Economy

On October 3, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, based in Washington DC, released a huge trove of 11.9 million leaked documents pertaining to the wealth of hundreds of world leaders, public officials, and billionaires. Like the Panama Papers that were leaked in 2016, the Pandora Papers detail vast offshore holdings, perhaps as much as $32 trillion, that have allowed the beneficiaries to avoid taxes that would have been due had the wealth been held at home. For instance, a United Kingdom company controlled by Cherie Blair, the wife of former prime minister Tony Blair, acquired a £6.45 million ($8.8 million) property in London not directly but by purchasing a British Virgin Islands company.

I just read a headline on the Daily Mail (I know, I know, I get what I deserve): '[Singer] Demi Lovato says they are no longer sure they want children — admitting life in their 30s without kids is "pretty nice" — as they open up about coming out as nonbinary and pansexual.' I rubbed my eyes and put in my monocle. Surely someone for whom English is a second language wrote this article? I squinted. 'Demi Lovato is no longer sure that parenthood lies in their future.' As intrigued as I was to learn more about Demi’s reproductive longings, neither my grammatical standards nor my sanity could take any more. Off I sped as fast as I could to the American Diner to recover my faith in humanity.

If you’re reading this in El Salvador, you’re probably taking a break from street protests against President Nayib Bukele’s adoption of bitcoin as legal tender, enacted last week. This small, heavily indebted Central American republic abandoned its own currency, the colón, 20 years ago in favor of using the US dollar — and has enjoyed relative financial stability ever since. The populist right-wing president’s insistence on shifting to the unregulated, ultra-volatile virtual currency favored by gamblers and money-launderers will supposedly bring savings of $400 million a year in commissions on the remittances from expatriate workers on which his economy depends.

To be chosen as one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people is usually an accolade worth fighting for. Yet this year, it seems to be the celebrity equivalent of the booby prize. Cockburn imagines that it was put together by various subversive elements within the publication who hoped to see the mass ridicule that its various choices, both of subjects and of writers, have led to. They will not be disappointed. That an airbrushed photograph of Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex, takes pride of place in the ‘Icons’ section says all that you need to know. He, poor boy, looks as if he has been captured by a militant group and is being made to put out a hostage video, while she — quite literally — is wearing the pants.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics issued its August jobs report this morning and the numbers are pretty dismal. While the unemployment rate dropped 0.2 percent to 5.2 percent, the number of new jobs created was only 235,000, far below expectations of about 700,000. In June the number was 962,000 and in July a whopping 1.1 million. And the unemployment was not spread evenly across the population. Unemployment went down for adult men and whites, but black unemployment went up significantly, from 8.2 percent in July to 8.8 percent in August. The surge in the Delta variant of the coronavirus is widely thought responsible.

For nearly two years, Americans have engaged in a great woke experiment of cannibalizing themselves. American civilization has invested massive labor, capital and time in an effort constantly to flagellate itself for not being perfect. Yet neither America’s resilience nor its resources are infinite. We are now beginning to see the consequences of what happens when premodern tribalism absorbs Americans. There are concrete consequences when ideology governs policy or when we take for granted the basics of life to pursue its trappings. Who cares whether the blow-dried media is woke if it cannot report the truth and keep politicians honest? Once journalists became progressive poodles rather than the watchdogs of government, the Biden administration had no fear of audit.

When a tech guy named Hamish McKenzie first reached out to me in early 2018 to see if I would try out his new newsletter platform Substack, because he thought I could make some money from it, I was skeptical. When I finally wrote him back, in May that year, I said, ‘I’m slightly leery of devoting much time to anything that won’t guarantee pay — I know that sounds somehow crude, but it’s just the reality of being a freelance writer. My book has forced me to do less freelancing than I would have otherwise, and while I’m fine for now, I do need to make sure to budget my time in a responsible way.’ A few years later, I’m exceptionally grateful that I took the plunge. I’m also a bit worried about where it’s nudging me as a writer and a thinker.

You’ve probably heard by now that effective October 1, 2021, OnlyFans will be banning sexually explicit content on its site that is all but exclusively known for hosting sexually explicitly content. OnlyFans has done what every start-up aspires to, at least in one sense. Both consumers and creators of content on OnlyFans have transcended mere ‘user profile’-status and have penetrated the mainstream, becoming infinitely stereotyped, talked about and joked about archetypes. When someone quips that a woman ‘probably has an OnlyFans’, it doesn’t matter if she actually has one or not. That kind of signifier means something. OnlyFans has left a real mark on Western culture; something that few tech companies are able to achieve.

Cockburn understands the appeal of communism. There are times when even he has dreamt of holding property in common — that ill-fated purchase of a timeshare in Cancun, for instance. So he understands the plight of the young idealists at Current Affairs, a magazine founded in 2016 with the mission to ‘help usher in a glorious era of democratic socialism’. Like the Soviet Union under Stalin, Current Affairs is the private kingdom of one man, in this case the dandy communist Nathan Robinson. For five years, Robinson has been all over Current Affairs like a cheap suit, while a small team of deluded volunteers has labored in his salt mine, generating content for the greater glory of the revolution, and their leader, the Potemkin page-turner. But even five-year plans go awry.

It’s very unlikely that I’d be a reasonably successful journalist today if I hadn’t come from an upper-middle-class family. Fresh out of college, I got a series of non- or low-paying internships. It wasn’t until spring of the following year that I found a staff position with benefits (and a salary of $33,000, which at the time seemed like plenty to live on). Because my parents provided financial support and because I had no debt, I was able to gain the experience and connections that helped launch my career. Somewhere, surely, there is a 37-year-old who is very similar to me and who wanted to be a journalist, but who is now doing something else because it just wasn’t feasible, financially.

Is renaming the seasons a sign of late-stage capitalism? Or empire? Or decadence? Whatever the case, our cultural commissars have spoken and they’ve decided that seasonal epithets are back in. No longer is it acceptable to wistfully recall the summer of ’69; we must now commemorate it as Raspy Canadian Dreamboat Summer or some such thing. The Chinese have long categorized their years according to animals — dogs and rabbits and tigers and so on. Not us. What we’ve done is to head to the Narcissus pool, hold up a calendar, and demand that the months and equinoxes look a little more like us. This began two years ago when someone called Megan Thee Stallion released a rap single called ‘Hot Girl Summer’.

'Hey, that’s some nice Facebook traffic you’re getting. Would be a shame if something happened to it.' That’s the tone, more or less, from a Monday NPR article 'profiling' Ben Shapiro’s phenomenally successful Daily Wire news brand. The average New York Times article on Facebook collects just under 2,000 likes, shares, and comments. The average Daily Wire link receives nearly 40,000. At the peak of the 2020 election, Daily Wire articles averaged almost 100,000 engagements. No other publication comes close. And all of this really bothers NPR. For 2,000 petulant words, NPR does everything it can to imply that the Daily Wire should be kicked off Facebook. Why? Because...because...it’s just not fair! Why do people read their articles more than ours?

Millions of unshaved lesbians are celebrating this week after Victoria's Secret decided to go all-in on marketing with a butch over-opinionated soccer star instead of naughty, scantily-clad models. The lingerie giant announced Wednesday they were cutting ties with their iconic Victoria's Secret Angels, the tall Barbie doll-esque models sporting fluffy wings. In their place are Megan Rapinoe, 35, along with six other female athletes, as well as transgender and plus-size women for the ‘VS Collective’. Hot, right? https://twitter.com/sapna/status/1405270760994709505 Rapinoe, a member of the US women’s national soccer team, made a name for herself in 2016 after she kneeled during the national anthem in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick.

At the height of the COVID pandemic, Microsoft workers ‘chose’ to sleep in data centers, according to a company executive. Last year, Microsoft directed employees to work from home after the virus landed in the US. In October 2020, a company internal memo announced more employees could work from home permanently. As cases and deaths continued to climb, however, some employees were so crucial that they had to sleep at locations hosting the company’s public cloud infrastructure and online services such as Microsoft Teams. 'I heard amazing stories about people actually sleeping in data centers,' said Kristen Roby Dimlow, Microsoft's corporate vice president, CNBC reported.

As that peerless philosopher of the 20th century Marvin Gaye once pointed out, there are three things in life of which we can all be certain: taxes, death and trouble. Cockburn has long admired the late soul legend’s lyrics, but this week, that weary little aperçu has rung somewhat hollowly in his mind. You will have no doubt read of the damning report published this week by ProPublica, investigating the murky relationship between the taxable assets and actual taxes paid by some of America’s billionaires. If so, you probably agree that it makes for thoroughly depressing reading.

The New York Times fiercely defended editorial board member Mara Gay this week after she faced ridicule on Twitter for comments she made on MSNBC's Morning Joe. Gay had told the Lucy and Desi of cable news that she was 'disturbed' by the sight of American flags flying high in Long Island on Tuesday. She apparently witnessed anti-Joe Biden flags standing alongside the Stars and Stripes. This horrid scene prompted her to fear that Donald Trump's supporters did not see a difference between 'whiteness' and 'Americanness'. 'We have to figure out how to get every American a place at the table in this democracy...how to separate Americanness, America, from whiteness,' Gay said. 'I was really disturbed,' she continued. 'I saw...

Donald Trump wasn’t a man for international agreements. Just imagine for a moment, though, that it was him rather than Joe Biden who had just persuaded the G7 to back a minimum global corporation tax rate. Would it be hailed as a great breakthrough for fairness, a sideswipe against amoral global corporations?  Like hell it would. On the contrary, the same deal pulled off by Trump would have been attacked as a charter for the big tax avoiders to carry on as they are — as well as a bullying attempt by the US to divert more tax revenues to its own shores at the expense of smaller countries with competitive tax rates. There are two elements to the agreement reached over the weekend. The first is the proposed minimum tax rate of 15 percent.

Montpellier, France I got a letter from Joe Biden, which doesn’t happen every day. In the envelope was a check, made out to me, for $1,400. The letter is headed THE WHITE HOUSE WASHINGTON and dated April 22 although it has taken some time to drop into the boîte aux lettres due to the President experiencing confusion over my address. ‘My fellow American,’ he began. Although I am not one I did once work there and paid Social Security contributions, apparently qualifying me for the President’s generosity. ‘I am pleased to inform you,’ he continued, ‘that because of the American rescue plan, a direct payment was issued to you.’ Having attracted attention, Joe, my new best friend, continues. ‘This has been a hard time...brighter days are ahead...