• Merkel slams Twitter's decision to ban Trump: 'Problematic' violation of 'fundamental right' - and more internat'l response to big tech purge
• Most Americans think social media has too much control over news, according to poll mainstream media quietly ignored

• For Martin Luther King Day, let us end his 'second assassination'
• Martin Luther King's powerful critique of scientific racism and scientific materialism
• Martin Luther King's 91st birthday: A reminder of an existential choice still undecided
• As east and west cooperation emerges, Martin Luther King's assassins try killing him again
• Martin Luther King Jr. and "Ghetto America"
• If Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was alive today he'd be censored and his Facebook page deleted
• Martin Luther King: The government took away his right to defend himself with a gun
• 50 years on from Martin Luther King's murder, hypocrisy continues to reign in America

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has warned against allowing "QAnon Shaman" Jacob Chansley to testify at former President Donald Trump's unprecedented second impeachment trial.

Chansley, also known as Jake Angeli, is facing multiple charges for his participation in the insurrection that the article of impeachment alleges the former president incited on January 6. Although Graham denounced the House for impeaching Trump on January 13 without calling any witnesses, on Friday the senator said that allowing witnesses at the Senate trial could lead to a lengthy "circus" featuring testimony from the likes of Chansley.

"I cannot think of a better way to turn the upcoming impeachment trial into a complete circus than to call the QAnon Shaman as a witness on anything," Graham tweeted. "The House impeached President Trump without a witness. If we open the witness door in the Senate there will be lots of witnesses requested on a variety of topics. And the trial will go for months, not days."

• Lawyer for 'Q Guy with the Horns and the Fur' claims his client finally realizes he's been 'duped' by Trump
• Feds walk back DOJ memo saying Capitol rioters sought to "capture and assassinate"
• QAnon: An FBI Psyop?
• The MAGA movement must either rehabilitate or purge QAnon cultists from its ranks
• QAnon legal battle against YouTube could transform free speech online
• New Yahoo News/YouGov poll: Half of Trump supporters believe QAnon's imaginary claims
• 'Not a body double': Navy SEAL rebuts Trump over QAnon theory on Osama bin Laden death
• Facebook bans QAnon across its platforms

• The Nobel Peace Prize is a sick joke
• Nobel-winning Ethiopian PM has overseen country's descent into barbarity and madness
• Trump nominated for SECOND NOBEL PRIZE for 'historic Kosovo-Serbia' peace agreement
• German parliamentary group nominates Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning for 2020 Nobel Peace Prize
• Greta nominated for Nobel Peace Prize AGAIN, as adults use teen to push climate narrative at expense of peace message
• Trump has not launched enough drone strikes to qualify for Nobel Peace Prize says committee
• Fake Nobel Prize - Fake Hockey Stick

A tug of war emerged late last week after short-seller Citron Research said it had placed a bet against the stock and that the company was "pretty much in terminal decline". In response, the Reddit day traders pushed the price of the stock through the roof.

The war is still to be won, but the battle victory certainly appears to have gone to the Redditors.

The gains caused by the Redditors have been so great that they have forced hedge funds to take heavy losses as they unloaded short positions.

The short squeeze was so sharp that funds were selling long positions in stocks to pay for the losses, which sparked a 1 per cent slide in Wall Street's main indexes.

An open letter to American broadcast network CNBC, posted on Reddit by a user earlier this week, made it clear the Redditors were not ready to give up.

"We don't have billionaires to bail us out when we mess up our portfolio risk and a position goes against us," the user wrote. "We can't go on TV and make attempts to manipulate millions to take our side of the trade. If we mess up as bad as they [Citron Research] did, we're wiped out, we have to start from scratch and are back to giving handjobs behind the dumpster at Wendy's.

"Seriously. Mother**** these people. I sincerely hope they suffer. We want to see the loss porn," the user added.

When Cuomo referenced Robinhood's connections with Citadel Securities, a firm that facilitates trades on the app and that bailed out Melvin Capital, the hedge fund targeted by the Redditors, Tenev maintained its relationships with any other company had "nothing to do with" its decision to halt trading.

"Robinhood, as a brokerage, has lots of financial requirements, SEC [the US Securities and Exchange Commission] requirements," Tenev said, though Cuomo shot back that the SEC "hasn't said you had to do this."

Tenev concluded by denying that Robinhood took action on the orders of any other market entity, and again blamed the decision on unspecified requirements.

Viewers were not convinced by Tenev's excuses, however, lambasting the CEO in CNN's YouTube comments, with some accusing him of "lying" and "dodging every single question."

"We are aware of concerns raised regarding activity on the Robinhood app, including trading related to the GameStop stock. We are reviewing this matter," James said in a statement on Thursday.

The announcement came hours after a group of investors slapped Robinhood with a class action lawsuit in New York's Southern District court, alleging the financial app "willingly and knowingly" halted purchases for GameStop shares "in the midst of an unprecedented stock rise," thereby "manipulating the open market."

In an effort to stem the buying campaign, Robinhood froze purchases of several companies' shares on Thursday, GameStop among them, a move it called a "risk-management decision," denying that it was done at the behest of the financial companies that facilitate the app's trades.

...[t]he Democratic chair of the House Financial Services Committee, Maxine Waters (California), said she would convene a hearing on the matter, focused on hedge fund short selling and online trading sites.

"We must deal with the hedge funds whose unethical conduct directly led to the recent market volatility and we must examine the market in general and how it has been manipulated by hedge funds and their financial partners to benefit themselves while others pay the price," Waters said in a statement.

After Robinhood controversially stepped in and made the "risk management decision" to block the purchasing of stocks being made unusually popular thanks to the r/WallStreetBets subreddit, its app on Google Play was inundated with reviews from unsatisfied customers.

The app's near-perfect rating stumbled to just one star on Thursday after over 100,000 reviews came in. Google has now deleted enough of those reviews, however, that the app's rating has jumped to over four stars (out of five).

Google admitted to actively deleting the reviews, as they violate a policy the company has on reviews that are published specifically to manipulate a company's overall rating.

People "sitting at home getting their checks from the government, trading their stocks" are the problem, Leon Cooperman said on Thursday.

In a lengthy appearance on CNBC's Fast Money: Halftime Report, the CEO of the New York-based Omega Advisors took aim at the small investors buying up stocks the "more knowledgeable" short-sellers had undervalued, blaming the Federal Reserve's low interest rates and even the government's coronavirus stimulus checks.

Later in the show, Cooperman griped about the market conditions that led to this situation, denouncing calls from the ruling Democrats for the rich to pay a "fair share" in taxes.

"If you don't have the police in there at the right time, things go a little crazy," she said. She did acknowledge, however, that the happenings in the stock market were a kind of crazy of a "lesser degree" than the violence the country saw in Washington, DC earlier this month.

It is, however, the same "platform-created frenzy that people are operating under," she added, saying Wall Street was living through "trying times."

Unger's comparison of the stock fluctuations to a violent political rally has not found much support on social media, given the fact she's comparing people using legal tools to purchase stock to people illegally entering a government building and causing chaos.

There is an old Cambodian proverb: When elephants fight, ants get killed.

That, at its core, is what's going on with GameStop shares.

[...]

On some level, it's hard not to root for the little guys. There was also a fundamental element at play: People who paid attention (including my buddy Jim Gillies) realized that GameStop was definitely not dying, and its results have been pretty good whenever new gaming consoles were released, which is happening right now.

GameStop shares have been rising quickly over the last month or so, and then this past week, they went parabolic. Melvin Capital Management is down at least 30% for the year and announced on Monday that it had raised $2.75 billion from Citadel Capital Management and others.

This may actually be the nastiest part of the whole story. Citadel Capital is the largest purchaser of order flow from Robinhood (once again, if you get anything for free it's because you are the product, not the customer). So Citadel buys the order flow (a transaction called "payment for order flow," or PFOF) that fuels the surge in GameStop shares, and turns around and bails out Melvin when it gets hit by losses from GameStop.

Underpants Gnomes version of Citadel's playbook:

1. Buy order flow from Robinhood.
2. As r/wallstreetbets begins manipulating GameStop, Citadel is front-running them based on the PFOF** it buys from Robinhood.
3. Await another hedge fund to teeter, and step in to rescue it at fire-sale prices.
4. Think we're done? Oh, no. Citadel is still getting order flow information from Robinhood, and there are other shoes to drop.

I use Citadel here, but it doesn't have to be Citadel. There is a tried-and-true model for hedge funds. They love situations where they are trading against a counterparty that is forced to transact. That's Melvin Capital Management, and probably a host of other funds that suddenly find that their short hedges are destroying their capital. It is not for nothing that these massive surges in GameStop, AMC, National Beverage, and other heavily shorted stocks are happening at the same time as a pretty decent move down in some of the biggest winning names from the last 10 months. Some huge shareholders are having to rebalance, and are being forced to transact.

And that's the moral of the story. This isn't the little guys against the big guys. I'm not a lawyer, but my guess is if a licensed broker/dealer did what the r/wallstreetbets folks are doing, they'd probably go to jail. Steve Madden and Martha Stewart did time for much lesser transgressions. (By the way, my "gosh, I wish I were there" desire right now is to be in the corporate headquarters of GameStop watching this happen. I'm also amused by the thought that some staffer at Treasury has had to brief incoming Secretary Janet Yellen on what r/wallstreetbets is.)

Meanwhile, Citadel and other elephants get to sit in the middle, buying order flow, printing money on the efforts of these individual investors.

No idea where it will stop. Someone is probably breaking a law, but what is certainly happening is that every hedge fund is looking at its risk book for evidence of this brand-new black swan.

Also, there are some individuals who have turned $50,000 into eight-figure bonanzas. Amazing. I hope they manage to hold on to them.

As for me, I'm just going to sit back and watch the elephants fight.

In financial markets, payment for order flow (PFOF) refers to the compensation that a broker receives, not from its client, but from a third party that wants to influence how the broker routes client orders for fulfillment.^[1] It is a controversial practice that has been called a "kickback".^[2] In general, market makers such as dealers and securities exchanges are willing to pay brokers for the right to fulfill small retail orders, since these can be matched more easily than large orders.^[3] The payment can be in the form of a direct cash incentive, a non-monetary service, or a reciprocal arrangement between broker-dealers to route particular order classes to each other. Market orders are typically preferred

"Payment for order flow was pioneered by Bernard Madoff. He described it as a way for market-makers to outsource the task of finding orders to fulfill, and compared it to retail arrangements in which a supplier pays for the rack on which its products are displayed."