No images? Click here CARNIVAL OF HYPOCRISY "By 2017, American companies had put at least $2.6 trillion into offshore tax shelters...Nike had $12.2 billion.... The company estimates that if its $12.2 billion was repatriated to the U.S., it would owe $4.1 billion in U.S. taxes... Designating its profits this way allows the company to avoid paying even a dime of U.S. income taxes on these profits..." - The Oregonian. More about this in a minute. The horrible murder of George Floyd was treated by the marketing industry this week as an opportunity to express sincere desire for change. Sadly, it also exposed our talent for hypocrisy. Taxation may be unpleasant. Tax dollars are often squandered on idiotic schemes. Paying taxes may reduce a corporation's returns to investors. But taxation is by far the most potent source of resources for societies to redress social ills. Taxation funds education. Taxation funds housing. Taxation funds health initiatives. Taxation funds social programs. There is no way around this -- when corporations take extraordinary measures to avoid paying taxes, they are doing extraordinary harm to citizens who have the greatest need for education, housing, health, and social programs. If brands really believe that Black Lives Matter they must stop starving our country of the resources to improve black lives by hiding their taxable profits in offshore tax havens. Like it or not, to a substantial degree, taxation is the engine that funds social justice. There will be those who say that these tax dodges are perfectly legal. In many cases they are. This fact impresses me not one bit. If you're going to use social media or paid media to pound your chest about social justice, you have a higher responsibility than just to obey the letter of the law. There is little honor in being legally compliant and ethically opportunistic. Dear business colleagues -- if you really want to help heal this country here's step one: Pay your fucking taxes. Until you're willing to do that, please instruct your marketing departments to spare us the high-minded pieties. Let's make this so simple that even a ceo can understand it: You can't be for social justice and against paying taxes. Facebook Clown Show Rolls On First, there was a "virtual walkout" by hundreds of Facebook employees protesting Facebook's publishing of Our President's wildly inappropriate posts that were widely interpreted as advocating violence. One observation: This walkout would smell a lot more like principle than politics if these protestors hadn't been asleep at the wheel for the past 10 years while FB was happily spreading all kinds of vicious shit from every flavor of basement-dwelling squid on the planet. Next, civil rights executives who met by phone with Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg said they were "stunned" by the "incomprehensible explanations" of Facebook's editorial policies. Silly them. Don't they know that Facebook's entire history is a compendium of "incomprehensible explanations?" Finally, after half a decade of being played for fools by foreign actors (looking to divide and sow discontent among the American public) Facebook decided this week it would put labels on posts by foreign "state-controlled media outlets." If you want to know more about this story, go to the dictionary and look up "too little too late." The Google Bugle Here are a few Google quickies from last week: - Google is so big and unwieldy that the right hand doesn't know what the right wrist is doing. According to Bloomberg, while actively trying to remove idiotic coronavirus conspiracy posts, their "programmatic" ad technology is placing advertising on the very sites that espouse these conspiracies. - The New York Times reports that a class action lawsuit filed by a group of marketers alleges that "Google violated federal wiretap laws when it continued to collect information about what users were doing on the internet without their permission even though they were browsing in so-called private browsing mode..." The complaint alleges that “Google tracks and collects consumer browsing history and other web activity data no matter what safeguards consumers undertake to protect their data privacy.” - Finally, three marketers are bringing an anti-trust lawsuit against Google claiming that it “leveraged its stranglehold on online search and search advertising to gain an illegal monopoly in brokering display advertising on other companies’ websites.” C'mon, they wouldn't do that! Sounds Of Silence Okay, now the fun stuff. The nice people at SilenceMedia in London are hosting an online Book Club discussion of my latest book, "Advertising For Skeptics." It's happening this coming Friday at 4pm London time (8am Pacific, 11am Eastern.) You can participate on their website. They've assembled an impressive panel of experts who will grill me on my crackpot ideas. I expect it to be a lot of fun. BTW, the latest Amazon review of "Skeptics" can be found here and, as you know, I would never link to it if it wasn't flattering. |