Stonks and Swabbing
A weird, weird week continues
Welcome to a Thursday evening edition of Progressives Everywhere!
The news cycle has not slowed since Trump crawled onto a helicopter and headed toward his Palm Beach swamp castle in Mar-a-Lago, but at least we’re getting a new diversity when it comes to the agents of chaos responsible for the madness. It’s a breath of fresh air!
There is plenty of news to touch on today, so without further ado…
Important News You Need to Know
The Stonk Market
Much of this week has been dominated by an anonymous mass of shit-posting day traders who have scrambled stock markets, shaken hedge funds, and enraged Wall Street with astonishing ease and speed.
It started out as an expression of populist anger, offered a few days of entertainment, created strange bedfellows on the left and right, and then wound up becoming an outrageous, transparent, real-time example of how the financial markets are rigged for the rich and powerful. I’ll be honest — as much as I’ve followed it, I’m still educating myself on the mechanics of and implications for what went down with GameStop, Reddit, Robin Hood, and a bunch of hedge funds. This is a good, quick explainer of the whole thing, so I’m going to let Wired do the work:
Traders on the WallStreetBets forums on Reddit and Discord, inspired by a new GameStop board member and the opportunity to squeeze short sellers like Citron Research, funneled their disposable income into shares of the beleaguered retailer. The higher the stock price rose, the more the shorts had to buy to cover their losses, turning a snowball into an avalanche. The volume of trading suggests that some institutional investors may have hopped on as well. Even Elon Musk gave it a plug.
This week a similar script played out with stocks for the movie theater chain AMC, electronics companies BlackBerry and Nokia, and more, albeit on a smaller scale.
Today, after a few days of market chaos, Robinhood, the ETRADE-like app that many of the Redditors used to buy the stocks, shut down trading on the inflated companies, except to allow people to sell off their shares. Other retail trading apps did the same. By late afternoon, they were selling for people, thereby driving the price down on the stocks to help the short-sellers regain their positions. Worse, the big Wall Street firms weren’t limited in their access to doing whatever they wanted with the stocks in question, which pissed a whole lot of people off — including members of Congress.
Rep. Maxine Waters has already announced a hearing on the issue — though it should really just be an investigation — and Sherrod Brown, the incoming chair of the Senate Banking Committee, has indicated a willingness to do the same. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has led the way on the issue… while also humiliating Ted Cruz in the process. She really gets so much done.
There’s a lot more going on here, and again, I’m pretty stupid when it comes to the technical parts of how Wall Street works, so I’ll refer you to this other explainer by the writer Alexis Goldstein. She knows her shit and it taught me a lot, and so instead of summarizing it, I’ll send you her way. I’m not going to pretend this was some big populist, righteous scheme cooked up by Redditors — they had to have a lot of free cash to do this — and I know that some big Wall Street people are profiting. Anyway, read her story.
One note: Robinhood will allow limited trading on GameStop, AMC, Nokia, and those other companies tomorrow, so… good luck!
Voting Rights
National: As I continue to document all the egregious assaults on voting rights that the GOP tosses out there every week, it’s good to take a step back every once in a while and take stock of the breadth of their unprecedented attack on democracy. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, Republicans really are going for gold this year:
In a backlash to historic voter turnout in the 2020 general election, and grounded in a rash of baseless and racist allegations of voter fraud and election irregularities, legislators have introduced three times the number of bills to restrict voting access as compared to this time last year. Twenty-eight states have introduced, prefiled, or carried over 106 restrictive bills this year (as compared to 35 such bills in fifteen states on February 3, 2020).
Yeesh! Not all of these bills will pass — some were in blue states or states governed by Democrats — but the sum total is still overwhelming. What’s also worrisome is that so many states had record turnout in 2020 due to temporary expansions of absentee and early voting, and in a lot of cases, they’ll be going back to their more limited voting laws even without proactive GOP legislation.
South Dakota: The clampdown isn’t limited to revoking voter rights, either. A State Senate Bill that aimed to create an online voter registration system in the South Dakota passed through the Senate State Affairs Committee… after the online voter registration part was stripped out by a Republican amendment.
Now all it really authorizes is a system that will people who have already registered in person to update their address. They can’t be afraid of Democrats taking over, but perhaps they were spooked by the huge success of the marijuana legalization ballot initiatives last year? They’re suing to overturn those, but if they can stop voter registration, they won’t even have to worry about that next time around.
Kentucky: Since taking office in December 2019, Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear has issued 178,000 pardons that restore voting rights to formerly encarcerated Kentuckians. That’s the good news.
The bad news? There’s still a long ways to go to get anywhere near the national average. Kentucky automatically wipes away those rights for good after someone is sent to prison and requires a gubernatorial pardon to get them back, which hardly happened at all under Beshear’s predecessor, the odious Matt Bevin. The bottleneck has resulted in massive disenfranchisement, including an unconscionable 15% of the state’s Black population unable to vote.
Beshear is being pushed to do more, while Republicans in the state legislature are being asked to pass a bill that would authorize a ballot initiative for a constitutional amendment to restore voting rights in 2022. So far, they’ve gone as far as supporting restoring those rights a whopping five years after prison, probation, and parole are all completed, which is pretty pathetic.
Ohio: Last summer, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose (the guy who just couldn’t possibly allow more ballot drop boxes despite being cleared by the State Supreme Court to do so) put forward a list of over 110,000 “inactive” voters who he wanted to purge from the rolls. He required people on the list to take one of several “election-related actions” to keep their registration active, and in the end, nearly 20,000 of them did so AND wound up voting.
LaRose hailed that as a sign that the system works, but I’d say that mass voter disenfranchisement is a bad idea if you’re putting that many people in danger of losing their rights.
Healthcare
This morning, my wife and I went to a clinic and received rapid COVID-19 tests. We had made an appointment the night before, so we were in and out of the office within 15 minutes. The results came no more than 25 minutes later, and thankfully, we both tested negative. The whole experience was remarkably easy and painless — they don’t even go all the way up the nose with the swab anymore — but it was also expensive, at $300 a test.
We only went because my wife’s employer paid for the tests; otherwise, we would have had to wait outside for hours in the freezing New York City morning to get our nostrils swept, the results of which would have taken about a week to get to us. I kept thinking about how lucky I was to have access to this kind of healthcare and how absurd and enraging it was that 99% of Americans do not have it. We shouldn’t have a system in which people with money (or generous employers, in our case) can get instant results and go about their lives, while those without money are forced to live in perpetual danger, taking a risk every time they step outside.
Just imagine how many fewer Americans would have died from COVID-19 if we had a system that was anywhere near fair and equal, if we weren’t dependent on private insurers and private provider networks that all need to squeeze as much profit as possible out of each and every one of us. It’s infuriating, and the notion that we’re going to just nibble around the edges of the system after damn near half a million Americans have already died from a virus enabled by our capricious and wasteful infrastructure scheme is beyond the pale. It’s inhumane.
Incidentally, the Senate candidate for whom I’m working right now, Tom Nelson, just so happened to announce his support for Medicare for All today. The timing was a total coincidence, but it really hammers home for me the importance of going all-in on changing the system. He’s not an idealogue — he wouldn’t vote against a public option, for example, if that’s what came up — but he’s committed to making sure everyone has healthcare.
He is going to be the most progressive candidate in this race, but he’s also the most accomplished. He was the State Assembly Majority Leader for years in Wisconsin, runs a red county with maximum efficiency, and he knows how to get things done. He didn’t ask me to write this, but I’d love it if you took a look at the video and, if you have a few extra bucks, send his campaign a donation:
Quibis
Democrats lost a special election in Iowa by a somewhat disappointing margin. The main takeaway, for me, is that they got outspent badly. Republicans have the infrastructure year-round to spend money and activate people in these races; Democrats let their guard down after big elections and don’t fund state parties nearly enough.
I couldn’t possibly care what they think! And thank you to Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock for making the right arguments.
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