One thing life online has in common with life offline is that drama tends to lead to more drama, and it can often come from unexpected sources. This week has been an excellent reminder of that, with a pair of intertwined episodes providing some surprises that have captured a lot of attention.
It all started with a shocking development on the stock market.
I know, it’s enough to put someone to sleep when you mention the stock market, never mind getting into the intricacies of it.
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What happened, at a basic level, was that some guys on Reddit found out that a big hedge fund was shorting GameStop’s stocks — in effect, betting against the company and in a position to make money should it fail.
So, the Reddit users banded together to drive up the price of GameStop, causing those hedge fund bigwigs to lose billions of dollars in a matter of days, while the Reddit crowd gained. As the news started to spread and regular folks started getting in on the action and making money, trading apps like Robinhood cut off access .
Needless to say, if the revolt against the hedge funds wasn’t enough to grab the attention of authorities, cutting off trading sure did it.
The whole idea of the stock market is that anybody should be able to invest in it, right?
While Robinhood maintained that it had to cut off access to comply with Securities and Exchange Commission rules about having enough money on hand to cover its users, some very prominent figures found the limitation troublesome, notably Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who sits on the House Financial Services Committee.
“This is unacceptable,” she wrote on Twitter. “I’d support a hearing if necessary.”
That does seem like a sensible thing for that committee to do, right?
It’s certainly right in their wheelhouse, and it sure looks like the folks on Reddit have shed light on a very large inequity in the financial marketplace that could use the attention. Allowing hedge funds to continue trading on a stock that regular people can no longer access certainly seems unethical, and on that score, politicians on the left and right can agree.
Indeed, Republican Senator Ted Cruz even dropped into AOC’s thread to do just that.
The conservative Cruz and progressive AOC agreeing on a matter certainly seems like a rarity — but it wasn’t going to last long.
While Cruz might have been ready to make nice and try to work together, AOC swiftly reminded him of his role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, in which she genuinely feared for her life.
“I did not know if I was going to make it to the end of that day alive,” she said in an Instagram Live post, according to The Guardian . “Wednesday was an extremely traumatizing event. And it was not an exaggeration to say that many members of the House were nearly assassinated.”
So, although she might be willing to work with Republicans on financial reforms, she’s not about to work with those who stirred up the violent pro-Trump crowd and spread the Big Lie, as Cruz did.
AOC also noted that the effects of the attack on the Capitol are still being felt.
Five people died in the attack itself, including a Capitol police officer. Another officer died by suicide the next day. And as AOC tweeted, it was revealed that another officer took his own life on January 27 after the attack.
So, while she says she’s open to working with other Republicans on problems with Wall Street, AOC merely encouraged Cruz to “resign.”
Cruz has yet to reply.
