Economy

Multilateralism was supposed to be the great theme of the Biden presidency. No longer would the US plow its lonely furrow. Instead it would engage with the rest of the world on matters of mutual interest. Where, though, does that fit with the attempt by treasury secretary Janet Yellen today to try to set a minimum level of corporate income tax for the whole world to whole world to observe? The US is no longer withdrawing from international agreements, as it did in Trump’s day — it is doing something far more objectionable, by trying to lay down American rules for the rest of the world to follow.

A wave of woke corporatism has been sweeping America. The latest example comes courtesy of CEOs being forced to weigh in on SB-202, a Georgia bill to restructure mechanisms of the state’s voting procedures and laws. Spurred on by President Biden — a man seemingly guided by his Very Online chief of staff, who takes his cues from Twitter hashtag campaigns from the likes of the pedophile-enabling Lincoln Project — celebrities and companies are lining up to demand boycotts of Georgia, labeling the new law inhumane and an abuse of basic human rights. While appearing on CNBC, Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey called SB-202 'unacceptable' and 'a step backward'. He said the company would work to remedy the legislation, through both public and private advocacy.

On January 21, a Canadian online news outlet called the Tyee published a hit piece on Angelo Isidorou, a 24-year-old journalist for the Post Millennial, another online Canadian magazine. Isidorou had made himself a target by becoming a board member of the Non-Partisan Association, a municipal political party in Vancouver which, in spite of its name, is center-right. Isidorou’s sin, as captured on the Tyee’s front page, was that he had been photographed ‘flashing a symbol favored by hate groups’. The symbol in question was the thumb-to-index-finger ‘OK’ sign, which according to the Tyee’s reporter is a ‘widely recognized white power signal’.

Just two weeks ago, Alexi McCammond was wheeled out as the new editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue, which uses the brand of a teenage fashion magazine to sell Bolshevism and anal sex (please don’t click that) to unmarried 30-year-old white women. Now, McCammond has been laid low before she could even begin. She fell prey to one of the sorriest Twitter cancellations on record, with enemies highlighting tweets she made a full decade ago as a college freshman. ‘Give me a 2/10 on my chem problem, cross out all of my work and don't explain what I did wrong...thanks a lot stupid Asian T.A. you're great,’ said one tweet. ‘Googling how to not wake up with swollen Asian eyes,’ said another. There were a few other archaic remarks of the ‘that’s gay’ variety, and... that’s it!

A regular column by an anonymous whistleblower 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. I know this middle-aged fetishist from New York whose preferred pronouns are ‘they/them’. He’s an heterosexual man whose ‘kink’ is to dominate young girls who act as his sexual and domestic slaves.

A brave Edward Snowflake from the Vanguard Investment Management Group (over $6 trillion global assets under management!) has leaked us an image of the badge employees are asked to wear at the company so as to signal their LGBTQ+ allyship and opposition to 'white supremacy’. Confused? Let’s deconstruct this particular piece of Woke Heraldry, or ‘Flairs’ as Vanguard likes to call them. The pink triangle was once the tag used by the Nazis to identify gay men in the concentration camps and the green circle represents a ‘safe space’. Duh. Not too excited about displaying a symbol invented by literal Nazis? Tough. Silence is violence, don’t forget.

Like many Americans, I have a complicated relationship with money. I love capitalism and want to be rich — but I have deeply buried resentments towards a certain type of rich person. Reconciling those two competing feelings has been a lifelong challenge. In ways that are uncomfortable to face, I’m a populist at heart. In other words, I promise I’ll stop bitching about the system when I’m rich. I was confronted with my populist tendencies during the recent GameStop stock market rebellion by self-proclaimed ‘autists, degenerates and retards’. The members of a Reddit group, r/wallstreetbets, wreaked havoc on financial markets by driving up the price of GameStop, a ‘meme stonk’ they realized was heavily shorted by the hedge funds.

What is driving the extraordinary crypto boom we are living through? Deep down, we all know the answer: it’s the power of bluffing. Bitcoin has been a crucible of nuclear-powered gibberish since its inception. Online people have been waffling on about blockchain and ledger systems for well over a decade now — the more people pretend to know what they are saying, the higher the prices go. In recent months, with so much time on our hands, the bluffing has gone manic and crypto-currencies have gone bananas. Is it the greatest pyramid scheme ever? The reformation of western capitalism? Who knows? More importantly, who cares? Just keep blagging until the fun stops, then make out that you knew it had to end.

Three weeks after GameStop and Robinhood sent the stock market berserk, Congress is finally catching up. At noon ET, the House Financial Services Committee will hear testimony from several of the major players: Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, Citadel CEO Kenneth C. Griffin, Reddit CEO and cofounder Steve Huffman, Melvin Capital CEO Gabriel Plotkin and Keith Patrick Gill. Gill is not a CEO: he is a smalltime investor known as DeepFuckingValue on Reddit and RoaringKitty on YouTube. His posts on the r/wallstreetbets subreddit are credited with setting the GameStop saga into motion. Below is the testimony he will read later today. *** Thank you Chairwoman Waters, Ranking Member McHenry, members of the Committee. Before I go further, I want to be clear about what I am not. I am not a hedge fund.

The mandarins of Qing China claimed the Mandate of Heaven. The French noblesse d'épée tied their privileges to a thousand years of military service to the kings of France. The nobles of Spain touted their cleanliness of blood, untainted by Jewish or Moorish ancestry. In America, no such backwards justifications are needed. Our elites claim their supremacy on intellectual merit, the power of their brains and the breadth of their knowledge. And to everyone’s misfortune, they really believe it. But how do you prove intellectual superiority past the age of 22, when it can no longer be measured with letter grades and test scores? Warren Buffett and Bill Gates can at least point to their enormous piles of wealth as evidence of intellectual horsepower. But what can journalists do?

Is there anyone left who still believes in sound government finances? After the 2008/09 financial crisis there was a lively debate between fiscal doves, who wanted government spend its way out of recession, and hawks, who thought it a good idea that governments at least attempt to live within their means, because nasty things would happen in the longer term if they did not. Such arguments seem almost quaint now. Where is the resistance now that Joe Biden is about to spray the US economy with a $1.9 trillion stimulus package, including helicopter money of $1,400 per household? In 2008/09, there was some justification in that economic activity was extremely weak and many households were in debt — you could argue that the economy needed a lift, at whatever price.

The Reddit story — in which a ragtag army of small investors have executed a spectacular short squeeze against hedge-fund goliaths — can be interpreted two ways. Some say it’s another populist citadel-storming in the spirit of the moment, but this time an admirable one because its target is ‘Wall Street’, which everyone hates: the so-called ‘stick it to the man’ version. Others see a fever of price-chasing, part-driven by lockdown despair, akin to crypto-mania and the surge in online gambling; in this version, it has nothing to do with serious investment but is a sure signal of more market turmoil ahead.

The American Spectator Foundation has complained that its trademark is being infringed by The Spectator in the United States. The Spectator is the oldest magazine in the world: founded in 1828 and read in America since at least the middle of the 19th century when, alone among influential British publications, it supported the North and the anti-slavery movement in the American Civil War. It has been sold in the US under that name continuously since that time. The American Spectator, previously called the Alternative, was founded in 1967, very much a publishing newcomer compared with The Spectator. It was not the first US publication to refer to The Spectator in its name. Indeed, an earlier journal, also called the American Spectator, was founded in 1932.

No one man has exposed the ineptitude of our government more staggeringly in the last few months than Dave Portnoy. Naturally federal experts such as $416,000-a-year Dr Fauci and hypocritical politicians such as Gov. Andrew Cuomo were doing a fine job displaying the depths of their idiocy all on their own. But right when it seemed impossible for the bureaucrats in DC to look worse — well, the founder of the podcasting empire Barstool Sports made it happen. As Congress tried to provide COVID relief for struggling Americans, they concocted a ludicrously pork-laden bill that included $10 million for gender programs in Pakistan along with over $1 billion in foreign aid. Their pathetic attempt to help the American people took months to draft and lard up.

It’s headline news at the New York Times: television is getting less gay! America’s paper of record may be uninterested in obscure matters such as Hunter Biden’s laptop or an Intelligence Committee Democrat falling into a Chinese honeypot, but it will always be there for the stories that really matter, such as de facto press releases from activist groups: ‘For the first time in five years, LGBTQ representation on television decreased, an annual report by the LGBT advocacy organization GLAAD has found. The percentage of regular characters scheduled to appear on primetime scripted broadcast television who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer decreased to 9.1 percent in the 2020-21 season, from the previous year’s record high of 10.2 percent.

Less than a week away from his inauguration, President-elect Joe Biden has announced his proposed roadmap to navigate COVID-19: a $1.9 trillion stimulus package to provide direct support to families, roll out a mass-inoculation program and send hundreds of billions of dollars the way of businesses and local governments. It is being framed as an extension of last month’s package, which after months of gridlock and political infighting was finally passed by Congress. This near $2 trillion more in spending, we are told, will ‘finish the job’. If it passes, every eligible American will receive an additional $1,400 direct payment, boosting December’s commitment of $600 to $2,000 in total.