A battle between Wall Street and a small group of mischievous investors on Reddit breathed new life into a left-right populist coalition with the potential to scrape old political alliances across the spectrum, with some Republicans and Democrats favoring them. position the boy. against the financial institution.
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When Robinhood and other brokers froze purchases of stock in video game retailer GameStop as Reddit users helped bid the price, the negative reaction was swift and ambiguous. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic and liberal sweetheart in New York, argues that curtailing retail access “while hedge funds are freely able to trade the shares as they see fit” is “unacceptable.”
“Agree completely,” Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican and leading Conservative, agreed in a tweet.
‘What we saw, I think with this GameStop collapse that Wall Street has now, these people at home, nowadays traders, retail investors – they have more criticism, more investigation than the people who have ruined the entire financial market. 2008, and they were rescued. Josh Hawley, a Republican in Missouri, told Fox News that the government saved all the people. “I mean, it shows you that the solution is right.”
Hawley added that they are “too big to fail … and now the big hedge funds, they want no competition.”
“This whole episode has shown the power of technology to democratize access to American financial institutions, which ultimately gives much more say in our economic structures,” Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat in California, said in a statement. “It also showed how the cards are stacked against the boy in favor of the billionaire Wall Street Traders.”
Donald Trump Jr., the son of the former president, also weighed in and tweeted: “It took less than a day for big technology, big government and the corporate media to take action and start their conspiracy to to protect hedge fund friends on Wall. Street. This is what a rigid system looks like, people! ‘
“The elite is bent over the form that a bunch of average ordinary users have figured out to make themselves billionaires,” conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh said. “There are those who may earn a lot of money and those of you who do not.”
The foreign bedmates’ political coalition on this issue suggests that the populist setback may not have ended with President Biden’s victory over former President Donald Trump.
“In the concluding section of our book, [Washington Examiner columnist] Salena [Zito] and I predicted that politics would not be the last sector of the American economy to rise or at least be affected by the populist rearrangement, ”said Brad Todd, a Republican political consultant and co-author of The Great Uprising. “The centralization of American commercial and political leadership, coupled with the simultaneous egalitarian voting line that technology offers, has enabled us to bring about all kinds of organic uprisings.”
The screams were similar to the coalition that formed against the Wall Street bailout after the financial crisis in 2008. Both big party presidential candidates, including eventual winner Barack Obama, along with then-president George W. Bush provided the federal aid for the big banks over the Occupy Wall Street opposition on the left and the burgeoning Tea Party on the right.
Some conservatives also support the mostly left-wing protests against the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999.
“We Americans alone must make decisions that are crucial to our destiny and our national security,” Pat Buchanan said at the time. “No global organization will ever be allowed to impose its rule against the sovereignty of the United States of America.”
The perception that the Obama administration did not make full use of public anger over Wall Street helped fuel Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2016 Democratic presidential campaign. Although he was a real estate developer and a reputed billionaire, Trump rode a similar populist wave until the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 and later to the White House.
In 2016, some Sanders voters actually supported Trump in the general election. Others have stayed home or voted for third-party candidates, such as Green Party nominee Jill Stein, who is helping Trump prevent the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, in the critical state of Rust Belt. Last year, these voters helped Biden cross the finish line. But Biden has brought in some corporate-friendly Democrats into his administration, such as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who was paid more than $ 800.00 by a hedge fund involved in the GameStop controversy. The president represented Delaware, a major bank state, in the Senate for 36 years before becoming vice president under Obama.
Even the battle between Robinhood and GameStop underlined how difficult two-party cooperation can be in the current polarized climate. Ocasio-Cortez immediately tweeted that she did not want Cruz’s help, blaming the Texan’s support for election challenges for the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Hawley was an ally of Cruz in the debate.
Yet the potential for similar future substances remains large.
“Everyone in America now has all the knowledge in the world in their pocket and the ability to connect with anyone who sees it the same way – and make the views known to elites in any industry,” Todd said.
Tags: News, White House, Wall Street, Occupy Wall Street, Tea Party, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley
Original author: W. James Antle III
Original location: How the Wall Street fight over GameStop led the populist coalition to rule
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