient game. Royal and ancient! Anyways, The AI…