Forget the Short Squeeze. It’s the Human Squeeze.

As of Thursday, January 28, 2021, we were all talking about the short squeeze in Gamestop (GME) as the Robinhood trading platform stopped its customers from buying shares. One can easily argue that Robinhood’s actions were justified in a chaotic market or that it was an engineered move to save certain well-connected hedge funds. What cannot be argued is that, given Citadel LLC’s deep connections to both Robinhood and the profoundly irresponsible hedge funds that were blowing out as GME’s price blew up, there is at minimum an appearance of conflict.

This pattern of insane risk-taking (with the consequences of those risks spread to others), incompetence, and self-dealing is the hallmark of today’s appalling elites. And the response is always the same — shutdowns.

The Human Squeeze

But current short squeeze in GME is minor compared to the human squeeze we’ve been living through for the past year.

To really understand this, I need to take you back to a moment in hallowed antiquity, days of yore, olden times. You know, 10 months ago.

Masks

The first thing the experts told us was “don’t wear a mask”. Now that they’re telling you that anything less than three masks is essentially grannicide, it is easy to forget that initial message. But that’s what they said.

Then, it was reversed. “Wear a mask”, they told us, and our betters filled their Twitter images with masked faces. Never has there been an easier and more hollow display of virtue than to tell others to wear a mask.

Lockdowns and Handouts

Then, the message moved on to stay home. Close your business. No earning money. If you weren’t a major corporation, they squeezed you right out of business.

Of course, they sent money your way. For businesses, there were forgivable loans. But those PPP loans were never sufficient for a year of shutdown. Nor were the $1,200 stimulus checks for individuals meant to last this long.

Suppression of Speech

Of course, you could go on social media and gripe about it. But you needed to be careful. Before very long, they began to “de-platform” or shut people up. Sometimes, there was a clear reason people were kicked off Twitter or Facebook. Sometimes, not.

Well, fine. You move to a new platform. Except they then invented the meta-de-platforming move. That is to say, they de-platformed the platform. Just as people were moving to Parler from Twitter, Apple removed Parler from the App store and Amazon kicked Parler off its servers.

Suppression of Wealth

But that’s just talking. What about your money?

Now, we have the de-platforming of savings. They’re printing money like there’s no tomorrow. So, if you want to hold savings in cash, the value of that cash is being inflated away. The official sources claim there is no inflation. And the CPI shows very little. But what if you want to own a home someday? Home prices are rising and expected to go up 10% next year. Education? Up by 5% ever year, year after year. Healthcare? That one is tricky. The official numbers show no inflation, but if you pay your own insurance, rates are rising by double digits. Even the official numbers show increases in the 4% range, which doesn’t sound like much until you compound it over a few decades. Everything your may wish to buy with your money has been squeezed.

So, you invest. But the incoming administration is planning to tax unrealized capital gains. Let’s translate. If the value of something you own goes up, you owe the government money, even if you didn’t sell. What if that value just went up with general inflation? Too bad, you owe.

Suppression of the Market (to protect insiders)

So, finally, we’re up to yesterday and Game Stop and Robinhood. If you’ve been in a coma, I’ll point out that the subreddit r/wallstreetbets has been targeting certain stocks, suggesting people buy them on popular platforms like Robinhood. This is all fine, as far as it goes. But, apparently, the stocks they’ve been targeting are ones that large hedge funds are short. So, big players are getting hit and hit hard. Stocks they’ve sold short at $20 a share have rallied into the hundreds per share. And

What do the squeezers do? They call on the SEC. The SEC leans on Robinhood. Robinhood halts its investors buying those stocks. They go to what they call “liquidation only”, which means you can sell your shares, but not buy. With the public limited to selling, what happens to the price? You guessed it. It goes right where the hedge funds who were short the shares want — down.

So, let’s review.

You can’t go to work, because they shut your business down.

You can’t talk about it, because they kicked you off Twitter.

You can’t talk about it on a different platform, because they shut that platform down.

You can’t save money because they print so much it’s well on its way to worthless.

You can’t invest, because they’re going to tax profits you haven’t even taken yet.

You can’t speculate and try to play the Wall Street game, because you aren’t Wall Street and the powers that be just knocked the stocks down.

But don’t worry. You can always organize and protest… except then you’re probably a domestic terrorist.

Well, there’s always democracy. You can organize and you can vote. Of course, yesterday, Facebook stopped accepting ads related to the recall effort against Gavin Newsom. So, they are de-platforming democracy.

Everywhere you look, it’s the human squeeze.