The wiser heads realize that Donald Trump’s rise to political prominence was merely a symptom of growing mistrust and suspicion among those of us in the common class who we are being taken advantage of by the elites.
Democrats twice were able to tamp down their populist crusader running for president, Bernie Sanders. The Republicans were not as successful with Trump, who overcame the opposition of Democrats as well as haters in his own Republican party to win the presidency.
The thinly veiled alliance of the two establishment parties to take down Trump in his bid for re-election spoke volumes about what the elites, the deep state, the people who really run things, are all about.
Mitch McConnell, lead Republican in the Senate, was all too eager to signal his willingness to find Trump guilty in a second impeachment trial, until backlash within his party forced him to reconsider because he didn’t want to lose support and display his weak leadership in such a public forum.
In a word, it is about control. Democrats and Republicans so fear Trump’s political viability going forward that they want to neuter him in any way possible in order not to risk losing that control.
And for all of you who eagerly voted for Joe Biden expecting your $2,000 stimulus handout, how’s that going? Already it’s been marked down to $1,400.
Now, as the Democrats concentrate on tying up the Senate with an impeachment trial they are not likely to win because the Constitution requires a two-thirds vote to convict, not a simple majority, the wait for money for the masses continues.
Even if the Democrats got all their members to vote for conviction of Trump that would leave the Democrats 17 votes short of the needed conviction total.
The penalty for conviction would be removal from office. But Trump already is out, so what this second impeachment amounts to is political theater. Meanwhile, the nation’s business – your handout stimulus money – is on hold.
The battle for elites’ control of the masses spilled over into the financial markets the past week. Keep reading, because even if you think you have no interest in investments, you really do and should understand what’s happening in that world.
Simply put, Wall Street already runs on a hybrid capitalist-socialist structure. The banks and investing firms there embrace capitalism when they are raking in huge profits. When they suffer losses, they want to socialize those losses among the populace – read all of us who pay taxes.
Think of 2008’s financial collapse which rose out of over-leveraged financial institutions making out-sized bets with money they didn’t have. When they lost and the piper needed to be paid, taxpayers were put on the hook to bail them out.
Last week, if you watch the financial channels on satellite TV – I do – there was a parade of aggrieved hedge fund managers and sympathetic talking heads – lamenting the action in GameStop.
For background, GameStop is a dying chain of retail outlets, in largely deserted shopping malls, selling video games. GameStop declared a loss of more than $4 million in its latest operating quarter, which was reported Dec. 8, 2020.
The stock was trading at $17.08 early in January. It began last week at $61.13, traded as high as $483 and closed Friday at $325 after a convulsive trading day during which was the stock as high as $413.98 and as low as $250.
Hedge funds and other big fish on Wall Street were short on the stock, a bet that its price would continue to decline. They were short, in part via the options market, a total equivalent to 130 percent of the stock’s available shares.
But an online movement birthed in the Wall Street Bets forum of Reddit sniffed out the absurd over-leverage, got a so-called short squeeze in motion and the big boys had it handed to them by a populist movement of small investors. The big guys and gals have combined losses so far on this short estimated at $20 billion.
See if this sounds familiar. Losing the game, the elites got the rules changed. Many brokerages stopped allowing purchases of GameStop, or limited purchases to as little as a single share.
Other methods regarding limiting investor funding or options markets access, were employed to attempt to abort the meteoric price rise and so save the powerful from further losses.
These are the methods used by the government and elites to stomp on the masses. Margin requirements (borrowing costs) are raised on investments they don’t prefer. Sell-only dictates are put into force.
Behind the scenes price support or asset dumps by the Plunge Protection Team, AKA Working Group on Financial Markets (a real thing, feel free to search the internet for it), help support or clobber a given asset as the masters desire.
Sometimes they also bring these weapons to bear on rebels among their elite class, as they did in early 1980 to punish the Hunt brothers for their attempt to corner the silver market.
I wouldn’t touch GameStop with a 10-foot pole in these wild times. But I do invest in silver and the Reddit people are being steered toward silver and the companies that mine it, such as First Majestic, which was up from just under $14 to just over $18 last week.
Silver, as measured by the spot price, jumped from $25.48 an ounce to $26.98 last week. It was even higher Friday before losing momentum in an atypical price action.
If the Reddit crew can embolden others to invest in silver, a precious metal that was as high as $50 an ounce in 1980 and was at $49 plus in 2011, but sits only slightly above half of those historic highs all these many years later, results could be spectacular.
And there will be public outcry for those in charge to do something to save those who are considerably short silver.
Meanwhile, it has been revealed that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband made an outsized bet in December in the way of options on Tesla, a stock that stands to benefit from Biden’s executive order made since then for the government to buy electric vehicles.
What did she know and when did she know it?
Also, more tax incentives are being proposed for people to purchase electric vehicles. All of these initiatives will be pushed through legislatively by Pelosi, someone even the brain-dead would concede has quite the conflict of interest on the matter.
But Pelosi and spouse are among the elite, so you should be OK with that.
You are OK with it, aren’t you?
Sam Ross Jr's site 