America, in many ways, has become a clown country.
We lack borders, societal cohesion, shared values, trust in one another, a common culture, and a clear direction for our future.
One could argue that we are more of an economic zone than a nation-state. Multinational corporations park their assets here, and those assets are managed by the ruling class oligarchs to the benefit of the corporate plutocracy and the detriment of the common man. That’s why Walmart can move into your town, sell products at a loss to bankrupt the small businesses, and then jack its prices back up after it successfully kills off the competition.
There’s no system of checks and balances for this pernicious behavior. It’s the “free market” at work, we’re told. If you don’t like it, you can just bootstrap your own multibillion-dollar retail giant.
Politicians are on the other side of the ruling class coin. They are pimped out by their friends in big business in exchange for campaign donation kickbacks, and they pull out all the stops to ensure their pimps get paid. Wall Street, which publicly trades behemoths like Walmart, is the biggest, baddest pimp on the block. Along with securities, Wall Street has been buying and selling our politicians for decades, and everybody knows it. The only time the peasant class—you and I—have a say in any of this, is when the politicians and the plutocrats nearly crash the world economy, and we’re forced to say “yes” to a massive taxpayer-funded bailout to keep their scheme afloat.
The people who are supposed to represent honest, hard working Americans long ago dropped the façade that they are even trying to make our lives better. They represent special interests while they attempt to keep us, the cattle, busy so they can rob us of our milk. It’s been working like a charm.
If America is a clown country, the ruling class on Wall Street, along with their ruling class friends in Washington, are driving the clown car.
You might have noticed that the suits are very upset this week. That’s because anonymous Redditors, while presumably brushing the Cheeto dust off their laptop keyboards, decided to do a little bit of stock speculation.
They had no fancy tools, no quantitative analysis, no Bloomberg terminals, and they’re certainly not members of the elite class who are entitled to engage in such sophisticated business.
What they did have was unbridled rage and disdain for the drivers of the clown car, and when they found a way to exploit them, they hijacked the clown car for themselves and took it for an epic joyride.
Reddit realized that a billionaire member of the Wall Street ruling class had a massive short position on GameStop stock—position that was coming due on Friday—and they decided to stick it to him. They bought thousands of shares of the fledgling stock, driving the price per share up approximately a gazillion percent.
That was bad news for Mr. Moneybags. It was, and perhaps still is, going to cost his fund, Melvin Capital, billions of dollars to cover his short position.
It was great news for the newly-minted Reddit stock speculators. As more and more people bought, the price of the stock increased. Regular people were making cash hand over fist, and sharing “Wolf of Wall Street” memes on Twitter. The peasant class’ revolt against their rulers was both lucrative and fun.
But if there’s anything the ruling class hates, it’s losing money—especially to a bunch of unwashed punks who were laughing in their faces while they sent Melvin Capital hurtling towards bankruptcy. In an instant, the rightful owners of the clown car demanded it back.
You see, only fancy hedge fund managers—members of the Wall Street ruling class—are allowed to decide the value of a stock. Those hedge fund managers decided the value of GameStop, a brick and mortar retailer, was very little. Hence the massive short position. They were allowed to short the stock as they pleased, which of course, in turn, continued to drive down the value of the stock, helping their positions. They knew what they were doing. Their friends at other hedge funds knew it, too, and took full advantage, pummeling GameStop into the ground.
In our clown country, only the ruling class is allowed to win. If the ruling class is not winning, it will simply change the rules of the game.
They did it when coronavirus hit, deciding that every American could vote by mail for the first time in history, which helped them install their obedient, manchurian candidate. And just as the ruling class expected, Joe Biden sat idly by and watched as other members of the ruling class changed the rules of stock trading to benefit themselves.
Hijacking the clown car from the ruling class to squeeze the GameStop short-sellers has been an entertaining endeavor. Once it’s over, many will laugh at the lengths the ruling class went to in order to squash a bunch of Reddit day traders.
But if this behavior from the ruling class continues, eventually the peasant class is going to revolt, and not just from behind their computer screens. The blowback could be severe and irreparable. The GameStop revolt should serve as a message to those in charge: you are loathed by ordinary Americans who are struggling to get ahead.
Congratulations to the ruling class for hijacking their clown car back. Let’s hope they don’t steer it off a cliff.