Beware the little guy getting really, really angry | Maria Panaritis

Special access to vaccines at a super-elite Chestnut Hill private school. The GameStop throwdown between small-time investors and giant hedge funds. The exasperating question of whether public school children will ever go back to school full time.

Here’s the common thread: No matter how hard we are spun to believe otherwise, America has become a nation of scarcity and scrambling. But the remarkable thing about the latest flareups is that Americans on the losing end of things appear unified in their disgust at being among the perennially shafted.

We’ve heard the warnings for years now about an economy that works for the rich but nobody else. Sen. Bernie Sanders gave an early voice to it in 2016 and Donald Trump exploited it in his single term that just ended. But our post-Capitol-riot lives, with the coronavirus pandemic now in its 11th month, have exposed this gulf even more nakedly.

GameStop traders took aim a few days ago at big investors by driving up the sagging retailer’s stock with some of the same manipulative tactics typically used by almighty Wall Street financial titans. They did this while across the country Americans were drowning in the dysfunction of nascent vaccine distribution. Meanwhile, as pressure intensified for public schools to reopen for in-class instruction, no one was rushing to say that that would be at all possible by even this fall.

People are exhausted, confused, and angry. And, as we saw this past week, they appear atypically united in their rage toward the forces that have made life very tough for all but the very affluent.

If this unity in anger could be sustained, it would help force federal policy changes to realign the economy under the Biden administration. A strong pandemic rescue bill, for instance, with resources and mandates to reopen and refortify public schools, would go a long way toward recalibrating the scales so that American prosperity lifts everyone.

Failure to sustain our unity in outrage, though, would further embitter us and leave a gilded few continuing to flourish amid the national decay.

Let’s look at what happened a few days ago at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy.

The well-resourced private school, unlike most public schools in our region, has been open for in-person classes for many months. More recently, as my colleagues reported in The Inquirer, Springside secured enough vaccinations to potentially place its teachers and staff toward the front of Pennsylvania’s inadequate supply line.

They made this deal with a pharmacy even as countless Pennsylvanians — seniors, people with underlying conditions, and staff at public schools where children have been forced to learn from home for nearly a year due to crowded classrooms — were being told they must wait, wait, wait.

» READ MORE: The wait for a vaccine is frustrating teachers and adding uncertainty to school reopening plans

We’ve seen this movie over and over again since the pandemic forced lockdowns in March 2020.

NBA players and billion-dollar educational institutions secured ready access to COVID-19 testing while pandemic-shuttered schools, grocery workers, and health-care workers were left toward the bottom of the Darwinian scrum in Pennsylvania and nationwide.

Here’s the thing, though. Word trickled out about Springside’s deal.

“I can’t help but think this is the next great competition of those who have the resources, the haves and have-nots,” said Dan McGarry, the superintendent of the Upper Darby School District, told my colleagues. “That’s not really the way the system should work.”

State health officials killed the school’s vaccination plans.

» READ MORE: A Philly private school got COVID-19 vaccines for its teachers. Then its clinic was canceled.

The financial-world drama involving GameStop also revealed a system baked with favoritism.

Individual traders banded together online with a stock-buying strategy that pushed GameStop shares into insanely high territory. They did this through a trading app whose goal has been to give ordinary people entree to the kind of trading flexibility that has typically been available only to Wall Street types. The supposed mission of the app in question, Robinhood, was to empower small traders to buy and sell stock easily.

Once the buying frenzy had pushed GameStop stock prices to levels that threatened hedge funds who’d bet big on the retailer’s stock plummeting, the unleashed masses found themselves suddenly back in bondage. The very app that had promised them liberty to pursue equal access to markets and capitalistic maneuvers cut access to further buying of the stock.

And here is where things got very interesting.

Robinhood’s move to hamstring the small traders provoked condemnation from all corners of the economic ecosystem, the likes of which I couldn’t recall even from my days covering the near-collapse of the global financial system from 2007-09.

Republicans and Democrats are so polarized that they refuse to agree that the Jan. 6 murderous rampage through the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters was an act of sedition. But on Thursday, there was such collective outrage over L’Affaire GameStop that Ted Cruz and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez both condemned what happened.

Here it was, a tool named Robinhood designed for the small investor, stabbing its own clientele in the back.

CNN anchor Chris Cuomo captured the sobering hypocrisy as he grilled Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev on Thursday night on live TV.

“This looks like a move by an outfit called Robinhood, which is supposed to be taking from the rich and giving to the poor, and doing exactly the opposite,” Cuomo told Tenev. “That when the big guys, including one of your main investors in your company, started to lose, you shut down the game to starve the little guy.”

Is the little guy finally ready to demand a fix to the fix? That would be the ultimate twist of our times.