Wsb Quotes

The popular appeal of WSB means that millions of ordinary people, not just high-flying financial traders, can participate in it. A new front in America’s class war opened up. As Robert Reich tweeted: “So let me get this straight: Redditors rallying GameStop is market manipulation, but hedge fund billionaires shorting a stock is just an investment strategy?”141 Who would have expected this: a class war transposed into a conflict among stock investors and dealers themselves?

The irony is that Wall Street, the model of corrupted speculation and inside-trading, always by definition resisting state intervention and regulation, now opposes unfair competition and calls for state regulation . . . As for the accusation from Wall Street that Robinhood is a platform for gambling, suffice it to recall that Elizabeth Warren repeatedly accused hedge funds of using the stock market “like their personal casino.” In short, WSB is doing openly and legally what Wall Street does in secret and illegally.

Yes, the January activities of the WSB participants were nihilist, but this nihilism is immanent to the stock exchange itself; it is already at work in Wall Street. To overcome this nihilism, we will have to somehow move out of the stock-exchange game. The moment of socialism is lurking in the background, waiting to be seized, as cracks appear in the very center of global capitalism. Will this happen? Almost certainly not, but what should concern us is that the WSB crisis is another unexpected threat to a system already under attack from multiple sides (the pandemic, global warming, social protests . . . ), and this threat comes from the very heart of the system, not from outside. An explosive mixture is in the making, and the longer the explosion is postponed, the more devastating it could be.

Burroughs’ conversation with Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale covers a dizzying array of topics—from Jordache jeans to religious fundamentalism to the likelihood of America becoming a fascist state. It’s also laugh-out-loud funny: JOHN CASALE: William, you and David Bowie had a discussion in Rolling Stone in 1974 about whether to use sonic warfare onstage. Bowie said he was not interested in doing that to people. He said he would never turn it on a crowd and make them shit their pants. I suppose we would. . . . WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS: In a sense, if any artist is successful, he would do exactly that. If you wrote about death completely convincingly, you’d kill all your readers. JC: What’s going too far, though? Making them shit their pants? WSB: Would it be going too far to kill them? I’ll ask that question. JC: Well, I suppose there’s still some liberalism left in Devo; we’d say yes. We want ’em to come back and shit again.48