Economy

It’s June and the biggest corporations on the planet want you to know that they are celebrating gay Pride — unless you live somewhere like Saudi Arabia in which case they couldn’t care less. On their main Twitter page, Procter & Gamble have put a Pride flag in their banner and in their pinned Tweet they proudly proclaim: 'We strive to be a champion of #LGBTQVisibility year-round, using our voice to drive acceptance, inclusion and a love for humanity.' I guess there are no gay people in Saudi Arabia to champion, which must be why P&G’s Saudi Twitter handle has not a single rainbow flag in sight and a pinned tweet simply wishing people a blessed Ramadan. But that is the beauty of corporate wokewashing.

Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti announced Friday that they were leaving the Hill, where they helmed the popular morning show Rising, and going independent. It seemed like a shock, considering the Hill's YouTube subscriber count ballooned with Krystal and Saagar in front of the cameras. But sources close to the show tell Cockburn that the duo's departure was a long time coming. The problem may have been political. Krystal and Saagar started cohosting Rising together two years ago and began covering populist issues from a left and right perspective, focusing on areas of agreement between the two sides of the political spectrum. The pair earned a New York Times media profile and appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience.

Is President Joe Biden living up to expectations? It’s hard to say, since the expectations generated on his campaign trail were so murky. Biden made plenty of promises on the stump but only one thing was ever clear: he wasn’t Donald Trump. Beyond that, no one was really certain what iteration of Biden would enter the Oval Office on Inauguration Day. A pragmatic moderate or a progressive ideologue? A return-to-normal steady hand or a malarkey-scourging bomb thrower? The law-and-order author of the PATRIOT Act or the 'Black Lives Matter' anti-racist he suddenly morphed into last summer? Biden was so defined by who he wasn’t that no one ever quite worked out who he was. Now we have our answer. Whatever moderation was once attributed to him has been quickly abandoned.

In his late-middle age, my father cultivated more of the interests of the old neighborhood. His kitchen overflowed with pasta makers and deli slicers. His prep table was taken over by a home wine-making operation; we ate our meals beside a glass carboy as it bubbled up fermented gas. And scattered about the living room, tucked in the bookcases and stashed behind the coffee table, he positioned an array of locked cases and bags containing a growing collection of rifles, pistols and shotguns. The acquisitions that came to fill our Upper West Side apartment mainly came from the shops around Little Italy. Home winemaking was once common among Italian Americans. So too was a well-developed sense for gun culture.

It’s 2021, and as your new Spectator media columnist I’m here to tell you that the American media is a disaster. It’s not that there aren’t still many exceptionally talented reporters and editors doing good work, against all odds — there are. It’s that the overall scene is being destroyed. Newspapers are on the verge of extinction. Newer, supposedly more agile online-only outlets are shedding staff or shuttering as well. No one has come close to developing a replacement for the funding model that kept journalism humming along nicely until the internet came along and broke everything. Of course, the destruction has birthed creation. Journalistic startups pop up frequently, though few do anything that seems worthwhile and sustainable.

It wasn’t the exact same speech, but the words were familiar and the message was identical. President Biden addressed the disappointing April jobs report on Monday, just as he did on Friday. Economists had expected the economy to create as many as one million jobs in that month, but employers added just 266,000. Biden insists that everything will be all right. It takes time to recover from a once-in-a-century pandemic, he said, urging patience both days and no doubt sensing the political danger a slowing economy puts on his ambitious infrastructure package and other spending proposals. On Friday, the president asserted that his $1.9 trillion stimulus package was a long-term play: 'We never thought that after the first 50 or 60 days everything would be fine.

'There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money,' is an insight the famed biographer James Boswell attributed to Samuel Johnson. Clients of the late Bernie Madoff, however, might take issue. Over four decades, Madoff, acclaimed as the greatest fraudster of them all, ran a Ponzi scheme that swindled 40,000 people, including his closest friends, out of $65 billion. But if 'getting money' is among the most innocent of callings, America has more than its fair share of the goodly people who excel at it. According to Forbes's 35th annual ranking of billionaires, last year witnessed a population explosion. Some 660 new billionaires were added to the number for a total of 2,755. And more than one in every four billionaires is an American.

President Biden wants to nearly double the tax on income from capital gains, currently at 20 percent, to 39.6 percent. Add to that the 3.8 percent Obamacare surcharge and you’re up to 43.4 percent. Many states tax capital gains as well and in 13 of them (plus the District of Columbia) the total tax on capital gains would be over 50 percent with the proposed new federal rate. In California it would be a staggering 56.7 percent. But it gets worse. Unlike the tax on regular income, the capital gains tax is not indexed for inflation. So with long-held assets, much of the gain is illusory. For instance, if you bought an asset in 1971 for $50,000 and sold it this year for $1,000,000, you would owe taxes on a nominal capital gain of $950,000. At 56.

The end of the 27-year marriage of Bill and Melinda Gates looks tidier, so far, than Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s parting from his ex-wife MacKenzie Scott, but will no doubt turn into another fee fountain for Seattle’s legal fraternity. Melinda French was a manager at Microsoft, the software giant created and driven by Bill, when the two met in 1987 — and is widely credited with turning him from a hardcore techie and ruthless competitor into a mellower, more admirable human being. The $50 billion charity they created together has become the flagbearer for ‘venture philanthropy’, which is the application of large-scale private funds to address global problems, particularly in healthcare, that governments and market forces fail to solve.

What the stupidest thing you will hear today? Here’s one way to improve your odds at an accurate answer: who is the stupidest television commentator currently polluting the airwaves? If you said 'Don Lemón™’, you are hot on the trail. When I first encountered the CNN talking head, I thought he was just the latest embarrassing affirmative action hire. How could anyone take this unpleasant, unremittingly partisan hack seriously? But it soon became clear that Lemón (accent on the 'o’) was something special. It was partly the brittle touchiness, partly the steady emission of self-satisfied entitlement. Mostly, though, it was the stupidity, unwritten by ignorance and fired by adamantine self-certainty. The latest instance is one of the best.

In December 2016 I was speaking at a conference in London. Much of the discussion, unsurprisingly, gravitated toward Donald Trump’s recent election as president. It meant, I noted, that an outspoken free-trade skeptic would be in the White House. At that point a bright young French economist turned to me and said, ‘Mon ami, I thought that free trade was a done deal on the right. Apparently, it isn’t.’ As it turns out, it wasn’t just free trade that much of the American right was on the brink of rejecting. A systematic questioning of the central place assumed by free markets in conservative thought and policies since the 1970s, in the United States and the broader Anglosphere, was well underway.

A regular column by an anonymous whistle-blower operating deep within the heart of the Social Justice Movement. To protect their identity, they will go under the code-name ‘They/Them’. Wokeyleaks is a confidential news leak organization for anyone who wishes to divulge classified information (and hilarious anecdotes) about woke culture without fear of getting canceled. To any would-be Edward Snowflakes out there: leak your woke-culture war crimes to wokeyleaks@protonmail.com. We promise to protect our sources. A friend of mine who knows about my secret double life as a woke whistleblower for The Spectator asked me the other day how I became so right-wing. I answered that it wasn’t me that changed, it was the left.

The Spectator and The American Spectator are pleased to announce the settlement of the recent lawsuit between the parties. The Spectator and The American Spectator are independent publications and have been available in the United States for many decades. Historically, The Spectator has focused primarily on UK politics and affairs while The American Spectator has focused primarily on US politics and affairs. This arrangement has worked well and the publishers have even considered each other to be more friends than competitors. The Spectator has recently decided to launch new publications with a focus on US politics and affairs.

The American Recovery Plan Act: $1.9 trillion. The American Jobs Plan: $2 trillion. The American Family Plan $1.5 trillion. It’s fair to say that the Biden administration’s attempts to transform the country are adding up. We keep being told, by the very enthusiastic pro-Democrat press corps, not to underestimate the radicalism of the new president, and Joe Biden is eager to prove the point. He really is proposing to remold the American economy and his government is wasting little time. He and his advisers clearly take the FDR comparisons seriously. But the trouble with gargantuan government spending is that, even in the topsy-turvy world of pandemic economics, the people of the country eventually have to foot the bill.

Billionaire soccer club owners are being accused of self-interest and greed — and I for one am shocked. News of the proposed European Super League stunned sports fans worldwide this weekend. Twelve of Europe’s most historically successful clubs are proposing the formation of a 20-team league to become the new top tier of European competition, superseding the UEFA Champions League and Europa League. The ‘founding members’ of the ESL cannot be relegated — which the British press has dubbed an ‘NFL model’. That doesn’t seem like a fair comparison — the NFL is much more egalitarian. The American sports leagues may not have relegation, but they do operate a draft system which helps keep the rosters even over a 15-year period.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s May 2021 World edition.  Ron DeSantis was smeared by the media. He was never going to take it lying down. When 60 Minutes aired a laughably dishonest report implying he’d operated a pay-for-play vaccine distribution scheme in Florida, America’s most pugnacious governor fired back. The ‘smear merchants’ at CBS News were pushing ‘horse manure,’ he said. ‘That’s why nobody trusts corporate media. They are a disaster in what they are doing.’ That a major news outlet blatantly lied about a conservative governor isn’t surprising. Far more interesting is DeSantis’s choice of words there: ‘corporate media’. A departure, that.

No one likes to waste a good crisis, and the digital-payments industry is certainly trying its hardest to spin the narrative that COVID-19 is about to deliver the coup de grâce to cash. Various lobbying efforts culminated in a recent CNBC report claiming we have all switched to payment apps to avoid catching the disease from dollar bills. A ‘cashless customer’, Heima Sritharan, supposedly speaks for the entire millennial generation: ‘Not that I was using cash that much before, but I find that during Covid especially, I just don’t want to use cash as much because of the germs aspect.’ The report quotes a figure from the Pew Research Center suggesting that 34 percent of consumers under the age of 50 went the previous week without making a single purchase with cash.