https://prospect.org/power/gamestop-craziness-pulls-back-curtain-on-stock-market/

About a decade ago, we first heard the phrase “Occupy Wall Street,” which referred to groups of young people, fed up with a rigged economic system, taking over a small park in Lower Manhattan and demanding an economy that works for everyone and not just the one percent. It had a short shelf life, as police, in paramilitary mode, dismantled the encampments. And life went on.

It went on until the past couple of weeks, when we’ve discovered yet another meaning for “Occupy Wall Street.” A group of online-investing enthusiasts, congregating on Reddit message boards and armed with the app-based trading device Robinhood, have busted into the Wall Street gambling hall and reduced the balance sheets of some well-established financial players to smoldering ruins. They did this through brute force, bidding up stocks that Wall Street had left for dead.

In so doing, they used approximately the same tactics as the big-money boys to intimidate and pummel the competition. They’ve also revealed the public stock markets as essentially artificial—markets where anyone with capital behind them can just decide something has value. They’re using this power to pummel hedge fund short sellers, who gladly use the same tactics whenever it can help them. It’s one of the most hilarious bits of poetic justice I’ve seen in the past decade.