Pay Your Fucking Taxes Stupid Billionaires II

Must Be Nice To Be Twiggy

Last week saw reports that Twiggy forrest turn over 4 billion dollars in the last financial year. I mean success is nice but what the hell is he going to do with all that money? The man's net worth is $27.2 billion. You have to wonder what the bloody hell he could spend it all on before he dies. I normally don't begrudge successful people their money. If you're Elon Musk and you somehow managed to get to the top of the heap, I doff my cap to you. Having your own space programme? Starting up an electric vehicle company? These are things I might do too if I sat on billions. But Twiggy? I really don't know what on earth he does with his time and money. In fact even his Order of Australia seems to be a product of political donations more than anything else. 

A quick look at his Wikipedia page has a section on his alleged philanthropy: 

Philanthropy[edit]

Andrew and Nicola Forrest made The Giving Pledge in 2013, stating:^[80]

"We hope to help empower individuals and families currently suffering the despair of poverty, slavery and the lack of opportunity for themselves and their children. We feel that if we all do whatever we can with whatever we have, large or small, then each of us will help make our world a more equitable and positive environment for others to thrive in."

— Andrew and Nicola Forrest, February 2013

Well that's a joke. If he's making 4 billion a year and farts around doing unspecified stuff while 'empowering' people - what does that mean anyway? - how exactly is that making the world more equitable? If you're selling coal, how the fuck are you making a positive environment in any way shape or form? 

Indigenous Australians[edit]

After stepping down as chief executive officer of FMG, Forrest noted that he had been spending more than 50% of his time on Indigenous philanthropy.^[9][81] Forrest became an ambassador for the Australian Indigenous Education Foundation.^[82] Encouraged by the philanthropy of the Rockefeller Group, Warren Buffett, and Melinda and Bill Gates,^[83] Andrew and Nicola Forrest established the Australian Children's Trust in 2001.^[55]

Through the influence of Scotty Black, Forrest started the GenerationOne project,^[84][18] with assistance from James Packer and Kerry Stokes, who each donated A$2 million, along with the support of their respective media stations, Channel 9 and Channel 7.^[85] GenerationOne and the Australian Children's Trust help to create sustainable solutions on addressing social disadvantage.^[86] With Kevin Rudd, Forrest launched the Australian Employment Covenant,^[86] that campaigned for businesses to hire Indigenous Australians, as they could "add value" to Australian businesses because they were "professional and reliable and wonderful" and that there is no reason for Indigenous disparity.^[18][87] GenerationOne ran a series of television advertisements privately funded by Forrest, Packer and Stokes.^[88] Between 2008 and 2011, Forrest obtained 253 business signatories to his covenant.^[87] With Rudd, Forrest planned to employ 50,000 Aboriginal people.^[89][90] As the two-year deadline approached, estimates put the number of Indigenous job placements under the scheme at around 2,800, well short of the original goal.^[91]

That's pretty laughable. Maybe there aren't 50,000 Aboriginal people who want to work for people who condescend to employ them? That is sort of reached 5.6% of the target is like a damnation of the very paradigm he's waving around. 

Forrest is opposed to welfare dependency for Indigenous Australians.^[92] He has recounted stories of young Aboriginal girls in the Pilbara offering men sex for cigarettes. Five Indigenous women from the region to collectively lodged a complaint with the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission that Forrest's comment was racist and vilified the community.^[93] Forrest has been publicly accused of engaging in questionable methods of land acquisition,^[94][95] and has had accusations levelled at his company for failing Indigenous trainees at FMG's vocational training centre in Port Hedland.^[96]

In 2013, Forrest was chosen to lead an Australian Government review into Indigenous employment and training programs.^[97] Delivered on 1 August 2014 with 27 recommendations,^[98] the review proposed the creation of the Cashless Welfare Card.^[99]

Well of course he's against welfare dependency - it means more taxes have to be spent on welfare if people are 'welfare dependent' and that could only mean one thing, more taxes for high earners like him. What a self-serving joke that he thinks welfare dependency is the problem. 

The next bit gets better (for laughs): 

Slavery and human trafficking[edit]

Forrest's daughter, Grace volunteered at an orphanage in Nepal and discovered the children she had looked after had been trafficked to be sex slaves in the Middle East. This distressed Grace and motivated her father to act.^[100][101] Grace, aged 21 years, said at a 2014 interfaith meeting held at the Vatican, "I feel like a puppet for hundreds of thousands of girls who are voiceless – if I can stand for them, that is what I'm here to do."^[102]

Forrest established the Walk Free Foundation in 2010 to fight modern slavery.^[103] In 2013 the organisation launched the Global Slavery Index ranking 162 countries "based on a combined measure of three factors: estimated prevalence of modern slavery by population, a measure of child marriage, and a measure of human trafficking in and out of a country".^[104] The Index estimates there are 29 million slaves worldwide, roughly half in India and Pakistan.^[101] In January 2014, Forrest announced a deal with Pakistan to do away with more than two million slaves in return for cheap coal.^[105]

He traded coal for 2 million slaves! What a hero. With any luck that coal will raise the sea level and sink Pakistan... maybe? All because his daughter told him to grow a conscience. Pretty sad.   

Forrest founded the Global Freedom Network that the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Grand Imam of al-Azhar lead. The Global Freedom Network works to stop all religious faiths from using organisations involved with slavery in their supply chain.^[100]

When I heard the news [that all parties had agreed to the venture] I have to admit I became emotional. This is going to change everything. This is set up like a high-achieving, measurement-driven, totally target-oriented company, it's like a hard-edged business. We are out to defeat slavery, we are not out to feel good. This is our mission. You see the complete hopelessness in the eyes [of enslaved people]. It’s like I’m stuck, I will never get help, I am dirt. Then you know that you can’t rest until you free them.

— Andrew Forrest, interviewed in 2014

In 2014 Andrew and Grace Forrest attended a meeting held in the Vatican, being a Joint Religious Leaders Declaration Against Modern Slavery. The anti-slavery declaration was signed by Pope Francis, Mata Amritanandamayi, Justin Welby, Thích Nhất Hạnh, K. Sri Dhammananda, David Rosen, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, Abraham Skorka, Mohamed Ahmed El-Tayeb, Mohammad Taqi al-Modarresi, Basheer Hussain al-Najafi, and Omar Abboud – religious leaders representing forms of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism.^[102] Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, urged consumers to demand more information about whether forced labour was involved in goods they bought.^[106]

h went around meeting people with big job titles up to and including the Pope. They got together and made a declaration that slavery is bad. Jesus wept, you think the world doesn't know? How exactly is this philanthropic?  

Other philanthropic interests[edit]

As of September 2007, Forrest had injected A$90 million into his children's charity.^[83] Philanthropic activity has included gifts to his alma mater, Hale School;^[107] participation in the St Vincent de Paul Society CEO sleepouts;^[108] and a gift from the proceeds of the sale of 5,000 tonnes (5,500 short tons) of iron ore to the Chinese earthquake relief effort.^[51] In October 2013 it was announced that Forrest was to donate A$65 million towards higher education in Western Australia. At the time the sum was believed to be the highest philanthropic donation in Australia, with most going toward funding scholarships.^[109]

The Minderoo Foundation, Forrest's private foundation, was renamed as the Minderoo Group is to be expanded to include higher education contributions. The foundation has given A$270 million through the foundation since 2001.^[110] In 2014, Andrew and Nicola Forrest pledged A$65 million over ten years through the Minderoo Foundation, establishing the Forrest Research Foundation to offer scholarships to students pursuing a PhD at a Western Australian university.^[111][112] In 2017 Forrest donated A$400 million to medical research and social causes,^[113] and in 2019 donated a further A$655 million to expand the existing work of the Minderoo Foundation in areas including cancer research, early childhood development, ocean health, and eliminating modern slavery, the largest ever living donation by any Australian philanthropist.^[114]

What can I say? That's all kinds of laughable. 

So my point is this: he's not doing anything useful, sensible, or valuable with his charitable works. He's just wasting his time. It would be better to just tax him and give that money to government services that need it and can do a better job. I'm not saying take his whole 4 billion. But if you took 50% and left him with 2 billion for this year, is it really going to impact his life adversely? I mean, this is the same arsehole who campaigned against the Mining Tax. He should be the one to be paying more. 

Come Join The Fun!

More On That Intellectual Bankruptcy

Here's An Example!

Right on cue, here's an article by Tom Switzer that illustrates my point.

It should be obvious to even primary school students that a war criminal is someone who has actually committed a war crime. More to the point, to equate a democratic leader who supported the toppling of a brutal dictatorship with the likes of the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge is a cheapening of moral language. 

One could oppose the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and still believe that Howard, like Tony Blair and George W. Bush, was motivated by good intentions. Saddam Hussein, after all, was a murderous despot who had invaded Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990 and subsequently defied about 17 United Nations resolutions. He also used chemical weapons in the murder of tens of thousands of Kurds in the north and the Shiites of southern Iraq.

Where do you start? Let's do this in order.
When the so-called 'Coalition of the Willing' invaded Iraq in 2003, it did so without a sign off from the UN Security Council. You might recall Collin Powell getting up and showing aerial reconnaissance photographs which purported showing Iraqis shuttling trucks loaded with Weapons of Mass Destruction. The UN did not say, "sure go ahead", they said, "no".

The point is, the 'Coalition of the Willing' invaded Iraq unilaterally, and for that John Howard has to wear the responsibility of co-authoring that disastrous move - a move so disastrous we're still reaping the poisoned fruits of those labours. This side of 1945, we do have an understanding that world leaders who unilaterally invade countries (no matter the goodness of intentions) are up for war crimes.

And as stupid as it is to repeat this here, this is why there is a legitimate argument to be made that George W. Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard are war criminals by the very same ruler we use to measure such diverse people as Herman Goering, Hideki Tojo, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, and whoever else tinpot dictators in Africa we don't like. This accusation is expressly not, "cheapening of moral language" as Switzer argues; merely a logical ramification of the legal logic cast upon these other people like Herman Goering, Hideki Tojo, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic et al. To argue otherwise is an attempt to create one set of rules for the people in history we dislike, and another set of rules for leaders of English speaking nations to suit Tom Switzer's bit of sophistry.

As of the findings of the Chilcott Report earlier this year, it is no longer tenable to give the benefit of the doubt to GeorgeW. Bush and Tony Blair for their so-called "good intentions". To argue that Saddam Hussein had it coming - sans proper trial at the Hague which he did not get - and therefore his misdeeds justified the Iraq War, flies in the face of the principle of having War Criminals. If you think Saddam being Saddam justified the 2003 invasion, you're arguing that any nation can go invade another if it can form its own coalition of willing countries to participate because might and majority make their own right.

Clearly we in the Western World do not go by this thinking, and this is also why the world has such an elaborate institution as the United Nations with its Security Council to forestall such free-for-alls. You just can't have it both ways where Saddam is a War Criminal and George W. Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard are not War Criminals, if you believe in the moral language of having war criminals in the first place. That leaves the legal defence of John Howard to the possibility that he was not part of the criminal conspiracy perpetrated by Bush and Blair, but merely a tag-along. That would make him a dangerous adventurer, which is no more admirable than a "War Criminal".

The thing that gets me is that all of this is simply logic. It's not a philosophical issue at all.It's simply the logic constructed by the types of conservatives in the past - like Winston Churchill - thought up with all this legal logic. The history altering event of 2003 was that the self-appointed leaders of the free world would throw reason together with caution to the wind and go rampaging into Iraq. To pretend otherwise is so intellectually deficient and dishonest it makes you wonder how the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald doesn't balk at it (yes you Darren Goodsir).

Anyway... Switzer decides to give himself a pat on the back - a bit unseemly but what the heck - and then goes on to say:

What Howard failed to recognise, however, was the adage that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Toppling Saddam, as many conservative realists (such as this writer and my friends Owen Harries and John Mearsheimer) warned at the time, was also fraught with the danger of unintended consequences.

Good God. Conservative realists? Really? As opposed to ordinary realists who opposed the war on principle, the Conservative realists who opposed it on the basis of the difficulty of fulfilling the rest of the mission, once begun? If you are going to bang on the morality of language to begin with, you'd think you would argue things on the principle of it, but no. Tom Switzer wants to argue a technicality that the mission itself was difficult, and that's why it was wrong. Switzer is saying if the Iraq War worked out much cleaner, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
He's dead wrong.

On top of which, if that were the case, then he is once again arguing that Saddam had it coming, and that's good enough for him - but heaven forbid those who would argue on principle that the invasion of Iraq was a war crime. That's the height of hypocrisy.

Then there's this bit...

The objectors to the honorary doctorate also claim Howard was a racist. Never mind his post-Tampa asylum-seeker standoff policies boosted public confidence in our immigration and humanitarian refugee agenda. So much so that the rate of legal, non-discriminatory migration from four corners of the world, including Africa, doubled from 2002 to 2007. When Malcolm Turnbull praises Australia as the global role model for border protection, he is paying tribute to Howard (and his successor Tony Abbott).

Look, John Howard landed himself in much trouble in the 1987 Federal election campaign when he said there were too many asian migrants. It took him a long time to rehabilitate his image, but those words were uttered and even in 1987, it was obvious that he was playing race politics to get ahead. That would make John Howard a racialist politician. If he is not one today, it may be because he's grown to be a better man since, but the John Howard of 1987 was rightfully spotted as a racist - and proud of it. These things are not going to get forgotten. If John Howard never wanted to wear the epithet, he should have had the good sense not to stoke those fires for a few votes more. Most famous people who are not racists, never get hung with the epithet. The fact that it landed on Howard speaks volumes.

As it is, his tacit non-condemntion of One Nation in 1996 only entrenched the view that he was still a racist, even after his alleged detente with the Chinese community. There is no way known you could argue John Howard was not a racist politician. Malcolm Turnbull can praise Howard for a multi-cultural Australia all he likes, but he'd be dead wrong too - it simply wasn't the way that historic discussion went. Once again, it is intellectually dishonest for Tom Switzer to present John Howard as this amazing champion of multiculturalism in Australia. He can try it on, but it's called lying.

And this is what we have as conservative commentary. Two bits of sophistry combined with moral outrage about the "moral language" ("egadz!") and an outright attempt to rewrite the track record of a man who was an unpleasant racialist politician, if not an outright racist individual.

John Howard richly deserves the opprobrium heaped upon him. That the University of Sydney with its crappy regressive culture would want to honour John Howard with an honorary doctorate is their business. In my books, nothing is beneath them. If Switzer thinks John Howard is so deserving of this honour, that's also his business. However, complaining about those who would object to this conferring of social capital is a bit rich. The public record is what it is; John Howard knows what he did; Switzer knows what he did; we all know what Howard did. Let's not pretend for a moment that it's not contentious to hand this man an honorary doctorate and praise him. It's this kind of game-playing sophistry and hypocrisy that makes the conservatives look so intellectually vacant in this country. If Tom Switzer is the leading light of these conservative thinkers, then they've really got a problem.

Just saying.

Conversations Around The Traps

Who Suffers From Zero Interest Rate Policy?

Zero interest Rate Policy or ZIRP as it is known in some circles has been going on for two decades in Japan. It has also been going on for 7 years in the USA and Europe. The reasons have ostensibly been from keeping asset prices to stopping banks from toppling over due to lack of liquidity, through to keeping people employed. The extremely accommodating policy has been running parallel with the Quantitative Easing program in the US and Europe which have somehow helped to prop up asset prices in bubble condition around the globe, but also not spurred growth as promised.

The way the traditional/classical economy was supposed to work was that lower interests would fund capital investment for the next phase of economic growth. Instead the low interest rates have allowed speculators to place bets at lower cost, while the piled up debt has eaten into future growth in a big way. The point of all this is to say, the things the easy money has gone towards have not been exactly productive or helpful, while there are people who are genuinely suffering because interest rates have been kept so low for so long.

For instance retirees in America and Europe with some amount of money saved up during their working lives would be finding that they won't be living off the interest of the money they saved, but be forced to eat into their savings just to survive. This sort of thing can be seen as a breaking of the social contract. There would be a whole generation of kids growing up without learning about the virtues of saving because  they've never seen interest payments on their bank accounts. I don't think this is a good thing because we're raising people who haven't seen the benefits of saving and compound interest.

Worse still, with something like QE going on at the same time, Zero Interest rate translates into a situation where you cannot sit on cash because inflation is eating away at that value; and you can't stay in bonds because whole countries have been threatening to default for the last 3 years. That leaves equities or foreign currency trades, and they're no guarantee of a return.

In fact, it's worth asking at this point in time why people who save should suffer at the hands of the Central Bank while it essentially rewards people who go into debt to buy into positions. Why is it that people should not sit on their earnings as savings? If deflation is such a threat, then why is it so bad if the man on the street is able to get more for less?

Frankly I think the world is getting ripped off.

Politicians Lie, But Must They Be Brazen About It?

I was in a conversation earlier tonight with walk-off HBP, and the issue came up about how the Murdoch press essentially insist on telling non-truths and heavily-spun tag lines, all of which amount to nothing but lies. It's like an Orwellian thing where untruths are shouted out loud until everybody accepts it as the dominant discourse and acquiesces.

But then Tony Abbott gets up and celebrates the repealing of the Carbon Price, characterising it s this bug bear in the economy that was raising people's costs of living while not doing anything at all for the environment, and that his government is a "conservationist" government. All of these things are wrong. The Carbon Price was hardly a blip in the rising retail power prices, it was contributing to the reduction of our emissions, and there is no way you can call a government that insists on dismantling the Carbon Price system a conservationist government in any dialect or accent of English.

It's an astounding thing that we have a Prime Minister that stands there and spouts untruths as if they were truth, pronouncing white is black and black is white. I can accept that politicians will work the facts of the matter in their favour through spin, and that they sometimes get it wrong, making them liars after the fact. I just can't recall a single Prime Minister of this land lying knowingly with a straight face and expecting the people to buy it. This isn't "no child will live in poverty" things where a politician simply gets the scope of the problem wrong. These things happen and I don't judge too harshly. Going right back to Malcolm Fraser and looking through all the NSW premiers, I don't think I've seen a single head of government lie with a straight face as Tony Abbott does.

This is a person who knows the science but chooses to ignore it; understands the facts and chooses to deny them; and then acts on the worst possible advice for ideological reasons and then says he is something that that he has never ever been; and that the ignoring and denying of science and facts and going against them for ideological reasons represents something that is positive for this country when it clearly is not. For Abbott to characterise his government as 'conservationist', he may as well as be saying his is a ballerina government, or an artistic government, or a caring compassionate government, or a forward-looking government. These things are equally Un-true of his government as the expedient, idle, lunatic, conceited claim that his is a conservationist government, especially having repealed the Carbon Price legislation, and telling us this at the press conference to announce the repeal.

I've just never seen anything like it. And my mind boggles, my brain explodes... It's like a never ending torture of our minds.