CCP-Lite, With Pride Month!
CCP-Lite, With Pride Month!
Episode 5. Tablet magazine takes down the 'China Class'. Yes, the market will rally more on China-style stimulus, a Davos Man fave! Meanwhile, Smartypants reminds us the media owns DC.
Hi there.
Welcome to Double Plus. It’s a Chinese saying. It means something that is really good. I hope this is really good. It’s in beta mode. And it’s free.
We are a big picture macro investing newsletter. We focus on Davos Man and what he’s up to in this big bad world of ours. He’s the guy (and the gal) that attends the World Economic Forum and hangs with Hollywood celebrities on yachts. We don’t like him (her or they).
Today, I highlight a thought-provoking article that ran in Tablet magazine. It shows that we are on the right track in calling out the real problem in the economy and in society: it’s the asshole tyranny of the Party of Davos.
Join us. We are a group of American and China investors jawboning. Maybe you’ll learn something.
China Is Not Your Problem. These Guys Are.
If you are paying attention to non-traditional media, Substackers (like me) with large followings (unlike me) are calling out the corporate media and I love it. It is better to remind people that these ‘journalists’ are all a dime a dozen; what matters in the critique is not Jake Tapper’s latest asinine Tweet. What matters is AT&T/Warner and NBC Universal and Viacom and Comcast. CNN’s Tapper is merely a poppable soap bubble in the mega-corporate spin cycle.
Guys like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi have been pointing it out incessantly over the last few weeks: the media is the virus. I’ve worked in this business for over 20 years — from NPR and The Atlantic as an intern, to Salon and the Boston Globe as a freelancer, to staff foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Brazil. Their assessment of the industry is spot on and they are now sharing this with a wide audience. Good. You should subscribe to their Substacks. They have more time on their hands to “write good shit”. I’m just raw.
Beyond these important revelations about the corporate media being popularized by those with media street cred, what else is happening in our society as we come to understand the messaging of the powers?
Academics like Michael Lind have shown some light on what he refers to as the “managerial elite”. Or what I call the Party of Davos (nod to Steve Bannon). Lind’s book “The New Class War” is a must-read.
But a recent article by a man named Lee Smith writing in Tablet is even more of a must-read. It’s the shortened, driving too fast, Phil Collins I Don’t Care Anymore version of Lind’s warnings. It hits the powerful right in the mouth.
If you want to have a more intellectual understanding of the Party of Davos and their relationship with China, read Lee Smith’s long essay in Tablet today.
“And because it was true that China was the source of the China Class’ power, the novel coronavirus coming out of Wuhan became the platform for its coup de grace. So Americans became prey to an anti-democratic elite that used the coronavirus to demoralize them; lay waste to small businesses; leave them vulnerable to rioters who are free to steal, burn, and kill; keep their children from school and the dying from the last embrace of their loved ones; and desecrate American history, culture, and society; and defame the country as systemically racist in order to furnish the predicate for why ordinary Americans in fact deserved the hell that the elite’s private and public sector proxies had already prepared for them.”
Smith likens the ‘China Class’ – let’s name some of them, shall we: Michael Bloomberg, Jeff Bezos, the late Steve Jobs and Tim Cook – to the Spartans of Greece. The Spartans hated the Democratic system of Athens. The riff-raff (us) had too much say in how things were run. So the Spartans eventually took them over, gave them less say, and humiliated them. They deserved to be humiliated because they were gross, stupid, backward bums and reprobates who have all sorts of phobias and “isms”.
Using modern fiction as our muse, it’s less like Smith’s ancient Greece and more like Panem, the futuristic America-like, crass entertainment-obsessed country in the Hunger Games.
Is there any surprise that wandering minstrels like Lady Gaga, who attended and sang at a heavily fortified Inauguration Day event wearing an outfit with a large golden dove of peace pinned to her lapel, was compared to the A-listers from The Capitol in that dystopian novel. Yes, her pin did look like the Mocking Jay.
Like the Hunger Games, we have been hearing from our media personalities — many of the most famous among them being nothing but willing (or perhaps unwilling) useful idiots of transnational corporate power and billionaires — just how “The Capitol” is now safe and protected from les miserables, those who must be droned.
Honestly, the only thing missing from Lee’s essay is to state what is becoming increasingly obvious: the class of people of which he speaks all believe that the only real problem with the China Communist Party style of running a country is that it doesn’t allow for gay pride parades. If the CCP allowed for Pride Month, even the Uyghur genocide would be fine.
Instead, they can placate the most educated among us on multiculturalism and sell us on their kindness with their ads full of a United Nations cast all happily comingling, ready for a bright future, a future that is increasingly global, and void of them, their families, their neighborhoods.
But it’s okay, because they’ve sold you on their acceptance of pronouns as they take your jobs, your livelihood, and shut you up, and then blame you for it.
You can learn to code. You can make solar panels.
These are the guys Smith is writing about, quite precisely, in his Tablet essay.
This is a problem for investors if you think about it. If you’re on the wrong side of a trade – like the Reddit guys, betting against the wrong people, or told to be hopeful when the rug was about to be pulled out from under you, you will be crushed not by just being on the wrong side of the trade, but by corporate and official powers all lining up against you. This looks new to me and has to be watched.
See GameStop and AMC and Nokia. I’m waiting for the day they ban Bitcoin. Decentralization scares them. Like the CCP, they want control. When that day comes, it will be cheered in The Capitol, and by the Lady Gagas of Late Night. Millions of us will watch and laugh.
In the meantime, we will try to be alert to these things and keep you in the know.
From Tablet on the ‘China Class’
“What seems clear is that Biden’s inauguration marks the hegemony of an American oligarchy that sees its relationship with China as a shield and sword against their own countrymen. Like Athens’ Thirty Tyrants, they are not simply contemptuous of a political system that recognizes the natural rights of all its citizens that are endowed by our creator; they despise in particular the notion that those they rule have the same rights they do. Witness their newfound respect for the idea that speech should only be free for the enlightened few who know how to use it properly. Like Critias and the pro-Sparta faction, the new American oligarchy believes that democracy’s failures are proof of their own exclusive right to power—and they are happy to rule in partnership with a foreign power that will help them destroy their own countrymen.
“What does history teach us about this moment? The bad news is that the Thirty Tyrants exiled notable Athenian democrats and confiscated their property while murdering an estimated 5% of the Athenian population. The good news is that their rule lasted less than a year.”
The Wall Street Watercooler:
Rally Without End. Amen.
In the meantime, the market is juiced on stimulus news and we are going to base our short-term decisions on that. I am looking to pick our spots just before momentum builds, or build into holdings where momentum is strong for the longer term. I want to buy stocks that I can hold for a year or more, but if they’re rockets, I will program stops and take the capital gains hit.
From what I am hearing from everyone, even the bears, is that Treasury and the Fed will provide liquidity for the rest of 1H21, so I think you can ignore the sour grapes. Program your stops at deep discounts, like 20% drops. Because this market has legs.
My sources are global investors. Though they invest in the U.S., too, a lot of them have been looking outside where things are a little cheaper.
Investors can consider using pockets of volatility to ease into emerging markets and build long-term positions. We like China. India is too expensive.
We keep hearing this on India. And on China, we heard this a week ago from JP Morgan, only we don’t like their ETF trade.
We are only buying the KraneShares China Healthcare (KURE) or KraneShares China Internet and E-Commerce (KWEB). I only own KURE. It’s doing well and I’m up around 30% last I checked. I’ll buy more but only on deeper dips of 5% or more now. KURE is my only China trade. I think you can hold it forever, but right now it’s trading at an all-time high and is overbought. Don’t short it. But keep an eye on it as one of the two best China ETFs out there. It’s a relatively new ETF so it doesn’t have a lot of history. We don’t know if $40 is too expensive. This could just be getting started for all we know. China needs medicine and its biotech industry is part of the Made in China 2025 plan. This isn’t going anywhere, even if the China and U.S. decoupled.
For my foreign readers, I am paying close attention to policy and President Biden’s climate agenda. I want to get off the beaten path, though, and not get too crazy with stocks that have rocketed from the Davos Agenda’s ‘Great Reset’ – like Blink Charging (BLNK). I made my money in that one and I’m out.
Here’s a trade to consider that is cheap: I bought American Manganese a few months ago when it was trading under $0.20 a share. This is a Toronto company that has developed a technology that can recycle lithium, cobalt, nickel, and manganese out of car and other batteries. It’s now trading over $1.
Because I bought it so cheap, I am not so sure I will buy more at $1 just yet. This thing is up over 20% in two days, and I don’t like to chase. But if it falls under $1, I’d recommend a simple 100 share purchase. I think you can sit on it and watch it for a while and not worry about losing too much money.
Climate change is going to be a core of the Biden Administration so any stock seen as climate-positive will do well. Most of them are overpriced.
How am I looking, guys? This is the Toronto listing.
Previous readers also got this pick idea from me early on. I said that Big Tech brands are burning out. I picked MercadoLibre (MELI) over Daddy Warbucks’ Amazon (AMZN).
How’s it looking? I don’t shop at Amazon anymore because I’m opposed to corporate tyranny and censorship. If I shop online, it’s at Wayfair, Etsy, Rakuten, Barnes & Noble, or specialty catalogs. (I’m a particular fan of Carbon2Cobalt).
Lastly, even a guy going bearish admits:
If the government is going to write unprecedentedly large checks for some in the market, then it can produce one last desperate leg in the rally. I have no doubt some of this new round of stimulus will do just that.
On Corporate Media and Washington, by Smartypants.
“The government has almost no influence over the media like you think they do. It’s like asking ‘how do the Democrats or the Republicans convince Amazon to try and maximize its profits?’ The media are huge global corporations that share the interest of the multinational corporate sector that dominates the government. The government cannot tell the media what to do because the companies that own the media are very influential in Washington. The coming impeachment trial is quite exciting for them. Besides the late-night hours and romances in the newsroom that will take place over the time period of roughly two weeks to Trump’s pending censure, it is all quite profitable for corporate ownership. You keep watching. It’s better just not to watch. I know I won’t watch. If you don’t watch, they lose money. Naturally, they will just blame you for not being smart enough to tune in to the modern-day equivalent of the Ministry of Truth. But tuning out is an individual’s biggest weapon against the corporate media messengers.”
Closing Credits:
I Don’t Care Anymore
Well, you can tell everyone I’m a dumb disgrace/drag my name all over the place/I don’t care anymore