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What will unify the USA–  How about hatred of the corruptocrats?

The USA might just unify despite Joe Biden. There are not many things that can bring the Occupy and Antifa crowd together with Proud Boys but sticking it to the overlords of Wall Street is just the ticket.

The Gamestop monster battle between the ruling class and the peasants

The naked short sellers of Wall Street were never a healthy part of a free market — they were selling shares they didn’t own. Their predatory behaviour could create the very destruction they profited from, ruining potentially productive assets in the process. In a bonfire of gambling greed, the Predators could effectively sell more shares than even existed  — betting they could drive the price lower and buy back for a bargain. But the little-guy-punters in the reddit/Wallstreetbets crowd got organized and called the bluff. They pushed the $4 stock to $400, busting the Smarty-pants players and reveling in it. There are estimates that hedge funds have already lost nearly $20 billion. One group of short-selling gurus have been burnt so badly they’ve abandoned publishing short selling research. The wake from this is just beginning.

The problem for the Democrats is that this wave is a form of Draining The Swamp. There is no identity politics involved. This kind of unity will bite them.

There is a kind of democracy to this response. People are voting with money.

GameStop insurgency is just the latest rebellion against ‘the Big Guys’

Glenn Reynolds, New York Post

Tech overlords are quashing dissent. We’re in the middle of what our betters call the “Great Reset,” when the power of big institutions and the Really Smart People™ is supposed to be re-established after the unfortunate deviation of the Trump years. The hoi polloi are supposed to know their place now, especially those annoying loudmouths on the Internet.

How’s that working out? Just ask Melvin Capital.

Writing for The Post this week, Charles Gasparino explained why the little guys got together to buy GameStop: “Mostly, they’re out to hurt the big guys.”

The Big Guys’ problem is that nobody likes them much. From Silicon Valley to Wall Street, they’re deeply unpopular with ordinary Americans, on both the left and the right, resentment they’ve stoked with selfishness, arrogance and condescension. Their solution to this unpopularity has been to use their control over online platforms, and their influence over the government, to silence their critics.

But they can’t stop the signal. No sooner did the tech giants collude to shut down Twitter alternative Parler than a new revolt sprang up somewhere else entirely among stock traders on Reddit. What will it be next? Truck drivers refusing to deliver food to Silicon Valley? Plumbers boycotting “woke” executives? It’ll probably be something cleverer and less foreseeable than that, but it’ll be something. The more the techno-elite tightens its grip, the more Americans will slip through its fingers.

The little guys also exposed just how crooked the game is.

The Octopus of Wallstreet fought back — but with a form of cancel culture, not finance

Tellingly, the Pros on Wall Street didn’t try to outsmart the amateurs.  As the Hedge Fund Melvin Capital burst into flames, one of the major brokerages called Robinhood suddenly just banned the punters from buying Gamestop shares, thus thwarting the little players. In some cases Robinhood even sold off shares without permission from the owner. The broker that was supposedly there to make investing possible for everyone with no fees was one of the cartel — protecting friends like Citadel and Melvin Capitol.

One rule for you, and no rules for the rulers

The reddit day traders must have felt under seige. The server hosting the r/Wallstreetbets also piled on, with Discord banning the group for “hate speech” of all things. The banning was nothing to do with Gamestop, said Discord, it’s just a coincidence it happened at the exact same time… Sure.  Meanwhile the reddit WallStBets group has grown to over 3 million members, and somehow it managed to find other servers, and came back online.  But the actions of Robinhood and Discord show the platforms don’t want customers as much as they want control of their customers– the ability to shape the conversation.

As Tyler Durden said: “Robinhood, is effectively joined at the hip with hedge fund Citadel, which in turn is a part owner of Melvin Capital which was destroyed by the short squeeze that Robinhood banned, so a clear conflict of interest”.

During the ban by Robinhood, the price of Gamestop dropped by 40% within hours. But furious reddit investors fought back again, this time launching a class action lawsuit, and flooding Google with over 100,000 bad reviews for Robinhood. The Google tentacle of the oligopoly promptly deleted all those bad reviews, saying they were “coordinated or inorganic” — as if the peasants could not be genuinely angry about losing their money, even as the overlords kept changing all the rules.

By the way, the same hedge fund Citadel, which part owns Melvin Capital  has previously paid $800,000 in speaking fees to Janet Yellen. She is, of course, the former Federal Reserve chair who is now the newly confirmed Treasury Secretary. Theoretically, she’ll be advising President Biden on the Gamestop and Robinhood “disruption”.

See how this works? Potentially, Big Money could almost buy anything.

Easy money, especially the Quantitative-Easy kind that’s printed from thin air, has had ten hot years to weave its way through the layers of power — greasing palms. The bail outs of 2008 rescued the Corruptocrats then, and made them bigger.  In some sense we reap what we sowed.  No one went to jail.

As Voxday says:

One thing is clear from all of this. The American public is not going to support another bank bailout once the next financial crisis begins. They’d rather see Wall Street burn, and rightly so.

The Gamestop Bubble hasn’t popped yet, but pop it will. The thrill of taking down the Big Guys will hopefully take the sting out of the pain, but the last man holding the $300 Gamestop has a long way to fall.

Terry McCrann points out that Naked Shorts are illegal:

It seems clear that the basic rules of shorting were ignored. It appears that over 100 per cent, perhaps as much as 150 per cent, of GameStop was sold.

This means there’s been naked short-selling — when you sell a stock without having borrowed scrip — as you self-evidently cannot borrow more than 100 per cent of a company’s issued stock, and naked short-selling is illegal, even on Wall Street.

Fake shares. Fake News. Fake Elections. Fake Democracies.

But if the masses just stand up together, they can still win.

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