If you’re anything like me, you probably haven’t heard about the events leading up to the hedge fund collapse on Wall Street from a week ago, and after trying to have your stock friend explain what shorting a price is, you were still left lost.

Overall, “shorting” a stock means that you bet on the company losing money, as compared to gaining money. Because GameStop has been on a steady decline for the past few years, closing over 460 stores, according to Games Industry, many billionaires decided that it would be a safe idea to bet money into GameStop losing more. However, what the billionaires did not see coming was Redditors from the subreddit r/wallstreetbets that collectively wanted to buy GameStop stocks to mess with their bets, which in turn, would make them lose millions of dollars.

This event was a huge deal to many people and for many reasons, but in leftist spaces, it signified one of the first major successes of working-class people taking money from the upper class and redistributing it, even if the people who were doing the redistribution did not know the societal implications of it.

Another reason why people were celebrating this occasion was because of an incident that happened just under thirteen years ago: the infamous Wall Street crash of 2008 occurred. Most of us were too young to remember, but photographs of the time showed hedge fund members laughing and celebrating their wins at the expense of ordinary people losing thousands of dollars and going into deep debt. Therefore, under the guise of “you reap you sow”, these billionaires should have seen it coming that if they stole money from ordinary citizens, then they were going to lose said money from ordinary people.

In my opinion, what happened a week ago was incredible. It really showed the power of the collective- coming together and uniting under a single goal can truly make a difference if we all put forth our best effort. It also shows that we as a collective have more power than billionaires could ever wish for- so much power to the point where billionaires were on their knees begging the government for a bail and for the rules to change.

This past week has also revealed that Wall Street truly does not reflect the economy and how billionaires and the upper class treat Wall Street as their own casino; they use Wall Street as a way to maintain the billions of dollars they already have while pretending not to notice when they are screwing over the working class. They truly do not care when others are suffering or losing hundreds of thousands of dollars by playing fairly (take the Wall Street Crash as a prime example), but when ordinary people finally use their rules against them, they go apeshit and try to change the rules again so it benefits them and benefits them only. The double standards that have been shown this past week have truly been outstanding to see, but something that we have known for a long time. 

The wealthy were never for the people. It’s time we all wake up and realize that.