Articles have popped up since the beginning of the pandemic suggesting a recession was imminent. Whether we can agree or not that a recession has already begun, it is a fact that for the past 30 years, the rich, the right, and the elite have slowly chipped away at the things that gave the working class a fighting chance at a meaningful, prosperous life. Personally I have only really felt the impact of this erosion over the past 2 years, however in my conversations here and with people facing similar struggles, I have come to discover that people with less privilege than I have struggled for decades.
Today our economy looks better than ever on paper, yet pay hasn't budged for most people in years. Health benefits have become useless expensive safety net plans nearly across the board. Employers maximize their labor force by intentional staff shortages which lead to burnout of the current workforce and gatekeeps anyone from trying to enter the workforce while simultaneously claiming a “booming jobs market”. Billionaires made more money in the past two years than in the past twenty, and it can be proven time and time again that this was a direct result of abuse of PPP funds, exploitation of the working class during a global pandemic, and soaring rates for basic necessities just so that fat cat CEOs don't lose any off their bottom line.
So I guess my question is WHEN DO WE ACTUALLY START EATING THE RICH? No but seriously, we are seeing the exact same pattern with the stock market as we did with the Great Depression. During the pandemic, the fed slashed interest rates to zero, which coupled with the other methods of abuse, allowed the rich to get richer even faster. Today, the fed increased interest rates to combat inflation, the rich will be slowing down investments and selling off billions of dollars of their own investments in order to retain capital. Banks will run out of money…you know the rest.
The Great Depression is said to have stretched from 1929-1941, with economic recovery catalyzed by WW2 and FDR's New Deal. However, you have a period of time just before where you have massive economic growth. The automotive industry was relatively new and was producing and selling more cars than they had ever before. I think the parallel you could draw today would be Amazon's record profits during the pandemic. The piece I am missing is what did the working class look like during this time? I mean Upton Sinclair's The Jungle came out in 1906 and it took 40 more years for worker's rights to truly come into the light. Any footage you can see from the Roaring Twenties tends to show smiling white people dressed nice with the fancy cars. Yet less than a decade before this, people were falling into meat packing machines and they would continue production to reduce losses? At least today, everyone isn't putting their life savings into the rising market, but that's because any savings they had got wiped out during the pandemic and they've spent two years just trying to navigate a broken economy that is constantly fighting against them. And that is just the privileged class. This is nothing new to poor families who have faced these struggles their whole lives.
So I guess is that it? Were the ones who got to enjoy the Roaring twenties the rich white people while minority and immigrant groups made their money for them via their labor? Or am I missing a whole piece of the puzzle?