America Has Cost Europe Too Much
Americans are not "generous" to be in NATO and send troops to American bases in Europe. They receive so much in return, not just commercially. See, Europe became culturally and commercially immersed in Americanism and it is entertaining abusive lawsuits from Americans - to the point taxpayers need to foot very large bills.
But when it comes to technology, GAFAM is a huge liability. A lot of European systems are now virtually controlled at several levels by the Pentagon in the US. With a "keyturn tyranny" situation, the assumptions made before about amicable leadership across the Atlantic are breaking down.
Countries ought to be controlling all their own systems. It's not a question of "anti-Americanism"; wanting to control one's system or one's destiny is a basic route towards true autonomy. A lot of our politicians have given away all their sensitive communications to the US and are still doing this every day. This is espionage in progress. Remember what The US did in Portugal.
Meanwhile the US is constructing more military bases abroad, but in quasi "data centre" clothing, usually at the expense of taxpayers at the occupied countries. As someone has just pointed out in response to an American oligarch-owned (NewsWeek) propaganda piece:
Follow the money. The article is propaganda because it carefully censors the money. About 4/5 of the states offer tax incentives for data centers, so its essentially a transfer of money from the states taxpayers to trillion dollar AI companies. Sort of an inverse Robin Hood thing. No one can explain why the wealthiest corporations on the planet "need" taxpayer handouts. Its kind of like how Walmart doesn't have to pay it employees enough to survive because they sign up their employees for food stamps and welfare programs in general. Slaves must be made to work! Although at least planation owners paid for their properties meals, walmart doesn't even do that. So yeah, thats one reason DCs are unpopular. The utah example is some weird 100%/80% property tax abatement. The taxpayers of Utah should have to pay for trillion dollar companies to build a shack in their city because if they don't ... they'll just have lower taxes and we can't have that?
The next reason is the country is still covered with failed mcmansion subdivisions and such. This will be the next wave of failed real estate. There's a lot of semi-accounting fraud going on about 40 year depreciation cycles and similar nonsense... all those buildings are going to be empty in a decade. The locals can get stuck with the bill to police and demolish the abandoned properties. This is a pretty big issue; my SiL moved out of a semi-rural town that was getting a data center that would bankrupt the town WHEN the town has to demolish it. It would have been by far the largest building in town, huge surface area, no jobs for the locals, of course. Just a giant white elephant they'll have to pay to get rid of in 10 years when the bubble pops and the town is literally too small to afford it. She moved down the road to a town without a data center hanging around it's neck. Its too bad, it was a nice little small town and then the bankrupt AI company destroys the town, it'll be a huge, pointless loss. Someone's going to have to pay for all the power lines and fiber lines to that town and its not going to be the trillion dollar bubble company that no longer exists LOL. Even better, imminent domain the previously working businesses so they won't even have that after the bubble pops.
So you can tell its propaganda because it discusses free floating anger caused by no reason at all probably just ignorance who knows why they're angry. But talk to the people affected and its the usual "follow the $$$$$$" and angry about bribes, and that story is being intentionally censored in "journalism" discussions.
Really, it's just a corruption thing. Fill up the local council members re-election funds to F-over their constituents by approving a project that is wildly inappropriate and often fraudulent (donate to my re-election campaign and I'll set your property tax rate to 0% totally unrelated separate activities and totally not a payoff corruption situation). How much money does it take for a politician to F over their constituents? Apparently not that much. Some take the money and run, move up in politics maybe. Some get swatted down when the angry voters react. The next batch will just take bribes from the same sources so they're not winning all THAT much. Whomever replaces this Adams guy from the story after the election this fall will just take the bribes next year.
The anger is only being taken out on the politicians. At some point, prosecutors may or may not go after the companies offering the bribes. Right, now they are not. But the wheels of justice grind slowly but very finely, who knows, maybe a decade after the bubble pops and all that land is ruined, the prosecutors will get around to filling the prisons with corporate criminals. Right now, they have free reign and only the politicians are feeling the heat.
We wrote a lot more about this recently. █
Image source: Five, ten and twenty pounds banknotes