GAMESTOP AND WALLSTREETBETS ARE A MOST ILLUMINATING DEBUT OF THE BIDEN ERA: 66% of Voters Believe Insiders Manipulate Stock Market.
Related: The New Americans.
Here, in other words, was Occupy Wall Street in action, but maybe a hundred times more effective: ordinary people protesting against the financialization of the U.S. economy by taking collective action to squeeze the short-sellers, saving companies they cared about and saving thousands of jobs belonging to the people who work at those companies, while forcing the suits to disgorge some part of the money they were making by treating the market like a giant video game and squeezing the life out of companies for profit. Give the money back to the people! And hats off to them boyz and girlz willing to show their faith in collective action by putting their measly day-trading accounts on the line. What a perfectly American act. What a demonstration of collective solidarity in action at a time of increasing social atomization and economic suffering, in the dead of winter, in the middle of a pandemic—why, I could just go on and on and on. …
Not everyone saw it this way of course. There were the terrified hedge funders, including the rare few who actually despise the pump-and-dump approach to markets, and the government, which could imagine itself appeasing the mob by tossing the hedge funders to the sharks—not that old-fashioned hedging has been all that lucrative lately, with markets that are increasingly run by AI. Then there were the Upper West Side and Lower East Side lefties, who don’t know what to make of the internet exactly—except for the fact that Donald Trump lives there, and memes are racist. So if a bunch of day-trading weirdos on a Reddit thread doesn’t sound enough like “collective action” for your tastes, let me try and break it down for you, Susan. I too have noticed the absence of appropriate placards depicting Native Peoples and Chicano pride, the red banners with Karl Marx’s face printed on them or slogans in Spanish that recall the ancient glories of the fight against Franco during the Spanish Civil War, though being proudly “of the left,” I would also note the absence of other left things like putting working Americans first and freedom from state censorship and surveillance from what passes now for leftist discourse. So maybe we should agree that it’s confusing times all around, and leave the whole troubled and, let’s face it, at this point in history hopelessly debased and idiotic question of “the left” aside for now, and focus again on the main point.
One of the perennially frustrating things about “the people,” in their collective incarnation and also as individuals here in America, is that they are middle class at heart, which means that they tend to express themselves through things like buying stocks through free online trading accounts rather than by marching in the streets with banners and placards like they do in Venezuela and Cuba. They are also poorly educated about the revolutionary fashions of 75 and 100 years ago, and as a result tend to show little awareness of the slogans of the past, like “no pasaran!” Some people, and by some people I mean me, might see in this failure to endlessly repeat slogans from the past a good thing, given the reality of the past, which is fine enough as a closet for kids playing dress-up, but is not a very suitable guide for anyone interested in the American future.
Well worth a read, although it does get a few things wrong, including: Is Jen Psaki’s Brother a Portfolio Manager at Citadel? Based “on all available familial information I can find about Jen Psaki, she has no brother, much less one named Jeff or Jeffrey. She only has two sisters.”