Modern Revolution

 Differing weights are an abomination to the Lord,
And false scales are not good.

-Proverbs 20: 23 NRSV

There are many things that the Hebrew Scriptures point out as "abominations," but the sort of thing that gets that label rather more often than just about anything is economic injustice.  Whether it is scales that do not weigh truly (not by accident I wager), or the moving of a duly placed property marker, the detestable nature of trying to cheat others rises as a stench in the nostrils of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  Fortunately for the financial industry and Wall Street, God appears to be currently on vacay from the whole smiting of first born children and plagues... well maybe not plagues, that one may still be on the table.  Whereas Jehovah may have been merciful to the hedge fund managers and corporate raiders, the virtual community of Reddit has decided to mete out a rather delicious form of justice, which I suspect The Lord Almighty is having a rather holy chuckle about as we speak.

    If you're not familiar with what has transpired over the past several weeks, let me give you the quick and dirty layman's explanation (the only one I can really, I'm not much of a financier).  The retail chain GameStop, has been struggling mightily, even before the pandemic.  It was a victim of the fact that people who want to buy video games mostly do so by downloading them over now ubiquitous broadband connections. GameStop was a sort of retail/thrift store for gamers, you could trade in old games and buy new or used games and equipment.  It had a brief and rather successful run in the industry before the paradigm shifted on them (O those pesky paradigm shifts, we church folk know them all too well).  Well, when GameStop's fortunes appeared grim the vultures of Wall Street sprung into action.  By the way, I may be doing a disservice to actual vultures in using that metaphor, but it is rather appropriate.  Hedge fund rich guys decided it was time to bet on GameStop going down the tubes, so they start to do their sorcery and create a downward spiral deflating GameStop stock and making it easy for them to swoop in and buy it all at a discount and then liquidate the assets.  All of the Chads on the Street know this game, and so they all sort of stand back and let it happen, survival of the fittest, cheerio!

    Well, a certain Redditor who also knew the game, decided this was a crappy way for a business who once helped him indulge his Legend of Zelda jones to go out, so he rallied the troops.  And troops there were to rally.  It shouldn't surprise anyone that an online bulletin board like Reddit is rather thick with gamers.  Gamers have been inhabiting such spaces since they were run in MS-DOS and had nothing but white text on a blue screen that would make most people today think their computer had crashed.  These gamers are also now not 14 year old boys with barely enough allowance money to buy a sandwich.  They are now a diverse group of actual adults who have jobs and income, and thanks to the pandemic, a bit of extra time.  They started buying GameStop stock, and before the Wall Street Chads knew what hit them, their little short sell scheme was shot all to hell. One hedge fund got hit so bad they needed over a billion dollar bailout from their big brother company.  That's some serious damage caused by a large group of motivated people.

    All of the sudden billionaires were crying about how unfair this is; "class warfare," they shouted.  I'm going to buy stock in the manufacturer of the world's smallest violin, except Robinhood probably prohibits that nowadays.  Oh yeah, Robinhood is a stock trading platform that many of the Redditors used to buy stock, because it's purpose is daytrading and speculative investing.  They are of course, not a rogue band of economic justice warriors as perhaps their name portends, but just a tool that was put out there by some big corporation who couldn't possibly see how allowing massive numbers of regular people to play the same games Chad and Todd have been playing on Wall Street for years could ever backfire.  Now the mask is really off though, lots of people are seeing that the game is not just rigged, but if you figure out how it's rigged and manage to work around it, they will change the rules super quick.

    It's villainous really.  You might even say an abomination.  I would for sure.  This is a dire flaw of capitalism: money makes all the rules.  The Bible actually gives the situation a name: Mammon, and let's just say it's not a term of endearment.  I have really enjoyed reading about how this little thing has played out, but I'm actually hoping that it doesn't stop with GameStop.  The great thing about "the people," is that we come up with solutions to almost any problem eventually.  I mean think about how we Americans took a gamble on this thing called democracy, at a time when the world could scarcely imagine any other way of governance other than the aristocracy and monarchy, it would be chaos, they said.  Sometimes "they" were right, there is a fair amount of chaos in democracy, the past four years are a testament to that and the past month was a serious flirtation with destructive chaos.  But if we learn from it, we will get better.

    I have suspected for years that, despite the benefits it might have, the system of unfettered capitalism might just kill us all.  We can't let the already incredibly wealthy just continue to bleed us dry, making their own rules and then turning over the game board when they get beat anyway.  Call it class warfare if you want, but the existence of billionaires when people starve to death and go without shelter is an abomination if I ever saw one.  Violence is not going to solve this for us though, they can afford their own army if they need one.  Perhaps if enough of us see through the game though, and learn to play it in a way that creates real monetary consequences for the worst of the greed-heads, we might just get things to change.  As it stands, I'm not sanguine about GameStop's chances.  Despite their now soaring market value, they're still a thing the world probably doesn't need very much.  It was never really about saving GameStop, it was about kicking a bully where it hurts, and as such it was a jolly good show.